The Visual Rhetoric of Traumatic Histories Essay

Imagine, people at your feet, doing everything you ask, raising you higher and better than everyone else. Does it feel good to live a life of luxury? Some would give up everything they have to achieve this fantasy, and the ones who finally have it never let it go. This is what it is like to have power and most abuse it. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, it follows a young boy named Elie, through a tragic event called the holocaust. Through so many traumatizing moments of fear and helplessness gives the ongoing theme of power, or the abuse of power. Power is something that an individual gains by asserting authority over others and can influence what they do or what happens. In this case many people that took part in the holocaust abused their power to accomplish extreme genocide. The abuse of power originated from Hitler, onto the people who ran the concentration camps, and to the people directly looking over the mistreated Jews.

Select a non-discursive artifact such as a painting, a musical composition, a building, or a piece of furniture. Do the five canons of rhetoric—invention, organization, style, memory, and delivery—apply? If they do, explain how you see them manifest in the artifact.

When Elie Wiesel talks about the various devastating events happening in the world, he says, “Countless civil wars, senseless chain of assassinations….bloodbaths in Cambodia, Nigeria.”(paragraph 3) These example of imagery are effective towards showing the audience striking images of what's really going on in the world while they sit back oblivious doing nothing about it. This visual imagery impacts the tone of guilt by the author including the details that are so vivid, showing the worlds awful reality. The authors uses imagery to prove his point of view and illustrate the tone of guilt towards the

In the annals of history, the Holocaust registers as one of mankind’s most “unspeakable” offenses. And yet, over the past seventy years, survivors have strived nonetheless to transform torture into language—to verbalize the violence against man’s body and spirit that occurred at the hands of the Nazis.

Rhetorical devices are elements embedded in a piece of work that allow the viewer to fully interpret and engage with the content presented. Rhetorical elements can be used universally through various mediums. In this essay I will be analyzing a photograph, specifically addressing the images logos, pathos, and Telos. The photograph frames your not so typical geriatric couple complete with skateboards and their flying birds. The caption of the photo is “This couple sticking it to the man”. This ironic photo packs a strong central message of living young wild and free. The unknown photographer develops the central message through the use of rhetorical deceives.

In Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” they put forward the central argument that film is a commercial product in the capitalist system and therefore also the unconscious instrument of the dominant ideology which produces it. In opposition to the classic film theory that applauds camera as an impartial device to reproduce reality, they argue that what the camera reproduces is merely a refraction of the prevailing ideology. Therefore, the primary and political task for filmmakers is to disrupt this replication of the world as self-evident and the function of film criticism is to identify and evaluate that politics. Comolli and Narboni then suggest seven categories of films confronting ideology in different ways, among which the second category resists the prevailing ideology on two levels. Films of this group not only overtly deal with political contents in order to “attack their ideological assimilation” (Comolli and Narboni 483), but also achieve their goal through breaking down the conventional way of depicting reality.

The use of distinctively visual images allows an audience to perceive and distinguish the composer’s specific representation. From these distinctive visuals, the audience’s perceptions force them to respond in a particular way. In ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, Ang Lee utilises a range of film techniques to position his audience through a combination of quiet, dramatic scenes and choreographed action sequences. In his painting, ‘Third of May, 1808’ Fransisco Goya conveys meaning exclusively with distinctively visual techniques. Both the composers are able to effectively convey their message and

The holocaust was a tragic time which involved the killing of Jews to create a ‘pure race’ in Germany. Jacob Boas analyzes the stories of five young Jewish children through the book “We Are Witnesses,” who were forced through the hardships of war. Through the perspectives of David Rubinowicz, Yitzhak Rudashevski, Moshe Flinker, Éva Heyman, and Anne Frank, the struggles of the five children are clear as they try to hold on to their ideals while still fighting for their lives. “We Are Witnesses,” by Jacob Boas adopts repetition and diction through the eyes of David Rubinowicz, imagery using Yitzhak Rudashevski, repetition and imagery via Moshe Flinker, repetition with Éva Heyman, and repetition and syntax by Anne Frank to brandish how Jewish

Gender theory is an effective framework to interpret Jewish deportation because it offers valuable insights into the subtle power relationships between Jews and their oppressors. In order to effectively use gender as a prism of analysis it is necessary to venture beyond descriptive usage of gender; Joan Scott’s characterisation of gender as an implicit way of signifying power provides a sophisticated avenue to explore this topic. When applying gender theory to Schindler’s List, scholars should modify their expectations in light of Zelizer’s critique that popular culture cannot mirror the Holocaust ‘as-it-happened’. To resolve some of these challenges researchers can ‘triangulate’ popular representations with photographs to ensure that their scholarship remains rooted in historical fact. Ultimately, provided that researchers are cognizant of the limitations inherent within both Schindler’s List and photographs, gender theory is a highly applicable intellectual backdrop to examine themes of power, masculinity, and authority during the Holocaust.

In John Berger’s essay “Ways of Seeing,” he shares his view on how he feels art is seen. Mr. Berger explores how the views of people are original and how art is seen very differently. By comparing certain photographs, he goes on to let his Audience, which is represented as the academic, witness for themselves how art may come across as something specific and it can mean something completely different depending on who is studying the art. The author goes into details of why images were first used, how we used to analyze art vs how we do today, and the rarity of arts. He is able to effectively pass on his message by using the strategies of Rhetoric, which include Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

Throughout the film Image Before My Eyes, directed by Josh Waletzky, viewers are shown videos, pictures, and interviews regarding European Jewry from the late 1910’s to the 1930’s. Though this is a film explaining the events and upheavals that led up to the Holocaust, the word Holocaust is rarely ever mentioned. It is through the use of multimedia in this film that the devastating history of the Holocaust becomes illuminated. The film allows the viewer to begin to fathom the destructive events that occurred between the two World Wars as well as the secularization of daily life for Jews throughout this time period.

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).

In this essay the following contemporary painters are going to be examined: Marlene Dumas, Wendy Sharpe, and Euan Macleod. Besides, I will analyse the ways in which these artists engages in dialogue with current social or cultural concerns, focusing on specific ways that the medium influences the effectiveness of visual communication.

Magazine covers are a distinct multimodal genre that attracts the reader’s attention and assumes a position with respect to the theme of the issue. In order to account for the argument that a magazine cover conveys, an argumentative reconstruction is required that focuses on verbal and visual media interacting to create

Like the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the tormented artist son in Pasolini's TEOREMA (1968), the received cultural baggage and semiotic referentiality of the image is eliminated until all that remains is purest subjectivity of the spectator. And so, picture-making technology mediates reality only up to a point: once the threshold of referentiality has been crossed, the suspicion of a murder in the park gleaned from a series of enlarged photographs would seem to say more about Thomas' own paranoid state of mind than what his camera may or may not have