Rhetoric of Film

How movies move us, the different ways in which they engage and affect us, will be the subject of study. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, the endeavor to influence others, the sway of attitude and belief, orientation and viewpoint. In this course, we will look into the various means of persuasion—emotional or logical, personal or social, and usually a combination of things—employed in the cinema from the silent era to the present day. We will focus on the transaction between movies and their audiences. We will inquire into where a movie is coming from, what position it takes and would have us share, what designs it has on us, and how it shapes our response. Much of our discussion will be devoted to the forms and techniques of film art but with emphasis on their effect on the spectator. Realism is often treated as a matter of content, but we will consider how it is also a matter of rhetoric: A shaky camera in the manner of a newsreel, for example, gives us the sense of being right there in the midst of things and serves to achieve what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect.” We will pay special attention to tropes and figures of film rhetoric, classical tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, irony) and, specifically, cinematic figures such as the close-up, the reverse angle, cross-cutting, or camera movement. Identification will be a central concern. We will examine the way identification is always partial—partial both in the sense of incomplete and in the sense of biased—and how our identification with characters enters into a larger and often complex rhetorical play of identification. To give a simple example: In a love scene set by a river with trees in flower and birds singing, we identify with the lovers while they are identified with nature—and nature in our culture is generally identified with good things. But Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath takes place in 17th-century Denmark, a milieu in which religion was strict, witches were burned, and nature was identified with paganism and the devil; so young lovers by a river would not be seen in a positive light, and we are torn—this is part of the film’s rhetoric and its moral complexity—between our identifications and beliefs and those of another culture. In this course, we will study the workings of persuasion in a variety of films of different provenances and styles and with different motivations and intentions.