What is the highest-grossing movie in the world in 2023?
The answer is: "Barbie".
At the 81st Golden Globe Awards, "Barbie" won the "Film and Box Office Achievement Award". After the film was released in the summer, it was a global hit for 14The $4.2 billion box office also made director Greta Gerwig the first solo female director in the "$1 Billion Film Club." Actor Meryl Streep (Meryl Streep) even thanked "Barbie" at the previous Palm Springs Awards for saving the film industry in 2023 and bringing joy to people of different ages and genders.
Director Greta Gerwig with star Margot Robbie at the Golden Globe Awards.
Looking at the entire film industry from "Barbie", what exactly is a women's film? What is the true meaning of feminism? What is the reality of women filmmakers and women's films? In the "Seeing the World from 'She' - How Does the Narrative of Women in Cinema Change?" organized by Sanlian Life Weekly and DT51 Rendez-Vous in Beijing? In the theme salon, Dai Jinhua, professor of the Department of Chinese at Peking University and director of the Center for Film and Culture Research of Peking University, Li Moxiao, producer and co-founder of Shanyi, and director reporter of Sanlian Life Weekly, who served as the host, discussed the relationship between women's films and culture and life from a number of films, focusing on women's stories on the screen and female creators off the screen.
Seeing the World from 'She' – How Are the Narratives of Women in Cinema Changing? "Theme salon scene.
Barbie is the beginning of this discussion, this film about Barbie and Ken leaving Barbie Land for real adventure, is undoubtedly a huge innovation in Hollywood commercial cinema, it reconstructs pink, reconstructs Barbie, and reconstructs a new female narrative. But this hugely successful work shouldn't be the end of the discussion. At the end of the movie "Barbie", a middle-aged professional woman from the real world saves Barbie Land and makes Barbie from the fantasy world into the real world. In Dai Jinhua's view, movies are an art of dreaming, but letting Barbie go from dreams shows that behind the relaxed tone of this feminist core commercial film, it is still not an easy reality.
Barbie" stills.
We chose Barbie, what do we want to see?
In March 1959, the first Barbie in history appeared in the image of red lips, a golden ponytail and a white striped swimsuit. According to data disclosed by The Economist in 2002, girls between the ages of 3 and 11 in the United States have an average of 10 Barbie dolls per person; In 2009, Barbie sales worldwide exceeded 1 billion, and 9 out of 10 American girls owned Barbie dolls.
In the 64 years since its inception, Barbie is not only a doll for little girls, but also a dream and incarnation of women, reflecting every trend and fluctuation of feminism. In the 70s of the 20th century, the second wave of feminism in the United States arose, and Barbie's sales fell for the first time. Feminists at the time believed that Barbie was the first "standard of beauty" that many women were exposed to, and that Barbie's image represented "unrealistic body shape ideas and outdated gender stereotypes". "Refuse to be Barbie" became a popular slogan at the time.
By 2016, Mattel, the toy manufacturer that launched Barbie, had launched Barbie with 3 body shapes, 7 skin tones, 22 eye colors, and 24 hairstyles. Two years later, Mattel launched multiple character models in one go, encouraging girls to break the career ceiling with more than 250 job types. From ** to astronaut, you can find Barbie in any profession. On Barbie**, he wrote: "By introducing girls to the stories of women from all walks of life, they are starting to see more opportunities for themselves. ”
Today, Barbie has a variety of body shapes, skin tones, and hair colors, representing different professions and identities.
It took 15 years from the beginning of preparation for Barbie to the release of Barbie, which is not a particularly long time for Hollywood, but the process of "Barbie" going to the screen and facing the audience has obviously overcome many difficulties.
From the perspective of the producer and co-founder of Yamaichi, Li Moxiao analyzes the various decisions made at the production and creation level of the film. It wasn't easy to make similar decisions, then and now, and even more commendable, they proved to be wise after the film's release.
Margot Robbie is a very important name in these decisions. The actor of "Barbie" in the movie is also the producer of this movie. Long ago, Robbie signed an exclusive agreement with Warner Bros. to produce and star in Warner Bros. films on women's issues. Immediately after that, Robbie, as the producer and important decision-maker of the movie "Barbie", chose the director Greta Gerwig very smartly. Gerwig is known for her feminist perspective, and has many masterpieces such as "Lady Bird" and "Little Women", and is a creator who has made achievements in the field of women's films. "The creative team, which has a strong sense of femininity, laid an important foundation for the later completion of this film. Li Moxiao concluded.
Producer and co-founder of Shanyi Li Moxiao (first from left) shared the scene.
Li Moxiao believes that there are many reasons for the success of "Barbie":Deep-rooted IP and image, brisk comedy rhythm, as well as gentle and straightforward satire, and witty exposure of the situation of real women. In terms of marketing, Mattel has licensed Barbie's IP to nearly 150 commercial brands in different fields, making the pink image deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, so that "wearing pink to see Barbie" once became fashionable.
But what hits people's hearts more is the content of the movie itself. A "declaration" of a middle-aged working mother in the movie almost expresses all the situations that women can encounter in reality and have wide resonance. This clip, combined with high-intensity marketing and marketing, attracted many people to the cinema.
Li Moxiao said that for the movie itself, this kind of manifesto line may not be a perfect way to present the line, but it expresses people's expectations for the movie "Barbie" to the greatest extent:When we chose Barbie, what did we want to see?
One of the most widely circulated monologues from the movie "Barbie".
I have been doing women's film festivals for so many years, and I am still in the process of activating everyone's imagination and expectations for women's film festivals. But this movie successfully let everyone enter the cinema, go to **, and understand, which is an important gain that this movie has brought me. ”
After interpreting "Barbie" from the perspective of production, Li Moxiao shared her observations and insights in the process of working in the industry from three directions, and also threw out three questions:How to create films freely with feminist consciousness? As a film industry practitioner and a curator, how can we understand the sustainability and value of female directors? How do we recognize and imagine the future of women's cinema?
In 2017, Li Moxiao co-founded China's first and only official international women's film festival, Shanyi International Women's Film Festival, as an artistic director. As a producer, she watches a large number of domestic and foreign women's films every year and collaborates with different female directors. In Li Moxiao's view, strictly or ideally, women's films are films that focus on the fate of women and use women's perspectives to interpret and express them. When more women enter the production and decision-making process of films, it will also bring better impetus to the development of women's films.
Barbie" stills.
But during the discussion, Li Moxiao emphasized that there is a clear difference between feminist films and women's films. "Feminist cinema represents a director's proposition. In the course of the entire history of cinema – or in the entire history of women's cinema – there are not many female directors who flaunt feminist creations. Although Chantal Akerman, as she is known, has always been a long-term subject of concern for women's work, love and desire, Li said, she denies that her work is feminist. "She feels that if she interprets her films from a 'feminist' perspective, there are limitations. ”
In Li Moxiao's work, she often comes into contact with many young female directors. She is pleased to see that in recent years, more and more female directors have appeared on the international stage and won various awards, but female creators have to face a cruel reality both at home and abroad. In Europe and the United States, there are also very few female directors who have entered the "$1 billion film club", and "Barbie" is the first film to be shot by a female director alone at the box office of more than $1 billion; In China, from 2017 to 2021, only 10% of theatrical film works in the past five years have been made by female directors.
A still from Little Women.
Although facing the cruel reality ahead, Li Moxiao hopes that the creators and the audience will still have a kind of expectation and expectation. "There are more and more young female filmmakers, who are full of power and passion for filmmaking. Woolf once said that women should have their own rooms. In my opinion,The days when women needed to own rooms may be over, and women are already building their edifices now. I think women are very powerful, and I am very much looking forward to the future of China to give birth to such a popular and popular female film as "Barbie", and I especially look forward to more and more female directors becoming more and more excellent. ”
People are used to dreaming in moviesBut Barbie chooses to get out of the dream
As a long-time scholar who has been following and studying film for a long time, Dai Jinhua said that 2023 is an "exciting year" - Chen Cuimei's "Barbarian Invasion", Liu Jiayin's "It's Not Worth the Trip" and Ma Yingxin's "Parrot Killing" were all staged this year, and in the film market, more films that focus on women and are created by women have emerged.
The movies "Barbarian Invasion", "It's Worth the Trip" and "Parrot Killing" to be released in 2023 are all from female directors.
As a commercial blockbuster with a feminist core that has rarely been seen in recent years, the scale of production and distribution of "Barbie" and its global success are unprecedented. "When director Greta Gerwig appeared on the cover of Time magazine, we could once again be convinced that she had a huge impact on Hollywood, the United States, and the world's culture. ”
Dai Jinhua believes that in people's previous imaginations, feminists need to have some kind of masculine characteristics — at least relatively neutral, not overly feminine. Feminists shouldn't have much to do with pink or the body. But "Barbie" presents the audience with a different kind of feminist gesture. Dai Jinhua said that the film has created a sense of unity, at least among young Chinese women in China's moviegoers.
Dai Jinhua further elaborated on the change of feminist ideology reflected by the image of this ** toy from Barbie to the movie "Barbie". In Dai Jinhua's view, from the 1960s to the 21st century, people's perception of Barbie has changed, showing a significant change in post-feminism. Barbie used to be the object of criticism, and people tacitly accepted that it represented an impossible body proportion, represented men's imagination of women, and represented women as the main body of consumption, which led to the emergence of new industries dominated by female consumers such as fitness and medical beauty. Later, the emergence of Barbie in various occupations, different body types and skin tones may indeed be a successful business book for the toy manufacturer Mattel, but the emergence of these diverse Barbie images shows the process of American society going through the changes of the times and various struggles, constantly attacking various privileges and advantages.
Dai Jinhua (second from left), professor of the Department of Chinese at Peking University and director of the Center for Film and Culture at Peking University, shared the scene.
There is a detail in the movie "Barbie" that makes people laugh. Ken enters the real world and learns about patriarchy for the first time. Just as he discovered his gender advantage and began to look for a job with joy, he found that he needed all kinds of diplomas and endorsements of identity. This exaggerated detail vividly illustrates the high degree of stratification within patriarchal or patriarchal societies. While the male community has absolute structural privileges, each individual male has to compromise with its construction and struggle under patriarchy. Dai Jinhua thinks that this is a very interesting clip of the whole film, which reflects reality in a lightweight and joking way.
Dai Jinhua said, "Film theory usually tells people that because reality is too heavy, people have to dream in movies. But there is a huge difference between most of the film works of "Barbie": it is the fantasy world Barbie Land that is about to collapse, but it is a mother from the real world, a middle-aged professional woman, who finally saves Barbie Land with her "anti-**" declaration. "Barbie in the fantasy world finally decides to go into reality. The inversion itself seemed very intriguing to me, and behind the lightness of the film, perhaps it was the heavy reality that was captured. ”
Stills from "Crazy Flowers at the End".
In an interview, Dai Jinhua was asked whether the film had gender. Looking back now, she still doesn't hesitate: "Other arts may also have the imprint of patriarchy, but none of them are like films, from the industrial system and production traditions to narrative conventions and lens language, which are so obviously influenced by male culture everywhere." So in that sense, women are interlopers in the film industry. Women have to face such a system, such conventions and conventions, struggle to express themselves in such linguistic paradigms, and then create, and finally form women's films. ”
So what is a real women's film? Dai Jinhua thinksThe definition of "women's film" is one of the hardest in the world. "If women's movies are about women, then too many movies are about women, but are these films born for women? In patriarchal and patriarchal civilizations, the image of women has long been present, but most of them are passively determined by men as subjects: they are men's mothers, men's angels, witches or demons in men's nightmares. Most of the time, women only play a functional role. ”
Stills from Lady Bird.
What is "Women for Women"? Dai Jinhua finds it equally difficult to define. Women make up half of humanity, so all the problems of human society are related to women, but through the elevation of human vision, this correlation may erase the problems that women face alone, face and bear for a long time. Like "who can represent women", "women for women" is a great difficulty, which determines that "what is a women's film" is a difficult definition.
At the end of the sharing, Dai Jinhua discussed the paradox in women's films, "In 'Barbie', we see that when Ken discovers that it is patriarchy that rules the real world, he says how can there be such a good thing in the world? Why is Barbie not patriarchal? Then we see that the director has a very conscious, very restrained and decent expression here:In fact, Barbie Land is the reflection of patriarchal women, a copy of women's domination of men and women's reproduction of the patriarchal world, and there is no real liberation here. ”
Seeing the World from 'She' – How Are the Narratives of Women in Cinema Changing? Group photo at the theme salon.
Dai Jinhua said that in the works of some female directors, people often see such a female image: they can be strong and chic and walk freely, they are strong people who do not touch the leaves in the thousands of flowers in their emotions, and Barbie Land, the world created by these movies is also a reflection of women in the patriarchal world, but is this the freedom and liberation that women want to pursue? In response to Li Moxiao's previous remark that "women are building buildings", Dai Jinhua hopes that everyone can think about it:"What is it about women's cinema and the new women's culture, our values, our templates, the edifice we want to build? We still have a lot to think about when it comes to women, women's cinema and women's creation, and we still have a long way to go. ”