Imagining Visual Literacy:
        The Poetics and Rhetoric of the Image
        Robert L. Root, Jr.
         

                 The first time I saw someone at a national convention declare the need to face up to the reality of visual literacy, I was a new Ph.D. looking for a job at the 1975 MLA convention.   I had been thinking a lot about the adaptation of Shakespearean plays to film--I was a 17th Centuryist in that incarnation--and attended a session purportedly demonstrating effective teaching of a Shakespearean sonnet through film adaptation.  The film began with a slow zoom across a wheat field--the professor who made it taught in Kansas--ending in a medium shot of an aged wooden water tower which reversed the polarity of the film, from positive image to negative image, and projected the sonnet on the tower in white letters.  The image lasted while the audience read it once quickly, then again more carefully, then curiously a third time and cursorily a fourth, a muttering of impatience starting to rise.  Then the letters disappeared, the image shifted back to positive, the zoom shot reversed itself, and the closing credits began to roll--the film was over.  Because this was  the MLA, a lengthy discussion followed and the audience argued whether the presentation was ironic, prophetic, whimsical, and/or profound; my own view was that the speaker, whether deliberately satirical or merely passive-aggressive, was hostile to visual media and making the cranky point that the only way to get students to read print media was to film it and project it as print.  It was a position that begged the question of visual literacy altogether, ignoring the powerful and complex conventions of visual literature and treating visual literacy merely as the imprinting of words on celluloid instead of paper.
                 Recently, nearly two decades later, I previewed some videotapes intended for classroom use and was dismayed to discover that visual media as a means of instruction (at least in these examples) had barely advanced from the level of that sonnet film or even the much earlier Sunrise Semester "talking-head" series of the '50's and '60's.  One videotape showed scenes of Cape Cod and Sturbridge Village while a voiceover read seemingly unrelated excerpts from Thoreau's Cape  Cod, a ten-minute presentation that revealed little about either the location or the book.
                 More distressing was the five tape series on The Elements of Style, a 210 minute (that is, three and a half hour) oral reading of the book by Charles Osgood, the doggerel-writing newsperson.  The tapes show Osgood dutifully, relentlessly, in a pleasant, patient tone of voice, reading Strunk and White from beginning to end--the introduction points out with pride that virtually the entire script has been taken word-for-word from the book; the camera and Osgood never move.  The only variation from this static approach comes when a rule of usage or principle of composition is introduced.  Then the video inserts a colored background and flashes the rule or principle on the screen in white letters while a woman's voice reads it aloud, in the calm, reassuring tones of a professional caregiver.  "A participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence must refer to the grammatical object," she reads, and then we are shown a sample sentence or two.  When the video cuts back to Osgood, he reinforces the rule by telling the camera benignly: "Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence."  Implicit in all this is the belief that if students hear grammatical rules read aloud, they will understand them better than if they read them silently.  Nowhere in the tape is there any attempt to make the rules clearer, to use video to illustrate language in action.  It would be just as effective as an audio tape--the visuals are as lifeless as if a classroom teacher herself sat at her desk and read the entire book aloud without comment or interaction with her students.
                 My complaint about such videos is this: Not only do these visual aids fail to use visual media effectively in the teaching of subject matter, they fail to achieve a level of visual literacy the students themselves possess when they walk into the classroom and, therefore, they fail to extend the students' own literacy about media.  As subject-matter teaching tool, as example of visually-literate media, and  as media-literacy teaching tool, they waste the time of both student and teacher, alienate the student from the subject matter, and squander the resources of the school's visual media budget.  In the print universe of the past this mattered less than it does now, in a universe immersed in non-print media.
                 Like our culture at large, our students are steeped in visual media, which are their chief sources of both entertainment and information.  If the filmmakers, videomakers, and songwriters themselves are any indication, visual media exerts tremendous influence on the shape of the dialogue we have about life in America-- Madonna's "Express Yourself" video imitates the classic silent film, Metropolis  (1926);  Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted Snake" video is a powerful homage to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz  (1979);  Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" video is as much a montage of media images as it is a compressed cultural history of the last several decades.  Such successful recent films as Hook (1991), Cape Fear (1991), and The Last of the Mohicans  (1992) have been based not on literary works but rather on earlier films inspired by them.  Indeed, for some time now, visual media have been the most important and pervasive forms of lyric, narrative, and dramatic literature, not merely interpreters of print forms of such work;  in commercials for products and services as well as in political advertising, they have also become ubiquitous models of rhetoric, everpresent examples of faulty reasoning and deceptive argumentation, and shifting, shifty interpreters of social values.  For all these reasons it has become increasingly important that we include visual literacy among the literacies we teach rather than to continue to allow students to confront non-print media with only the critical resources such media themselves provide.  Acknowledging this, NCATE now includes media literacy among the criteria by which it accredits programs of teacher education and the National Council of Teachers of English has established a Commission on Media to address the issue of media literacy, particularly in programs for preservice elementary and secondary English language arts teachers.
                 Because calls for new subject matter to be added to established programs often seems at best burdensome or even daunting, I'd like to suggest some ways of imagining visual literacy in the English department by insisting that, at base, we already have the tools we need to deal with visual media.  As with any form of discourse, be it literary, expressive, referential, or persuasive (in James Kinneavy's terms) or expressive,  transactional, or poetic (in James Britton's terms), visual media are subject to the critical systems of analysis we already apply.  As departments specializing in rhetoric and poetics, we need to recognize that visual media extend the forms of print genres--that film and television drama are extensions of fiction and drama, that popular songs and music videos are extensions of poetry, that newscasts and documentaries and commercials are forms of expository and argumentative discourse--and we need to find ways to incorporate them into the poetics and rhetoric we already teach.
                 Let me give some examples of what I mean by the poetics and rhetoric of the image, of visual media generally, by starting with the poetics of film.  I begin with a brief example from world literature, brought to my attention by Trisha Jurkiewicz in her master's thesis comparing Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace  with two film versions (44, 64). At one point in the novel the French forces have routed the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky has fallen wounded.  It is a moment of epiphany for Andrei--all along he has admired the greatness of Napoleon, the French commander, but as he lies wounded staring at the sky he recognizes not only his own insignificance but Napoleon's as well.  Tolstoy tells us:

          Above him there was nothing but the sky, the lofty heavens, not clear, yet immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly drifting across them.  "How quiet, solemn, and serene, not at all as it was when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like our running, shouting, fighting; not like the gunner and the Frenchman with their distraught, infuriated faces, struggling for the rod; how differently do those clouds float over the lofty, infinite heavens.  How is it I did not see this sky before?  How happy I am to have discovered it at last!  Yes! All is vanity, all is delusion, except those infinite heavens.  There is nothing but that.  And even that does not exist; there is nothing but stillness, peace.  Thank God . . . " (344)
        Later Andrei awakens on the battlefield and hears Napoleon's voice giving orders to his aides.
          But he heard the words as he might hear the buzzing of a fly.  Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them, instantly forgot them.  His head was burning; he felt that he was losing blood, and saw above him the remote, eternal heavens.  He knew that it was Napoleon--his hero--but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was taking place between his soul and that lofty, infinite sky with the clouds sailing over it.  At that moment it meant absolutely nothing to him who might be standing over him or what might be said of him; he was only glad there were people there, only wished they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he understood it. (357)
        Andrei's change of heart at the battle of Austerlitz is a pivotal moment for him, one that irrevocably changes his character, and that surely must be acknowledged as one of the important scenes in the book.  We can understand something of the nature of visual narrative by seeing how such a moment is translated into cinematic literature, and Jurkiewicz  has done so by comparing the treatment of this scene in the 1956 American-Italian production, directed by King Vidor, and the 1968 Russian production, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk.  I particularly want to draw attention to two parallel shots.
                 In both versions Andrei is ordered to rally retreating troops, picks up a fallen standard, and leads the Russian troops back against the French.  In Vidor's version the troops cross from right to left and charge off-screen in a long shot that dissolves to a view of the sky.  The camera tilts down from the sky to the unconscious figure of Andrei lying on his side in a rather fetal position.  Music soars and we cut to a shot of Napoleon riding up.  Looking down from a level higher than Napoleon on horseback, we see him point down at Andrei and pronounce, “That  is a fine death.” A full shot of Andrei rousing slightly and glancing up at Napoleon is followed by a medium shot from Andrei's point of view of Napoleon on horseback against a background of sky which he and the horse dominate.  (I should note that in the original VistaVision format the sky would undoubtedly have extended further on either side of Napoleon but not necessarily any further above him.)  Napoleon orders Andrei to be taken to his bivouac and his wounds treated.  Andrei moans and opens his eyes, but gives no evidence of conscious reflection through the scene.
                 The Russian version develops the scene more fully (the original length of the film was 434 minutes, over seven hours; its American running time is 208 minutes, three and a half hours).  We see Andrei lead the charge, then follow him into battle until he stops, staggers, and falls.  Simultaneously the sounds of battle grow faint and disappear, as if he can no longer hear them.  The screen darkens, and then cuts to an iris of Andrei’s face in a circle of black, his eyes opening and looking up while his voiceover muses, “How quiet, how peaceful.” The voiceover goes on into the next shot of what he sees, the brilliant sky and churning clouds above, and it continues even when the screen blacks out and we hear Andrei think: “Even the sky doesn’t exist.  It’s all stillness and peace.  Thank God.”  The screen stays black for a few seconds after Andrei stops speaking, then opens on the bright expansive sky.  The camera tilts down to discover Napoleon on horseback in the middle distance of the shot and Andrei in the foreground at the bottom of the screen.  Napoleon, even on horseback, is a small figure against the background of the sky.  That framed shot is a visual translation of the scene as Tolstoy portrays it verbally in the book.  In the Russian version Bondarchuk has expressed the idea behind the narrative event in the book; in the American version Vidor has merely represented the actions of the narrative or the plot and ignored any expression of their significance.  Cinema can indeed translate the interior life of characters in fiction into "visual language" (as well as oral narration in voiceover), but we also need to be able to read that visual language.
                 Let's take another example, this time from drama.  One of the most memorable and moving speeches in all of theatrical history is the one Shakespeare gives Henry V to address his beleaguered and outnumbered troops just before the battle of Agincourt, which has been filmed by both Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, each directing himself in the role.  It is a powerful and persuasive speech, and both men have responded to it as screenwriters by amending it in similar ways for performance--both cut lines 24-33 (“By Jove! . . . O, do not wish one more!”), possibly to shorten the speech, take the focus off the issue of honor, and avoid a convoluted argumentative passage.  Olivier further omits the line “This day shall gentle his condition” (line 63), changes “vile” to “base” (line 62), probably because the original word has changed meaning since Shakespeare penned it, and reads “be he ne’er so base” as modifying “Shall be my brother” at the beginning of that line.  Otherwise the two actors read the same speech:
             What's he that wishes so?
             My cousin Westmoreland?  No, my fair cousin:
             If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
             To do our country loss; and if to live,
             The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
             God's will!  I pray thee, wish not one man more.
             By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
             Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
             It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
             Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
             But if it be a sin to covet honour,
             I am the most offending soul alive.
             No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
             God's peace!  I would not lose so great an honour
             As one man more, methinks, would share from me
             For the best hope I have.  O, do not wish one more!
             Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
             That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
             Let him depart; his passport shall be made
             And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
             We would not die in that man's company
             That fears his fellowship to die with us.
             This day is call'd the feast of Crispian:
              He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
             Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
             And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
              He that shall live this day, and see old age,
             Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
              And say 'Tomorrow is Saint Crispian:'
             Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
             And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
             Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
             But he'll remember with advantages
             What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
             Familiar in his mouth as household words,
             Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
             Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
             Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
             This story shall the good man teach his son;
             And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
             From this day to the ending of the world,
             But we in it shall be remembered;
             We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
             For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
             Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
             This day shall gentle his condition:
             And gentlemen in England now a-bed
             Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
             And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
             That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.  (IV, iii, 18-67)
        This speech would be wonderful to analyze for its rhetoric, another brilliant example of a Shakespearean character using language to move the mob, but for the moment I'm more interested in how the speech is played in the two film versions of the play.
                 Laurence Olivier's reading in the 1945 film directed by him is as oratorical as it might be when played in a theater.  Indeed, from the beginning of Henry’s speech the camera stays on a long shot of Henry, dollying in as close as a medium long shot early in the speech but always keeping his throng of men in the frame, tracking with him as he crosses the camp and climbs onto a cart, slowly pulling back to take in a panorama of his troops surrounding him in the foreground, the tents of his encampment behind him, and the backdrop of distant buildings and fields painted in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts.  Olivier once explained his belief that, in filming Shakespeare, “You have to reverse the usual film technique of getting closer and closer to the actor as a scene reaches its climax . . . It isn’t necessary in Shakespeare for the camera to create the climax.  The verse does that.” Because he felt that “the lines demanded broader and broader acting,” he filmed the speech in Henry V  so that the “camera started close up and, as the climax of the speech neared, it drew back so that the actor could let himself go” (Schwarz 22).  Note that this viewpoint is principally theatrical in origin, not cinematic.   Throughout the scene Olivier as Henry is handsome and heroic, an undeniable leader of men, every inch a king, throughout the scene, and his troops are appropriately stirred to battle.  Only when the speech is over does Olivier the director cut to a medium shot of Westmoreland and a medium close shot of Henry for the personal exchange.  Henry stands out visually because of his simple black tunic and silver leg armor, while all other soldiers are in battle gear, and William Walton’s score for the soundtrack is not played during the speech.  The weight and force of the speech is carried by the actor, not the cinematography, just as it would in a theater; it is delivered in a single shot with no attempts at close-ups of the speaker or any of his listeners;
                 In his 1989 version Kenneth Branagh, by contrast, uses the full arsenal of the cinema: a stirring soundtrack by Patrick Doyle underscores the speech, the camera tracks with him like one of the officers being addressed and consistently sees Henry from a low angle and his listeners from a high angle appropriate to his power in this scene, and the sequence of shots takes us from a long shot at the outset to medium and then close shots for emphasis toward the end.  Moreover, since the use of close-ups throughout the film has visually established the identities of many of his listeners, inserts of reaction shots underline the significance of several lines and underscore their reception by the various listeners to whom the speech is addressed.  For example, when Henry says the names that will become “familiar as household words,” we see the approving reaction of Henry’s inner circle, the figures named, particularly Exeter, played by Brian Blessed, whose facial responses to other’s speeches throughout the film is a constant aid to interpretation for the viewer.  Similarly, when Henry mentions “this story shall the old man teach his son,” we see the Boy (played by Christian Bale) listening intently.   The more powerful moment, perhaps, comes when the music softens and Henry's voice lowers on the line: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," as if Henry has just realized how much these men mean to him, as if the line means something more to him than simply the inclusive camaraderie he needs to instill in them. At the same time, the insert of a reaction shot of Fluellen, Gower, Jamie, and MacMorris, pleased and moved at that line, gives identity to the band of brothers and reenforces the language with visual confirmation of its effect.  The establishment of the bond between Henry and his men is further indicated by the rapid cuts to three groups of cheering supporters--the nobles, the officers of four nationalities, and the low characters--and the effect of the scene is to bond the audience in the movie theater to the audience gathered around him on the battlefield.
                 The differences between these two versions of the play are chiefly the difference between showing and telling.  Olivier's effects are achieved by staging that the camera records; Branagh's makes the camera an intimate part of the storytelling itself--you have to watch Branagh’s film carefully to see what it's driving at whereas in Olivier's you largely listen to what is said in front of you.  Great visual literature uses the poetics of the image to tell the story, interpret character, and make its point.
                 In addition to poetics, of course, the other great force of discourse in English departments is rhetoric.  I have already suggested that Henry's speech is a particularly fine example of Renaissance rhetoric--others have studied Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in any number of plays.  But I want to suggest not only that rhetoric may used to analyze a character's speech, in the same way we would analyze the Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Kennedy's Inaugural Address or King's speech at the Washington Monument, but also that it may be used to analyze the literary work itself, as Wayne Booth has done in The Rhetoric of Fiction.  The idea that a literary work can be a rhetorical act should be a familiar idea--what are 1984  and Animal Farm, to pick two obvious examples, if not rhetorical?  Similarly, visual and aural media are also rhetorical, and subject to the same systems of rhetorical analysis as any other form of discourse.  Start with the obvious: the songs of Bob Dylan, “The Ballad of the Green Beret”, “God Bless America”; the television series All in the Family  or Good Times  or The Cosby Show  or Roseanne ;  films like Death Wish  or Gandhi  or Norma Rae  or All the President's Men.    In fact, all discourse is rhetorical, as Kenneth Burke and James Kinneavy have been saying for years.
                 Let's go back to those two Henry V  films.   For each film the climax, as it is in Act Four of the play, is the battle of Agincourt, but the way in which those battles are filmed are suggestive of the rhetorical stance each takes toward its subject.  In Olivier's version, the discovery of the slaughter of the baggage boys leads Henry to declare, "I was not angry since I came to France until this instant," and to mount up again to return to the battle.  His wrath is righteous; mounted on a white horse, in silver and red armor, he defeats the black-mounted, black-clad Constable of France, its most dangerous military leader, in single combat while the armies watch.  Throughout the battle scenes Olivier has used traditional film storytelling methods to help the audience follow the tide of battle, the opposing forces are clearly indicated, and the devastating barrages of arrows of English longbowmen--historically the deciding factor in the battle--are depicted.
                 Branagh's version highlights the faces of the waiting British army, one of several times in the film that Branagh insists we come to distinguish among minor characters in the play.  Their fear and anxiety are the focus of our attention while the charging French army is only heard--not seen--closing in.  Then Branagh casts us into the thick of the battle, again using medium shots and medium close shots to cut off our ability to follow the strategic flow of the fight, and using only the sounds of whirring arrows, clanging swords, crashing armor, shouts and cries and whinnies and grunts, thuds and thwacks to help immerse us in the experience--for the first section of the battle there is no music.  Though we follow identifiable British figures in many of the battle scenes, little attempt is made to highlight one army over another.  The turning point is the three-fold slaughter of Nym (stabbed while cutting the purses off corpses), the Constable of France, and the Duke of York.  Mud, blood, desperation, and exhaustion splatter every visage, and the battle ends with the surrender of the French forces to a Harry England uncertain of the tide of battle.
                 In Branagh's film the battle is simply sustained carnage; in Olivier's it is heroic and triumphant.  The close of battle reinforces the attitude of each director toward the battle.  In Olivier's the king reads the death tolls from either side, mounts up, and leads his forces back to England.  The sequence closes with a train of troops and transport winding its way toward the backdrop beyond which lies Calais.  While the battlefield has a few runaway horses and scattered bodies and debris, the great cost of the battle in human life is de-emphasized visually.  The sequence ends much as it would in a theater, with the cast leaving the stage to end the scene before the scene changes.
                 Branagh's Henry and his troops bear more marks of battle, and the emphasis in Branagh's recitation of the death toll speech is on his weary amazement at their victory and his somewhat bewildered attribution of it to higher powers.  "Let there be sung Non Nobis and Te Deum,/ The dead with charity enclosed in clay," he orders and his forces set out to deal with the aftermath of the battle.  Then occurs a cinematic moment that ought to be required viewing for future filmmakers: beginning with a close-up of a soldier singing the Non Nobis  the camera tracks out across the battlefield, leading Henry with the body of the Boy over his shoulder while behind him the panorama of slaughter opens up ever wider and wider and all the living characters cross the screen, until Henry mounts a cart heaped with the dead and deposits the boy's body.  Only then do we cut to a medium close shot of Henry, looking exhausted, gazing dazedly across the battlefield.
                 Branagh's film is much more ambiguous about the glory and honor in war than Olivier's, and much truer to the dark ambiguities of Shakespeare's "heroic history play."  The fate of the low characters is portrayed in grisly detail, the battle scenes have none of the romance of warfare typical of most medieval spectacles, the motives of Henry are more ambitious and less principled than we would prefer in heroes, although it may also be said that Branagh seems to offer the possibility of growth in Henry--the campaign makes him more than merely a politician; it makes him finally a king.
                 Part of the difference in interpretation may stem from the historical context in which the films were made.  Shakespeare, after all, told the story of the heroic king at a time when the succession to the throne of Queen Elizabeth was on everyone’s mind, and the play is partly a treatise on the responsibility that comes with the crown.  When Olivier made his film version of the play, near the end of World War II, he was prompted by the effect it might have on the morale of the British people, who had long been besieged by Hitler’s armies and who had identified with and responded favorably to the “band of brothers” speech when Olivier had read it on the BBC.   To make a patriotic and positive film in wartime, Olivier edited out the darker motives, the more cynical behaviors, the ambiguity: his Henry is a warrior king from the outset, and his victory is one to be celebrated, applauded.  He cuts the scene with the traitors from Act II, eliminates the fate of Bardolph and Nym and plays Pistol’s last scene for laughs, and plays up Henry’s candor in the courtship scene as merely charming and endearing.  He also gives considerable attention (including pastoral visuals and music) to Burgundy’s long speech about the need for a return to peace in France. We may also say that Olivier is more interested in the subtext of dramatic representation that runs through the play in the character of the Chorus than Branagh is, and this inspires some of the most creative and effective devices of the film, such as the opening in the Globe Theater of Shakespeare’s time and the medieval matte work inspired by the illuminated Tres Riches Heures du Duc du Berri.
                 Branagh’s film, made forty-five years after Olivier’s in a period of post-Vietnam and post-Falklands skepticism about military adventuring and political motives, chooses to make quite different emphases with the same material.  It is less celebrative of Shakespeare’s theater (his Chorus opens the film on a soundstage and speaks directly to the camera) and more unabashedly connecting the Chorus’ dramatic references to the cinema.  It is more ambivalent about Henry’s methods, emphasizing the political maneuvering between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king, adding as flashbacks scenes from the Henry IV plays involving the low characters, and including in the Chorus’s epilogue references to the short-lived consequences of the victory at Agincourt which Olivier had cut.  During Burgundy’s speech in the final act Branagh gives the King of France and Henry opportunity to flashback to the cost of their warfare in individual lives; Henry’s wooing of Katherine is more patently expedient than amorous and the note of concord sounded in his final speech about marriage (of kingdoms as well as people) is undercut by the camera dollying away from the scene and the intrusion of the dour-faced Chorus before it ends. The film’s ending is somber rather than, like Olivier’s, celebrative.
                 Each director, then, has a view not only of his own interpretation of the play but also of the effect he wants to have on the audience and the use of history to which the play is to be put.  That is the rhetorical dimension of each film, of any film.
                 In the examples I've cited the poetics and rhetoric are cinematic, not verbal, not print.  The visual dimension, aided in some cases by music, influences our interpretation of plot, character, and theme--indeed, in Shakespearean films the dialogue cut from the play is often that which describes what film can just as powerfully (and more efficiently) show.  Moreover, the visual dimension creates the same kind of motifs, symbols, and associations that typically occur in verbal language in a text.  My point is that poetics and rhetoric are a part of visual discourse in the same way they are part of print discourse, not only in adaptations of literary works but also in original works for visual media.  If English departments need to be more attentive to visual literacy, particularly in the training of English teachers--and there is no question that they do--then extending our classroom investigations of literary and referential discourse into the poetics and rhetoric of the image would be a good place to start.
         
        Works Cited:

        Bondarchuk, Sergei, dir. War and Peace.  With Bondarchuk, Ludmila Savelyeva, and Vyacheslav

          Tihonov.  Mosfilm, 1968.Branagh, Kenneth, dir. Henry V.  With Branagh and Derek Jacobi.  BBC/Curzon/Renaissance, 1989.
        Jurkiewicz, Trisha M. "From Epic Novel to Epic Films: Two Cinematic Adaptations of War and
          Peace ". Thesis. Central Michigan University, 1990.
        Olivier, Laurence, dir. Henry V.  With Olivier and Robert Newton. Two Cities, 1945.
        Schwarz, Daniel, “The Present and Future of Shakespeare,” The New York Times Magazine
          12 May 1946: 22-23,56.
        Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  Hardin Craig, ed. Chicago:
          Scott, Foresman, 1961.
        Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. trs. Ann Dunnigan.  New York: NAL, 1968.
        Vidor, King, dir. War and Peace.  With Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer.
          DeLaurentis/Paramount, 1956.
         

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