Film as an audio-visual medium that incorporates various modes of expression (such as image, sound, written and oral language) is a productive source of knowledge when it comes to different ways in which meaning is created. Traditional film metaphors that are recurrent in the writings of film historians, critics and theoreticians, such as “film as visual music”, “film as moving image”, “film as window on the world”, “caméra-stylo”, “film as language”, “film as dream”, “kino-eye” etc., indicate that the nature and ontology of film are not arbitrary. Cognitive metaphor has played an essential role in shaping film into a new art, as well as structuring it as a new domain of meaning. Film is therefore viewed as a very complex target domain. The thesis focuses on an early period of the formation of film and investigates how it was conceptualized across various source domains, including the human body domain. Cognitive semiotics provides the theoretical framework to investigate how conceptual metaphors, and metonymy to a smaller extent, are manifested in the theoretical writings and films belonging to the French Impressionist movement, that Bordwell (1987) places in the period between 1918 and 1929. The analysis aims to define the main source domains that directly integrate with the domain of film and structure it. In the history of film, French impressionism, also called the first avant-guard by Bordwell, played a key role in the formation of film as art because it did not only incorporate experiment and new, innovative procedures into the classical narrative paradigm of film style and narration but also set up the foundation of the theory of film. Many Impressionist film authors were also active as theoreticians and film critics (Dulac, Delluc, Epstein, L'Herbier etc.), which has made it possible to compare the analysis of verbal metaphors in language structures with the analysis of visual metaphors in films. The findings reveal common metaphorical mappings thus suggesting that both linguistic and visual metaphors are not only manifest in the surface structure of expression but are also grounded in cognitive structures. Four groups of metaphorical mappings were generalized: FILM AS LANGUAGE, FILM AS ART, FILM AS TECHNOLOGY OF MOVEMENT/TRANSPORT, FILM AS BEING. Accordingly, four source domains were defined that structure the conceptual domain of film: language, art, communication/transport and human body. The domain of human body appears to be one of the basic source domains for the conceptualization of the Impressionist film. The metaphor FILM IS (HUMAN) BEING and related visual metaphors are investigated in the selected Impressionist films and vision emerges as the central concept of the body metaphor. This is in accordance with the subjective aspect of the Impressionist style that was detected by Bordwell. Vision creates associative links with other concepts within the domain of film, such as space and time, and by means of metonymic processes builds the illusion of perceptual wholeness. Vision produces space. Through semantic extensions, the camera-eye is directed away from the exterior and towards the interior space thus transforming film from a being of action into a being of contemplation. Movement plays an essential role in revealing the origin of the look as an attribute of a dynamic observer and the source of subjectivity. A new schema is proposed that explains the formation of mental space by means of camera vision and movement and links the visual/filmic and the mental/human in order to explain how film creates meaning. The proposed schema is used to review the traditional models of understanding the history of film.