English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Annotated Bibliography

Burke, Kenneth. “Lexicon Rhetoricae”. Counter-Statement. Hermes: Los Altos, 1953.

Burke’s “Lexicon” investigates literary appeal and lays out terms for use in such an endeavor. Defining form in literature as “an arousing and fulfillment of desires,” Burke splits form into progressive form, repetitive form, conventional form, and minor or incidental forms.
I have yet to master a full understanding of his categorization, but already I can tell that his definition of form could be instrumental in discussing experience and expectation in the form of movie trailers. Burke’s precise use of language fits in well with the schematic expository writing of the movie advertising and visual interrogation sources I have already consulted. In other words, I think that Burke and the other writers create categories for classifying types of experience, expression, and marketing that will aid in my exploration of these complex issues.

Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Delta: New York, 1982.

Syd Field’s oft-accessed book about writing screenplays is useful to my purposes for laying out a coherent paradigm through which to view most films. From the first page, explaining how scripts work, Field discusses his understanding of the three act structure that, he says, applies to every script.
Naturally one can be wary of absolute faith in such metanarratives, but since Field’s work has been acknowledged from the early seventies to the present (Darren Aronofsky has cited him as a huge aid in his writing of Pi and the adaptation of Requiem for a Dream), Field’s narrative organization provides a basic template against which to view the operations of trailers. When we say that trailers show a film’s dramatic arc, do we mean that they show the setup and the confrontation (acts one and two, respectively), or that they also hint at the resolution? Field’s book should give me a good rough vocabulary with which to discuss common narrative arcs of movies as they compare with trailers.

Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. University of Texas: Austin, 2004.

As I mentioned in my Clarification Project, Kernan’s book is a comprehensive rhetorical look at the operations of trailers. Concerned with the rhetorical situation of trailers, Kernan interrogates issues such as audience construction and the rhetoric of trailer genre. Taking these fairly traditional rhetorical concepts, Kernan treats trailers as an entity to themselves, rarely giving much discussion time to the films from which the trailers draw material.
Kernan’s book will doubtless be invaluable to my discussion of trailers in a way similar to that of Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoricae.” Just as Burke gives a helpful set of terms for describing literary appeal that I should be able to appropriate into my study of trailers and film expectation, Kernan shows one way to align rhetoric to trailers, and her explication of the invoked audience, while not mine, should give me a good starting point for describing the rhetorical creation and destruction of expectation in trailers.

Marich, Robert. Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies Used by Major Studios and Independents. Focal Press: New York, 2005.

Marich’s book is a comprehensive exposition of marketing strategies used by a wide range of film producers and distributors. Of particular note are his words on teasers and trailers. Teasers are shorter advertisements for films that hit theatres well before movies are scheduled to arrive, he reports, and thus have a dynamic and goal very different from full-length trailers. Teasers can create a sense of mystique and in fact can be hindrance to the film promoting process if they give too much of the film away or even are successful at making an audience want to see the film (since the film release date is so far off). Teasers thus can be far more “experimental” or less formulaic than full-length trailers, which tend to be formulaic.
Marich explains that the most common complaints about film trailers, that they give away the film’s ending or they show the best parts of the film, are due to the fact that the trailers appear later and must often resort to the “hard sell.” Films that an audience might consider too artsy are often marketed as less experimental to avoid audience confusion and frustration, and in order to make engaging trailers (a key part in movie marketing) quality parts of the films must be used.
Marich’s writing is clear and concise, which will make it easy to include in my paper. Though he speaks of marketing strategies, his writing uses concepts such as the “mystique” of a film, which I think should help me in my discussion about viewer expectation.

Messaris, Paul. Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Sage Publications: London, 1997.

Though Messaris does not address movie trailers specifically (and in fact does not address moving images at any length), he does make a very interesting point about Charles Sanders Peirce’s study of signs. Pierce arranges signs into three categories: index, icon, and symbol. He simplifies index to be that which is caused by its object and serves as a physical trace pointing to the object’s existence (viii). An icon is characterized by some form of similarity or analogy between the sign and object. Symbols Messaris doesn’t really address at any length.
The interesting point Messaris makes is to point out how visual arguments are unable to explicitly indicate “causality, analogy, or any relationships other than those of space and time” (xvii-xviii). Messaris is likely overstating the case, but if we follow his argument and apply it to trailers, we can say that there is an implicit mystery to merely visual images, and that showing a scene is quite different from giving away one of “the best parts of a movie,” since the image itself is limited. Trailers that have no sound would really tell us very little about the movie, and for this reason trailers generally require voice-overs and textual cues, which directs my investigation to those vestiges for more nuanced creation and destruction of the anticipation that accompanies movies.

The Terministic Screen. Ed. Blakesley, David. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale, 2003.

Blakesley’s book runs the gamut of rhetorical investigations of film. The disparate offerings interrogate aspects of film as widely different as the rhetoric of talking about movies, the rhetoric of film theory, and how rhetorical practices are used strategically in film plots. The perspectives are organized accessibly in Blakesley’s Introduction, where he describes the emerging field of the rhetoric of film and illuminates some of the rhetorical issues held in common by the articles.
Since movie trailers are nowhere mentioned explicitly, the significant material for my studies from this book will be how rhetorical notions are seen to play out in film by the various authors (especially, I think, the notion of identification) and how the book became source material for Lisa Kernan’s work.