Blakesley uses Burke’s identification to analyze film. One technique he uses to analyze the film is thorough film language: “film functions both like a language (in its sign system, with cinematic technique the analogue equivalent of a grammar), but also rhetorically, as an appeal to or assertion of identity in the audience…Approaching film as a language suggests the possibility that there is a grammar of visual signs that operates predictably and that can be used to generate an infinite variety of meanings” (114). In film, this might include camera angles and movement, color, visual repetition and so on.
Key Term
- Rhetoric: “the faculty for elaboration or exploiting ambiguity to foster identification itself” (113).