In the era of national imaging, conduct an “unprecedented” imaging experiment
By Zhan Qingsheng
At the beginning of the new year in 2024, the documentary film “Fireworks in the World” was quietly released. Although it was quickly submerged in the noise of various commercial genre films, the film’s unique significance to media culture still attracted attention: this is an unprecedented vertical screen film mainly based on user-generated (UGC) content on short video platforms. Cinema movies.
The creator selected more than 50,000 short videos from Kuaishou’s massive material, and finally used 887 videos posted by 509 ordinary users to create the film again. The protagonists of the film are ordinary people who are struggling for survival but still have a positive and optimistic attitude towards life. The ups and downs, rain, snow, joys and sorrows they experienced, the rich flavor of life and real and touching emotions contained in the lives of these ordinary people moved countless viewers to tears. However, the film’s creative mode based on user-generated materials and its vertical screen presentation have also caused controversy.
From “scarcity” to “surplus” the era of national imaging has arrived
This documentary film created by Tsinghua University’s Qingying Film Studio is actually an in-depth observation of the short video cultural phenomenon by media observers and film creators under the academic knowledge system and an innovative attempt at documentary film inspired by it. The film undoubtedly demonstrates the creator’s keen sense of media culture. The original idea for the film came from the end of 2018, the creation was started in early 2019, and the production was completed in October 2020. However, it did not appear on the big screen until recently due to the epidemic. Unlike today, where short videos have taken the mobile Internet world by storm, in 2018, China’s short video industry has just emerged and is far from reaching its current popularity and influence. The creators of the film realized at that time the enlightenment significance of short videos for the creation of documentary films, that is, documentary images began to face a milestone transition from “scarcity” to “excess”, and an era of national imaging has arrived.
The rapid development of mobile short videos has pushed the trend of media power redistribution and individual empowerment triggered by the digital revolution since the Internet era to the extreme, and has also enabled the production of documentary images to reach an unprecedented level of popularity. In 2005, the “Village Video Project” launched by independent documentary director Wu Wenguang can only train 10 villagers at a time to return to their hometowns to shoot documentary short films. The creation period of a single work can take up to one or even several years, and the dissemination influence of the completed work is extremely limited. . Today, a large number of short videos show that the popular image production that documentary filmmakers once dreamed of may have become a reality.
The popularity of short video documentary images is in stark contrast to the increasing niche and segmentation of traditional documentaries, as well as the difficulties faced by professional documentary creation. Countless grassroots users use images to record and share their lives, constructing their own and community identities in virtual communities. Many user-generated videos contain a sense of reality and impact that far exceeds professional works. All of this has a profound impact on traditional/professional What does it mean to be a documentarian? How do they respond to this new era of change?
The author of “Fireworks World” chose “to be grateful for the image empowerment brought by technology” because it breaks through cultural and educational barriers and allows ordinary people to complete “self-writing”. At the same time, “Letting these ‘self-written’ images be seen, integrated, and remembered is another mission of documentarians.” (Director Sun Hongyu) Professional video workers select from the massive short videos released by ordinary people. The materials are excavated for secondary creation, and the combination of professional production and amateur presentation, elite perspective and grassroots culture, short video and big movie, vertical screen and screen makes “Fireworks World” no longer a movie in the conventional sense, but a It is an exploratory documentary imaging experiment in the mobile Internet era, and a reproduction of meaning under the collision and fusion of different cultural perspectives.
“Fireworks in the World” is a record of records and an affectionate tribute from professional documentarians to ordinary documentaries. As early as 2020, the film became the opening film of the Pingyao International Film Festival and the closing film of the Golden Red Cotton Film Festival of the Guangzhou International Documentary Festival. It also won the Best Innovative Documentary Award at the China Documentary Academy Award. What these awards and commendations affirm are his keen media sense and sense of responsibility, as well as his bold exploration courage and innovative spirit.
Is it a “short video collection” or a workers’ song?
“Fireworks” has received a lot of professional and academic recognition, and has brought heartfelt touches to many viewers. However, it has also encountered many doubts, including some quite sharp criticisms, such as viewing it as “a quickie in the theater.” “Short video collection”, “blasphemy to movies”, “lack of creativity and initiative”, and even so-called “stealing the fruits of working people” and “consuming the people at the bottom”, etc. These extreme reviews even pushed the film’s Douban rating to just above the passing line. Considering that Douban ratings have a tradition of being relatively tolerant of documentaries, the polarized response faced by the film is worth analyzing.
Although the film uses platform short videos as its basic material, it also has obvious secondary creation characteristics. The creator must establish the theme and narrative structure of the film, and then clarify the basic principles for material selection. Today’s short video platforms are rich in content, diverse in occupations, and diverse in people, beyond imagination, covering almost every field of social life. The film finally focuses on ordinary workers, using “clothing, food, housing, transportation, and home” as the narrative structure to tell the story: The female textile workers worked hard and sweated their clothes, and Yang Ge, a grain farmer in the Northeast, pointed to the rice fields and called them “I “The country we laid down”, the fishing boats and fishermen were about to be swallowed up by the roaring wind and waves, the truck driver Bao Ge became the “God of Cooking” on the road, Xiaowei, the bricklayer, became famous for practicing horizontal bar fitness at the construction site, and the workers wrote “God rewards those who work hard” on the cement “Then quickly wipe it away. The female workers who climbed up the overhead crane sang songs and yearned for love. The girl who drove the boat enjoyed the scenery on the river while cooking. Xiao Huihui and his wife who died unexpectedly while driving in Qinghai were finally sent back by volunteers. After leaving home, the migrant workers in the city return home in different ways before the Spring Festival, the fear of being close to home, the joy of reunion with relatives, grandma using a washbasin to collect mobile phones from family members before the New Year’s Eve dinner, the tears of parents when parting… Most of the content in the film is obvious. None of them are popular in terms of traffic – based on the platform algorithm mechanism and the information cocoon created by it, these contents that are salvaged, refined and displayed by creators from massive materials may have little chance of being pushed to the eyes of urban netizens. The film allows these neglected and obscured figures to be highlighted, and uses the reorganization of materials to reveal its own theme – a tribute to workers. This is a workers’ song and a simple and touching civilian epic.
As a university team, Qingying Studio, which created the film, has become an important force in domestic documentary creation in recent years. It is the lead producer of “I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City”, “Ladder to the Himalayas”, “The River Sings”, “University” and “A Piece of Rice Paper”. ” and other works mostly involve cultural relics protection, intangible cultural heritage, university education, ethnography, migrant workers and other different fields. The creation method of this film is very reminiscent of the documentary “One Day in the Life”, which used “proposal composition” to “crowdfund” to collect “other” materials; while this film directly draws from a large number of real “others” Screening and refining themes from the materials are actually two approaches to the same artistic strategy, which also include the active subject participation and creation of the creator.
As film and television anthropologist Zhu Jingjiang pointed out, short videos can also become the subject of anthropological research. The short video materials generated by labor users used in this creation are actually the product of fieldwork in the media sense. The film’s observation and analysis of short videos, the extraction and sorting out of the characteristics of specific community groups on online platforms in terms of cultural expression, identity, social interaction, spiritual and emotional traits, and its reflections on the collision of urban and local cultures undoubtedly have their own merits. Anthropological value.
Not all praise is cheap and not all attention is “exploitative”
As a documentary film released in theaters, “Fireworks of the World” obviously belongs to the mainstream cultural category. On the one hand, compared with most independent documentaries that try to pursue ideological and artistic depth, it observes Chinese society from a positive and affirmative attitude rather than a reflective and critical perspective, trying to create positive and positive emotional stimulation rather than through stinging Social analysis is based on feelings, pointing more to warmth, brightness, optimism and hope rather than coldness, gloom, sadness and despair, and pursuing a more popular emotional resonance rather than individualized ideological perspective; but on the other hand, the two as a whole There is some kind of spiritual commonality and intersection, that is, the concern and respect for every humble individual and ordinary life, and the inherent humanistic spirit contained t…