| Abstract: | On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth are read as epideictics for the experiences of directors Elia Kazan and Herbert Biberman testifying before the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC). These films are self-conscious studies of the directors' principles in which union struggles serve as the vehicle for narrative analogies that express differing philosophies about a key tension in the American identity–that between individualism and community. Because these films represent the creation of meanings at two different synchronic sites within the culture, they offer opportunities to inspect how their messages are historically and culturally determined and how they are like, or unlike, the cultural memory of our own time. This rhetorical approach to reading cultural memory investigates the diachrony of contexts, requiring the rhetorical critic to act not only as an archaeologist of the moment of production, but also as a historian of the circulation of texts, and as a contemporary social moralist. Such a multi-layered approach is necessary for understanding the different cultural options and cultural force of On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth. |
