The human race has created a complex web of social and personal relationships and connects between people, the universe, and themselves. War and Upheaval through Film has helped me understand these connections and the issues that people face through a rhetorical and contextual perspectives. The course has help me to look at films from a different perspective; it forced me to separate my emotions from the truth of what the plot is revealing to me as a spectator. There were times in which it was difficult for me to watch certain films without bias and my own opinions, and it was a constant battle between me and the truth. Besides this fact, I know that there are always going to be issues that …show more content…
In this course, I have discovered that rhetorical choices are part of the foundation of a good storyline. There were different sources I could use to find out different points of view on what the films rhetorical choices were. For example, in Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise 1991), I used to view the film as just another Disney princess movie with no meaning behind it besides a love story. After our first viewing of Beauty and the Beast and reading its article, An Epideictic Dimension of Symbolic Violence in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Inter-Generational Lessons in Romanticizing and Tolerating Intimate Partner Violence I was better able to understand the perspective that Olson got on domestic violence. With the Beast’s constant rage and undermining abuse towards Belle in the beginning, the connection between what I thought was a beautiful love story and the perspective of domestic violence seemed to intertwine and my views about the film changed because of it. Filmmakers use rhetoric to create a more complex and broad story so that critics can find outliers of the film and make assumptions of the filmmaker’s rhetorical choices. Olson says [about Beauty and the Beast (1991)] that “the film’s combination of sophisticated rhetorical strategies might cultivate a romanticized understanding of and …show more content…
War and Upheaval through Film has given me not only the ability to be a critical spectator in films, but also in life. In the article, Social Issues in Disguise by Barry Brummett, he addresses that “It is hard to speak, to see a television show, or to watch a film without the stuff of our discourse implicating and alluding to some wide social issue, a social issue that us thus at least partially in disguise (Brummett 1).” I now know that in ever film I have the ability to find the rhetorical choices, why the filmmakers chose them, and I can make assumptions not based on my emotions, but on the criteria I am shown. From this course I have learned what my role as a spectators is, and that I can split my emotional thoughts from my critical thoughts to understand the full context of the films I view. This course has helped me understand what rhetoric is and how I can discover it beneath the surfaces of films. Spectators are never supposed to be truly shown the rhetorical choices of a film; we are supposed to find it for