An Invention without a Future. James Naremore
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actor’s body, the eloquence of camera placement, and the mute spectacle of staged conflict.
Gilberto Perez has described motion picture direction as an art of “dramatized showing,” a phrase that nicely captures the fundamentally rhetorical nature of decoupage and mise-en-scène and that enables us to see point-of-view shots and other camera positions as rhetorical and theatrical, not merely narrational (62). But in the history of American cinema, directors have approached this art differently, and they can be categorized in terms of the degree to which they employ grandiloquent images in the service of an overt rhetoric. John Ford, for example, was a disciple of Griffith who claimed to have played a Klansman in The Birth of a Nation and whose films overflow with populist sentiment, patriotic symbols, and painterly images of military horsemen seen against spectacular landscapes. Ford’s particular sort of masculine nationalism was memorably embodied by Will Rogers and Henry Fonda, plainspoken, folksy heroes who were quite unlike the grandiose orators of the nineteenth-century Eastern establishment, but were visualized in monumental style and posed in a way that invited us to see them as emblems of American history. Ford was also the director who propounded the notion that when the facts become legend, we should print the legend—the idea that rhetoric can be more important than truth. Thus in pictures such as My Darling Clementine (1946), the emotions seem authentic and the vistas breathtaking, even when the history is a lie.
At an apparently opposite extreme is a director such as Vincente Minnelli, whose musicals and melodramas create a luxurious excess of movement, light, fabric, and decor. Seen in relation to the ancient debates about rhetoric, Minnelli was a Sophist rather than a Platonist, because his pictures are so unabashedly about the flattery of the senses, the pleasures of dance, costume design, cosmetics, and above all color. Even in a small-town domestic melodrama such as Some Came Running (1959), he indulges in sentimental emotion, swirling action, and gaudy hues. To quote Lichtenstein again, “Flattery, cosmetics, artifice, appearance . . . all the terms of this metaphorical chain . . . qualify the effects of color as effects of seduction; they are the effects of illusion and pleasure. Essentially sophistic, color is also rhetorical, from the point of view of its effects: it is the figure of ornamentation and the ornament of figures” (53). Thus Ford and Minnelli, for all their differences, are opposite sides of the same coin: if the potential critique of Ford rests on a relatively recent notion of rhetoric as an instrument of phallic, masculine hierarchy, then the potential critique of Minnelli rests on an even older notion of rhetoric as a “feminine” and perverse practice of deception, an art of surfaces rather than essences.
In a different category altogether are the modernist directors, who employ an ironic rhetoric that questions its own validity. Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer, for example, exhibit varying degrees of detachment from their audiences—as in Buñuel’s Land without Bread (1932), which uses Mozart’s music and a travelogue-style narration to create a bottomless, Swiftian irony. Orson Welles is another obvious example, particularly in Citizen Kane (1941), a film that sets out to expose the manipulative bombast of a media tycoon and that treats every instance of public address, such as News on the March or Kane’s stem-winding campaign speech, as a hollow deception. The film’s claims to truth reside in the whispered “Rosebud” and the spectacular but ambiguous conclusion, which places the audience in the position of trespassers and tells them that a word can’t sum up a man’s life. Consider also The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which superbly adapts the rhetorical conventions of Booth Tarkington’s old-fashioned, omniscient novel while at the same time evoking pathos in relatively unorthodox ways. What seems unusual here, as in Kane and several of Welles’s other films, is the way in which the audience is invited to sympathize with characters that are also treated critically. “I believe it is necessary to give all the characters their best arguments,” Welles once told a group of Spanish interviewers, “including those I disagree with. . . . I do not want to resemble the majority of Americans, who are demagogues and rhetoricians” (Cobos and Pruneda, 16).
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