This Frenchman Luc Jacques spent 13 months in the ice and snow, filmed 120 hours of footage, and finally edited it into an 85-minute documentary, taking us into the world of emperor penguins. At the beginning of the film, the singer Ai Millie Simon, the voice of another "Pan Björk" specimen, "I want to live in paradise", listens to songs with ethereal texture, breathes pure white Antarctic snow and the strong emotion of the film , it should make people cry involuntarily.
Emperor penguins are the largest in the penguin family, and their total number is also the smallest, with only more than 100,000 in the world. Its appearance is almost unique in the penguin world, and the bright yellow on its neck shows their kingly style. The protagonists of the film are these masters living on the Antarctic continent - emperor penguins.
On the Antarctic continent with a temperature of -40 degrees Celsius, they jumped out of the sea and had to travel long distances to land to mate and reproduce. Through the narration and carefully edited pictures from hundreds of hours of shooting, the film strung a touching story: penguins saw the cracked ice, and they leaned over in groups; young penguin couples hatched little penguins, penguins Close-up of parents feeding the little penguin - the big penguin feeds the food hidden in its mouth mouth to mouth to the little penguin. The Antarctic continent is lifeless. Such a group of special life is stubbornly surviving. When seeing the lonely corpse of the old penguin on the white snow, countless male and female penguins are gathered in the blizzard, fighting for mates. The penguin couple lost their children, and the cruelty of being killed by sea lions or eagle birds...
If I am an ordinary movie lover, not a researcher of documentaries, I think I will easily give them a gentle smile of approval. , maybe even tearful. After all, the beautiful cut pictures, the warm French dubbing, the ethereal music that always plays at the right time... all bring a rare beauty and purity to the busy and nervous modern urbanites for a year, which is indescribable. enjoy.
But it is these admirable special embellishments of the documentary that have become the entrance to my doubts. Let's take a look at the relevant text introduction on the film poster:
Title: March of the Penguins
Director / Screenwriter: Luc · Jacquetr Luc Jacquetr
Genre:
Documentary Length: 80 minutes (USA)/85 minutes (France)
That is to say, this film is a documentary, then let us first look at some definitions of documentary in the professor's class:
Japan The published dictionary of professional terms for mass communication reads: "Documentary is a form of film that does not contain all dramatic fiction and expresses reality in a realistic manner." The
American Dictionary of Cinematic Terms wrote: "Documentary, A film that excludes fiction, it has an attractive and persuasive theme or point of view, draws subject matter from reality, and uses editing and sound to enhance the appeal of the work."
Vertov of the former Soviet Union said: "Grasp the fragments of reality and combine them in a meaningful way."
Chen Hanyuan of China believes: "Anyone who is interested in real individual life (human beings, animals, plants, cells and other living objects), real events, real scenes, and real atmosphere TV works produced by the filmmakers, and films with a length of more than 10 minutes become TV documentaries. For documentary purposes, TV documentaries should be filmed under the condition that the subject is strictly free from any interference.”
These definitions have some features in common: that is, Non-fiction and documentary, and the inner plot of the subject itself.
Some Japanese magazines have some opinions on documentaries, which are arranged according to the acceptance level from high to bottom:
1. Documentary is a form of film that does not contain all dramatic fiction and presents facts in a realistic way.
2. Documentary is a form of program that uses facts to tell the truth and does not use any directorial techniques.
3. In principle, documentaries should try their best to avoid reproduction and design. When it is impossible to shoot according to the shooting plan, the shooting plan can be changed or the commentary can be modified.
4. For documentaries, the most important thing is to convey truth. However, facts often change and do not always reflect the truth. Therefore, it is up to the producer to judge whether it is necessary to use the director's means to spread the truth after preliminary investigation and on the basis of facts.
5. For a documentary, the key is to see whether it reveals the truth through the festival itself, and individual scenes can be designed and reproduced without the need for running account descriptions and editing.
6. Documentaries are programs that are dramatized based on facts. In cases where shooting cannot be done due to time or weather conditions, etc., reproduction director can be performed.
My first question about The Diary of the Emperor Penguin is whether the anthropomorphic plot and poetic commentary will hinder the documentary's objectivity and whether authenticity and artistry are more important. Of course, many times what audiences like to see is not the original appearance of things, but what moves them is actually the "facts" created by the director's subjective will (artistic processing). What we do, and what we most want to see is the spirits that are deliberately strengthened. However, it has to be said that this is a compromise that the new documentary has to make in order to balance the balance with the market.
The second doubt derived from this is whether the whole film fully reproduces the life cycle process of emperor penguins, or is it a partial generalization? It should be said that the starting point of this film from beginning to end is the emperor penguin's ode to life's persistence. From another perspective, it is also a reminder of the gradually lost spirit of human beings. Although the road is far and the mountains are cold, the emperor penguin never shrinks. This is its positive reflection; while the negative generalizations, such as how the natural enemies invaded, and even the damage caused by the harsh nature, are summed up in a few words. , the comprehensive reproduction of the difficulty of survival of emperor penguins can actually sublimate the value of their persistence in life. After all, documentaries are different from feature films, they are obliged to reproduce the whole picture of a process; although the advantage of a single thread is that it is easier to grasp and explain a spirit, but this is already a weighed "processing documentary" .
Most producers believe that "for a documentary, it is more important to correctly express the facts and truth confirmed by the producer through the entire program, and hope to be able to decide when and how to use the director. method." This is at odds with the audience's opinion that "any footage of a documentary must be real". As a documentary filmmaker, you always have to balance the power between reality and art, reality and market, restoration and creation. A smart director can find the limit of his power, because persistent audiences will always hesitate between enjoyment and professional judgment.
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