A Small Introduction to Rhetoric in Film

The word “rhetoric” has a few different meanings. Its origin is both Greek and Latin, translating to mean “the art of rhetor”. Dictionary.com defined rhetoric as meaning “the art of influencing the thought and conduct of an audience” (“Rhetoric”, 2011, para.1). In film, writers, producers, and directors are using an art form, the film, to influence your thoughts and/or actions. For example, a movie about the effects of tobacco use could be trying to keep you from smoking cigarettes. Now, while most movies may just try to persuade you to think a certain way, some movies use rhetoric in their films to bring about a social change.

In order to understand rhetoric fully, I went to a website called Auburn.edu. The site was “intended as a guide to analyzing film rhetorically and writing about it” (“Introduction”, 2005, para. 1). Although the site is someone else’s final project from a college, the site contains a lot of very useful information. In order to examine a movie, we will use the three rhetorical appeals: logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is also referred to as the logical appeal. According to the author, Kristen B. Miller, logical appeals are the facts about what is being sold”(“Logos(Logical Appeal)”, 2005, para 2), or what message you are being sent. Logos are very obvious in most films. Ethos is also referred to as the Ethical Appeal. According to the article “ethical appeals are usually made through the arguer’s credentials, the knowledgability with which they present themselves, their use of credible sources and their use of the appropriate tone” (“Ethos(Ethical Appeal), 2005, para 1). The last rhetorical appeal is Pathos, or the Emotional Appeal. Anything in a movie that is designed to get an emotional appeal out of the audience is an emotional appeal. So, for example in the movie The Boondock Saints when Murphy and Connor’s best friend Rocco is killed in front of them, is an emotional appeal.

To help you further understand how to analyze a film using these three rhetorical appeals, you will need to know some cinematography film terms. While in the editing process of a film, the selected editors use a “cut” or change from one shot to another without using a fade or other type of transition to move onto the next shot. For example, in Twilight, the editors cut away from Edward to Bella during  their conversation he saves her in the parking lot. Other transition techniques are fade, wipe, and dissolve. All of these are used to create the effects that writers, producers and editors want you to see. Lastly, long shots, medium shots, and close-ups are used to show things like the emotion in a characters face(close-up), or the atmosphere around them (medium shot) or the entire ship while its in warp speed while in space (long shot).

Now that you have some background on rhetoric in films, you can use it to watch your favorite movies or even movies that you disagree with, to find out what the underlying message is.