Oral History Documentary Narrative Research

Oral history is the oral description of historical facts by a person or a group of people; while documentaries use sound and pictures to record and reflect real life, whose function is similar to that of oral history. So the combination of the two has become a necessity. Oral history records the personal viewpoints of historical events through interviews or tape-recording, providing information for people to learn more about history. With the combination of oral history and documentary, the unique narrative and the development of documentary has attracted people’s attention. Based on the theories of film and literature narratology, this thesis takes recent oral history documentaries in China as its object to study the narrative of oral history documentary.The thesis is divided into five parts:the first part is an introduction to oral history documentary, the present research and future trend of oral history documentary at home and abroad.The second part analyzes the inevitability of the combination of oral history and documentary, the development of oral history as well as the film development of oral history documentary in China. This part shows how oral documentary witnesses, gets involved in the real history, and provides audience with intuitive emotional experiences. Taking into consideration of the development of oral history documentary in the competitive diversified media market and the practical significance of oral history documentary, this part shows the significance of narrative research on oral history documentary.The third part discusses the narrative of oral history documentary from three aspects--narrative point of view, narrative language, and narrative structure. The narrative point of view of the witness or the narrator can objectively reflect historical events and enrich people’s idea about history. In order to overcome their shortcomings, oral history documentaries enlarge their merits in the course of the narrative. The story-like narrative of pictures pays more attention to details and can better show the social context and characters:the sound effects strengthen the emotional communication of visual pictures. Sound is both a narrative device and a supplement to visual pictures, while,"group voice" narrative also forms a kind of language montage, supporting narrative content, and strengthening its objectivity, authenticity and visual senses. Narrative structure occupies an important position in the text research of oral history documentaries, which often use cross narrative structures such as mixing time and space or fiction and facts. This structure can better highlight the subject of a documentary.Based on large amounts of literary resources and oral history documentaries, the fourth part draws the conclusion that the following aspects need to be done in order to keep oral history documentaries flourishing in the media market. First, use various imaging techniques, and focus on the visual scene of the incident Second, combine various fields of view. Third, colloquialize the language. Fourth, make the content attractive to the audience.The last part concludes that oral history documentary provides us with true historical images, unique inner perspective of narrative and personalized emotion. It can enrich our awareness of history and provides much more space for the development of the oral history documentary.