The terministic screen : rhetorical perspectives on film / edited by David Blakesley.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Blakesley, David.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures.

Rhetoric.

Film criticism.

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

x, 312 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Taking on such varied issues as Hollywood blacklisting, fascistic aesthetics, and postmodern dialogics, editor David Blakesley presents fifteen critical essays that examine the significant role rhetoric plays in film. The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film offers a rhetorical understanding of cultural periods and cinematic technique using popular films that include The Fifth Element, The Last Temptation of Christ, Deliverance, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, The Music Man, Copycat, Hoop Dreams, A Time to Kill, and many more.

This unique volume is about seeing and interpreting, about visual rhetoric and making meaning, about film as a symbolic form of expression. Aided by sixteen illustrations, these insightful essays consider films rhetorically, as ways of seeing and not seeing, as acts that dramatize how people use language and images to tell stories and foster identification. The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film establishes the rhetorical approach to film as a set of well-grounded theoretical perspectives (psychoanalytic, semiotic, hermeneutic, phenomenological, and cultural) that until now have been widely practiced but rarely discussed.

Adopting this broad view of the emergent field of rhetoric and film, the contributors address key questions asked by film students and enthusiasts across an immense range of interests: What counts as film theory and criticism? What do film theory and criticism make possible? What are the social or political functions of film or film theory? Is film theory itself even possible or useful in the wake of the rhetorical turn? Answers range from the need for fusion of theoretical approaches under new theoretical formulations to suggestions that film theory is dead. These essays are neither post-theory nor adrift, but instead revitalized by rhetorical approaches that view film and film interpretation as social acts of contending with the words and images that shape our lives.

The fifteen essays are presented in three distinctive categories: "Perspectives on Film and Film Theory as Rhetoric," "Rhetorical Perspectives on Film and Culture," and "Perspectives on Films about Rhetoric." The book's introduction provides a detailed overview of various rhetorical approaches and a clear framework for classifying them. Section introductions discuss each essay as a model of rhetorical analysis and theory. Collectively, these essays examine society through a rhetorical lens, inviting the readers to judge for themselves the significant role rhetoric plays in the arena of film. As rhetoric often implies, there are no exact answers to the theoretical questions posited herein, only alternative ways of thinking, perceiving, and interpreting cinema and its effect on society.

Contents:

Mapping the other: The English patient, colonial rhetoric, and cinematic representation / Alan Nadel

Rhetoric and the early work of Christian Metz: augmenting ideological inquiry in rhetorical film theory and criticism / Ann Chisholm

Temptation as taboo: a psychorhetorical reading of The last temptation of Christ Martin J. Medhurst

Hyperrhetoric and the inventive spectator: remotivating The fifth element / Byron Hawk

Time, space, and political identity: envisioning community in Triumph of the will / Ekaterina V. Haskins

On rhetorical bodies: Hoop dreams and constitutional discourse / James Roberts

Looking for the public in the popular: the Hollywood blacklist and the rhetoric of collective memory / Thomas W. Benson

Copycat, serial murder, and the (de)terministic screen narrative / Philip L. Simpson

Opening the text: reading gender, Christianity, and American intervention in Deliverance / Davis W. Houck and Caroline J.S. Picart

From "world conspiracy" to "cultural imperialism": the history of anti-Plutocratic rhetoric in German film / Friedemann Weidauer

Rhetorical conditioning: The Manchurian candidate / Bruce Krajewski

Sophistry, magic, and the vilifying rhetoric of The usual suspects / David Blakesley

Textual trouble in River City: literacy, rhetoric, and consumerism in The music man / Harriet Malinowitz

Screen play: Ethos and dialectics in A time to kill / Granetta L. Richardson

Postmodern dialogics in Pulp fiction: Jules, Ezekiel, and double-voiced discourse.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0809324881

OCLC:

50006563