The Legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites in Audiovisual Media

The Pre-Raphaelite art seems to be remediated in any kind of cinema genre establishing an engaging relationship with the viewer whose attention is attracted by Millais’s photographic realism, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s stunning female portraits, William Morris’s gorgeous wallpapers, Burne-Jones’s visionary worlds, and William Waterhouse’s Romantic representation of the femme fatale. Watching a movie imbued with Pre-Raphaelite visual references is a dynamic and unforgettable experience, involving a process of renewing attention to create and follow the relations between words, images, and subtitles. Audiovisual translation specialists are becoming ever more interested in exploring the relevance of gestalt perception theories to audiovisual translation. The range of psycholinguistic, cognitive10, and neurolinguistic studies reveal how the human mind functions while engaged in the process of audiovisual translation. A set of widely shared assumptions pertaining to the assembly and storage of language in the brain and a widening network of conceptual tools – including, among others, notions such as figure/ground alignment, deictic shift theory, cognitive construction, and parabolic projection – are improving our understanding of the processual interplay between verbal and nonverbal semiotics. It is my aim to investigate the legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites from a cognitive perspective in order to attest the pervasive influence of Pre-Raphaelite art on contemporary cinema. Neil LaBute’s Possession (2002), Paul Gay and Diarmuid Lawrence’s Desperate Romantics (2009), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), and Richard Laxton’s Effie Gray (2014) are only a few examples of how the Pre-Raphaelite mindstyle is still inspiring the contemporary audience.