For instructors looking for a fresh approach to teaching the figures of speech, I'd like to recommend N. Roy Clifton's book The Figure in Film. With examples drawn from movies that range from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Zombies on Broadway, Clifton discusses cinematic counterparts to almost a hundred rhetorical figures.
I'd like to recommend The Figure in Film, but unfortunately it's out of print (and not yet available in a digital format). What I can do is let Clifton illustrate his method, which movie-going teachers and students may wish to adapt.
- Metaphor in The Ladykillers (1955)
The two parts of a metaphor are . . . an image on the screen, and some event or idea compared with it, together giving a visible form to an attitude or comment. . . .
When her lodgers realize that Mrs. Wilberforce will certainly confess to the police her nonexistent guilt and implicate them, they sit glumly around the room. Louis makes the decision: he snaps open his springknife, and throws it at the tabletop, where the point of the knife imbeds in close-up. The image is the embedded knife, but the gloss is clear: Mrs. Wilberforce must die (The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick). - Simile in Modern Times (1936)
When a thing made for one purpose is used for another, we have demonstrated a simile; we are thinking and acting the word "like," even if it never passes our lips. . . .
In the wealth of similes in [Charlie] Chaplin's films, some are more elaborated. As a waiter in Modern Times, he is taking a duck to a customer, and is swept away by dancers rising from their tables and filling the center of the floor. At last he reaches a carving table, and one of three young men snatches the duck and runs away tucking it under his arm like a football. Charlie intercepts, catches the duck, runs as in a football game, dodging the three opposing players, and leaps onto the carving table and another table beyond it, scoring a touchdown as he crashes to the floor with his customer. - Personification (or Prosopopoeia) in Sullivan's Travels (1941)
To give a human shape or human qualities to an animal, thing, or idea is the figure prosopopoeia. . . .
[John] Sullivan is trapped by a widow, who commands the only door to his room and has made amorous advances. We have seen on the wall a picture of Joseph, the widow's late husband. As Sullivan ties the rope of sheets for his final successful attempt at escape by the window, we see Joseph's eyes widen. For a moment the painted canvas appears to live (Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges). - Punning (or Paronomasia) in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Where the figurative meaning of a word is confronted by its literal image, the pun is rather more filmic. . . .
As we see the police raising a car from the Thames, the voice of a radio commentator expresses the confident opinion that the thieves who stole the gold bricks "would find their loot too hot to handle." Two of them are now seen with tongs, lifting a glowing retort out of a furnace and pouring gold into molds of the Eiffel Tower. There are several such puns in The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Chrichton). - Synecdoche in The Third Man (1949)
Synecdoche is a form of metonymy in which the part stands in place of the whole or (less commonly) the whole in place of the part. . . .
The actor's task on stage is to find the gesture, the director's on the screen to find the close-up, which in the part betrays the whole person. . . .
Harry Lime is elusive. Long before Holly Martins, his friend, persuaded Lime to [attend] a meeting, Martins finds but hints and glimpses of him. One night Harry's kitten lies on polished shoes, all that is seen of a man in a dark doorway. Martins, drunk, shouts at the man, and the light goes on in a second-floor window as a woman opens it up and abuses Martins for his noise. For the moment the light is on, we see a sardonic face in the blackness of the doorway. Before Martins can reach it, there is a clack, clack of running feet, and, as he pursues, he sees a great shadow running along a lighted wall. Martins comes out in a silent, empty square. Parts to signify a presence: never the whole man (The Third Man, Sir Carol Reed). - Antithesis in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
[I]n the most effective antithesis, a contrast in form is matched by a contrast in meaning that has some significance in the narrative. . . .
If the two extremes are shown more than once, the figure becomes a montage of antitheses. When [Jefferson] Smith's opponents, controlling the press, prevented his home state from hearing of his filibuster, boy rangers ran the story off on a handpress. Handsetting is contrasted with linotype, handpresses, with automatic, and so on to wrapping and final delivery--each stage of production is a separate antithesis (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra). - Anadiplosis in Citizen Kane (1941)
In the strict filmic anadiplosis, the same image ends one scene as begins the next. . . .
Boss Geddes threatens to publish the fact that [Charles Foster] Kane has a mistress, unless he withdraws as a candidate for governor. Kane refuses. Geddes and Kane's wife have just emerged from the house where the mistress lives. The wife goes off right and Geddes left, leaving the lighted double doors and the number above them--185. The tone changes from dark gray to light, and we pull back to see the doors now on the front page of a newspaper, exposing Kane's "love nest." The repeated image is stronger, from a cause-and-effect relation: the scandal as a consequence of Kane's refusal (Citizen Kane, Orson Welles).
Even if you're able to locate a second-hand copy of The Figure in Film (Associated University Presses, 1983), you may be disappointed by the author's unfashionable black-and-white examples, all drawn from movies that are significantly older than our students. Fortunately, I've found that my college freshmen are quick to catch on to the concept of cinematic figures. So just stand back and invite your students to identify the allusions in Super 8, the personifications in Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the metaphors in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
Then, if you're teaching English rather than film studies, be sure to redirect your students' attention to the corresponding figures in prose.
More Figures in Films:
- Anastrophe (Ballad of a Soldier )
- Aposiopesis (Citizen Kane)
- Ellipsis (To Be or Not to Be)
- Prosopopoeia (The Three Caballeros and Dumbo)
