Parallelism and Progression: Two Structural Thinking of TV Documentary
If documentary is an art of discovery, it is also an art of narration and structure. In TV documentaries, structure is the concretization and meaning of narrative, and narrative can express the author's aesthetic feeling smoothly through structure. Therefore, establishing structure is to establish the way and significance of unfolding and completing narrative. The narrative structure of TV documentaries presents different structural styles because of different structural subjects. However, any structure is the result of people's thinking, and the investigation and study of structural thinking may bring us a shortcut to understand and grasp the narrative structure of TV documentaries.
Structural thinking is the thinking process of transforming the generated space-time materials into one-dimensional and linear language chains and language flows in the writing thinking stage. The purpose of structural thinking is to create a quasi-natural space-time structure and logical structure through the narration of language and materials, which makes people clear and easy to understand and grasp. The structural thinking to achieve this state is parallel structural thinking and progressive structural thinking.
1 1 parallel structural thinking
Parallel structural thinking is a structural thinking mode in which all structural units of TV documentaries keep parallel and parallel spatial relations. Parallel structural thinking often presents a block state or block state, so it can also be called block structural thinking or block structural thinking.
Parallel structural thinking has the following three characteristics:
1, the plot content is in segments, and the unit content is relatively large, but the number of units is relatively small;
2. The contents of each section are relatively independent;
3. There is no transition between sections, only paragraph switching, often jumping.
In the thinking of parallel structure, each block can be built independently in parallel, or it can be broken and interwoven between blocks. From the perspective of the relationship between plates in parallel structure thinking, it can be roughly subdivided into several specific thinking forms, such as parallel structure thinking, connected parallel structure thinking and segmented parallel structure thinking.
Parallel structure thinking is a way of thinking in which plates are parallel, parallel or relative. The TV documentary "ancestral home" is constructed with the thinking of juxtaposition structure. It is divided into five sections, each with a subtitle, which is "ancestral geomantic omen", "aristocratic family", "benevolent love" and "weddings and funerals" in turn. Although these five sections are all around the ancestral home of "Feng Lin Cuo", they are the TV documentary "Jiangnan" and constructed by parallel structural thinking. In order to describe the local culture in the south of the Yangtze River as a whole, the creators chose Dirt in Dingshan, Visiting Tianyi Pavilion, Millennium Wine and Old House for recording, which constituted the overall image of the culture in the south of the Yangtze River. The Temptation of Tibet also adopts a parallel thinking structure. It reveals the theme of the work through the situation of four religious believers trudging on the pilgrimage road: there is a true God in everyone's heart, not a person who is afraid of being half-hearted.
Connecting parallel structure thinking, that is, plates are connected one after another in order of time and space. The TV documentary Destiny is constructed by connecting parallel structural thinking. "Destiny" is divided into chapters according to characters. When the content of the last character comes to an end, it adopts a structural narrative, either from an interview with him or from events related to him. Connecting structure thinking not only maintains the relative independence of each section, but also strengthens the connection between each section, so that the whole film can be divided into several sections and still maintain a relatively perfect integrity.
If the connected parallel structure thinking shows life in a vertical relationship, while the segmented parallel structure thinking shows life in a horizontal relationship, it often shows different events of different people at the same time in a parallel montage. Dexing Square, for example, adopts the sectional structural thinking. 29 1 lives in Dexing square, 1939 built the old Shikumen Hutong, and the house is tight. TV documentaries start with recording their daily lives and choose three families to "record", which objectively reflects their living conditions and attitudes. The TV documentary "Sand and the Sea" is also created by using fragment structure thinking. It shows people's survival consciousness and fighting spirit through the narration of the life of a resident living in the desert and a fisherman living on the island.
2 1 progressive structural thinking
Progressive structural thinking refers to a structural thinking mode that keeps irreversible logical, temporal, spatial and degree relations among the contents of various structural units through progressive and in-depth cutting.
Progressive structural thinking often presents linear structural characteristics, so it can also be called linear structural thinking, and often organizes stories with continuous progressive event relationships.
Progressive structural thinking generally has three characteristics: (1) narrative units are small in capacity and relatively fragmentary in content, but there are many units; (2) There is a certain connection between narrative units, which becomes a clue relationship; (3) There is a transitional connection between narrative units, not a big switch or jump. Progressive structural thinking can be divided into two specific styles: single-line progressive structural thinking and multi-line progressive structural thinking.
Single-line progressive structural thinking, that is, a structural thinking mode that runs through the works with a clue. Single-line structural thinking can be internal or logical, such as the problem of water shortage in distant villages and the creative experience of China centennial festival painter. It can also be external and formal, such as the pagoda tree at the entrance of Longji Village and the Great Wall of Wan Li Great Wall.
Single-line progressive structural thinking can be divided into coherent, beaded, sequential inversion and other progressive structural thinking: structural thinking with a structural clue as coherent progressive structural thinking; There is no coherence between events, but a structural thinking mode that combines relatively concentrated events like scattered beads, which is a beaded progressive structural thinking; The progressive structural thinking of time series inversion is a clue that the time-space sequence is disrupted and then reversed, which is a bit like time-space interleaving, but time-space interleaving is two or more clues, and time-space inversion is a clue; It is also a bit like interpolation, but the capacity is slightly larger than interpolation, which has certain structural significance.
Multi-line progressive structural thinking is a structural thinking style composed of several clues. Multi-line progressive structural thinking mainly includes parallel progressive structural thinking and staggered progressive structural thinking. Parallel progressive structural thinking is that several clues cross in parallel at the same time; Staggered progressive structural thinking, that is, several clues from different time and space intersect The TV documentary "Centennial Festival of China" passes as many as five clues: the painter paints; Exhibition site; A hundred years of historical facts; Painters talk about creative ideas; A painter's diary, etc It's all on record.