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