I am Jack's Bump Halbritter, an image of an image of a man.

Cinema may be the best example of multimodal compositional interface, perhaps because it has a 100-year plus history invested in discovering how this medium works. Cinema, of course, combines three media–verbal, visual and aural–to make a single, integrated medium of rhetoric: the film.

Individual senses are targeted in unison in cinematic composition. Teachers need to develop an anticipatory pedagogy when dealing with students’ multimodal work because the possibilit exists they will create something entirely new for the instructor, and the only guide for interacting with such a composition may be the composition itself. In the words of John Cage, teachers must be ready to “identify[...] with no matter what eventuality” in the multimodal composition classroom.

Prerecorded music may be incorporated effectively into a multimodal composition to serve a number of rhetorical functions. For example, music may serve as a symbolic screen or lens through which to view something else, a thesis (rhetorical screen for evidence and promise to audience), ethos (moral dwelling place) , example of Burkean irony (goes forth as “a” and returns “non-a”) or metaphor (”a” is not “b”; however, “a” is “b”). All these parts interact in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), in which a Rolling Stones’ hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” serves as thesis for the film, achieving many of the rhetorical effects listed above.

When considering multimodal composition classrooms and rhetoric, instructors must be careful to recognize the difference between technology and pedagogy. For example, taken alone, hypertext and metaphor present technologies that can be adopted in multimodal composition, but a systematic approach to use hypertext, prerecorded song and visuals in a digital composition environment to make a metaphor (the Fight Club example) is a pedagogy.

"I look like you wanna look." (except for the shiner and blood)