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Film Posters

Our class has spent considerable time and focus on the elements of visual rhetoric so most of this blog post will not be groundbreaking information. Film posters have always interested me in how they function as an advertisement and still retain the artistic essence of the specific film they advertise. This combination proves to have very interesting results. If done with success, an effective movie poster will reflect on the thematic elements of a movie while engaging the viewer in terms of design and the textual information contained. Essentially, the poster should be a hint to what the film will be.

I have noticed that several techniques are commonly used depending on what the poster is trying to achieve in terms of resonance with a particular audience. The inclusion of a small catch line (which is done very often in commercially popular films) has the potential to reflect on the film while adding another dynamic to it. In the case of Jurassic Park, the catch line read, “an adventure 65 million years in the making”. This hints towards how the film will revolve around dinosaurs while adding a clever (and therefore engaging) element to the poster. Another technique in film posters that is often used is the inclusion of the symbol for a prestigious award within the film industry. This serves to establish ethos for the film as it shows great artistic achievement, and its mainly geared towards people who take a greater interest in movie culture. Another element that establishes ethos is the inclusion of the various talents that went into creating the movie. This usually includes the director, main actors, and the producing companies apart of it. Viewers get the instant opportunity to see if their favorites are included within the movie which also serves to engage them. These are the main techniques used in film posters that I have noticed but the medium (if I can call it that) is certainly not limited to them. Anyone know of any others?

These three posters all have an aesthetic that thematically coincides with the films they advertise while maintaining an engaging edge.

"I Am Very Real"

The following letter was written by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut in response to the news of his book Slaughterhouse-Five being burned by a school administrator named here as Mr. McCarthy. I felt that Vonnegut's thorough approach in his rhetoric was executed perfectly and that the manner in which it was done was inspiring. The reason why it was so inspiring is because he did not attempt to intensely defame the subject outright. Im sure Vonnegut was more than capable and ready to attack Mr. McCarthy with an unending stream of insults. Rather, he focused on the argument, rarely diverging from rational development of his points (remember: he's responding to a very irrational action). The civil manner in which the letter was written should serve as a framework for how all (or most) rhetorical arguments should be constructed. If he didn't choose to write in this fashion, the chance for Mr. McCarthy to change his opinions would have never arisen. 

I'm not saying that the letter didn't include any insults. "Ignorant", "fool", and "bad citizen" are insulting enough. I'm saying that Vonnegut seemed to keep his composure in the face of actions that contradicted his very being, which is very admirable and honest to the ideals of rhetoric. 

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?


This section allows Vonnegut's ethos to shine as he informs Mr. McCarthy of his refrain from destroying his life in the face of society at large. It reveals his humility and further bolsters the soundness of his argument. 

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.


This section represents another attempt at the building of ethos. Here he establishes his character as one of high merit and success in the eyes of the world.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.


This paragraph bolsters the logos of his argument by pointing out the irrationality in the actions of McCarthy. 

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

This paragraph calls into question the character of McCarthy as Vonnegut directly questions the morality of his administrative behavior.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.


This paragraph is an appeal to pathos because Vonnegut calls into question McCarthy's existence as an American which would most likely serve to elicit a strong emotional response in the subject.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

Information is Beautiful

The way information is received is undoubtedly apart of rhetoric. The substance of the medium that the message in embedded within ultimately influences an individual’s perception of the message. When an individual's perception is affected the rhetoric of the argument, or plain information in the case of this post, is likewise affected. After all, rhetoric is fundamentally based on how a person reacts to persuasion.

The recent focus of class has been over the various aspects of visual rhetoric. Visual argumentation, as opposed to spoken or written arguments, affects an audience in a different while having a greater effect in some areas and a lesser one in others. This is where the whole “the message is the medium” philosophy comes into play. The effect that visual rhetoric has on perception is that the argument or information presented is immediate as the audience has a clear image of what is being presented rather than having to construct their own image of the information that would be presented through other mediums. However, visual rhetoric is limited in the sense that an audience is given a somewhat surface representation of an argument which can fail to give a full understanding.

The reason why I have been discussing this is because of a website that I had stumbled upon called Information is Beautiful. The website collects various forms of data and general information and creates affecting, visual representations of the data. My point is that the visual representation of the data is far more effective (in my opinion) than reading informative text by itself. The information is more accessible, understandable, and even more entertaining.

In this example of one of the visual representations, information is presented visually in an highly organized and effective way to create and implicit argument about the destructiveness of nuclear bombs. If this image was condensed to a written description, the argument would lose much of its value and directness.This is how the medium ultimately affects the message.

Although all the visual information on the site isn't argumentative, tit is is still interesting to explore how the information is affected by the medium.

informationisbeautiful.net

R for Rhetoric

An icon that is growing in cultural eminence is the “Guy Fawkes” mask that was brought to mainstream focus through the film V for Vendetta created by the Wachowski brothers.  Through its association with the spirit of revolt, the icon has come to embody ideals such as justice, rebellion, and political keenness within whichever person deciding to wear it. As of recent, movements with significant influence including Occupy Wall Street and the “hacktivist” group Anonymous have used the symbol heavily within the rhetoric. It functions to provide a sense of unity across many elusive, dissenting claims. It is used as visual rhetoric to signify to others the spirit a person is trying to convey. With the right precision, the use of this mask can be surprisingly effective in creating a fairly distinct message.

An example of the precise use of the mask is in the scene of this picture. Polish senators are seen holding up the emphatic mask to their faces for what purpose? To protest. They use the symbol behind the mask to protest the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) from getting passed through their political system. The Trade Agreement would impose harsh restrictions on the liberal use of copyrighted material which is seen by many as a direct violation of Internet freedom and creativity. The climate that ACTA would create is the type of climate that the ideology behind the mask is opposed to. The politicians recognizing this, utilized its symbolism to visually argue the agreement in a poignant way. This is a testament to the power that a simple image can hold rhetorically. I believe that this group of politicians’ decision to use the mask is stronger by leaps and bounds than just simple verbal argumentation alone. This act would have a far greater reaction with the public which potentially increases the success and recognition of the argument. All of the mask’s hype and success reveals the importance of visual rhetoric in modern culture and it also suggests its potential to cause effect.  

Another interesting piece of visual rhetoric using masks is used in the "March of the Dead" in which protesters wear a mask that shows their lack of identity and name of a specific American or Iraqi that was killed in the conflict. 

Animation and Rhetoric

An interesting youtube series from RSA Animates has been brought to my attention fairly recently. The initiative takes a sound clip from TED talks and creates whiteboard animation that coincides with the topics discussed in the lectures in a wholly engaging and entertaining way. A particular favorite of mine focuses on a lecture given by Sir Ken Robinson on the institutional nature of the education system of the United States. His argument revolves around how schools and the culture that they assume are doing destructive things for students by limiting their capacity to learn and their general outlook on almost everything. Now, Robinson is not saying that education is a destructive force. Rather, he is stating that the institutional foundations in American education are mostly irrelevant and wrongly applied to the best interest of people who wish to flourish in our current system in which economic and social structural stresses are abundant and present. These are the basic premises that Robinson discusses in his lecture, but I am more concerned with the use of animation for the purpose of more effective rhetoric.

I was very surprised to find how engaging this video would be with the title of  "Changing Education Paradigms". I can honestly say that I have viewed this video multiple times and that I'm still entertained and engaged in the material. I believe that the animation aspect of the video is mostly responsible for this. This is the main reason as to why the video and series as a whole function on such a deeper level of rhetoric than just the lecture alone. The animation portion of the video allows the argument to be emphasized to a greater extent because it allows the material to resonate with the viewer. The added level of dimension that it brings cause me to confront the argument with a heightened awareness which further allows the argument to make its impact. Thus, a deeper rhetorical power is added which causes the argument to be reinforced and given more attention to. 

Its worth the 12 minutes!

Film the Police

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFjQKcwbTdY
This video is age restricted so you might have to sign in to your youtube account before viewing. Also, you shouldn't watch if you are easily perturbed.

A disturbing and harsh truth that I've been aware of subconsciously, but not fully, is the fact that American police officers have become increasingly violent in terms of dealing with criminal offenders however trivial or significant the offenders' actions may be. I watched this video in disbelief as a blur of  recordings of police brutality were flashed on my screen. Although the film includes highly dramatic music and a commentary that includes appeals to logos and pathos, the clips can easily speak for themselves, exposing the reality of a minority (hopefully) of police officers' morally disgusting professional conduct. Although I can write at great length on the moral and ethical vacancy of these types of police officers and the injustice that they serve to humanity, I am mainly interested in the power of the recordings on their own.

The clips on their own serve as a great rhetorical device. All that is needed as a requirement for these recordings to serve as rhetoric is a sense of human decency and a value of justice in the mind of the viewer. With these requirements in mind, the argument is able to construct itself. I feel that the general argument that the clips present is: why are police officers who are supposed to serve the best interests of the people aiming to do the opposite? An emotional response is first elicited and what follows is the viewers own sense of ethos in determining the values that are being contradicted within the society that they are apart of and in essence, represent. The filming of these acts of professional indecency allow a direct representation of truth to surface. How a viewer takes these representations is up to them. It may not be a piece of traditional rhetoric, but any individual with a sense of cultural awareness knows that the conduct is in the wrong. Ultimately, cultural awareness and understanding allow the argument to exist.

The element that makes this type of rhetoric so powerful is that anyone has the power to record malicious police behavior. Cell phones and recording devices are prevalent enough to make this tool as powerful as it is. In this following music video, Sage Francis and other spoken word rappers highlight this described power.

The following images reveal the inhumane actions of police officers and the power that recording devices have in relation to this. These actions might have gone unnoticed if recording devices weren't in place. They are graphic. 

Image of police officer mounting woman who was apart of a peaceful protest in Rhode Island. Her leg was broken as a result.

The actual image of the well known beating of Rodney King.