Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Perez examines how film makes its imprint on its audiences via a wide-ranging study of different filmic techniques and their effects. He does this in order to counter some prior theories of film’s effects (particularly Lacanian and apparatus theory) and posit an alternate study of the “way construction elicits response” (xix). Perez explicitly places rhetoric between studies of poetics and reception to more thoroughly examine the relationship between the two.

Though Perez focuses mostly on American film, it is clear that his desire is to build a way of looking at film that will work across boundaries of time, space, and different groups of audiences (even if that last part is more implicit than explicit). In other words, Perez occasionally runs into the problems of creating a universal spectator, undifferentiated and unexamined, which feminist, race, and queer theorists have problematized.

Perez does rescue some films from previous interpretations that have portrayed the films (such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and Young Mister Lincoln in the opening section) as one-dimensional by the likes of the folks at Cahiers du Cinema. The penultimate section, on melodrama, similarly reexamines some films that have been dismissed by the genre(?) affiliation, as well as some movies (horror in particular) that have been, by some, pushed outside of that genre’s boundaries.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

I’ve already addressed who this work is responding to and why, so here I’ll tackle its intervention in a bit more detail. I’ve read (and studied with) some rhetorical narrative theorist here at OSU, and I am intrigued and convinced by it as a theory of literature. I had thought of some ways it might apply to film, but hoped that a book like this would come along on my reading list to make some of the arguments and connections for me. Perez succeeds on this account, using genre, metaphor/synecdoche, and identification theories to think about how movies make their meanings and how audiences understand those meaning-making devices.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Split into four sections, Perez (usually) starts by developing a general idea of what is going on with the area of rhetoric that he’s examining in that section then spins out from there, looking at interesting little examples and strands to explore the boundaries of the way of thinking he’s proposing. The first and last sections are a little different, with the first being an extended study of John Ford’s films to explain why rhetoric is an interesting way of studying movies and the last being a short coda looking at how identification (with characters or situations) differs from the apparatus theorists who posit an unfailing suturing into the film (identifying most with the camera) whereas Perez shows (through talking about horror) that the audience more frequently shifts their identification between different characters, situations, and camera positions throughout the film depending upon the film’s construction and their own thoughts and feelings.

In the second, and first big section, Perez discusses the idea of cinematic tropes, particularly metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Following structural linguist Roman Jakobson, Perez theorizes that these aren’t just tropes but “ways of making the connections of meaning,” with metaphor acting as a “way of similarity” and metonymy as a “way of contiguity” (57) Metaphor, in other words, says, look, this is like that, while metonymy says, look, this comes from that. Perez continues to develop this theory by diving into synecdoche, which takes metonymy one step further to say, look, this is part of that. He calls film a “thoroghly synecdochic medium” because every shot refers to the larger whole of the film, and therefore the study of the relationship between details (at whatever level, mise-en-scene, shot, scene, sequence) and the whole will help us understand the intended effects developed by the implied author of the film (63). I find this to be very convincing. Perez uses this understanding of how film works to walk through how political and social messages are created and transmitted through film, how characters come to stand in for ideas and how camera movements or editing can be representative of different ways of thinking.

In the third, and second big section, Perez looks at melodrama as a genre/mode that draws on the pathos part of the rhetorical triangle. He interestingly theorizes that melodrama isn’t the exact opposite of realism, as we might expect, but that they both operate as related reactions to classicism, which presents only what it needs, through excess: melodrama as an excess of emotion and subjectivity, realism as an excess of detail and objectivity. For me, this is a great way of thinking about how to classify different movies based on what they’re focused on and remove from the discussion of realism and melodrama (a pet interest of mine) some of the value judgements that have haunted them in the past. Perez spends the rest of the section teasing out how a film will create that excess of emotion through film techniques and what implications those emotional excesses have on audiences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’d call this one very useful. I am very interested in merging rhetorical narrative theory with film poetics to discover why and how films make us feel and think what they do. Perez nicely explains several (though certainly not all) ways that this happens and opens some interesting doors that I’ll keep exploring as I read theory and watch films. Indeed, the area that might be most interesting to me is the one that gets the least attention from Perez, identification, so I’ll keep puzzling through what he claims here and thinking of ways of expanding upon it.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

As covered above, rhetoric, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, melodrama, identification.

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

We may think of identification as personal affinity, putting ourselves in another’s place, as when we identify with a character in a movie. But we never simply identify with a character; we identify with an action, a situation, an emotion, a motive, an interest, a point of view, something the character represents. Our identification with a character usually works together with other identifications that precede it, accompany it, modify it, complicate it. (13)

The part for the whole, the general in the particular: synecdoche is too important a figure to be subsumed under metonymy. Particulars, which are all the camera knows, are synecdochic inasmuch as they have a meaning, which is always something general. Film is a medium of particulars invested with meaning as parts of a whole. Each image on the screen shows something in particular, but something that has a place in a construction of the general. Out of the bits and pieces the camera renders, a film puts together an inclusive picture. Synecdoche is the figure of inclusion. (60)

Nothing is more important to the rhetoric of a work, to the way it affects its audience, than our sense of the author’s attitude toward the characters. (158)

Truth and beauty are goals of art as well as life, ends to be sought. But they are also means of persuasion. The best way to tell a lie is to envelop it in truth, with truth used as a means to make the lie more persuasive. That’s just what a movie does when it enacts a fiction in actual locations; the ambient reality makes the fiction more convincing. Beauty, too, serves to win us over. Usually the hero or heroine we are to side with is beautiful. Tropes gain much of their effect through the persuasion of beauty; a metaphor expresses something more forcefully because more beautifully. Often truth and beauty are looked up to as ultimate things and rhetoric is looked down on as mere deceit, but as Kiarostomi knows, truth and beauty are regular instruments of rhetoric. (196-7)

Realism is often opposed to melodrama, but both realism and melodrama are modern forms that emerged in opposition to classicism. Classicism is art that exhibits just what is necessary, the right measure of information and emotion, the perfect fit of form and meaning. Realism feels real because it exhibits more than seems necessary in the way of concrete observation, because it imparts the sense that the world exceeds our assumptions of meaning, that there are more things out there than we can account for. Both realism and melodrama are excessive relative to the norms of classicism. Realism is excessive objectively, in its representation of fact; melodrama is excessive subjectively, in its expression of emotion. Melodrama is to the inner world as realism is to the outer world. Like the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, melodrama and realism may be opposed but are better looked upon as complementary. (203)

A cut at once interrupts and connects, breaks off something and links it to something else, thereby having it both ways: the break that links, the fragments of modern life pieced together on the screen. Conjunctive cross-cutting, which began with Griffith’s last-minute rescues and is still going strong, takes the form of a rupture anxiously looking forward to its mending. Film is able to combine the fragmentation of a modern art with the completion of a classical art. (296)

In identifying with the camera, however, we identify not only with the visual perspective in each image but with the governing intelligence we sense behind the arrangement of images. We identify, that is, with the image maker, the implied author, which to some extent we must do in order to follow a film, just as we must identify with another person in order to engage in conversation. Our identification with characters is always part of a larger play of identification. (349)