The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film

by Gilberto Perez, James Harvey (Foreword by)

Overview

A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us

Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses.

Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric--metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche--and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences. 

Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816641338
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/23/2019
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gilberto Perez (1943-2015) held the Noble Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College and was author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. He was film critic for The Yale Review and his essays on film have been published in The Nation, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Publisher's Note ix

Foreword James Harvey xi

On Gil Perez Diane Stevenson xv

Preface xix

Introduction: John Ford's Rhetoric

Judge Priest's Rhetoric 1

Plato and Cicero 4

Rhetoric and Comedy 7

Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit 10

Identification 13

Comedy and Hierarchy 16

Larger than Life 18

The River and the Dance 20

Politics and Principle 22

Myth and Truth 27

Rhetoric of Genre 33

House of Miscegenation 39

Road to the Promised Land 43

I Cinematic Tropes

Metonymy 51

Tropes and Figures 52

Metaphor 53

The Unraveled Underwear 54

The Broken Necklace 55

Metaphor and Metonymy 56

Synecdoche 60

The Hands, the Bootie, the Sandals 62

Faces 64

The Stolen Necklace 66

Rosebud 68

Havana Stories 71

The Dancing Women 73

The Guillotine 74

Freedom and Predestination 76

The Puncture and the Veil 77

The Train Whistles and the Hunk of Blue 79

Documentary, Repetition, Representation 82

The Village Church 88

The Revolutionary Battleship 91

Allegory and Extended Synecdoche 95

The Monster and the City 99

Steamboat Willie 103

Figura Futurorum 105

The Marriage of East and West 113

The Walls of Jericho 116

Technique as Metaphor 119

The Road of Life 121

The Striped Box 124

Surprise 126

The Slashed Eye and the Primal Scene 127

The Priest and the Pineapple 130

Irony and Realism 134

The Bridge and the Ballad 136

Dramatic Irony 139

The Hurdanos and Us 140

Ironic Self-Effacement 144

Open Synecdoche and the Reality Effect 150

Hometown and War 153

God Bless America 158

The High of War 159

Reflexivity and Comedy 161

Modernist Parody 166

Folk Tale and Revolution 172

Each Scene for Itself 177

Black Sheep 184

Flowers 188

II Melodrama and Film Technique

Between Tragedy and Comedy 199

From Theater to Film 201

Thinking and Feeling 203

The Close-up as Aria 207

Melodramatic Argumentation 209

Novelistic Characterization 211

The Reverse Angle 213

McTeague and Greed 216

Photographer 224

Music into Drama 227

Melodrama of the Spirited Woman 231

The Ambiguity of Stella Dallas 236

Moving with Characters 249

Not Reconciled 261

In the Mood for Love 266

Tragic Narration 270

The Personified Camera 280

Jump Cuts 287

Crosscutting 294

Split Space, Unbroken Time 298

Displeasure 307

The Devil's Point of View 318

Allegorical Dimensions 324

The Garden of Eden 332

Melodrama and Comedy 337

Coda. Of Identification 345

Notes 355

Index 381