Recording is at the core of documentary. The first film in human history is documentary. In modern society, documentary has been everywhere. Since the 21 century, a large number of documentaries are emerging. When talking about documentary, “authent...
Recording is at the core of documentary. The first film in human history is documentary. In modern society, documentary has been everywhere. Since the 21 century, a large number of documentaries are emerging. When talking about documentary, “authenticity” comes into our mind in the first place. Documentary is non-fiction art. On-the-spot record is the most important creative technique. In another word, there is no documentary without authenticity. Authenticity is a significant feature that distinguishes documentary from other audio-visual languages. Nowadays, people pay more attention on storytelling and aesthetics of documentary, while overlooking its primary feature – authenticity.
Documentary pursue the unification of “the authenticity, the goodness and the beauty” and the authenticity is the premise of the other two. Authenticity not only finds its expression in content, but in techniques. The creative process of documentary is an artistic way of rework, which ensures the authenticity of documentary. The whole process requires appropriate creative perspective, objective storytelling identity, objective shooting angle and non-fiction recording to ensure authenticity.
This paper mainly takes the authenticity of documentary as the starting point, taking the advantage of author`s work: <Eternal battle>, discusses the creation process of author`s documentary, elaborates some subjective judgments along the documentary production process. The background of <Eternal battle> comes from the Covid-19. It records theliving conditions of citizens and volunteers in Wuhan, Hubei province, where the Covid-19 outbreaks, reflecting the real state of society under the pandemic. Due to the lack of sufficient production experience, there are inevitably some problems in the process of production. This paper focuses on the subjective elements in the documentary production, taking the principle of authenticity as the core.