A Rhetoric of Film
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In the introduction to The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, the late Gilberto Perez proposes that rhetoric offers a distinctive lens through which to conduct critical scholarship since it occupies a space between the poetics of construction studies and the responses of reception studies. For Perez, current trends in filmic analysis favour both philosophical and ideological perspectives. With this in mind, he journeys the well-trodden environs of cinematic discourse where he cleverly parallels his position on rhetoric as a methodology with a wealth of established criticism. He argues "rhetoric is not only language but also gesture, movement, action. Rhetoric is performance. And like all performance, it’s addressed to an audience " (p. 2).
Perez’s engagement with key films ensures a broad, balanced, and nuanced understanding of the problems consuming scholars from both historical and theoretical perspectives. He outlines three defining characteristics to illustrate how rhetoric functions in film: firstly, that it is a performance; secondly, and as a consequence of the first point, that it requires an audience; and finally, that it is most effective when it captures the actuality of real social situations. Perez digs deep into rhetoric’s historical relation to philosophy, iterating how Plato disparages rhetoric for deceiving audiences, while Aristotle dismisses it as mere performance, whereas Cicero values rhetoric for its effectivities.
The ambition of Perez’s project is underlined by its scope, and by taking John Ford’s oeuvre as his point of departure, Perez signals to the reader the breadth of a lifetime of knowledge. Indeed, Perez in his introduction delves into Ford’s body of work to illustrate how valuable rhetoric is as a critical tool, examining how cinema constructs imperfect societies, where ideals, actions or situations are performed, affecting audiences into identification. For example, "comedy is about living in the world," argues Perez (pp.16–17). In an unjust society, then, a performative, roguish rhetoric can improve the outcome of a situation. By setting the limits of the possible, comedy is capable of disturbing social hierarchies as audiences identify with the plights of characters. Rather than persuading readers of the virtues of taking a didactic perspective, Perez suggests that inharmonious positions and ideas can encounter one another and co-exist in Ford’s films.
Far from creating a problem, these comings-together actually enrich his productions. Perez continues by saying that, for Ford, identification is not bound to a static ideology; instead, a complex, dialectical synergy between culture and nature forces audiences to think.
For example, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ford explores how law and violence intermingle to articulate how one legitimises the other. A forceful rhetoric emerges from a synthesis of myth and truth, best exemplified by the murder of Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) kills Valance from the safety of the shadows, a truth he shares with Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), whom the townspeople celebrate for shooting the villain. The shared secret of the twinned heroes launches Stoddard’s political career, where both myth and truth provide the basis for the structuring of a society.
In a lengthy first section (of two), Perez then sets about systematically defining the function of tropes to examine how they work in a cinematic context. Central to his analysis is the transformative value of tropes, where in language the meaning of words changes from literal interpretation to figurative speculation. He carefully observes how metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche similarly function cinematically to modify the meaning of images. The section is rich with lucid and provocative examples, whereby cinematic techniques, such as camera movements, shots and cuts transcend their literal function to blossom as tropes. For example, to articulate how metaphor is expressed through cinema, Perez considers a scene from Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). An apple is shaken from a tree, plummets to the ground and tumbles down a hillside towards a stream. The camera follows what appears to be an inimitable journey, but when this piece of fruit finally comes to a pensive rest, a scattering of apples comes into view, each one of them displaying varying stages of decay, thus acting as a metaphor for both the journey of life and the commonality and inevitability of death.
In considering the work of linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson, Perez also notes that tropes are "lines of association, ways of making the connections of meaning" (p. 57). As cinema shifts focus, switches perspective, and seamlessly meanders between plot and character, it opens pathways of connection. Synecdochic details are linked to metonymic generalisations, illustrating how the part sits within the whole to signify a general meaning. Perez continues with this analogy to explore how they share a likeness, and this imbues the synecdochic part with a metaphorical value. For Perez, the most famous synecdoche in cinema is Rosebud, which both drives the plot of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and acts as a metaphor – the burning sled acting as a metaphor for Kane, through his identification with the object, seamlessly connecting the part with the whole.
Turning his attention to the function of representation in documentary, Perez then enlists Charles Sanders Peirce, whose concept of the symbol signifies through processes of repetition rather than through contiguity or likeness. Documentary purports to indicate the actuality of the image and, through the process of rhetorical repetition, it imposes itself upon the viewer. Perez considers the limit offered by documentary when tackling the profundity of the Holocaust in Alain Resnais’s film Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (1956). He suggests that if representation is impossible, the filmmaker can "gain rhetorical force by declaring their limitations" (p. 88). The constructed world of the documentary presents different problems for the selection of a synecdoche and its relation to the whole. How can one represent the impossible in an image if it is beyond our human capacity to understand? For Perez, to admire the rhetorical quality of Night and Fog does not diminish the strength of its argument, but it does bring into focus our relationship with the image and how it imposes itself on the viewer through repetition.
The second section continues to foreground rhetoric as an alternative means of analysis. Perez accurately observes that we inhabit an age of extreme scepticism and that the proposition of certainty causes deep unease. He posits that the study of argument and persuasion enriches the cinematic text, where multiple and competitive perspectives can co-exist. For Perez, entrenched views forego a more nuanced reading in favour of buttressing rooted interests. To concretise his stance, Perez engages in an in-depth study of melodrama, where social relations and personal perspectives typically and unhelpfully cannot exist in the same text, or more bluntly where thinking and emotive lines of enquiry make for improbable bedfellows. He argues that "rhetoric must find common ground with its audience, and the rhetoric of melodrama often looks to the past for views and values on which people can agree, but that doesn’t rule out questioning the present or looking to the future" (p. 206). The most lucid examples of the co-existence of the personal with the philosophical are found in his analysis of the work of Terrence Malick. The Tree of Life (2011) demonstrates how the jump cut stands in as a rhetorical device to allow grace and nature to exist simultaneously in the same text. The dead time of the quotidian is eliminated through jump cuts, however the sequencing of time is bound to the internal dialogue of the characters, where they re-examine the certainty of meaning as singular. Instead, they meander impressionistically through thought, musing on the possibility of the multiple which leads to intricate and expansive explorations of ideas. While the habitual falls away, the search for meaning surfaces through the characters’ inner dialogue, where the complexity and proliferation of meaning jumps from belief to precarity. Perez highlights this tension but also stresses a difficulty in delineating between these frictional poles. He pinpoints how Malick attributes grace to the figure of the mother while assigning nature to the father. Grace is seen here as an acceptance in being slighted, rejected, and even hurt, while nature is selfish in pleasing itself (p. 288–289). Perez insists that these views do not necessarily represent Malick’s personal beliefs, but instead help to build tension in the film via the mother’s Catholic education and the father’s fruitless attempts to enforce his nature on others. The jump cut then helps to support viewers in understanding the entanglement of thought and emotion present in the everyday of a family melodrama.
The Eloquent Screen was close to completion when the untimely death of the author occurred. Perez’s book has nonetheless been lovingly put together by the author’s friend, film scholar James Harvey, and by his wife, the poet Diane Stevenson. I should like to end simply by saying that Perez’s love of cinema permeates every page.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/film.2022.0200?af=R&cookieSet=1