Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Abstract

Wisconsin and other places who strived to carve out discipline particular to the medium, and much of this by defending film as an “art” (a tack also taken by Herbert Wichelns in the 1920s, arguing for oratory as literature). The consequence of the push for disciplinary turf from U.S. film scholars such as David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Tom Gunning, and others has been a subtle snubbing of rhetorical perspectives on film. An admittedly crude take on the antipathy is that U.S. film studies prefers to treat film either historically or on its own, aesthetic terms while rhetoricians are prone to read films symptomatically, as signatures of culture. Phillips’ Darkness is exemplary because it does both.