Television Documentary Writing, Anthropology, As The Threshold

Human culture is going through an unexpected age of electronic media. Due to television's uncomparable ways of producing images, it has deeply penetrated into people's social life and has become the most influential media. As a type of televison program, television documentary, developed from movie documentary, has long been the refined one with the largest cultural content among various television programs. It has great value in social cognition, literature research and culture inheritage. China's television documentary developed quickly after the reform and opening up and reached the peak in the 1990s with the style of realism. However, with the marketization and commericialization, the competition of ratings is more and more severe. Therefore, documentary programs were defeated by various entertainment programs. Since late 1990s, in spite of the innovations of television documentary, it still couldn't avoid the embarrassment that it had rare audience despite the good remarks. It became the elite one and the social influence was greatly reduced. For the sake of surviving, many documentary programs were cancelled or changed. Many documentaries also chose to entertain audiences. Their strategy was to avoid the true reality and find out the emotional and sensational stories. They focused more on the creation of suspense. Meanwhile, some took advantage of the technology to simulate the situation, which has great visual impact. This phenomenon not only caused the value absence and culture deficiency, but also cannot avoid the fact that by introducing imaginary means into real documentaries, it will cause conflict between the core value in the traditional documentary and the one in today's documentary. Particularly, the phenomenon of breaking the bottom line of the reality not only cause the creators to confuse, but will mislead audiences, which results in the crisis of the meaning of documentaries.Therefore, the author believes, in order to develop television program, we not only need to abandon the opinion that market is the single standard, but also need to broaden our horizen. Anthropology, which studies human and the culture from an integrated perspective, can provide some ideas and methods for documentaries, such as the way of working, the perspectives, the way of experience, and the features of languages. By making use of these methods through the whole process from designing to editing, the quality of documentary will be improved and its social, historical and cultural value, as well as the functions of documentary, can be better reflected.This paper reviewed stages of the development of China's documentary and deeply analyzed the existing problems. On the basis of previous literature and other authors'theories, as well as the anthropology knowledge, this paper will study what can be learned from anthropology to improve television documentary in the following aspects:Firstly, humanistic solicitude:humanistic solicitude is the core idea of anthropology and also the traditional spirit of documentary. Considering humanistic solicitude, documentary should demonstrate real feelings instead of superficial emotions.Secondly, Field Work:anthropology relies on field, while documentary relies on the spot. Anthroplogy prefers to observe in the field. If field work can be used in documentary, documentary will more correctly reflect the interviewees, which therefore maintain the principle of being real.Thirdly, emic and etic:anthropology not only has etic observation, but also emphasize on emic one. It supports the idea that people should respect others'view and study culture from the perspective of people who belong to this culture. Thinking in others'shoes provides a new perspective of observation and record.Finally, holism:studying culture in an integrated perspective is one of the basic aspects of anthropology. By applying holism into the creation of documentaries, documentaries can focus on topics that are typical and can represent a group. When we reflect the interviewee, we also need pay more attention to the whole cultural environment.Television documentary has been researched a lot, but most of the previous researches focused on one subject. Those researches which combined anthropology with documentary are mostly limited to visual anthropology. The author put the whole process of documentary's creation into anthropology perspective and it is the first time in this research area. Although in the area of visual documentary, some people have chosen this perspective, the author is trying to be more systematic, comprehensive and better targeted in each single part of the making of documentary.The author has more than ten years working experience in media and three years systematic learning in anthropology, therefore, the research methods in this paper combines the real working experiences with the thoughts and observations occurred during the leaning process. Meanwhile, this paper adopts the method-literature analysis. In this paper, a lot of visual materials and research materials have been collected. Besides, the author also did some targeted interviews in order to complement and prove the literature materials.By doing this research, anthropology can be applied to a new and more influential media area. Furthermore, it is helpful to improve the quality of documentary, and help documentary take the social, historical and cultural responsibilities. This research will play a positive role in meeting audiences'demand for refined culture.