I will be teaching a course in cinematic rhetoric in Spring 2008 at Brigham Young University. The preliminary syllabus follows. Feedback is welcome:
Overview
This course will focus not on rhetoric or discourse about film, but the rhetoric of film–the structure and function of cinematic form and its aesthetic and social influence. Using both historical and contemporary theoretical models for interpreting both static and moving images (see list of texts and contexts), students will be invited to explore and apply the rhetoric of cinema in its various contexts. This will include examining film as a persuasive medium that plays ideological, commercial, and normative acculturating roles; looking at films as rhetorical texts with their own structure and complex multimedia grammar (language, iconography, narrative); and examining the peculiar and evolving phenomenology of film as movies are now multipurposed and more diversely experienced through the digital media. Along the way we will look at comparisons between the pragmatic methods of composing texts and making films; film as translation (the rhetoric of adaptation), and film as spiritual rhetoric (rhetorical methods for representing or invoking the sacred).
