Under the influence of post-modernism and Marxist historical materialism, the rise of“global view of history”and“social historiography”based on the concept of people-oriented have prompted the birth of the“archival memory concept”. As one of the important forms of collective memory and social memory, the compilation of image archives can be a purposive and conscious construction behavior of social memory, which adhere to the social ideology, ethics, social value orientation and interest relations at that time. This article chooses the outstanding literature documentary Images on Fire to explore the social memory attributes and functions of literature documentary as a product of image archives compilation. As the first panoramic documentary about the War of Resistance Against Japan with realistic images, this film, based on the China Film Archive, is made by the archive to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victories of War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japan and the world Anti-Fascist war.