A Study Of Strategies For Portraying Minor Characters In Character Documentaries

Character image is an important carrier to reflect social development and serve the theme of documentary.Since the early 1990 s,China’s documentaries have entered a period of popularization.A large number of creators began to take "individuals" as independent units,gradually get rid of the typical character construction thinking of "Gao Daquan",focus on small people and tend to be popularization,which also makes the audience more able to project themselves from them,appreciate the cold and warm of society,find the life force of small people,and the connecting force between the fate of small people and society.This article will discuss the path of portraying the minor characters in the context of Bishop’s work Under the Ordinary.The film is a documentary on street singers,documenting the daily life of Wang Xuewen,the first licensed street performer on a pedestrian street in Changsha,as he faces the "35-year old dilemma",presenting the main character’s process of healing others and feeding himself at the same time,and revealing the current situation of street singers and their inner world,ultimately shaping the image of a man who It also reveals the existence of the street singer and his inner world,and ultimately creates an image of a small person who is willing to shine a light on society even when he is in the "dark".This paper is divided into five chapters,of which chapters 2 to 4 are the main part of the study.The first chapter is the "Introduction";the second uses Marx’s theory of the typical character to analyse the civilianisation of the typical character and further discusses how to show the complex and multi-faceted nature of the typical character through the relationship between the character and society and the self;the third chapter focuses on the video text and examines the narrative strategies of everyday narrative from the levels of narrative structure,narrative space,narrative symbols and narrative perspective.Chapter 4 examines how to create a realistic and full-bodied image of a minor character through sound and picture symbols in the context of audiovisual language theory.In conclusion,this paper combines Marx’s and Engels’ theories of typification and video narratology,takes the minor character as the object of study,uses civilian selection,everyday narrative and plain audio-visual as the basic framework of this study,and uses the research methods of documentary research and textual analysis to provide a reference for the study of the image of the minor character in character documentaries.