The Eloquent Screen
A Rhetoric of Film
WINNER OF THE RENÉ WELLEK PRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION
A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us
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.
"A landmark in the history of cinema studies." —The New Yorker
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.
Awards
René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association
Rhetoric is persuasion, but there is a kind of rhetoric, Gilberto Perez suggests, that is ‘all the more persuasive for seeming not to persuade.’ Similarly there is, at least in this amazing book, a powerful kind of film theory that seems not to be a theory at all but only a closely studied collection of film moments. We learn a lot here about the rhetoric of film, how it works, and the many forms it takes. But the range of examples is so wide and so rich, and the discussion of them so detailed, that a second book begins to hover discreetly behind the first: an introduction to the whole art of film itself. It’s a piece of amazing good fortune to have both works together.
Michael Wood, film critic and author of Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much
How fortunate that Gilberto Perez finished this book before his untimely death. His agility in combining criticism and theory—interrogating the rhetoric of films as disparate as Stella Dallas, Shoah, Sherlock Jr., Toni, Caché, The Deer Hunter, Nazarin, and Greed—testifies to his precision. And his graceful prose has the unfashionably literary virtue of honoring his discoveries.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic and author of Cinematic Encounters
This affirmation of transcendence through art, evident even in the most rigorous passages of The Eloquent Screen, contrasts with the tenor of contemporary criticism.
4columns
True to its title, Perez’s final book is eloquently written and elegantly argued. It transcends film theory, reaching beyond reductive polarities and definitions and takes in the wider world glimpsed in parts through the lens of film. The intellectually agile scholar looked at his subject with fresh eyes and imagination, grounded in the movies he closely watched.
Shepherd Express
A landmark in the history of cinema studies.
The New Yorker
This is a smart, readable book.
CHOICE
It’s endlessly readable and inviting, a genuinely thrilling deep dive into the interplay between cinema and rhetoric and how the latter is used, almost on a primordial level, in the former.
Criterioncast
Perez provides a compelling account of how identification and narrative function within a film to direct thoughts and feelings in viewers, and The Eloquent Screen offers readers a rich vocabulary for critically analyzing their reactions to cinema.
Los Angeles Review of Books
As Perez’s final book, The Eloquent Screen is, fittingly, a coda on its own.
Comparative Cinema
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Foreword
James Harvey
Preface
Introduction: John Ford’s Rhetoric
Judge Priest’s Rhetoric
Plato and Cicero
Rhetoric and Comedy
Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit
Identification
Comedy and Hierarchy
Larger than Life
The River and the Dance
Politics and Principle
Myth and Truth
Rhetoric of Genre
House of Miscegenation
Road to the Promised Land
I. Cinematic Tropes
Metonymy
Tropes and Figures
Metaphor
The Unraveled Underwear
The Broken Necklace
Metaphor and Metonymy
Synecdoche
The Hands, the Bootee, the Sandals
Faces
The Stolen Necklace
Rosebud
Havana Stories
The Dancing Women
The Guillotine
Freedom and Predestination
The Puncture and the Veil
The Train Whistles and the Hunk of Blue
Documentary, Repetition, Representation
The Village Church
The Revolutionary Battleship
Allegory and Extended Synecdoche
The Monster and the City
Steamboat Willie
Figura Futurorum
The Marriage of East and West
The Walls of Jericho
Technique as Metaphor
The Road of Life
The Striped Box
Surprise
The Slashed Eye and the Primal Scene
The Priest and the Pineapple
Irony and Realism
The Bridge and the Ballad
Dramatic Irony
The Hurdanos and Us
Ironic Self-Effacement
Open Synecdoche and the Reality Effect
Hometown and War
God Bless America
The High of War
Reflexivity and Comedy
Modernist Parody
Folk Tale and Revolution
Each Scene for Itself
Black Sheep
Flowers
II. Melodrama and Film Technique
Between Tragedy and Comedy
From Theater to Film
Thinking and Feeling
The Close-up as Aria
Melodramatic Argumentation
Novelistic Characterization
The Reverse Angle
McTeague and Greed
Photographer
Music into Drama
Melodrama of the Spirited Woman
The Ambiguity of Stella Dallas
Moving with Characters
Not Reconciled
In the Mood for Love
Tragic Narration
The Personified Camera
Jump Cuts
Crosscutting
Split Space, Unbroken Time
Displeasure
The Devil’s Point of View
Allegorical Dimensions
The Garden of Eden
Melodrama and Comedy
Coda. Of Identification
Index
