Documentary: Ideas and Practices

Author: Wang Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: The title of this book is "Documentary: Ideas and Practices," aiming to demonstrate that what plays a crucial role in documentary creation are: (1) Ideas, the creators' deep emotions and rational reflections; (2) Practices, the various techniques used by creators to collect footage on-site and the post-production skills employed. In actual production, ideas and practices are intertwined and mutually influential, representing the internal and external aspects of the same factor. Any idea must rely on practice to be expressed, and any practice is also imbued with ideas. Often, when ideas are adjusted, practices must follow suit, or vice versa—if practices do not adjust accordingly, the ideas cannot be effectively expressed, which means a lot of ineffective effort is wasted. To clarify the close relationship between ideas, practices, and their interplay, one must turn to history and examine how past documentary film masters thought and acted. Thus, this book will take the historical evolution of film and television documentaries as its narrative thread, specifically analyzing the development of documentary creation thoughts and methods. More specifically, this book will describe the evolution of documentary imagery from the perspective of expressive methods, explaining how, over the past century, people have used film and television to record "real events in real time and real places." Therefore, the core terms of this book should be—imagery, documentation, thoughts, and methods.