Hi!

Here are some articles of mine that work with rhetorical concepts or rhetoric-inspired concepts in cinema studies. They are all in Portuguese. I will publish one soon in English. As soon as possible, I post it here.

Best regards

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So sentimental and Kitsch may differ.  The term "sentimental" is used to vent critical disfavor that HOW GREEN WAS M VALLEY took the Best Picture Academy Award in 1942 over CITIZEN KANE.  How Green--was the story of working-class miners in a Welsh village. Hardly middle-class.  Anthony Trollope used the nickname "Mr. Sentiment" for Charles Dickens and his advocacy fiction for working-class characters.  That terms has become a pre-fabricated abuse term (or what rhetoric theorist Ernst Bormann called a "fantasy theme") for films that attempt to elicit empathy with working-class characters.  In the case of How Green- and Citizen Kane, much ink is spilled abusing How Green was my Valley for this film's daring to win Best Picture over Citizen Kane (a film about an elite anti-hero favored by the elite.) 

I wrote an entire essay comparing the two films and posted it here.  But here is the remark that Anthony Trollope made about Charles Dickens, who was considered too "sentimental" to study in college English literature classes for a time.  Dickens, in his day, was considered a radical and dangerous writer by the English upper-classes.

QUOTED:

.  Anthony Trollope sniffed in his 1855 novel The Warden about reformers like “Mr. Sentiment” (code for Dickens) who is

BLOCK QUOTE

                . . . the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put  down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and enough bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest.

END BLOCK QUOTE

many film scholars are still analyzing ideology, "race", class and gender are notions in a lot of analysis  by feminist, post-colonialist or marxist scholars. I guess one will not find that much literature under the term "rhetoric", but films are part of greater discourse and play a significant role in constructing and distributing ideological, stereotyped or subversive approaches to these issues. (as for sentiment: there is a whole field of studie in melodrama and sentiment. just have a look at Lea Jacobs The Decline of Sentimemt. American Film in the 1920s f.e.

Dear Gloria,

I'm trying to analyze films rhetorically. In fact I'm trying to set a methodological basis for this kind of analysis. My first step is the article Aristotle in Hollywood: Poetics and Rhetoric in Audiovisual Narrative. It's in Spanish.

Here is the abstract in English:

"The subject of this paper is to use the rhetorical model proposed by Aristotle to create a framework for a potential rhetoric of audiovisual narrative. For this, first we define the object of study, isolating it as much as possible from other related arts or sciences, as poetic or dialectic. Then we discuss some key issues emerging from the application of a model of rhetoric based in words to a rhetoric based in moving images and sound. We discuss for instance the difficulty of translation from one language to another or the need to avoid the reduction of rhetoric to one of its parts. Finally, we establish what we consider the basic Aristotelian rhetorical frame (the three types of proof by persuasion), and we apply it to audiovisual narrative."

Here is an entry of my incipient blog (filmstudies.eu) where I try to clarify differences between ideology, propaganda and covert propaganda. From my point of view, rhetoric is the methodology used by propagandists in their purpose of persuading and influencing people’s minds (beliefs, opinions and behaviours).

I agree with Claus Tieber: it's not easy to find much literature under the term “rhetoric”, and generally is literature about classical rhetoric in films, not about rhetoric of audiovisual language/narrative. Maybe you may try with these names: Peter Biskind (Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties), Michael Ryan, Douglas Kellner or Robin Wood. They don’t say they are analysing films rhetorically but I think that’s what they are doing.

 Regards

http://www.filmstudies.eu/index.php/en/2016/02/ideology-propaganda-and-covert-propaganda-in-audiovisual-narrative/

Article Aristóteles en Hollywood: Poética y Retórica en la narrativa...