Exploring The Narrative Style Of The Gourmet Documentary

In the 21 st century,China has witnessed rapid development of media and communication.Meanwhile,audiences are more and more familiar with television documentaries,which aim to display various kinds of history,customs,and living habits.Compared with traditional media,a documentary is characterized by its function to educate and promote national self-confidence.Since 2012,food has become the most popular subject in terms of documentaries,creating a boom of food-oriented documentaries.Carefully choosing representative food as well as stories behind the food,food-oriented documentaries tend to provide audience a holistic view of a specific food culture.As a result,food-oriented documentaries would satisfy audiences' needs for elaborate food,necessitate education and publicity functions of documentaries,and more importantly,substantiate artistic ideas of directors.Categorized as a food-oriented documentary,Keep Hungry and Find Foods in Shanghai(Chanlaojing Shanghai Meishi You)is divided into four independent food-oriented stories.In those stories,the characters and their virtues are served as reminders of different spirits of Shanghai.In essence,the redefinition of documentaries has been heatedly discussed under the competition from TV and Internet series.If focusing too much on educational function,documentaries may lose its appeal to audiences;nonetheless,if emphasizing too much on suspense or conflict,documentaries may lost its realistic nature.As a response,how to attract audiences while remaining documentaries' realistic nature is discussed in this thesis.