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The Educational Review, USA

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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2025.01.016

Is There Such a Thing in the Chinese and Western Documentary Film?

Le Cao

Institute of Education, Culture and Media, Meishan Branch of Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences, Meishan 620010, Sichuan, China.

*Corresponding author: Le Cao

Published: February 21, 2025

Abstract

This article explores the ongoing debate surrounding documentary film's relationship with reality, focusing on the concepts of implicit realism and subjectivism. It examines the origins of documentary realism, contrasting Western direct cinema with Chinese Jishi-ism. The article argues that while documentary film inherently strives for realism, theorists have approached it from various epistemological and ontological angles. The debate over the subjectivity and objectivity of documentaries, whether documentaries are an objective presentation of truth or the subjective expression of personality. Such an assumption, which we now believe to be philosophically untenable. In fact, the reception of the films was in general less conditioned by these filmmakers’ rhetoric than by these powerful, if unstated, culturally implicit claims of objectivity. It highlights the shift from socialist realism to phenomenological realism in Chinese documentaries and the influence of postmodern-pragmatist perspectives that question the objectivity of documentaries. The article concludes that the question of convergence between representation and reality remains central to documentary film.

Keyword

Chinese Jishi-ism; Direct films; Documentary; Realism; Subjectivism; Reality

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Copyright

© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

Is There Such a Thing in the Chinese and Western Documentary Film?

How to cite this paper: Le Cao. (2025). Is There Such a Thing in the Chinese and Western Documentary Film? The Educational Review, USA9(1), 112-116.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2025.01.016