“There is no PLANet B,” reads the inscription on a
cardboard poster held by the organizers of the 3rd Kraków Green Film Festival to be held on August 13-23, 2020. The great
popularity of this international festival proves the importance of the issues
raised by the filmmakers who are "focused at improving the culture of life
in accordance with the «green» values." The films presented at the
festival (available also online) might be one
of many widely available inspirations for the analysis of the visual rhetoric
encompassing the textuality of ecology. The trio of the key terms which bind
the topic together are: Visuality/Ecology/Rhetoric.
The aim of the issue of Res Rhetorica on Rhetoric of
Ecology in Visual Culture is to provide different critical perspectives on the
persuasive power of images in environmental and ecological rhetoric. As Heather
Dawkins observes in Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature (2009, 91), the complex
scripto-visual strategies can be used “to construct affective resonance, […] to
demonstrate ideas, to define the good, to persuade and to propose action” and,
as such, the images – whether they are still images (photographs, paintings and
posters) or motion pictures (films and other related media) – have “taken their
place as intrinsic rhetorical structures in environmental rhetoric” (Dawkins
2009, 91).
