The Narration Of Natural History Films

Natural history film is a special category in documentary films. During its 100 years'development, it separated from the other types of films in its early days, and then won a great number of audiences in the television era. This is because natural history film inherits the traditions from both documentary films and feature films, and twists them into a unique code and convention. Its narration, however, is more influenced by the feature films tradition. In spite of its large number of audience, natural history films have not achieved an equivalent reputation in modern criticism for a long time.The author claims natural history film as a"genre". In this paper, the author is going to analyze and discuss how the narration of natural history film has emerged and varied, and how it is going to evolve, from both historical and empirical point-of-views. Suggestions to Chinese natural history film-making are also included in this paper.