Reality And Fictitiousness In The Creation Of Chinese TV Documentary

From the history of the documentary, objective and actual record is being pursued since the birth of the photography. At the beginning of the birth of the film, Lumiere gave special emphasis to the actual record of the film. Robert Flaherty, an American director, produced the first documentary Nanook of the North. In the 1920s, Dziga Vertov,the Soviet documentary master, initiated Kin-Eye recording of actual life. The creator of Direct Cinema maintained the photographer was always like a bystander, recording silently forever in order to copy actual life without interfering with the development of the event. Andre Bazin and Krakauer put forward the theory of documentary, which had great influence on the creation of Chinese documentary.In the middle and later stages of the last century, Chinese documentary held strong belief of the Soviet model of subjective preaching. And in the 1990s, as the introduction of the concept of record, Chinese documentary was diverted to pursue objectivity and authenticity, paying attention to the creative orbits of objects and life using the record technique. Thus, China started a record trend, which led to the unprecedented prosperity of Chinese documentary films.The documentary using reality usually attempts to approach the actual life from an objective and observant perspective in order to avoid destroying the objective content because of the creator's subjective inclination. It adopts a non-compulsory, opening narration and uses the technique of reappearance to present completely the whole information to the audience, which provides more choosing room for the audience and gives them the equal sense of participation, thus helping the audience to draw their own conclusions and form their own opinions. As a result, the documentary using reality could better satisfy our desire of obtaining more direct, more colorful, and more authentic information.For a long time, the record technique has almost been the only technique of the documentary because the overpowering record technique elbows other styles and kinds out of the way. Moreover, as a result of many people's misunderstanding of record, the record technique becomes vulgar and rampant; the objective reappearance is regarded as the ultimate goal of record technique. Many documentary directors are shamed or daunted to talk about expression as if the documentary and expression could not coexist.However, as regard to the documentary creation of historical and scientific subject, such as the passed time and space, the macrocosm and microcosm which could not be approached by human being's ordinary perspective, the creator could not get the original audio-visual materials. If the traditional record technique is adopted, obviously the direct expression can not be realized. It has become a trend that the documentary pursues the perfect television-like expression by some fictitious technique such as performance, actual reappearance, computer flash and so on. Meanwhile, the development of digital technique ensures some fictitious creation.The idea of"new documentary films"rising in the 1990s provided an original explanation for the authenticity of documentary. The American expert Linda Williams proposed the concept of"new documentary"and expounded the appropriateness of embedding fiction into documentary filmmaking, which had a great impact on traditional ones. Meanwhile, the fictional interpretation applied in documentary making has brought about an unprecedented situation. Like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, there emerged a great many works covering culture and history, science and technology as well as nature, which caused an audio-visual shock with very high audience rate and great popularity.Therefore, it is significant to study how to realize the true value of documentary, how to appropriately apply modern technology to enhance their expressive force of art and how to extend human's sight and broaden its thematic fields.This thesis intends to analyze and compare the two techniques of documentary filmmaking, namely, record the facts and fictional interpretation. And it traces the social background and history of documentary which has influenced its making concepts, features and artistic expressive ways. To combine factual representation and fictional interpretation, the thesis attempts to study theories and solve problems in reality in order to better understand the fundamental knowledge concerned with filmmaking.What's more, based on critical analysis, the writer has illustrated some aspects related to the new fictional filmmaking and concluded that fact recording and fictional interpretation can be applied in a complementary way. Particularly, with the application of modern technology, we can reach the utmost extent to which documentary displays the truth beyond time and space.