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| A Documentary on Documentary Masters (November 21) |
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Documentary, the first-born in the family of cinematography, has remained a poor elder brother to fiction throughout the development of the film industry. However, despite ups and downs in history, documentary as a form of filmmaking has never lacked loyal audience; and its influence is indisputable.
From the early works by the Lumi¨¨re brothers, documentary has witnessed the birth of a dazzling list of film geniuses, with their names connected with various aesthetic tides and philosophical schools at different time periods.
Beginning November 18, CCTV-1 has aired a 16-part documentary on the history of the documentary in the 20th century. With rich archive materials, entitled "Documentary Classics", the epic work reviews 16 film masters who have made milestone achievements in the genre, including Joris Ivens, Dzga Vertov, Robert Flaherty, Leni Riefenstahl, John Grierson, Humpgrey Jennings and Maysles brothers. Among them, many were also masters of fiction, for example Alain Resnais, Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl, and Mikhail Romm.
Documentary is virtually the art of truthfully representing societies in their times. Therefore, historic social transformation has always been the focus of attention of this film category since its birth. From the First World War to the Second World War, from the leftist movement in the 1930s to the vibrant tides of social transformation in the 1960s, the epic will lead the audience to the golden ages of documentary when its impact far exceeded that of fiction.
Apart from directly recording major social events, another aesthetic value of the documentary lies in the discovery of the hidden connection between ordinary people and their lives and historic events that have changed history. Many senior Russian citizens who survived the Second World War kept up the tradition of dedicating garlands to cinemas every year because it's at the cinemas that they caught a last glimpse of their loved ones on the battlefields. In this way, documentary can preserve precious personal memories and evoke strong non-fabricated emotions and universal feelings.
And sometimes, the realistic charm can extend to common natural phenomena ignored by most people, for instance, rain. The candid camera reopens our eyes to natural wonders in our otherwise banal lives.
(by Elaine Zhou)
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| Editor: Zhao Xuan CCTV.com |
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