“An Art of Regrets” : Creativity and Constraints in Olympic Documentary Making in China

This chapter shows how creativity and constraints are dialectically factored into the scripting, shooting, and production of the series based on the author’s ethnographical work, which included shadowing key creators in post-production and attending review or pre-broadcasting screening sessions during which feedback was gathered from organizational leaders. Sports documentary production is a “puzzle-piecing” process,6 whereby obstacles from multiple sources are dealt with, sometimes constraining, and other times energizing creativity. While offering a quintessentially Chinese story of how individual creators negotiate the state’s preferred narrative, the chapter also sheds light on some generalizable lessons on the creative constraints experienced by professionals in sports media. Since the documentary project brought together a consortium of actors including a state media organization, a state sports regulatory organization, as well as numerous personalities in the Chinese sports sector, the creative constraints were manifested as inter- or intra-organizational struggles over different interests and institutional logic. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Fan Hong and Liu Li; individual chapters, the contributors.