Poetic Expression and Image Significance of Documentaries on the Elderly

In the context of the accelerating aging of the population in contemporary China, documentaries on the elderly have become an important way to interpret the intergenerational contradictions in modern society and re-understand the value of aging by focusing on the lives of the elderly and the relationship between generations. They use a realistic perspective, such as looking at ethical changes from the perspective of family daily life, looking at intergenerational communication from the perspective of technological influence, and looking at the changes of the times from the perspective of memory records. In the connection between personal stories and social development, they help people better understand the phenomenon of aging. This paper focuses on the creation wave of documentaries on the elderly in China after 2010, selects typical texts, and explores the response of images to the social spiritual dilemma of “getting old before getting rich” from the dual dimensions of the transformation of the character writing paradigm and the ethical tension of poetic expression. The study finds that the aesthetic expression level uses the aesthetics of mono no aware, the poetics of time, and the archaeology of sound to reflect the fault and bridging of collective memory through individual life history, so that the aging issue is sublimated from a social problem report to a metaphysical questioning of the dignity of life. This type of documentary builds a bridge between the embodied aging experience in the context of the “silver wave” through the strategies of “poeticizing trauma” and “sanctifying the daily life”, challenging the utilitarian discourse that reduces the elderly to a social burden and providing the possibility of visual therapy to eliminate intergenerational loneliness. This creative practice not only constitutes a cultural memorandum for China’s aging society, but also reveals the unique value of documentary art in protecting the warmth of humanity in the era of technological rationality.