Stills from the documentary film "Tiangong Su Zuo" released some time ago
Niu Guangxia
When intangible cultural heritage is combined with documentaries with the basic feature of "artistically showing the truth", it not only adds an inexhaustible and rich optional theme for documentary creation, but also inserts wings for the traditional skills, folk customs, and national arts hidden in urban corners and rural areas at the moment of the strong rise of visual culture.
Intangible cultural heritage, as the crystallization of human wisdom and the source of creativity, is the main expression of China's excellent traditional culture and an important carrier for the continuation of Chinese civilization. Recently, a cultural company that is well-known in the media for producing the three-season intangible cultural heritage documentary "The Great Craftsman" has launched a series of short documentary films called "Non-Genetic Inheritance, Teenagers Dare to Be" on Station B, in which the young protagonist or teacher learns the filigree inlay technique to handcraft Chinese style ornaments, or combines the opera body with the Chishui folk stunt of Guizhou Qianbei Chishui, or uses a disabled body to study the bamboo weaving craft to finally produce exquisite bamboo works. They combine inheritance with innovation to firmly and persistently guard the tradition, so that the ancient intangible cultural heritage they are engaged in will be rejuvenated, thus triggering another wave of young people's attention to China's intangible cultural heritage at the B station where young people gather.
The current documentary on the strong rise of visual culture makes intangible cultural heritage "seen"
Since 2001, when Kunqu opera was declared a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible cultural heritage of mankind" by UNESCO, and in 2004, when China became a party to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the concept of "intangible cultural heritage" has rapidly become popular in China. In the following ten years, more than 4,000 intangible cultural heritages in China have been successively selected into the world, national or provincial, municipal and county-level lists, and from the national to the local level, various activities related to the protection of intangible cultural heritage have been vigorously carried out, which has stimulated the re-evaluation and recognition of the value of folk culture.
When intangible cultural heritage is combined with documentaries with the basic characteristics of "artistically showing the truth", it not only gives birth to the advent of intangible cultural heritage media documentaries such as "Looking for Craftsmanship", "Materia Medica China", "Cloth China", "Tea, the Story of a Leaf", but also large-scale audio and video documentary projects such as Chinese Festival Video Chronicle, Chinese Epic Video Chronicle and national "Intangible Cultural Heritage" representative inheritor record project led by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of china (formerly the Ministry of Culture), which together constitute a contemporary intangible cultural image. Among them, "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" and "The Great Craftsman" have become phenomenon-level Internet celebrity documentaries, which have produced strong social repercussions, while "Dahe Singing", "Bookmaker", "Tiangong Suzuo" and so on have entered the theater line with the posture of documentary films. This combination not only adds an inexhaustible and rich optional theme for documentary creation, but also inserts wings for the traditional skills, folk customs, and national arts hidden in urban corners and rural areas at a time when visual culture is rising strongly, winning the attention of the public, especially young people, and winning the possibility of their own inheritance and development.
Last year, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Further Strengthening the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage, proposing to increase the dissemination and popularization of intangible cultural heritage and support the strengthening of documentary films on related topics. At the same time, this also prompts us to think about how to better integrate the cultural carrier of intangible cultural heritage and documentary to help protect, inherit and promote intangible cultural heritage.
Craftsmanship and Ingenuity: The Main Theme of The Intangible Cultural Heritage Documentary
Different from the science and education documentaries that purely tell the traditional craft process, most of the intangible cultural heritage documentaries focus on people, telling the extraordinary skills and persistence of the craftsmen with a story-based narrative strategy, and presenting the life rhythm and spiritual code of the people behind the intangible cultural heritage. What moves viewers the most about this kind of documentary is often the craftsmanship and ingenuity of the intangible cultural heritage that are guarded in various ways in different regions.
"Inheritance on the Fingertips", "Looking for Craftsmanship", "Great Craftsman", "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", etc. are all based on the "craftsman" as an incision, looking for those craftsmen who maintain their original intentions in the hustle and bustle of red dust and guard the spirit of craftsmen, record their daily lives when they are accompanied by intoxicated handicrafts, and trigger them to spit out their hearts about the crafts they love in their lives and the self-cultivation philosophy they pursue. Whether it is the national cultural relics conservator who "resurrects" the rare treasures of the Palace Museum in "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", or the old man Kanwen who makes oil-paper umbrellas in "Looking for Craftsmanship", the uncle of Longwan Village who makes sheepskin rafts, the Tibetan boy who carved the scriptures by hand, and other lonely folk craftsmen, the craftsmen who are recorded are not only craftsmen with extraordinary skills, but also "keepers" who carry feelings and stories, who integrate their emotions and lives to carve time and inherit culture. According to statistics, since 2015, under the organization of the "Intangible Cultural Heritage" Protection Centers in various provinces, documentary filmmakers across the country have recorded the comprehensive video data of more than 1,300 national -level "intangible cultural heritage" inheritors, and have established a documentary for each inheritor.
On the basis of telling the vivid stories of craftsmen, these intangible cultural heritage documentaries focus on presenting the mutual cultivation and enrichment between people and their heritage creations, and in the meaningful recording and exploration, present the unique charm of traditional Chinese culture and the long-term oriental aesthetics contained in intangible cultural heritage.
Many documentaries such as "Cloth China", "Exquisite", "Dahe Singing", and "Bookmaker" focus on describing the "present tense" of intangible cultural heritage in the current era of rapid social change, such as "Dahe Singing" and "Bookmaker" who are faced with the embarrassing situation of various modern entertainment methods. "Big River Singing" selects five people who grew up in the Yellow River Basin, su Yang, storyteller Liu Shikai, flower singer Ma Fengshan, shadow puppet class leader Wei Zongfu, and Qin Cavity leader Zhang Jinjin as the main subjects, and internally related and contrasted the northwest folk music tradition with contemporary popular music. "Bookmaker" takes the cultural scholar Cao Bozhi walking in northern Shaanxi to find and interview blind bookmakers as a clue, and takes the performance and life status of blind storyteller Zhang Chengxiang and others as the main content to structure the whole film, in the film, Zhang Chengxiang and the taoist drama actor He Si, whose style is closer to the contemporary audience, the dispute between he Si and his team around the performance opportunity, and the gathering of the bright-eyed storytellers in Zhidan County at the end of the film with a happy and confident atmosphere, becoming a documentary character story, storyline, An important basis for the detailing of the plot. This creative method of linking tradition with the present, while arousing the audience's high degree of recognition at the emotional level, also makes the more plump character image emerge from the film.
Surprise and Out of the Loop: A New Form of Intangible Cultural Heritage Documentary
The mainland has been exploring the path of intangible cultural heritage protection with the participation of national authorities, academic expert teams, social forces and media organizations, and has made a very powerful and beneficial practice in the image recording of intangible cultural heritage. In the pan-documentary era of the integration and development of television media and online new media, and the rise of documentary short videos and live broadcasts, how to produce high-quality content that resonates and empathizes with young people is considered to be the key to breaking the situation of the documentary industry.
Whether it is a traditional TV or film documentary or an online self-made documentary, they strive to make changes in content and form to establish a closer relationship with youth, the public and the market, and surprise and out of the circle have become their common pursuit. For example, the large-scale intangible cultural heritage documentary "Inheritance at the Fingertips" changes the shooting method of traditional intangible cultural heritage documentaries, integrates scene reproduction and animation production, and selects the first platform on the video website, and in addition to the 25-minute version, a 3-minute downbridged micro-documentary version is specially launched to adapt to the Internet communication ecology in the era of fragmentation for use by WeChat and Weibo platforms. Such documentary videos launched by online media in line with the interests of netizens have tried to get rid of the labels of "niche", "marginal" and "unpopular" documentaries in the minds of previous audiences, and seek to enter the public vision. "The Great Craftsman" invited Lin Chiling to serve as a sharer and commentator, telling the story of the craftsman's ingenuity, and the second season also added a live broadcast format to achieve linkage with the craftsman and real-time interaction with fan users, and repeatedly topped the list of cultural and artistic videos. "Looking for Craftsmanship" does not have the exquisite audio-visual and meticulous planning in "Inheritance on the Fingertips" and "Great Craftsmen", and focuses on the "Sincerity and Dream Chasing" card. In the film, the director revealed that he sold his house and sold a car to complete the dream of making a documentary, claiming that it was a documentary made by a layman and had to be slagged off. The whole film adopts the form of a second-person dialogue, conveying the filming process of the documentary intertwined with embarrassment, hardship and emotion and the subjective emotions of the creators. It is such an anti-industrial aesthetic, "not dazzling at all" documentary that has aroused strong empathy and pursuit among netizens.
At the same time, intangible cultural heritage documentary videos have become the darlings of new media platforms, and their contributions to enhancing the public visibility and social influence of intangible cultural heritage cannot be ignored. In 2016, China entered the first year of online short video, driven and led by a series of successful intangible cultural heritage documentaries, new media platforms have also begun to explore the huge cultural and commercial value of intangible cultural heritage. Short video platforms such as Ergen and Yiyi based on mobile Internet networks and social media platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have laid out intangible cultural heritage content in a timely manner. For example, Douyin launched the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Partner Program" and the "See Craft Program"; Kuaishou launched the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Leader Program", and some data pointed out that on the Kuaishou short video platform, every 3 seconds, an intangible cultural heritage video is generated, and more than 15 million intangible cultural heritage content creators have opened live broadcasts on Kuaishou to produce videos of intangible cultural heritage-related content.
In view of the fact that some intangible cultural heritage is in an endangered situation, the non-genetic inheritance development project takes "protection first, rescue first, rational utilization, inheritance and development" as the working principle. In the face of the increasingly prominent media ecology of the young audience group and the trend of media integration, documentaries and other artistic means and creative carriers need to further open up new thinking, new forms, and new paths, delicately present the ingenuity of craftsmen, and attract young fans with heart.
(The author is a professor at Shandong Academy of Arts)
Source: Wen Wei Po