On The Application Of Visual Rhetoric In Ecological Films

In a visual culture age,people are increasingly dependent on the visual texts to cognize,explain and understand the world,visuality is gradually becoming the dominant element in culture.Pictorial symbols which construct persuasive discourse by the method of visual rhetoric are playing an increasingly essential role in the construction,communication and campaigning of environmental issues.Especially in terms of the current environmental films,visual rhetoric has great influence in the process of articulating the individual's emotion,self-identification and mobilizing social action.Based on structuralist semiotics and text analysis,this paper is going to use the case of the series of short film Nature Is Speaking from International Conservative and its secondary text to analyze how visual rhetoric is applied to realizes the creation of the meaning of the film,identification creation and discourse construction,thus providing an analytic path of visual rhetoric to understand the ecological films.This article analyzed the film structure,the oppositional elements in the film and filmic representation of this film series.This film not only take full use of plural visual rhetoric including accumulation,deformation,samdarsana,metaphor and symbolism etc,but also it use the techniques including montage,music,acoustics,subtitles etc to realize the persuasive effect of the film.On the one hand,ecological film utilize visual representation to display various important nature issues and affect people's perception of the environmental problems and stimulate their emotions,on the other hand Filmic symbols articulate with ecologism by the use of language to realize cultural and value identification thus realizing deep persuasion on the rational level.Visual rhetoric research derives from the exploration on the pictorial rhetoric of advertisements and it mainly focuses on the work of categorization of the static pictures of advertisements but it lacks comprehensive research of visual rhetoric for the films.And the research of visual rhetoric of ecological film is also at the explorative stage and this intersectional research between environmental communication and visual communication is inspiring for us to understand the persuasive mechanism of the ecological films to the audience.The future research will extend to the analysis of dynamic and synthetic media form such as new media and build up more complete categorical system of visual rhetoric.