From Visual Rhythm To Life Rhythm:A Study On The Poetic Documentary

Documentary is just like a mirror for the existence of human beings,mirroring and reflecting the existence of life in real word.Besides,the poetry of documentary leads people from visual rhythm to life rhythm to pursue the reality.In pursuing the poetic feature of documentary of recent hundread years,it should be combined with historical background,mainstream about culture and art,technological development and philosophical thoughts,and analyzed within the context in which factors just mentioned were included.On the base of documentary’s texts,this thesis will discuss the development and progression of documentary’s poetic feature since 1921,in a span of nearly a century,explore the deep roots for the changes in the expressive form of documentary’s poetic feature,figure out the structure and expressive methods of documentary’s poetic feature in different periods,draw a hieratical diagram for documentary’s poetic feature,and discuss about the philosophical perspective of documentary’s poetic feature.This research aims at extending the perspective of research on documentary’s poetic feature and providing possible theoretical guides for designer’s practice.The poetic feature of documentary prompts its practical functions and promotes art performance.Meanwhile,the poetic feature of documentary is related with that of poems and poetics.For this reason,in the first chapter of this thesis,there are some discussions about “the conception of documentary’s poetic feature and general issues”,and a brief introduction on “documentary’s poetic feature from the perspective of documentary’s classification”.Then,further discussions are extended to some general issues about the scope,form and content of documentary’s poetic feature.In silent film era,the poetic feature of documentary derived from vanguardism and realism.The earliest published documentary depended on the function of images that is,recording actual events,and was combined with the conception of realism to explore narrative signifying system in poetic videos of documentary.Comparatively,poetic documentary pursuing form in silent film era absorbed ideas of vanguardism,sought for the ontology language of film and created form signifying methods of visual image and visualized expressive methods of music.However,the poetic signifying method unduly relying on visual images caused that this category of documentary disappeared gradually for being away from recording actual events.The development of sound technology reinforced the function of images to record actual events,and furthermore advanced the process that form signifying documentary in silent film era was transferred into sound film.In early years,documentary demonstrated poetics through sound and images.During this period,the poetic feature of documentary had ideological orientation because language was added into documentary.In the preliminary stage of sound film,the poetic feature of documentary stuck on the signifying methods in visual form and created a new signifying method with sound and image working simultaneously.However,the poetic feature of Grierson’s documentary,in which sound could control image,was in decline because of audience’s aversion to the imperious broadcast of ideology and deviation from the domain of “recording of actual events”.The poetic feature of documentary in both silent film era and sound film era shook their foundation as independent film because of paying too much attention to form and deviating from reality.Since in the early years of 1960 s,synchronization of sound and picture saved at the very time documentary production from danger.However,videos recording actual events with the support of synchronization of sound and picture made poetic demonstration deviate from documentary’s narration of recording actual events.At this point,poetic demonstration methods,pursuing forms in the early years of silent film era when rhythm was regarded as blueprint,and language in the early years of sound film era when language was regarded as a media,failed to perform their signifying functions independently.However,the poetic demonstration methods mentioned above took advantage of their own functions,utilized signifying function(metaphor)of videos,assisted to implement video narration of a certain theme,told the existing of life,revealed the emotion truth and the thought truth behind the life rhythm.