TV Documentary Research Articles

The role of TV documentaries to disseminate osteoarchaeology more widely: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The role of TV documentaries to disseminate osteoarchaeology more widely: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The effect of choir-singing on self-reported embodied cognition in persons with dementia. A pilot study.

With an understanding of dementia through the lens of embodied cognition and a musical sense of the dynamics of the body, a fundamental continuity of personhood is possible. With music and singing, body and mind are positively affected for persons with dementia, and with promising evidence on emotional wellbeing during choir-singing. Based on this, we carried out a pilot-study to explore the effect of choir-singing on self-reported embodied cognition in persons with dementia. As part of a Danish TV documentary on choir-singing, 17 participants with a mean age of 71years took part in choir rehearsals and a concert. The majority of the participants had moderate/severe dementia, and 29% mild dementia. Altogether 164 self-report forms were analysed and showed a highly significant increase in embodied cognition from before to after choir-singing. The results provide initial evidence that choir-singing for persons with dementia positively influence the participants' self-reported embodied cognition. Further, the positive effect seemed to increase in line with increasing level of dementia. The 8-item Embodied Cognition in Dementia Assessment Scales (EmDAS) showed good internal reliability and promising properties for evaluating the effect of embodied cognition. For future research, controlled trials with larger samples are needed to provide evidence of choir-singing for persons in various stages of dementia.

Curating 'the good story': Care as representative performance in Danish veteran rehabilitation.

In this article, we explore the intricacies of veteran care and show how care practices come to incorporate veterans' 'self-performances' to raise political attention and funding for future rehabilitation activities. By bringing into dialogue theories of care and theories of performance and representation, we illustrate how a seemingly classic form of care-veteran rehabilitation-takes the form of representative performance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with the Danish Invictus Games team, we demonstrate how politics, research and TV documentaries are integrated into veteran care practices. Through this integration, mentally wounded veterans, while performing 'themselves' for shifting audiences with shifting agendas, come to assume the roles of both caregivers and care receivers. Crucially, we highlight that wounded veterans, while undertaking their personal rehabilitation journey, are curated into and (un)willingly positioned as representatives of others. By showing how caring for wounded veterans goes hand in hand with caring for fictive, future wounded veterans and for political, research and media agendas, this article offers new ways of thinking of and with care.

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.

The narrative strategy of micro-documentary If Treasure Can Talk under the background of new media

If Treasure Could Talk is a TV documentary by CCTV Record Channel. Each 5-minute episode tells about a traditional Chinese cultural treasure. Based on the narrative strategy of micro-documentaries under the background of new media, this paper studies the narrative strategy from four aspects: narrative perspective, narrative theme, narrative structure and narrative language.

Life of the Russian Regions in the Mirror of Television and Documentary Cinema: Comparative Analysis of the Tools

The article presents a comparative analysis of activity of the Russian regional and federal television, as well as the author’s documentary cinematography, covering the life of the Russian regions. Accordingly, the objects of research are television and documentary cinematography, and the subject includes the differences in the tools that they use in the mentioned activity. The relevance of the topic is due to new phenomena, connected with the growing interest of screen media not in the distant countries, as before, but in the life of their own country and its separate territories. Various scientific approaches to the differentiation of television programs are considered, special cycles are described, their peculiarities, advantages and disadvantages are identified. One of the article’s sections is devoted to identifying the differences between television and cinema, involving the opinions of respected domestic and foreign scientists. The empirical material for writing the article was activity of the Russian regional and federal TV channels, creative work of several domestic TV hosts and documentary film directors, as well as the work to establish interaction between the regional film communities in order to promote the regional documentary cinema to the audience. As a result, trends were identified that appeared in the pattern of covering the life of the regions by different media; differences in approaches to the problem of “author and hero” on television and in the cinema were indicated. In a situation when the regional television is clearly losing to the regional cinema, the audience’s demand for which is growing, television is recommended to switch to the regular screenings of the author’s documentary cinema in order to improve its own programming policy away from “formularity” and entertainment to more meaningful creative solutions.

Chic in knit: Youth, yarn and the comeback of the Faroese sweater

This article explores the recent revitalization of Faroese knitwear production and fashion in what I have called the ‘woollen turn’ in the Faroe Islands. I examine and analyse the reinvention of the Faroese knitting styles and cultural identities through the lens of an anthropologist reflecting on the role of the multifaceted globalization process in present-day craftsmanship and entrepreneurship in the context of a North Atlantic archipelago. The revival of the patterned sweater is a story about slow fashion, local knowledge and the search for new Faroese expressions inspired by the world beyond the ocean. The patterned sweater, locally embedded yet also immersed in global flows of fashion, has the potential of endless variation as handmade woollen garment. The sweater is not just a sweater anymore. It has a story of value chains and of local–global connections in the Arctic region, but it is also an environmental footprint and a point of identification. This article draws on material from TV documentaries, newspapers, fashion magazines and websites, as well as semi-structured interviews with fashion designers and knitting-connoisseurs in the Faroe Islands.

The Medical and Cognitive Research Unit in Austin Health, Australia

AbstractThe Medical and Cognitive Research Unit (MRCU), Austin Health and University of Melbourne, is sited in Heidelberg, Australia at Austin Health, a large University Teaching Hospital. Part of the Aged and Continuing Care Department, it is headed by geriatrician Associate Professor Michael Woodward.MCRU employs 25 staff‐ nurse coordinators, psychologists, medical doctors, scientists and administrative. Some 10 research affiliates each year complete projects in collaboration with the department, but the main focus is sponsored clinical trials. Research areas include Investigational Products for AD, with over 200 Phase 1‐4 trials completed over the last 30 years. Other research foci include wound healing, immunization and frailty.AD research is accelerated when the skills to recruit into and conduct trials are developed and maintained in this centre of excellence. Close affiliation with clinical cognitive practice, including the Austin Health Memory Clinic and private practices of doctors working in MCRU attracts patients to such services, providing a pipeline of patients suitable for studies. These patients also contribute to large data bases, including the Alzheimer’s Disease Network (ADNet) and the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle study (AIBL), and inturn these studies identify patients suitable for clinical trials in MCRU. The Head is one of 3 Medical Advisors to Dementia Australia, and as a member of the Dementia Australia Research Foundation funds dementia research throughout Australia. Numerous media exposures involve MCRU staff, raising national awareness of AD and related disorders‐ eg a recent National TV Documentary on mAbs for AD.International AD research looks to large sites to conduct trials, and inturn these site develop research protocols and contribute to national and international meetings. MCRU has recently contributed to protocols involving several small molecules to treat AD.International collaboration is a hallmark of a successful AD Research Centre‐ MCRU through AIBL and ADNet, and the affiliated Florey, have collaborated with ADNI and the World Wide FINGERS initiatives to better understand and prevent AD and related disorders.

YAKUT TELEVISION IN USSR: FACTORS OF FORMATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, INFORMATION POLICY

The article considers the process of organization and development of television in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in USSR from the establishment of the fi rst TV studio to the collapse of the USSR (1961-1991). It is the fi rst attempt to describe the factors of the appearance of television, the organization of infrastructure and activities of a television studio in the national republic in the conditions of party-state policy. The purpose of the article is to identify the conditions, stages, features of the organization and development of Yakut television. Also we have a goal to determine the content and forms of information policy implementation in the Soviet period. To achieve the goal, empirical research methods were used: analysis of archival documents, statistical and literary sources, periodical materials.Basing on archival documents, we identifi ed three stages of technological development of regional television: the 1960s - material and technical base establishment, training, mastering television genres, techniques and technologies of live broadcasting; the 1970s‒1980s – infrastructure development, Union-wide centralized broadcasting network establishment, the emergence of satellite and color television, the introduction of video recording and linear installation, organization of belt broadcasting throughout the country; The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the abandonment of fi lm news technologies, the use of linear and nonlinear editing, and the testing of new video formats.In Soviet times, television employees were tasked with the ideological, political, cultural and aesthetic education of the population by promoting achievements in all areas of the country’s life. According to archival data, Yakut television sought to cover various socially signifi cant topics in the fi eld of foreign and domestic policy, labor achievements, history, culture, art, health and sports. The broadcast was conducted in Yakut and Russian. The main genres were news, reports and conversations in the studio. For 30 years, the creative teams of the TV studio have managed to create samples of serious TV journalism, art productions, documentaries and feature fi lms. During the years of “perestroika”, the Yakut TV Studio set a course to strengthen regional identity and form national culture.

The regimentation of femininities in the world: the translated speech of non-Japanese women in a Japanese TV documentary series

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate the ideological workings of translation by analyzing the ways Japanese women’s language is employed to translate the speech of women in seven cities worldwide in a Japanese TV documentary series. The analysis finds that the TV production team allocates the features of Japanese women’s language differently to the speech of women according to region, drawing boundaries between women in Europe and the Americas, those in Asia and Africa, and Japanese women. The program’s practices of translation regiment the femininities of women according to region in terms of formality and politeness by actively expanding the indexicality of features of Japanese women’s language away from reticence, politeness, and gentleness, and by restricting the use of these features to co-occurrence with the plain form. The analysis implies that this regimentation of femininities serves to reproduce and reinforce Japanese domestic stereotypes concerning women in distinct regions among Japanese audiences.

Strategies and Tactics to Communicate ‘Nature’: Beyond Anthropocentrism in Swedish Media

Media play a central role in the discursive struggles over the meaning of nature, climate change and human–nature relationships through the strategic selection and salience of media content. This paper investigates the strategies and tactics mobilized by media producers in communicating environmental issues. The investigation is based on a selection of seven media productions in the Swedish context, comprising TV series and documentaries produced between 2015 and 2020. Through a discourse-theoretical analysis of these audio–visual products and interviews with their producers, we identify a five-cluster model, ranging from mainstream anthropocentric strategies to alternative ecocentric tactics. Our model aims to delineate media strategies reproducing hegemonic anthropocentrism to critically inquire about environmental ideologies in media communication and explore potential alternative tactics for more ecocentric representations of nature.

Research on the Development Path of Urban Documentary Driven by New Media Technology

With the arrival of the new media era, the development of urban documentaries has attracted public attention with its unique form. This article outlines the impact of the new media environment on the creation and dissemination of micro documentaries, as well as the characteristics of their creation and dissemination. A city documentary is a true record of the changes in people and things that we discover. It uses real life as the creative material, real people and events as the expressive objects, and through the processing and presentation of artistic creation methods, ultimately triggers people's thinking in the form of television or movies. There is still a lot of room for effort in the operation of television documentaries in China. With the rapid development of emerging streaming platforms, the number of paid subscription users continues to increase, providing a possibility for TV documentaries to achieve stable returns. This article attempts to explain the environmental characteristics faced by documentaries in the new media environment from three aspects: production, dissemination, and industrial chain construction, as well as the changes that should be made to seek greater development. It is hoped to provide constructive suggestions for the development of documentaries.

Postcolonial aging, amah, and diaspora in A Simple Life

ABSTRACT Based on the life story of the Hong Kong film producer, Roger Lee, A Simple Life/Taojie (Ann Hui [2011] 2012) is a semi-fictional biographical film about the life of Taojie, an amah (Cantonese migrant domestic servant) who served three generations of Lee's family for more than sixty years. The intervention of this essay is two-fold. First, this essay situates A Simple Life in the burgeoning but understudied journalistic and documentary discourse on aging as a postcolonial condition in Hong Kong since the 2010s. An intertextuality between the film and its adjacent media productions, such as journalistic reportage and TV documentaries, reveals the social anxiety about the lack of holistic and accessible elderly care in Hong Kong's medical and social welfare system and the profit-driven nursing home industry. Second, this essay argues that A Simple Life responds to the postcolonial anxiety of old age by articulating an intergenerational kinship through Roger Lee and Taojjie, a diasporic Asian icon of amah that is localized, nationalized, internationalized under the framework of CEPA (Hong Kong and Mainland Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement). Multiple imaginaries of home, family, and community—Roger Lee's home, a local nursing home, Roger Lee's transnational family, and a new Hong Kong–Mainland cinematic community—co-exist in this film as interconnected and interdependent sites of care, demonstrating how a postcolonial, national, and transnational sense of home and belonging are simultaneously articulated under the framework of CEPA.

The crime-culture connection in a crime fact story: An applied approach

This paper explores “crime” as cultural and not simply an individual act. The aim is to contextualize a transgression as an outcome of a social “phenomenon” that happens in real-time, is reported in the newspaper and TV documentaries, and is adopted for analysis as a “crime fact story”. Using a “discourse-based” frame analysis of the non-linear narrative characteristic of offender engagement discourse, I reorganize the narrator’s experience. Secondly, in the narrative act of the “double function” of a narrator as a character, I reveal an “unreliable” stance when the narrator, like the transgressor, is the victim of the interpretations the actors make of their surroundings in the 1st story of crime. In reorganizing the narrator’s experience, there are “microcontexts” which, as alternative storyworld, emulate the causes leading to the transgression left unnarrated in the 2nd “story of investigation”. Consequently, a “perpetrator-culture” nexus is conceptualized in the dichotomy of social factors and criminal behaviour, which is a phenomenon and represented as antecedentless pronouns and inanimate nouns in the text, stylistically “repeated” for emphasis in the discourse. The paper emphasizes the need to consider the impact of factors that influence society and inform deviance within a context of “culture” that is of shared value and behaviour and situates an offence to the interpretations the actors cognitively make of their surroundings.

The Specifics of the Director’s Work with a Central Figure in Film and TV Documentaries

The topic of the director’s work with a documentary’s central figure on the screen, in the conditions of active distribution of visual content, especially in the genre of interviews, is undoubtedly relevant. The interviewee’s preparation for filming, the methods of their emancipation, the achievement of the ultimate goal and the truth of life on the screen require detailed study, professional knowledge based on the experience of the classics of documentary film directing — D. Lunkov, Yu. Shiller, I. Belyaev, A. Lysenko, etc. Long-forgotten techniques are closely intertwined with innovative ideas of directors. These include what behavior the interviewer or presenter decides to adhere to. Depending on the combination of factors, the tone and course of on-screen conversation in different genres may change. By adopting a tough model of behavior, the presenter can make the conversation’s tone tense and, at the same time, more dynamic and sharp, while a soft behavioral model can make the conversation more sincere and friendly. The article analyzes the specifics of the director’s work with a central figure in the process of creating documentary screen works. The authors attempt to comprehend the experience of previous generations of documentary filmmakers, so that young specialists can take into account their mistakes and achieved results when working with the so-called non-actor — a documentary’s central figure in the audiovisual screen space. The article concludes that, despite the fact that the solutions to complex problems in the work of a director with a documentary’s central figure have already been described by leading practitioners and theorists in the field of audiovisual screen arts, the process of forming a central figure in film and television documentaries is not over. There are controversial points of view on a number of aspects of disclosing the personality of a documentary’s central figure, their emancipation on camera and the truth of life on the screen. Therefore, relying on the previous experience of the professionals and taking into account the emergence of new technologies, the younger generation of directors needs to use already well-proven techniques in their work, as well as try to find and apply new approaches (techniques) when creating documentary screen works having a central figure.

Chronological Changes in the Portrayal of Korean Nurses in TV Documentaries

Chronological Changes in the Portrayal of Korean Nurses in TV Documentaries

Representing the Silk Road: Literature and Images between China and Japan during the Cold War

The essay focused on the TV documentary series The Silk Road and discussed the significance of this co-production between China and Japan. Two television stations, NHK and CCTV, provided each other with technical support to create a new image of the Silk Road in 1980. They attempted to rediscover the cultural relationship in Asia. Japanese Oriental studies were either the base for this co-production or the source of trouble. CCTV needed to utilize and overcome Japanese technology and the resources from Oriental studies, to represent national culture and identity through images. On the other hand, Japan once again sought ways to represent the Asian “others.” However, the challenge was making it relative to Orientalism and imperialism. This essay also compares the two versions and suggests that both ancient Asian cultural histories that they represented through images reflected the contemporaneous political situation of the Cold War. In CCTV’s version, the images of the Silk Road became a symbol of the re-establishment of China’s national identity, including the imagination of a “multi-ethnic state” and a “community of cultural memory that unites East and West”. Furthermore, this version also represented the trade with neighboring states. Each of these elements had a realistic role in the political environment of 1980. On the other hand, NHK’s version contains a narrative to prove Japan is the last stop on the Silk Road. Moreover, before this documentary, Japanese literature had long sought the “unknown” of the Silk Road and became a strong intellectual foundation for The Silk Road. The narrative of Japan “being a part of the Silk Road, but unlike in colonialism, as a traveler” is what Yasushi Inoue repeatedly expressed in his literary works and appeared to have been passed on through the images of the documentary. Carrying the negative legacy of Japanese imperialism, then being caught between the United States and the Socialist bloc, and having a difficult choice of political identity, Japanese intellectuals refrained from expressing their political positions and chose to describe cultural history from the “traveler’s” perspective. This essay suggests this is an attempt to redefine Japan on the cultural map of Asia and indirectly to break through the polarization of capitalism and socialism in the Cold War.

A Study on the Narrative Structure and Narrative Art of TV Documentary

Television documentary is to systematically and completely report and record political, economic, cultural and other related news topics by using electronic recording equipment and means. TV documentary is characterized by authenticity: in its shooting process, from the perspective of news, it objectively and truly records social life, objectively reflects real people, real events, real emotions and real-life scenes, and focuses on showing the complete process of the original form of life. Therefore, when creating TV documentaries, we must pay attention to the rational and effective use of narrative structure and narrative art, so as to further enrich the content and expression of TV documentaries.

Danger, comfort, and silence at the home front: Mediating soldiers’ wives

This article explores how the experiences of soldiers’ wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers’ wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all ‘wives’) and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives’ groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier’s wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture.

OTHERNESS OF TREES: FACTNESS AND FICTION IN RECENT NARRATIVES OF ARBOREAL SURVIVAL

The primary intention of this article is to explore some of the ways in which present-day readers, living in an age of increasing awareness of ecological change, interact with the concept of the “tree” as it appears in a variety of discourses: children’s fiction, TV documentary, scholarly writing, popularising ecological discourse, and recent mainstream Anglophone fiction, most notably that of the Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak, whose The Island of Missing Trees (2021) features a sentient tree as a prominent narrator. The primary concern of this article is then to discuss some of the ways in which fictional texts have been augmented by popularising, fact-based discourses, most notably by the use of anthropomorphism, which supposedly permits the reader to “imagine” the existence of the arboreal Other. Inevitably, given the range of discursive sources, the findings are in part conflictual, although all can be seen to contribute in different ways to the current human-centred re-imagination of the perceived fraught relationship that exists between the natural world and the human being.