University of Minnesota Press
Rhetoric has become a term of abuse in contemporary America. In The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, Gilberto Perez reminds readers that the word describes nothing more insidious than the means by which we argue our point. The Rhetoric of Film is about how movies persuade their audience.
The Cuban-born Perez taught cultural history at Sarah Lawrence. Unlike many academics who inflict themselves on film studies, he wrote for an audience beyond his college’s merit pay-raise committee and the cultural studies conference circuit. Sadly, Perez finished The Eloquent Screen only two days before his unexpected death.
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.
The conventions of editing, back-and-forth shots, crosscutting and close-ups are examined; Perez finds continuities within innovation. Filmmakers seeking a large audience communicate with tools forged early in cinema history but that continue to be refined and redeployed.
Rooted in but not limited by arguments as old as Plato and Aristotle, Perez offers insightful analysis of classic Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra as well as foreign filmmakers. In thinking about American history as depicted in John Ford’s films, Perez concludes that “discredited myth does not give way to plain truth but to myth of another sort.”
