Footages And TV Specials On World Expo In China And Abroad: An Archival And Comparative Approach

For more than 150 years, the World Expo has journeyed major countries and cities worldwide. Against different times and era, and along with the technological development, the World Expo-related audiovisual archives not only stepped from black and white world into a color one, from the silent film into the sound movie, and from the film to the tape and back to the film again, but also became more sophisticated and had its own system in both form and content, which reflected different cultural and national specialties. Since few academic researches have been carried out on the universal World Expo footages and documentary specials in China, I tried to carry out a very tentative archival analysis in the field of video study on World Expo.Firstly, I've done some combing work on the first-hand audiovisual documents on World Expo of major countries in the world. After a comparatively complete analyzing and explaining on the several World Expos before the year 1930s, I then classified the World Expo documentary specials innovatively into three categories:"the pre-World-Expo publicizing TV special", "the near-World-Expo reviewing TV special" and "the far-post-World-Expo reflective TV special", and to comb and describe the three kinds from the aspects of the content, the style, the use of the camera, the presenting way, the producing institute, and the airing form, etc. Therefore, a video archive on the subject of the World Expo could be set up and maintained. Next, I summarized and compared the World Expo TV specials home and abroad from the following inspects:the generalities of international World Expo videos under the frame of historiophoty, the differential broadcasting system, the dissimilar operating mechanisms, the distinctive artistic styles and technological methods of World Expo TV specials so as to reach the effect that the traditional being used for present day, and the western experience being used by China. Among the research, some sparkles of personal opinion will be raised for discussion.It seems that an audiovisual history of World Expo could be regarded, to certain degree, as the developing history of the World Expo and the presentation history of audiovisual technology. I hope that the research work of my thesis could not only preserve a file of the history of World Expo videos, and expand and enrich the Expo research scale, but offer favorable experience for the media task of the post-World-Expo publicity as well, and in the meanwhile, more concern and further discussions aroused on audiovisual research are invited within the academic circles and amongst the industry professionals.