Landscape Production And Identity Construction Of Domestic Gourmet Documentaries In The "Post Bite Era"

Documentary films play an important role in cultural transmission and construction of national image with their documentary techniques and realistic image texts.They are supported and recognized by audiences from different cultural backgrounds,and are known as the boxed ambassador.Food documentaries take food as the traction and ordinary people's daily life as the main story.They have become a powerful way for people to use images to shape the images,spread culture and construct identity.With the changes in media technology and audience acceptance,food documentaries have changed substantially in its content,display form,and way of transmission.On the basis of the predecessor,the food documentary has formed a post-“A Bite of China”(post-bite)era Food Documentary.It provides a research field for us to further study the effect and significance of food documentary in local image shaping,cultural transmission and identity construction.This research takes “post-bite” era Food Documentary as the research object.Applying theories in film studies and key concepts from Cultural Geography,Media Geography and other disciplines,this research analyzes different spectacles within the documentary text,with special focus on identity formation and negotiation.User generated content of posts and comments on major online social media platforms is gathered and analyzed to reveal how viewers of these documentaries negotiate their identities in cyberspace.This thesis delves into the production of spectacles,the symbolic representation,and the utterance of identity negotiation in cyberspace in the“post-bite” era Food Documentaries.It reveals the important effect of the documentaries in shaping differences of local images,constructing the uniqueness of local culture.The “post-bite” era Food Documentary stimulates the audience's emotional connection and identification with other places.The conclusion of this study is that the “post-bite” era Food Documentary has represented local food,characters and restaurants as spectacles,which leads to the audience's specific imagination of a certain place.These documentaries construct people's symbolic identification with distant places.In addition,they have formed different identity representations.There are three main symbolic manifestations in the film,namely the body,the consumption and the ritual,which promote the emotional connection and identity construction between the audiences and the people living in remote places.At the same time,the film images have sparked identity competition and negotiation among different audiences on the internet,and have subsequently influenced different dimensions of their identity,i.e.local identity,distant identity and national identity.Therefore,the author argues that the “post-bite” era Food Documentaries not only play an important role in shaping the image of the local space and culture,they also provide a field for audiences to articulate the meaning of being“self” and/or “others”,further revealing the process of identity construction through viewing of food documentaries.