Aristotle's "Rhetoric" offers a model for applying the concept of the enthymeme to the work of film scholars to understand the role of the audience. Used from an analytic perspective, enthymemes emphasize audience reaction to a film, with the focus on how the film is seen, not on how it was made. Applying viewing skills to a sample of narrative films can demonstrate how the speaker and the audience jointly produce enthymemes. Films, then, make use of appeals to the audience (whether to ethos, pathos, or logos), arranged in deductive and inductive orders according to the enthymematic process. When a film is considered as an argumentative process, therefore, two important aspects of rhetoric stand out: first, the filmic argument is audience dependent in that enthymemes are completed through participation; and, second, a rhetorical theory of communication, such as Aristotle's, provides a valuable heuristic device for the critic to account for the filmic argument. By considering films as argumentative, the body of critical work on a film appears as perceptions of the argument; the critic must move to a meta-criticism by taking into account these arguments as consequences of the filmic argument. (JK)