Rhetoric In Film

Narratives of documentary as a craft of expression of metaphor and the soul of rhetoric have attracted many modern film scholars (Dorst 268-281). Discussing folk life of the films of Errol Morris, Dorst feels that ‘text’ and ‘apparatus’ in a documentary limits the usefulness of hybridity as a productive theoretical metaphor. Comparing the narrative structure of documentary filmmaker William Manchester and Truman Capote, Donald Pizer suggests that documentary narrative can vary in form. Its adaptability suggests that it will continue to serve as a vehicle of experimental narrative by serious writers as well as a form of the higher journalism. Like all literary artists, the modern writer is confronted by the problem of the seemingly rival claims

made on his roles as observer and as filmmaker. Documentary narrative with its striking of the chords of "truth" and "art," appears to have found favour not only because it "solves" this problem but because it proclaims its solution loudly and clearly (118).
Plantinga, focusing on the role of sound in documentary films states that sound – both diegetic (that exists within the film e.g.

natural sounds, voices of character) and non-diegetic (which are added during editing and the characters in the film are unaware about it) are also used for rhetorical purpose (79). Thus, spoken word, sound effect, music and silent shots are considered as a pertinent text in documentary film rhetoric. Context of using the sound bears a significant role in generating the meaning. Emphasising on the spoken word as a meaning clarifier, Plantinga says that the ideological function or effect of photography and sound recording in the nonfiction film is varied and can be superficial or informative, veridical or misleading, depending on their specific use and context (81). Plantinga in his artcle What a Documentary Film is, After All deals with the question of defining documentary films and how to distinguish it from non-fictions and other videos. He categorises all classical documentries as Documentaries as Indexical Record (DIR) and Documentaries as Assertion (DA) accounts and shows how these accounts fail to satisfy traditional definition of documentary (105). He suggests an alternative account ‘asserted veridical representation’, representation that is ‘in case of implicitly or directly asserted propositions truthful; and in the case of images, sound or combinations thereof, a reliable guide to relevant elements of the scenes’

(112).
Music offers a challenging task in exploration of the relationship between art and reality in documentary. John Corner examines this aspect in his essay Sounds Real: Music and Documentary. Analyzing a variety of documentary films, the article notes how the dominance of journalistic and observational formats has, for different reasons, tended to place music in the margins. Drawing on an example from the classic period of documentary filmmaking in Britain, it points towards a more expansive use of music in a complementary relationship with images. The essay suggests that there is more scope for aesthetic development in music-image relations than has often been recognised. According to Corner, the established inhibitions about mixing ‘fact’ with ‘emotion’ needs to be reviewed in recent developmentsin documentary filmmaking (357-366).