Separation And Intervention: The Creative Boundary Of Reflexive Documentary

As a newcomer to the area of documentary development,reflexive documentary has been an outsider ever since its birth until the uprise of new documentary films from the West started to hit the public in the 1980 s.The diversity of documentary development began to challenge the monopoly of the traditional documentary with more characteristics added to the presence of "reality".With that process going on,reflexive documentary gradually caught the public eye.As a mirror of a creator’s self-introspection and self-explanation,the reflexive documentary adopts a variety of visual strategies to present objective reality to serve its goal,while possessing qualities that other mainstream documentary genres do not have-by putting the creator and the subject altogether under the same time and space during filming process,it breaks the narrative boundary,and thus distancing away between the film and the audience.In addition to that,with creators’ active participation it also injects a stronger objectivity to the film.This whole series of characteristics prove to be a great challenge to the traditional documentary development,and the boundary between traditional documentary and reflexive documentary becomes vague – traditional documentary development has been more or less impacted by the inverse documentary,therefore its development process tends to come closer to the process of inverse documentary.For example,a creator begins to interfere or intervene in the image to some extent.At this point,the boundary between the reflexive documentary and the traditional ones needs to be specified,and the way we distinguish or define the reflexive documentary has become one of the hot trends in the development of the documentary nowadays.This paper attempts to take interstitial and intervention as the two characteristics of reflexive documentaries,and analyze the boundary issues of reflexive documentary creation by combining meta-cinema and mimetic theory.It is expected that such a research idea and approach will provide a reference for the genre research of documentary films nowadays.