Pathos (Emotional Appeal)

Quick reminder: anything in an argument designed to get an emotional response from the audience, be it anger, sadness, fear, happieness, or otherwise, is an emotional appeal.

Advertising uses emotional appeal constantly. For instance, just as nostalgia images can cause us to feel more trust toward the company or product being advertised, nostalgia images can also cause us to feel comfort or happiness, which we will then associate with the product or company being advertised. There are a lot of images in our culture that cause us to respond emotionally on a pretty consistent basis. We respond well to images of kids and families, of puppies and kittens, of the American flag. Music in commercials can help elicit an emotional response from audiences as well. Some commercials use editing to splice many brief images together at a fast pace; with or without music accompaniment, this can create a sense of excitement. You see this a lot in movie previews.

A lot of the same techniques are used in the rhetoric of movies. The pacing of editing can make something more exciting, intense, or scary. It can also create connections between events and set up before-and-after connections. Music can be used to tell you how to receive a situation. A scene with playful music playing over it can be completely different with more somber and serious music playing over it. A music crecendo in an imporant speech can heighten audience emotions at a given moment.

Acting, while an essential part of a film's ethos, also plays a major role in its pathos. A role played correctly will get the appropriate emotional response from the audience, while one played incorrectly or poorly will not.

Cinematography can be influential on audience perception of a scene or character, as well, though on a more subconscious level. A character shot from a low angle, with the camera looking upward, can seem intimidating; a character shot from above exactly the opposite. We associate a dark personality with a character who is darkly lit or dressed in dark clothes. A brightly lit movie is more easily seen as light-hearted -- most comedies tend to be lit this way. Horror movies and dark dramas tend to be shot with darker lighting. You probably don't think consciously about choices like these made by the filmmakers, but they definitely play a role in how the audience perceives the movie, and any quality discussion of a film will address these things.