Documentary Series Research Articles

Study on National Image Construction and International Communication in CHINA ON THE MOVE Amid Deconstructionism and Constructivism

National image documentary is a key part in shaping a country’s brand, fostering cultural exchange. However, China has faced challenges in presenting a dynamic and multidimensional national image on the global stage. In recent years, China has intensified its international communication efforts, leveraging various media formats to portray a more comprehensive image. The paper critically analyzes the contradictions inherent in the construction of national image and its overseas translation and communication, focusing on the biases of logocentrism and egocentrism. Taking China on the Move as a case study and examining its production, characterization, narrative, and translation strategies to summarize patterns and practices from a series of high-quality Sino-foreign co-produced documentaries. The analysis explores how the deconstructionist strategy of decentralization contributes to the joint-shaping of national image, and how an emphasis on marginalization reflects broader societal structures through the lens of ordinary lives. The deconstructionist translation strategy underscores the translator’s active role and the importance of “creative rebellion”. Conversely, the constructivist strategy elucidates the underlying logic of China’s image for international audiences, promoting empathetic communication by seeking common ground while acknowledging differences. The constructivist translation strategy also imposes necessary limitations on “creative rebellion” to ensure coherence in the translation process.

REVEALING POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH, IDENTITY AND GLOBAL INFLUENCE IN DEMI LOVATO: DANCING WITH THE DEVIL DOCUMENTARY

As a singer and an actress, Demi Lovato has fame which can influence her fans globally. Further, with the mental health, addiction, and trauma issues, she gains positive changes in her life that affect and encourage her fans as well. The object of this study is Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil documentary series. This study reveals Lovato’s posttraumatic growth that influences her identity and global influence. The narratives, captured clips, posts, and previous research are used as the data in this study. This study uses the theory of posttraumatic growth and new media for data interpretation. The findings show that Lovato’s posttraumatic growth consists of five domains: personal strength, relations to others, new possibilities, appreciation of life, and spiritual and existential changes. Moreover, her posttraumatic growth also leads her to discover her identity as a non–binary person and bring positive impacts to her fans around the world and the non-binary community. Therefore, as a new media form, the Dancing with the Devil documentary series successfully delivers Lovato’s stories and struggles to people worldwide, especially her fans.

토속민요에 대한 1960년대 라디오 프로그램의 인식 -다큐멘터리 시리즈 『민족의 향기』(1967~1968)의 사례 연구-

From the Japanese colonial period to the early 1960s, most of the Korean folk songs broadcast on South Korean radio were popular folk songs. It was natural that radio, as a mass medium, favored popular folk songs that suited the public’s taste. However, in the late 1960s, radio began to pay attention to indigenous folk songs being passed down in rural areas. As the most widespread medium in South Korea during this time, radio exerted significant influence over both public and private spheres. In this regard, it is necessary to study how radio programs during this period perceived indigenous folk songs. This paper examines how the documentary series Minjok-ui Hyanggi, broadcast on the Dong-A Broadcasting System (DBS) from March 1967 to October 1968, approached indigenous folk songs and evaluated their value. The documentary series aimed to establish a national ideology and contribute to the development of national culture by exploring Korea’s traditional culture and the spirit embedded in it. Accordingly, this program examined various tangible and intangible heritages of Korea with special emphasis on folk songs. Initially, the series sought to trace the origins of popular folk songs and explore their meaning in relation to regional identity. After several unsuccessful attempts, it shifted its focus to indigenous folk songs, featuring songs from Wido, Gochang, Jeju, Haenam, Jindo, Somuuido, Andong, Goseong, and Yeongsan from July to October 1967. This program discovered a positive and resilient attitude toward life, warm-heartedness, and unique music untainted by foreign influences in the folk songs of these regions and shared their significance with listeners.

Considering communication features of English-language argumentative interaction in the BBC 1 documentary series “Fake or Fortune”

Considering communication features of English-language argumentative interaction in the BBC 1 documentary series “Fake or Fortune”

The Theme Progression Patterns in Popular Science Book Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach

Despite the proliferation of digital mediums such as documentary series, video essays, and science podcasts, popular science books are still the primary medium for promoting science to the public as an epistemic way to understanding and being aware of our natural world. That said, in the domain of systemic functional linguistics, there exists a dearth of studies investigating popular science books. Hence, this study aims to investigate the organization of popular science discourse from the perspective of Theme Progression. A 93,078-word corpus was collected and divided into two main science categories: hard and soft—three disciplines under each main category and six texts under each discipline. The analysis of the corpus followed a mixed-method design where a Theme-counting excel sheet, created by the researcher, was used to calculate the most occurring Theme patterns. The results of the analysis indicate that the hard science disciplines give a logical presentation of the scientific text that intends to unpack and explain the intricacy behind the scientific notion whereas the soft science disciplines focus on expository narrative to connect and relate the scientific text to the target reader. Given these writing behaviors between the two science categories, it is recommended that future SFL studies explore the potentially arising differences within the broader aspect of the popular science genre, for instance, to juxtapose books from articles in the way discoursal features (e.g., coherence and cohesion) are structured in the text.

Building peace narratives between young conflict victims and university students: an analysis of participatory animation strategies in My story: The children who fought war in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis of the production of the animated documentary series My Story. The Children Who Fought War in Colombia. The series was developed through a participatory creation process between young victims of the armed conflict and student animators from the Visual Arts programme at Universidad Javeriana, Colombia. The objective was to construct narratives that promote peace and generate new imaginaries. Interviews with the series director, Mathew Charles, and an animator, along with a review of the creative process, revealed the distinctive elements of this production. The study concentrated on the manner in which participatory animation encourages the formulation of innovative paradigms that challenge the conventional representations of the conflict. The objective was to cultivate empathy and mutual understanding among the participants. The findings emphasise the importance of participatory animation in the reconstruction of peace narratives, offering innovative perspectives in post-conflict contexts. This research demonstrates the significance of artistic intervention, particularly through participatory animation, as a valuable tool for constructing narratives that encourage critical reflection and promote a deeper, empathetic understanding of the experiences of those who have endured war.

Book Review: The curious case of Natalia Grace, documentary series by Christian and Jackson Conway

Book Review: <i>The curious case of Natalia Grace, documentary series</i> by Christian and Jackson Conway

Research on the Influence of CCTV Documentary City 24 Hours on Audience Subjectivity

As an art form with reality as the core, how to make the audience have a sense of participation and play their subjectivity is a subject worth research and discussion. In recent years, under the rapid development and innovation of China’s TV documentary industry, excellent documentaries such as “A Bite of China”, “I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City” and “City 24 Hours” have been produced. However, it is undeniable that China’s documentary industry needs to improve more from the audience’s perspective to gain a higher national degree. Therefore, this paper studies the influence of the CCTV documentary series “City 24 Hours” on the audience’s subjectivity. This paper mainly studies the limitations of the documentary 24 Hour City in stimulating the subjectivity and making the audience produce “semantic democracy” for the narrative object. This includes serious labels, a lack of detail and engaging narratives, and even the mining and creation of traditional elements and online celebrity landmarks. The exploration of this series of problems and the implementation of countermeasures will be the only way in the development process of the documentary.

Eco India Magazine's Documentary Video Series' on the Solar Energy Usage’s Success Stories across India

The research paper analyses the usage of solar energy across the rural and urban parts of India, compiled into several documentary episodes by the leading environmental magazine-Eco India which airs on Scroll.in’s YouTube channel every week. Unlike non-renewable energy, derived from fossil fuels like coal, petroleum, and natural gas, solar energy is a ‘clean’ energy, which does not emit greenhouse gases like carbon di-oxide and pollute the atmosphere. According to the 2022 statistical research, India is the 4th largest producer of solar energy in the world and is also the world’s 3rd largest producer of renewable energy with over 40% of electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources like solar, wind power, and hydroelectric projects. In India, despite the industrial usage of solar energy for providing electricity, it has also entered the people’s homes in the form of household appliances like bulbs, lamps, and cookers. So the research adopts the case study approach to study the same. It is concluded that the documentary series has highlighted usage of solar energy in a positive manner, for people from all walks of life. It also highlighted various government schemes and innovative ideas put forth by the government and startups to increase its popularity among the common man.

Politicians in a nutshell: four-minute documentary portraits of three Israeli leaders

In 2011, a leading investigative television program in Israel launched a series of short documentaries entitled “Four Minutes,” each dedicated to an Israeli political leader. This paper focuses on three of these documentaries, dedicated to then-president Shimon Peres; then-Knesset member Tzipi Livni, who 2 years earlier had won the elections but failed to form a government, and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the founder of the Ultra-Orthodox Sephardi “Shas” party. Our goal is to outline the means by which these films construct and deliver their condensed messages, and to explore how, despite the rigid constraints of the format, they create a cohesive and complex portrait of these political figures and their strategic agendas. We analyze how the films’ multimodal language is used to reflect the messages promoted by each of the figures as well as by the filmmakers themselves.

The myth of the Basiji: Morteza Avini’s legacy for the propaganda in Iran

ABSTRACT From 1980 to 1988, Iran and Iraq fought the longest conventional war of the 20th century. As combat devolved into trench warfare from 1982 onwards, Iranian propagandists faced a new challenge in mobilizing troops for the front. The propaganda documentary series Revayat-e Fath, produced by the Iranian director Morteza Avini, is a response to these circumstances. In this article, the narratives employed by the series will be conceptualized as myths, and thus, it will be argued that the series uses already existing stories as work on myth, according to philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s definition of the term. Specifically, the series employs the Qur’anic myth of Ibrahim and the story of Imam al-Husayn’s martyrdom to narrate the necessity of patience, trust in God and self-sacrifice among the soldiers. By doing so, the series not only statically employs these myths but also engages in a process of reception in which certain significant parts are put into the historical context of the Iran-Iraq War. This resulted in the creation of a new myth, referred to in this paper as the Basiji myth, embedding the motifs mentioned above into a new narrative of the meaning of death and sacrifice.

Speculative worlds: anthropocentric realities and world-building in speculative documentaries

ABSTRACT This paper examines the anti-anthropocentric world-building in documentaries that employ aspeculative mode of inquiry and reckon with the ecological crisis. Dubbed speculative documentaries, they move beyond the Griersonian creative treatment of actuality toward a speculative treatment of subjectivity. Understanding their world-building encourages us to place the documentary within the interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and collective undertaking to address the Anthropocene and the increasing climate crisis. Slow Action (2010) imagines the evolution of species and ecosystems when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitats envisioning a science fiction future of island biogeography in face of extinction. Truth or Consequences (2020) considers the possible cataclysmic futurity as its present-day setting. It seeks to define the mode of speculative documentary as documentary footage placed into a fictionalized context where, as if it were science fiction, takes what is nascent today and treats it as though it is already happening. Jan Ijäs’s documentary series Waste (2016-ongoing) assumes a more-than-human approach to anthropogenic habitats by expanding on the concept of waste and critiquing the devastating human effect on the earth. The results are part ethnographic, part science fiction, offering a space for contemplation on constructed and natural environments that bewail and anticipate Earth’s transformation over time.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DOCUMENTARIES IN TEACHING PEDAGOGY IN HISTORY

Documentation in history plays a crucial role in preserving evidence and providing valuable information for future generations. In the context of documentaries, modern technology is utilized to present historical accounts with visual effects, offering undergraduate students a vivid depiction of the past. These documentaries serve as comprehensive and educational resources for students, providing them with a deeper understanding of historical events. Visuals are particularly effective in transporting individuals to different time periods and aiding their comprehension of complex conditions and issues. In some cases, explanations or theoretical concepts may be challenging to grasp or lead to confusion. This research employs quantitative data, longitudinal analysis, and an exploratory methodology to examine the use of technology in presenting visuals and its efficacy among undergraduate students from various academic streams who have an interest in history. Documentary videos, biopics, series, and films serve as mediums to help students comprehend historical topics, and their effectiveness can be assessed through surveys.

The Visual Narratives of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

This article analyzes a series of documentaries on the 1979 Iranian Revolution broadcast by Iran International and Manoto television channels. While covering the era of the Pahlavi dynasty, especially since the Second World War under Mohammad Reza Shah, the documentaries’ main goal is to present the era as a progressive epoch interrupted by a disastrous revolution. At the same time, they explain the Islamic government as a deviation from the path of progress led by the Pahlavis. By doing so, they dismiss the Pahlavi state as a root cause of the revolution, absolving it of the responsibility for its consequences, i.e. establishing an Islamic government. In contrast, this article highlights state politics as one of the main factors decisively shaping a historical process which culminated in the revolution. This makes the Pahlavi political order central to understand how the events in 1979 and afterwards unfolded.

Measuring the merit of a sensationalist documentary: A critical assessment of the Julcuy “Giant”

AbstractThis commentary evaluates the assertions presented in the documentary series Code of the Wild that the skeleton of a 7‐ft Manteño‐Huancavilca individual allegedly recovered in the Ecuadorian village of Julcuy serves as evidence that a population of individuals of considerable stature once inhabited the region. Given that an intact femur survived a flood that occurred in Julcuy during the rainy season of 2023, it was possible to implement the Trotter and Gleser technique to determine the individual's stature with precision. By analyzing the femur of this individual, the commentary demonstrates that the stature of the individual had been grossly overestimated. This commentary reinforces the significance of mathematical formulae devised to determine living stature as opposed to rudimentary field measurements.

Speaking in Riddles on Trisolaris: Communicating Liberal Democracy to the Disillusioned

It is hard to overestimate the effect of The Three-Body Problem and the ensuing trilogy by Liu Cixin1 on the collective imagination. Not many works of science fiction have achieved such global fame as The Three-Body Problem trilogy, also known under the common title Remembrance of Earth’s Past,2 and even fewer have had a three-part documentary series produced by BBC Studios explore the science behind the fiction.3According to the IMDB, at least 65 million people have watched the docuseries. Netflix has now commissioned Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to develop a TV series,4 to be released in January 2024—despite protests from several US Republican senators who had noted the writer’s controversial statements on Chinese policies against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The first book of the trilogy had sold more than 8 million copies by the end of 2020. On Reddit, fans discuss which disciplines one has to study in real life to approximate ‘cosmic sociology’, a fictional academic field that one of the central characters, Luo Ji, develops in his work.

Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was – Documenting Radio on the Radio

ABSTRACT During the mid-1990s, the Smithsonian Institution’s documentary series, Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, aired on hundreds of public radio stations nationwide. The series explored approximately 70 years of the history and socio-cultural impact of African Americans in radio – an ambitious and unprecedented undertaking. No previous radio documentary series had attempted to examine, so expansively, this influential subset of the broadcast industry. Given this author’s service as one of the producers of this historic series, this paper will provide an insider’s perspective on Black Radio’s creation and significance, and it will suggest that the series may serve as an inspirational roadmap for future media production and preservation efforts.

Science and audiovisual: the practial-theoretical creative process of scripting, mounting and editing the documentary series Eu, Mutum

Science and audiovisual: the practial-theoretical creative process of scripting, mounting and editing the documentary series Eu, Mutum

『DBS 리포트』 ｢민요의 고향｣을 통해 본 1970년대 중반 한국민요 전승 실태

This study examines the actual status of the transmission of folk songs in South Korea in the mid-1970s through DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang (Hometown of Folk Songs)" produced and broadcast by Dong-A Broadcasting System (DBS). DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" was a radio documentary series that covered farming and fishing villages to report on folk song transmission. DBS produced and broadcast 15 episodes of DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" in 1974 and 10 episodes in 1975. Although it did not cover all regions of the country, Gyeongsangnam-do, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Jeollanam-do, Jeollabuk-do, Gangwon-do, and Chungcheongbuk-do were included and the coverage was conducted at the village level. This program was significant in that it raised the public’s awareness of folk songs by covering and reporting in-depth on native folk songs rather than popular folk songs that were often heard through modern media, such as radio, TV, and LP at the time.&#x0D; DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" not only reported what kind of folk songs remained in the farming and fishing villages but also how the villagers were passing down folk songs and what these meant to them. This program covered a total of 18 villages. In 8 villages, folk songs were actively transmitted, while in the rest 10 villages, folk songs were found but not actively transmitted. The main cause of this was the changes in living conditions. In fishing villages, the opportunities to sing fishing labor songs disappeared with the decline of traditional fishing due to the development of fishing technology and changes in fishing grounds. Similarly, in rural areas, the opportunities to sing folk songs decreased due to the mechanization of farming, the use of herbicides, and the industrialization of the region. The spread of popular songs through the radio also diminished the transmission of folk songs. However, it is noteworthy that some villages underwent the same changes while the villagers worked together to preserve their folk songs. For them, folk songs were not only a means of relieving the boredom and exhaustion of labor and increasing the efficiency of work but also a source of vitality for living, art that enriched daily life, and valuable cultural heritage to be passed on to future generations.

Ways of seeing architecture and landscape in the voids of presence

The article examines the multi-layered roles of photography and film in “cultural translation,” representing architecture and landscape as a mediated place of conflicting visions, meanings and experiences. Taking the concept of the “production of space” as a starting point, it aims to contextualise the mediatory practices of photography and film by means of analysing the case study of a multifunctional building – the Krvavica Children’s Health Resort – designed in the 1960s by Rikard Marasović on the Adriatic coast of Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia). Focusing on an analysis of three paradigmatic examples of visual practices, the photographic series by Wolfgang Thaler (2011), the episode Mysterious Object in the Pine Forest filmed as part of the documentary series Slumbering Concrete (2016), and the experimental film A Record of Landscape without Prehistory by the artistic duo Doplgenger (2020), the article explores how photography and film communicate quality, in particular how mediated representations (re)create current interpretation and understanding of the intertwined heritage of modern architecture and landscape. Examining aspects of recording the site from different perspectives, a series of questions arise when addressing the issue of space, focused on its role in reshaping meanings, memories, emotions and experiences, narrating not only what architecture and landscape are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted in the context of different cultural identities.