Documentary "Dragon Ridge"

Based on the people in Longji Mountain area of Guangxi, this work depicts the image of a group of people in a permanent China village with realistic expression.

Because the works pay attention to people's living conditions and fate, and have a heavy sense of historical vicissitudes, they have rich and polysemous social implications.

The work is that Longjishan people look at simplicity, true colors and endless life from the height of human nature.

Longji Mountain Area has the original natural features in the inland areas of China. The living conditions, behaviors, thoughts and feelings of people in Longjishan area not only have the characteristics of regional culture, but also clearly and simply reflect the rural life of people in China, reflecting the essential significance of the growth, change and struggle of generations in China.

They are ordinary, but their simple and tenacious character gives people a sense of strength as solid as the mountains in Longji Mountain area.

Through the present situation of social life here, we can see how these unknown people create their lives with their own efforts.

The work discusses their eternal love for life and their courage to face suffering; Explore their optimistic and positive life consciousness.

The theme of the documentary "Dragon Ridge" is based on the concern and reflection on the fast-changing social life in Longji Mountain area and the unchanging spiritual character of Longji people.

By carefully recording the production, life and emotional activities of Longji people, this paper tries to explain the concern for ordinary people, the thinking about the most basic cell organization in China society, and the flesh-and-blood relationship between people and their homes.

At the same time, art and life are also vividly linked in the film, which stimulates people's ideological sparks and emotional sublimation.

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This film takes the Pan Nenggao family as the main line and unfolds the story of this village.

The creator aimed the camera at this family and recorded their lives in a quiet way in order to condense today's rural society.

In addition, he also paid attention to another figure-Pan Junquan, and through his activities, he reflected the desire of other people in the countryside to change.

The interwoven structure of Pan Nenggao and Pan Junquan is the biggest feature that distinguishes this film from the usual documentary with "three unifications" (one main line, one character and one story) structure.

This is a "polyphonic" style of expression.

Through the behaviors and ways of these two kinds of people, we can see Longji Mountain and Longji people from multiple angles, multiple spaces and three dimensions.

When you open the documentary, you see one shot after another, long or short.

Without the lens, there would be no structural elements of film and television, let alone sentences, fragments and films.

Editing is to cut and combine the material shots to express the central idea.

Editing according to the logic of life is the superficial pursuit of documentary.

Expressing the central idea is the fundamental wish of documentary.

Life logic mainly refers to the regularity of objective time and space.

Although the shooting material is taken from the time and space of life, once it leaves the time and space of life, it immediately becomes a hypothetical time and space.

Sitting in front of the editing machine is to edit these hypothetical symbols as if they were real.

In other words, it is to simulate reality.

Write characters as if they were really moving in front of the audience; Tell the events as if they were vividly presented to the audience.

The same is true of talking about scenery and things.

Only in this way can the audience inadvertently accept the central idea, and participate in their own ideas as little as possible to modify the editor's intention.

If the clip is not like the real time and space, not only can it not convey the central idea, but any audience will unceremoniously raise their remote control and shoot the film.

The key to editing a documentary is to formulate narrative guiding factors and establish the structural fulcrum of the whole film.

Documentary is not as fictional as drama and film, nor as easy as novel creation.

Time seems to be the most unfair to documentary people.

A lot of things have passed, and rushing by becomes the past perfect tense.

Sometimes, even if you are at the scene of the incident and face complicated information objects with a camera, you can only stand on one viewpoint at most, grasp one side and let more information slip away helplessly.

It can be seen that the material lens can never satisfy the editor's desire, and the editor has to constantly meet the needs of the audience.

"Dragon Ridge" will be difficult to grasp the pulse of the characters. Without the correct guiding factor and strong structural fulcrum, everything is equal to zero. Assemble the most expressive and meaningful shots in sections, and delete the useless or available shots and missing shots.

In this documentary, the film set up pictures of the beginning of the new semester, exams, gold panning and full moon wine, which became the core expressions of several parts respectively. At the same time, with other scenes, like an invisible pillar, it propped up several most representative stages in Dragon Ridge.

Filmmaker and narrator are two different concepts.

The photographer refers to the staff responsible for shooting and production, while the narrator is the assumed subject of the statement behavior on the editing platform, and he and the perspective together constitute the narrative.

He sometimes does some cross-talk, hosting, corroboration and foreshadowing in the film, but more often, he hides behind the scenes or tells stories subjectively or objectively.

According to the lens and commentary analysis, the narrator has been following the people in the village, and his sight has been accompanied by Pan Nenggao, and sometimes he will make some comments. This is the subjective narrative mode of the third person, which is often said in literary circles.

Although the narrator in the film does not call himself "I", he always exists as "I" everywhere.

For example, when he and Pan Junquan came home from the gold rush together, Pan Junquan carefully carried the hard-earned gold grains home and walked briskly along the way. After returning home, he gave the gold to the girl next door, seemingly happy and proud enough to see the narrator hiding behind the camera.

The narrator is an additional factor.

What no one can say and have no angle in life has its own narrative in objective time and space.

Documentary must have a narrator, without which there is no narrative.

Since there is a narrator, there must be a narrator, and there must be a perspective.

From which angle to observe, from which angle to set up the topic, from which angle to draw materials, and finally from which angle to edit, step by step.

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The word documentary originated from movies.

Now it is more consistent that the first documentary in the world film history is Flahadi's Nanook in the North.

Documentary uses advanced film and television technology to record and report the facts systematically and completely by means of photography or video recording. It requires drawing materials directly from real life, shooting real people and stories, and rejecting fiction and acting to the maximum extent.

Authenticity/objectivity is the foundation and life of documentary, and it is the innate essence of documentary.

"The truth of material recycling" has always been the principle and theoretical basis of documentary creation.

It emphasizes the objectification of performance, the objective record of social life, the respect for the original form of life and the reproduction of specific situations in life.

It can be said with certainty that without truth/objectivity, documentaries will cease to exist.

But it can be said for sure that the documentary is by no means an absolutely true/purely objective display.

First, as a creative act, documentary cannot be absolutely true/purely objective.

Pure objective presentation is only the eternal and gradual pursuit of truth in documentary, and the creator approaches the truth infinitely with his sincerity.

Because of sincerity, some things can be filmed at the request or arrangement of journalists, not just the calm record of journalists' watching; At the same time, because of this sincerity, the documentary can also have some psychological images on the basis of gaining the recognition of the audience, thus extending the significance of the documentary after the objective.

Second, if the creator does not pursue the ultimate meaning of the work, but only hopes to reflect the existing state of things through some information reflected by the object being photographed or the photographer's own behavior process, that is the creator's ignorance and weakness.

When defining documentary, John Gleason pointed out that documentary is "a creative treatment of reality" and "documentary is to shoot a drama from daily life and write a poem from a problem". The creative treatment, drama and poetry here mostly contain the emotions and intentions of the creators, which shows that a real documentary is an organic combination of theme and form, and is written with real materials based on the respect of the creators for the audience and objective facts.

The style of Dragon Ridge is objective and documentary.

The whole film basically maintains the characteristics of objective documentary, and the narration pursues a plain style, with little or no use as far as possible. The film records a large number of real, natural and vivid life scenes, giving people an immersive feeling. In the use of music and the handling of some plots, it also embodies a subjective expression. For example, students in Pan Nenggao's class often shout "Pan Nenggao is really capable." His grandfather often goes to the classroom door to secretly watch the children read books.

When transplanting rice, grandpa suddenly said, "Pan Nenggao is really capable." This is actually a complete life, just echoing the last paragraph, there is no design at all, but it is much more ingenious than design; There is also the folk songs and village tunes that appear many times, which can also be regarded as a music-guided style, so that it can sing the main theme for the documentary. This ingenious sound arrangement makes the documentary capture vivid and touching plots and details, and makes the whole film full of human feelings, reflecting an emotion and conveying a certain spiritual language and ideology.

This subjectivity and objectivity is the core of documentary, which supports the creation of documentary.

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In the field of documentary, cultural anthropology is an international currency and a major item of documentary.

It is widely used to study a heterogeneous culture that can produce aesthetic distance. Because our own cultural vision is significantly different from it, it is easy to explore the value and significance of the object, the observer's perspective is easy to find, and the observer's position is easy to show.

For contemporary society, cultural anthropology is not useless, but because it is too close to us and surrounds us, we don't know the true face of Lushan Mountain, so our perspective is easily limited by local details and difficult to grasp macroscopically.

This is the limitation brought by the observer's point of view.

To transcend this limitation, we must stand in the broadest possible cultural vision.

Generally speaking, "Dragon Ridge" is an attempt to depict a picture of rural life in a simple way, and some places are rendered in light colors for new ideas.

The significance of Dragon Ridge is not to remember the past, but to pay attention to the life phenomenon with essential significance, to pay attention to the richness and richness of life, and to pursue and maintain the expression of thoughts and feelings in a real and natural atmosphere.