In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato drafts a fictional dialog between Socrates and a bunch of pre-Socratic philosophers and academics generally known as sophists, who have been famed for his or her mastery of rhetoric. This experimental video essay from Epoché Journal combines considerably cryptic archival visuals, a haunting, dissonant rating, and textual content from an change between Socrates and the titular Gorgias on the character of oratory. Particularly, Socrates’ interrogations deal with the powers and perils of rhetoric as a persuasive system, particularly if used to persuade mass audiences to undertake a ‘perception with out information’. Embedded within the change is each a transparent expression Plato’s anti-democratic sentiment and a critique of the ‘artwork of oratory’ that also resonates some two centuries later.
