| With the influx of migrant workers into cities,social problems such as unbalanced urban-rural development and the proliferation of left-behind children in rural areas have become more and more serious.The documentary film focused on rural children is a documentary film reflecting the current situation of poor and left-behind children in rural areas against the background of China’s urbanization process.This paper takes spatial narrative as the core entry point for the study of rural children’s documentaries,and selects ten representative films from 35 rural children’s documentaries shot during the urbanization process(2005-2020)as the main research object.We analyze the story space(where things happen),psychological space(the narrator’s mental thinking),formal space(plot narrative techniques),and existential space(social value propositions)in the sample films,and explore the spatial narrative level in terms of their artistic and social values.This paper is divided into six chapters.The introductory part of the first chapter discusses the background,significance,research ideas,and research methods of this paper,and integrates and reviews the main research results at home and abroad.In the conceptual analysis section of Chapter 2,this paper defines the Chinese rural children’s documentary and explains the connotation of film space narrative with reference to the relevant theories proposed by Long Diyong.In Chapter 3,the paper analyzes the selection and construction of narrative spaces in rural children’s documentaries,and finds that family,school and field are the three most representative story spaces.Through exploring these three types of spatial symbols,this paper finds that the psychological spatial representations of children hidden behind the story space have three characteristics: struggling with life’s difficulties,pursuing identity issues,and reconciling with fate.In Chapter 4,this paper analyzes the narrative techniques used to shape story space and psychological space in rural children’s documentaries,and summarizes the characteristics of the films’ techniques in three aspects: narrative structure,narrative perspective,and audiovisual means,which provide replicable experiences for the aesthetic creation of future rural children’s documentaries.In Chapter 5,this paper analyzes the mapping of social reality through the spatial narratives of bodily landscapes and collective constructions in documentaries,and makes practical suggestions for the development of current rural children’s documentaries and the development of rural children’s physical and mental health from a theoretical perspective.Chapter 6 summarizes the research of this paper and affirms the significance of the development of rural children’s documentaries,further demonstrating that analyzing rural children’s documentaries through the research lens of spatial narrative not only can uncover innovative narrative paradigms in this subject matter,but also helps to reflect on and critique the phenomena of blurred identity perception,educational imbalance,and cultural dissonance that exist in rural areas today. |
