Blackesley, David (2008) “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 111-133. New Jersey: LEA.

Defining Film Rhetoric

Film Language

this approach [film language] treats film both semiotically and phenomenologically as a grammatical system of signs, with attention to spectatorship and perceptual processes. Metz’s groundbreaking work in particular has been enormously influential, mostly for his attempt to develop a sign system for film spectatorship, drawing heavily from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Metz develops for film analysis the concept of the mirror stage – the moment of self-recognition and distinction that marks he immersion into language – and the insistence of the letter in the unconscious – the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. In tying this semiotic system to the imaginary, Metz shifts our focus to the construction and reception of film and, thus, ways that film functions both like a language, but also rhetorically, as an appeal to or assertion of identity in the audience. – 114

Film Ideology

This approach [film ideology] to film rhetoric views films as serving ideological purposes in both its content, technical apparatus, and distribution mechanism. It examines film in its partisan aspects, as a kind of “pamphleteering”. The task of film criticism is to expose film’s complicity with or deconstruction of dominant ideology. – 115

As cultural expression, films reveal not only the predispositions of its makers, but they also serve ideological functions in the broader culture (as critique, as hegemonic force, as symptomatic) that can be analyzed as having a rhetorical function, especially to the extent that rhetoric serves as the means of initiating cultural critique and stabilizing cultural pieties. – 116

Film Interpretation

This approach [film interpretation] treats film as a rhetorical situation involving the director, the film, and the viewer in the total act of making meaning. – 116

Chatman attempts to show that film interpretation should account for audience reaction, the formal elaboration and function of genre, and the symbolic representation of meaning on screen. – 116

Film Identification

This approach [film identification] considers film rhetoric as involving identification and division. Film style directs the attention of the ideological, psychological, or social purposes. – 116

For Metz, identification occurs in the imaginary realm of the signifier, where film narratives create the conditions for identification to occur in a secondary order of reality. – 117

The Case of Vertigo

Mulvey explains: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. – 121

“Looking is hoping, desiring, never just taking in light, never merely collecting patterns and data. Looking is possessing or the desire to possess – we eat food, we own objects, and we “possess” bodies – and there is not looking without thoughts of using, possessing, repossessing, cherishing, borrowing, and stealing. I cannot look at anything – any object, any person – without the shadow of the thought of possessing that thing. Those appetites don’t just accompany looking: they are looking itself.” – Elkinson (The Object Stares Back) – 122

Visual Rhetoric and Identification