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Another activity in the class involved extending such analysis of performance to moving images. For this class we discussed some television ads, taped from the recent Super Bowl, and an excerpt of approximately five minutes from the 1996 film The American President. For the latter it was necessary to supply some terminology in order to shift the focus from the actors’ performances to seeing the film as a performance. The dominant mode of watching films assumes that the camera is invisible and natural, whereas we know this not to be the case; and attention to the various cuts, camera angles, and conventions of display involved are an aid to thinking about the many off-screen agents involved in its rhetorical address.
Students’ use of the pentad terms, by and large, were wooden and lifeless. They don’t quite have the academic knack of doing two new things with their writing at once—of both understanding and applying unfamiliar terms, and integrating those into writing addressed to the academic context. But apart from the unfamiliar terms, the concepts are not nearly as foreign as we might conclude. Students are well aware of the addressed character of many texts in the culture—they are only unfamiliar with how and why they might make use of them in an academic setting. Weblogs have served as a good intermediate step for this exploration.