Exploration Of Market-driven Documentary Film Making From The Perspective Of The Audience

The idea of market-driven media has been proposed long before with the rapid development of the media. However, the current situation with documentary film-making is not as promising as we have expected. One of the reasons is possibly that the role of the audience has not been properly considered. For a long time, TV documentary film-making in China have been controlled by subjectivity and education ideology. The relationship between the market and the media has been segmented. In fact, compared with other types of TV programs, TV documentaries have not attracted the audience attention as it should have been. In the eye of the audience, documentaries produced in China currently are mostly preaching, boring and stereotyped. The documentary film producers are totally indulged in their subjectivity and self expression; the needs of the audience are often neglected, or in other words, not enough attention has ever been paid to the audience needs. As a result, faithful audience of Chinese TV documentaries has become less, leading to the current difficult situation for documentaries to exist.How to get rid of the problem? This is not only an exploration into the motivation of film making itself, but also the existence of the film in the market-driven society. At present, research on TV documentaries in China is mostly focused on the production of the film itself. However, changes of motivation for production do not rely on the subjective view of the producers, but on the needs of the audience. So audience needs might be the essence for research rather than the motivation for production.The current paper, first, through review of relevant documents, particularly in term of the current market-driven situation of documentary film making, summarizes the present situation for documentary films in China as well as the audiences both home and abroad. Then from the theoretical perspectives of media, aesthetics, as well as sociology, the paper analyzes the audience needs, the specialization of documentary film channels for particular audiences, and the competition for audiences in the trend of globalization, etc. The paper also analyzes the causes for low Chinese audience rate for documentary films and tries to explore possible audience-winning strategies for the market-led documentary film making.