How to tell the story of "the cook" in the food documentary?
2021-10-26
The unique attraction of food documentaries is to connect food with emotion, convey taste memory through visual images, and realize new companionship to the audience. From the first season of "China on the tip of the tongue" directed by Chen Xiaoqing in 2012, which created a new documentary category of "food world", to the popular "breakfast China", "midnight Jianghu", "a string of life", "Jianghu restaurant" in recent two years, food documentary is undoubtedly one of the most popular documentary types in China in recent ten years. How does a food documentary trigger empathy? When the documentary director decides to make a food documentary, how does food and narration trigger the echo of the emotional structure of "dry people"? This may be the first thing they need to think about. For the author, growing up in the factory yard beside the canal in Northern Jiangsu and leaving his hometown for more than 20 years, he often thinks of his hometown dishes. In addition to the classic lion head, boiled dry silk or Yangzhou old goose of Huaiyang cuisine, there are always two must order dishes in the bottom memory menu: one is "immortal soup" and the other is "Yangchun noodles". The so-called "fairy soup" is actually a homophonic stem of "money saving soup": parents of double working families are late from work. They simply wash a bowl with soy sauce and scallions, put a chopstick lard, gently stir until it is completely melted, and the aroma overflows. In the summer evening, the off-duty workers set up small tables in the staff dormitory area and sprinkled water on the ground to cool down. The strong smell of lard and the fragrance of "supper flower" (evening primrose) rose together with the steam. "Dry people" teased each other about "immortals should also save money", becoming the most smoky daily in the factory yard. Another so-called "sunny spring noodles" is actually plain noodles in clear soup, with theout any side dishes or toppings, but with the a little scallion sprinkled on bare noodles. Grandma will greet "come Qie sunny face" with Suzhou accent. It was not until many years after leaving home that I suddenly remembered the optimism of the material barren era contained in the "sunny spring noodles": on the smooth noodles now called "pure carbon water" by healthy dieters, the only scallions can be described as the buds of the branches in March. I often wonder what kind of life attitude is such a beautiful psychological hint under the gray age background. This may be the real reason why food documentaries have become the most active subject of documentary creation in recent years. How to depict the group images of the times and the reality of the world is the true value of all non fictional creation. "Food" is a visual spectacle, and the "world" behind it contains the values of food populism. Just like city delicacy delicacy in COVID-19, the analogy of local cuisine is used to personification. "Hot noodles", "Xiaolong Bao" and "Yangzhou fried rice" are refuge. The pre modern cuisine not only replaces the metaphor of people to solve the post-modern crisis, but also recover the original simplicity. In terms of specific documentary narrative strategies, if food is a communication behavior for the purpose of persuasion, according to the classic persuasion theory, the director's narrative strategies can be divided into "central path" and "peripheral path". The so-called "central path" often refers to persuasion through detailed analysis, high-quality arguments and professional rationality. In food documentaries, directors can often show the careful selection of food materials, limited delivery, craftsmanship and taste touch. For example, how the God of sushi presents the careful selection of ingredients, the octopus needs to be kneaded 50 times, the seaweed needs to be roasted 100 times, and the rice can not be lower than the temperature of the human body. In this way, they all try to externalize the uncertain subjective evaluation of food into a quantifiable and standardized process flow in the way of industrial wonders. The "peripheral path" tends to slowly establish an implicit attitude, which is achieved by repeatedly associating attitude goals with emotions. In the narrative strategy, people's memories related to food, as well as the corresponding attitude and emotional structure are often mobilized through the presentation of character stories and details. For example, people's loyalty to a city team often does not necessarily come from the team's capital investment and star allocation, but may be more related to the family memory of watching football with their father on weekends when they were young; It's better than people's attitude towards traditional Chinese medicine, which may be inseparable from the smell of the old days when grandma boiled traditional Chinese medicine when she was young. The same is true for the attitude towards food, which is often embedded in the larger implicit values and emotional structure, implying the nostalgia of the post-80s, post-90s, post-00s and generation Z. Some media have reported that Camus's outsider and taizai Zhi's human disqualification are on the reading list of generation Z young people. The reading interest of generation Z may reflect a group social mentality: the life dilemma that "dry people" often face is the risk of becoming an outsider in their own life. How to rivet the coordinates of life and weave the network of meaning requires constant comparison with the lives of others. The documentary provides a sincere reference system. Excellent food documentaries, like excellent travel literature, take the young generation to see other people's lives and times, which is the process of self dialogue and self discovery necessary for growth. However, in the image industry, "what the director wants to express" and "what the market wants to see" are often regarded as a pair of competitive demands. The uniqueness of documentary category is that creators often come with the tradition of TV elitism born in the 1980s and have a strong Director based expression motivation. In today's network culture, the content evaluation of audio-visual new media platforms often takes user centrism as the performance label. Therefore, there is a competitive relationship between the two. However, as anthropologist Yan Yunxiang pointed out in the flow of gifts, the relationship in Chinese society is often not "I-based" or "other based", but "relationship based". From this perspective, food documentaries seem to be a "flowing gift" in the network of benign social interaction. The value of documentaries is neither "expressionist standard" nor "market / audience standard": the former often makes the expression too personal to the director, while the latter risks the visual narrative posture becoming flattery. Excellent food documentaries may reconstruct the "relationship based" dialogue through "food". Nowadays, two opposing emotions often coexist in the emotional structure of the network: on the one hand, it is easy to "break the defense" on the full screen, and on the other hand, it often lacks the basic ability of empathy. From this point of view, no matter what and how it is portrayed, if the food documentary can restart such relations and dialogue, it may be its greatest social value. (outlook new era)
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