Trope (cinema)

In cinema, a trope is what The Art Direction Handbook for Film defines as "a universally identified image imbued with several layers of contextual meaning creating a new visual metaphor".

[1] A common thematic trope is the rise and fall of a mobster in a classic gangster film.

The film genre also often features the sartorial trope of a rising gangster buying new clothes.

[5] A trope is an element of film semiotics and connects between denotation and connotation.

Bluestone said, "[A literary trope] is a way... of packed symbolic thinking which is specific to imaginative rather than to visual activity... [when] converted into a literal image, the metaphor would seem absurd.