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These "fancy tasks" greatly increase the drama and interest of the work, but the authenticity is not guaranteed, making the boundaries between documentaries and feature films, reality shows, cultural programs and other film and television types increasingly blurred. . Many people in the industry lamented: "With excessive fiction, will a documentary still be a documentary?"
In recent years, fictional creations in the name of experimentation, innovation, crossover, etc. have become popular in the field of documentaries. "Historical Things" introduces the concept of a small theater and inserts historical stories performed by actors. In "Fresh Museum: Attack of the Qin", Qin soldiers have modern thinking, saying lines such as "Leader, please think twice" and "Waiting online, it's urgent" mixed with Internet slang. "What to Tell About This Painting" uses famous ancient Chinese paintings as theater stages, showing the daily life of civil servants in the Tang Dynasty in "The Chariot Picture", and performing "records of the orchestra's life" in "Han Xizai's Night Banquet Picture". These works may include large-scale role playing and plot interpretation with scripts and lines, but it is difficult to see a direct index relationship with reality; or they may pursue the "natural occurrence" of events and the "natural reactions" of characters under prescribed situations and deliberately arranged arrangements. These "flower jobs" greatly increase the drama and interest of the work, but the authenticity is not guaranteed, making the boundaries between documentaries and feature films, reality shows, cultural programs and other film and television types increasingly blurred. Many people in the industry lamented: "With excessive fiction, is a documentary still a documentary?"
Documentaries have set off a trend of fictional creation, which is the result of a combination of multi-faceted factors. At the creative level, with the rise of the Internet, video platforms have become an important channel for documentary dissemination. In order to stand out in the fierce competition with a large number of film and television works on video websites and obtain high clicks and high market revenue, some documentarians regard the aesthetic appeal of Internet users as an important consideration in their creations. The majority of Internet users are young people. They are willing to seek innovation and change, and want to gain an interesting and even game-like aesthetic experience in watching. From this perspective, fictional methods that can bring a sense of novelty in form are more attractive than traditional documentary creation methods of static real-life shooting and separation of sound and picture. At the industrial level, the deep integration of media has enabled documentaries to start a more active exploration of integration in terms of elements and types, and the concept of "documentary +" has been widely practiced. For example, "records + variety shows" and "records + interactive games" actually use records as a technique and reality as an aesthetic feeling, and embed character interpretation, scene reproduction, and interactive expression that are commonly used in other cultural and entertainment forms into the creation. Technique. In the process of extending the value of the documentary industry, there is the superposition of documentary and fiction, and the dance of authenticity and drama. At the theoretical level, the deconstruction trend brought about by postmodernism is not only the boundary of genre, but also the level of meaning. In this context, the "truth" principle that documentaries adhere to is constantly being fictionalized, counterfeited, and questioned. People believe that even in documentary shooting, there is more or less the subjective judgment of the director, which represents the subjective will of the creator. This concept has to a certain extent prompted documentaries to accelerate their embrace of fiction.
When the trend of fiction becomes popular, the industry's discussion on "should and how to fictionalize documentary creation" has been put on the table. The author believes that documentary, known as the "National Album", is essentially an art of truth-seeking. This is the core feature that distinguishes documentary from other film and television types. A work labeled as a "documentary" has established a true commitment to the audience in terms of creative ethics. This commitment has been generally implemented in the long practice of documentary development and has formed a credibility. When viewers choose to watch a work marked as a "documentary", they assume that the content presented in the work is true and credible. Therefore, creators should abide by their agreement with the audience. No matter how the creative concept is updated, the creative treatment of reality, that is, fiction, must be based on the pursuit of truth.
However, the opposite of truth is the falsity caused by excessive fiction, not fiction itself. Therefore, documentary creation does not exclude fiction. But this kind of fiction must become the "forger" of reality within the aesthetic framework of the documentary rather than the "fabricator" of reality.We must control the volume and proportion of fiction and consciously follow the principle of non-fiction in the main content. On this basis, fiction, as a method of creative processing of reality, also pays attention to the usage scenarios and techniques. For those places that cannot be recorded or reproduced on site and have become narrative "fault zones", we can mobilize the subjectivity and imagination of the creators and use fictional art to bridge the gaps. For example, the third episode of "Why China" "Stars" fictionalized the images of a boy from Xipo and a boy from Lingjiatan. The original intention was to bring out the basic characteristics of Dawenkou culture and Hongshan culture through the perspectives of the two boys and connect them through imagination. It evokes historical time and space and achieves the purpose of conveying historical facts. In addition, the fictional part can also be appropriately informed to the audience through text prompts, separation techniques, etc., so that the audience can distinguish what is fact and what is fiction.
While acknowledging the rationality of fiction, it is also necessary to reiterate the boundaries of documentary. This can not only protect the aesthetic type of documentary, but also cultivate new audio-visual forms. We deal with those large-scale plot creations that mainly rely on live-action or digital visualization methods, fictional characters, and fictional plots. "Stories" that are based on natural materials under the art of montage and spliced arbitrarily according to dramatic logic may have script guidelines and follow Assumptions, restrictive conditions and rules are used to design and stage works that "happen" and are strictly screened. In this process, it is important to examine motivations. We must strictly put an end to excessive fiction that purely pursues dramatic effects, sensory experience, and traffic economy, or even deliberate fraud. In addition, the derivative layer of pan-documentary content needs to be distinguished from the ontological layer of documentary. Especially when promoting and marketing, we must strictly distinguish between the two concepts of "documentary" and "documentary variety show". Variety shows with a documentary nature cannot mislead the audience under the guise of documentaries.
Faced with the craze of fictional creation, it is necessary for us in the documentary industry to reaffirm the contemporary value of true records. The use of natural materials was once regarded as a key criterion to distinguish documentaries from feature films, establishing a blood-like indexical relationship with reality. Even if the scene reproduction constructed based on sufficient factual evidence has indirect indexability, there is still a gap between it and the "first scene". Especially now, generative artificial intelligence is widely used in the field of film and television, and virtuality and reality are deeply integrated. In this case, images taken from reality, with the aura of documentary aesthetics, are of great power and are even more precious and need to be taken good care of.
Author: Han Fei, deputy director and associate professor of the Department of Audiovisual Communication, School of Television, Communication University of China
Source: National Radio and Television Think Tank
