Since the new century, China film industry has made great strides in the low tide at the end of the century and the pain of reform. Looking back on the development of China's films, the transformation and innovation of film concepts can be described as drastic. The development history of a film is almost a history of conceptual innovation.
Man is a thinking animal and a thinking reed. Concept is the subjective consciousness of people's dominant behavior, which plays a fundamental role in guiding and regulating the principles, directions and behavior tracks of all people's thoughts and behaviors. The core of thought is the way of thinking. The way of thinking and the way of behavior it determines determine the most basic direction and style of human activities, so whether the concept is correct or not directly affects the result of behavior.
The change of movie concept is always accompanied by movies in the new century. Corresponding to these changes, the aesthetic form, narrative form and aesthetic concept of movies are also undergoing important changes. For example, our film concept used to be propaganda, a tool, a career and a mainstream ideological state machine; Or, like the fourth and fifth generation directors, take movies as the carrier of artistic expression or cultural reflection; In the 1980s, there was a debate about the "entertainment" of taboo movies. Then Shao put forward the "film industry theory", which is high and low, and the criticism is endless. However, in the new century, after the movies that started with blockbusters are fully commercialized, no matter the leaders of film bureaus, first-line filmmakers, screenwriters, directors, theoretical researchers or even ordinary audiences, they all recognize or acquiesce in the commercialization and industrialization characteristics of movies. The development of the times has made the concepts of film industry or cultural industry and film marketing deeply rooted in people's hearts.
If the film production mainly involves the target world, producers (creative planning, financing and investment, collective creation of screenwriters, directors and actors), products (film and television language, formal structure, generation characteristics, art forms, genre characteristics, post-production and technical intervention), audiences and markets (publicity, distribution and marketing, cinema management, etc.). ), almost every link is changing in concept.
This paper mainly combs and summarizes several important aspects (involving film planning, production, creation or production, publicity and marketing, etc.) such as industrial concept, artistic concept and cultural value concept. ).
First, the concept of film industry: production center system and marketing concept.
One of the most important concepts in the film industry is the concept of production and the concept of marketing, which rank upstream and downstream of film production respectively.
1, a producer-centered system and creative production management concept
In recent years, an important concept-"producer-centered system" has been highlighted in the production mechanism of China films, and the importance of production management mechanism has been highlighted.
The concept of "producer-centered system" is one of the core concepts of the film industry. Producer is a key role in the film production system, and his main job is production management. The "production mechanism" we want to emphasize is the production management mode of producers. From the perspective of Hollywood, in an ideal sense, "production management includes not only the management of film production process, but also the development of film scripts, film financing and the producer's control of film creativity and power balance with other major jobs by exercising his" hub "responsibility." [ 1]
The film-making tradition formed by the long-term planned economy system has a narrow concept of film-making. There are two common problems in the current production management mechanism in China:
One is not centered on the producer, but on the director (there are also big-name actors or ready-made scripts). Second, the producer's job responsibilities are narrow, or he does not attach importance to the production link or the producer's work, and does not give corresponding requirements. Investors have not given producers enough power, time and financial resources in the production process. In many movies, the responsibility of "producer" has not even been separated from the category of "producer director" (in layman's terms, it is the financial supervisor and the housekeeper of shooting and post-production). Compared with American film production, a famous American filmmaker once thought-provoking said when talking about the differences between Chinese and American films, "The difference between Hollywood film industry and China film industry is that China only pays attention to the production stage, but the development stage before production is usually very short in China, almost only two years, but the average time in Hollywood is nearly 10 years. Spielberg's Schindler's List comes from.
According to the production mechanism after changing the concept, the work of producer or production management can be said to run through all links of the whole film from planning creativity, screenwriter and director, production, publicity and marketing, and post-product development. Producers themselves know not only investment, but also art and cultural trends. He manages the rational allocation of funds, participates in the work of various departments, arranges publicity and marketing, designs products in advance and then develops them. Because at least from the most superficial point of view, the producer's control, arrangement and distribution of funds determine the specific operation of each link of the film-the length, depth and breadth of manpower, material resources, funds, opportunities and time invested. For example, The Painted Skin 2, which ranks first in the box office of Chinese movies so far, has practiced and perfected a Hollywood-style and extremely effective film production management mechanism. Their emphasis on brand strategy, their spare efforts in early "art design" [3], their marketing strategies, and their later product development and long-term and institutionalized operation are all enlightening.
The success of the series of films named "Painted Skin" is the combination of the producer's brand planning creativity, the director's artistic design, the creativity of words and the director's performance creativity, the technical creativity of picture modeling, the creativity of external publicity, the creativity of marketing operation mechanism and the creativity of later product development, which contributed to the birth of the myth of "Painted Skin".
2. Marketing and all-media marketing concepts
Since the new century, blockbusters have triggered the conceptual revolution of China's films and established the industrial concept of films-one of the important conceptual revolutions is the strengthening of marketing awareness.
The business model of big investment, big production, big distribution and big market established by blockbusters is the business operation model for Hollywood films to gain global market, and it is also the way to its success. Movie blockbusters attract funds extensively, pay attention to the international market and explore overseas stars. They operate as "high-concept movies" with international vision, oriental wonders and business formulas, representing the commercialization and marketization of China's film industry. According to the strategy of "activity economy" and "event marketing", blockbusters invest a lot of money, manpower and material resources to organize premieres and other activities to attract attention, strengthen attention and prolong the duration of events, showing the characteristics of industrial chain management and industrial cluster. In addition to the box office, some films also try to March into the vertical industrial chain (including film copyright, advertising, sponsorship, box office, derivative development and so on. ) and horizontal industrial chain (including books, scripts, movies, television, music, games, performance brokers, shooting bases and other industries).
Thus, China films gradually established the concept of film marketing. Zhang Weiping once said, "Before Hero appeared, our artists, including film investors, didn't see the huge potential of China film market at first, and didn't see that the release of a domestic film would cause such a big response in the eyes of Chinese people, and didn't realize that the film needed to be managed and marketed." [4] Therefore, the successful publicity and marketing planning of Hero has become a landmark event of China films, announcing the arrival of an era of film creative marketing. A series of media propaganda methods created by Zhang Weiping have also been borrowed and copied by various blockbusters.
However, the extensive, large-scale and luxurious marketing method pioneered by Zhang Weiping was quickly impacted by new media marketing. In recent years, Weibo, smart phones and tablet computers have become the key words of the media. With the development of digital technology and mobile communication terminals, the media structure on which film marketing depends is undergoing profound changes, and the changes in media characteristics and communication methods put forward new requirements for the content and channels of film marketing. Because we are in an all-media era, single media marketing is far from enough. Therefore, on the basis of the traditional propaganda mode, we have ushered in the era of new media and multimedia integrated marketing propaganda for film marketing. For example, Let Bullets Fly makes full and effective use of Weibo, mobile phones, outdoor mobile TV and other new media marketing. New media, especially Weibo marketing, contributed to the huge box office success of the low-budget film "33 Days of Lovelorn".
The change of the concept of production and marketing has promoted the film to return to the industrial essence and deepened the market economy, which is of obvious significance.
Second, artistic concept: from the creation of artistic films to the production of genre films.
Since the new period, the flow of art films is obviously different from that of main melody films and commercial films: "from the awakening of several generations of directors, to the artistic innovation trend with the fourth generation of directors as the main body, to the climax of film art in the new period with the fifth generation of directors as the main body and the shrinkage and differentiation after the climax, as well as the integration of art and commerce directed by the" last five generations ",to the marginal persistence of the sixth generation of directors, and the sixth generation of directors and [5] after the new century.
There is no doubt that movies have the characteristics of industrial production and commercial nature, which contradicts the pursuit of art movies to some extent. "The commercial and cultural reality of film production greatly offsets the desire to be a personalized creator, and has its own theme style and personalized worldview, which is offset by the economic reality of film products around the world and the tastes of most movie audiences." [6]
For example, some "directors of the sixth generation" embody the concept of art films with the characteristics of "minority", "non-mainstream" and "independent production". Directors generally take the road of art films, and most of them hate Hollywood. Their aesthetic tastes are aristocratic, European modernism and art films.
Generally speaking, the contradiction between the concept of art film practiced by the fourth, fifth and sixth generation directors and the market is obvious. Therefore, they have been in sharp contradictions and difficulties with the market and audience for a long time, and they are all facing painful transformation.
But since the new century, this situation has changed. New and old directors pay more attention to the entry of movies into the market: the pursuit of drama intensity, the borrowing of genre elements and the participation of stars. The transformation of Jiang Wen constitutes an important symbol. From the film The Sun Also Rises, which is very narcissistic and artistic, to the film Let the Bullets Fly, which has created a box office miracle in China, it represents the popularization trend of Jiang Wen. Although "Let the Bullets Fly" still retains his personal thoughts on history and reality. However, Let the Bullets Fly keeps a certain balance in the three dimensions of commercialization, artistry and mainstream, and Jiang Wen's "commercialization of art films" is a success.
Since 1990s, the genre of China movies has gradually become the knowledge of filmmakers. The concept of genre films began to be established. Genre movies have corresponding genre rules, which require reflecting the deepest national collective unconscious, core and universal mainstream values. To a certain extent, we should acknowledge and appeal to the genre road of China's films, that is, acknowledge their commerciality and their pursuit for the largest audience and box office.
Moreover, the trend of typology has not only become the knowledge of the industry, but also become a prominent critical school. The study of film genre is close to the characteristics of film as a popular culture and cultural industry, and involves the whole process and all-round problems of China films from creation, narration, form to production, announcement and distribution, which is a quite effective perspective.
Although the genre of China's films is not completely complete (compared with Hollywood), it goes without saying that with the intensification of globalization, the further deepening of market economy and the further deepening of film system reform, the production environment of China's films will be closer and closer to Hollywood, and genre films closer to Hollywood will emerge continuously.
Under the concept of genre film and industrial system, the creative ideas of screenwriters and directors have changed obviously.
In the traditional concept of film creation, screenwriter is the desk visual literature writing of "the foundation of a drama". Director is a director-centered and author-oriented film creation. However, in an era of marketization and creative economy, the economic factors and technical requirements of film production are getting higher and higher, and the production factors and teamwork are getting stronger and stronger. Accordingly, the director's personality factors and the "author's film" style are suppressed, which makes the director's main position obviously reduced. In the final analysis, the role of individual directors must be integrated into the organic link of the whole film production in order to give full play. This is just like the director's "industrial existence" revealed by Zhao [7]. In his view, as a director, he should have a fairly comprehensive quality, and even understand the market, investment, business and technology.
Wu Ershan, the director of The Painted Skin 2, has a clear understanding of the director's functions and changes in the industrial system. He sincerely obeyed the system and industrial production, and reached an appropriate tension with it. As we consciously realize, "We watch American large-scale commercial movies, such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Avatar, and they all have a set of standardized working procedures. On the contrary, China's film industry is quite special. Many directors don't want to follow the workflow, and no one knows the direction of work except himself. I don't believe in personal ability. What I believe is whether the team and the way to organize the team are scientific, and whether individual energy can be condensed into collective wisdom. " [8]
Yang, the artistic director and marketing director of The Painted Skin 2, actually revealed some subtle changes in the work and functions of screenwriters and directors to some extent. He believes that "the art design of today's commercial films is a huge and complex system engineering, and the idea of pinning the early art design on a good screenwriter is very outdated." The pre-film art design includes theme design, art planning, screenwriter planning, screenwriter implementation, art concept design, art visual design (including modeling, clothing, makeup, scene props), lens imaging design (including lighting effect design), action system design, CG technology planning, performance system design, etc. " In other words, this artistic design is not limited to the graphic design of the script, but a three-dimensional and visual design. He also specifically analyzed the work to be done in the art planning part: 1. Design of cultural concept system; 2. Role design; 3. Design of ideological concept system; 4. Design of aesthetic presentation system; And five. Interactive design. There are some jobs here that naturally don't have to be done by the producer alone. But Yang's summary of these works shows how deeply they (producers in a broad sense) are fully involved in the work of screenwriter and director. The work of "art design" emphasized by Yang here is actually the work of "script development" that Hollywood attaches great importance to, that is, "before the pre-production, 80% of the work is related to script production, and 20% is related to casting and visual concept design." Hollywood has a huge script development industry chain, including screenwriters, brokers, managers and big factories. [9]
Third, cultural values: from elite culture to popular cultural concepts
Since the 1980s, it is the artistic concept of movies that has dominated. Correspondingly, the film director's subjective consciousness is also full of the spirit of elite intellectuals.
For example, the fifth generation directors are typical idealists and elite intellectuals. The cultural spirit in the new period and the May 4th spirit they represent are historically inherited. Chen Kaige, for example, has always regarded himself as a "cultural worker" rather than a film director in a simple sense. He said: "I am not so much a film director as a cultural worker. What I do is to describe something I think is very important with my little strength (it is too big for me to use such a word). What I'm talking about is my concern about the current cultural situation in China, but I'm just calling for help, which may not necessarily cause a large-scale response. But it is my conscious choice to express my thinking about culture with movies. " [10] He also declared, "When the era of national rejuvenation begins, we hope that everything will start from scratch, and we hope that ideas that can inspire the whole national spirit will grow from the injured places." It is not difficult to find Chen Kaige's sense of historical mission, spirit of the times and enlightenment ideal.
The representative works of the fifth generation directors, Yellow Land, king of the children and horse thief, allegorically convey the lofty ideals of the whole social and cultural circles at that time to reflect on the disadvantages of the nation, criticize the national character, pursue "modernity" and March towards blue civilization.
However, they will soon face the fact of mass cultural transformation. The transformation of popular culture in the times has led to the disappearance of the boundary between elegant art and elite art, because in this era, the public seems to have the right to choose and judge. In order to survive, elite culture has to cover up its vanguard, smooth its edges and corners, and fill the boundaries and gaps between elegance, vulgarity, pioneer and the public. Elegant art and elite art have lost their standards more and more.
The so-called mass culture refers to the cultural products produced in modern urbanized industrial society, mainly aimed at modern urban citizens, and spread through contemporary film and television networks, new media, newspapers and books and other mass media. And do not pursue depth, easy to copy, and produce according to market rules. Mass culture is a special product of urban industrial society or mass consumption society, and its distinctive feature is that it is mainly made for mass consumption. Fashion is relative to elitism and minority. It should be said that mass culture is related to the vital interests of the public, which is created by the public and consumed by the public. In fact, mass culture is a modern industrial culture spread through mass media.
The film itself is a new type of popular art oriented by popular culture, but the concept of popular culture in this film has not always been like this, and it has also experienced complex and difficult ups and downs. Today, after a large-scale market operation, the wave of "entertainment" in the field of film and television has recognized the commercial and industrial characteristics of films and the concept of popular culture corresponding to the industrial concept.
There is no doubt that there are problems in mass culture itself (such as excessive entertainment of "entertainment to death"), which need the supervision, standardization and guidance of mainstream culture and intellectual elite culture. However, in the era of globalization, all-media and cultural upheaval, the rise of popular culture needs more attention and respect from government departments and intellectuals in colleges and universities in order to achieve win-win and healthy development.
With the establishment of the concept of popular culture, China's films have experienced a process of "popularization" from the initial art films and theme films to popular culture. However, commercial films with popular culture have merged some characteristics of main melody films and art films, and have also undergone obvious changes, which can be summarized as the "mainstreaming" of popular culture to a certain extent. From the perspective of mass culture, we might as well call these three movie trends "mass culture with China characteristics". In the contemporary context, popular culture has eliminated the difference between elegant culture and popular culture, elegance and popularity are no longer incompatible, elite culture has stepped off the altar, popular culture has stepped onto the mainstream, and * * * has blended with each other in the all-round infiltration of economy, politics, science and technology, commerce and culture.
Facing up to the rise of popular culture is an inevitable stage of China's cultural development and the inevitable result of China's transition from planned economy to market economy. Today, it has gradually developed into a popular culture with the uniqueness of China, including the uniqueness of local cultural resources, the restriction of mainstream ideology and the uniqueness of the nature of a socialist country. It combines the western popular culture theory with the reality of China's current cultural development.
As mentioned earlier, the essence of China's film "popular culture view" is "popular culture view with China characteristics", which is the result of the birth and integration of multi-cultures, including the conflict and reconciliation between dominant culture and commercial culture, sub-cultures such as civic culture and youth culture, and the influence and changes of traditional culture, Hongkong culture and foreign culture. The collage, integration and even dislocation of these cultural resources have created the diversified cultural pattern of China's current films.
Fourthly, China movies: cultural innovation under the background of concept change.
Thought guides action, and thought transforms reality. In an era of global commodity economy and concept change, China films have no choice but to dance with Hollywood, undertake the dual tasks of cultural heritage and industrial economy, and actively implement industrial upgrading and cultural innovation.
The cultural innovation of China films is mainly carried out in the following aspects.
1, modernization of traditional culture
China's blockbuster shows a new possibility and direction. And "Ancient Costume" makes this kind of blockbusters have more cultural symbolic significance, because "Ancient Costume" itself has poetic and cultural symbolic significance and surreal aesthetic significance because of its alienation from reality and the present.
To some extent, China's film blockbusters have visually transformed China culture in a unique visual way. This change can be seen from two aspects: the symbolic image expression of traditional poetics and the image representation of freehand brushwork and vividness
The development of film blockbusters has formed its own "visual standard" aesthetics. It is an inevitable choice in this era of popular culture in which visual culture is transformed and vision is king. Based on the popular culture of movies, traditional culture and China's artistic spirit can naturally become the organic source of today's popular culture. Costume blockbusters can be called the most important aesthetic representation of the times. This trend of visual turn coincides with the emphasis on images in traditional aesthetics to some extent. Of course, the emphasis on visual wonders will greatly reduce the elements of "image", such as meaning and emotion. However, from the perspective of development, it may be said that the picture modeling, scenes, colors and so on in the costume blockbusters are all reflected in the image of the film (although the "meaning" is not satisfactory). However, the open sublime, panoramic lens and surreal images shown in some films are also the cycle of freehand brushwork spirit in traditional aesthetics and a traditional modern image transformation.
Generally speaking, the film blockbusters represented by Hero attach great importance to the prominence of "scene" and intentionally emphasize color tone, picture and visual style. These scenes have the flavor of pan-China culture, and they are a kind of "form" or "symbol" with certain significance.
Corresponding to the scene, the elements of the scene, such as the beauty of clothes, are also obvious as visual elements in ancient costume blockbusters. In film and television dramas, costumes, props and fine arts generally only play an auxiliary role, but in ancient Chinese blockbusters, their significance is extraordinary. It can be said that it has independent aesthetic value.
Of course, from the perspective of mass culture and consumer culture, this complicated and colorful beauty, which is not dominant in China's classical aesthetic form, has become a new aesthetics with both gaudiness and luxury under the background of mass culture. This new aesthetics shows that in this kind of films with visual turn, the pursuit of visual pleasure of color and picture modeling is brought to the extreme.
In blockbusters, due to strengthening the ornamental value, fully pursuing the visual modeling effect of the image, the moving landscape of the film and the surreal realm of the picture, the film narrative has undergone important variations. Literary elements, dramatic elements and ideological connotations are obviously weakened.
Of course, the display of wonders, poetry and overall artistic conception also participate in the process of narrative expression to a low extent (for example, color and tone become important narrative means in Hero) and become a "meaningful form". In costume blockbusters, the traditional time narrative aesthetics has changed into space modeling aesthetics, and the linear logic of narrative time is often cut off by space "landscape" (including fighting scenes as an important element of martial arts films), and the meaning and depth are also replaced by the sense of form of representation.
2. Modernization of traditional marginal culture
After the rise of blockbusters in the early years of the century gradually declined, China's magic movies showed a warming trend. Legend of the White Snake, Painted Wall and Ghost Story are all magical love themes based on China's classical folklore. Through spectacular architectural scenes, stylized costume props and other objects, these films create an oriental magic type film different from Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, calling out the original emotional maintenance of human nature, love, man and nature from magic, and completing the public's aesthetic imagination of ghosts. "The Painted Skin II" promoted this genre to a higher level, thus laying a solid foundation for the genre quality of Chinese magic movies. At the same time, it is a magical film type with certain philosophical thinking, which pays attention to or involves some transcendental deep-seated problems. This type of film should have a good market among young audiences at present, and the box office results also prove this.
An important cultural significance of the painted skin 1 2 lies in the fox demon, a popular culture that has been in the marginal and non-mainstream position in China's traditional culture. In the process of this popular culture, many types of western magic movies have been integrated. The design of many scenes, picture composition and color rendering in the film are not purely China. There are many magical colors of the western regions and things from the west. Therefore, the film has the characteristics of cultural integration. In fact, apart from the fact that the prototype of the role of "Fox Demon" comes from the folk culture of demon fairy in China, the relationship between the film and the original "Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio" is not particularly close. This magical film, which reflects many contemporary topics (also a kind of "grounding gas"), combines multicultural symbols such as Mongolia, Tibet and Japan and presents it with exquisite and fantastic visual effects. It not only has the ambition to create Hollywood-style blockbuster audio-visual wonders, but also has a groundbreaking design concept similar to independent films.
2. Mainstreaming youth marginal culture.
Nowadays, the younger generation after 80s and 90s is gradually showing the importance of culture, not to mention the importance of winter and summer vacations to China movies. Only by attracting teenagers' attention and occupying the youth box office market can we be in an invincible position in the market. The cultural characteristics of young people are relatively thorough living, secularization, keen on games, "salty and entertaining", not strong in political consciousness, but not weak in commercial market consciousness, strong in civilian consciousness and civic consciousness, lacking in social experience and direct experience but rich in imagination, advocating sensibility and not deliberately pursuing depth and significance.
From the intergenerational perspective of film directors, among the sixth generation and younger film directors, some original petty bourgeoisie and minority directors have finally "grown up" and started to face up to the society, box office and audience reputation, and their films are also trying to "mainstream". This is the main force of mainstream movies in China. The integration of youth cultural factors and the art film tradition of the sixth generation directors into the mainstream film culture indicates the future development of mainstream films to a great extent.
For example, "33 Days of Lovelorn" has achieved great success through the "grounded thought inquiry" of young people, clever market grasp and marketing strategy, in which there is no far-fetched mainstream ideological dependence and no purposeful mainstream cultural guidance, and it has been recognized by the mainstream market and the vast number of young audiences for its popular and even "television" aesthetic characteristics and youth cultural endorsement methods. This is a myth that a youth culture on the edge of the original place (even a "chicken culture" based on "chicken movies") successfully entered the field of mass culture, creating a miracle of mass box office, and it is also an intriguing tributary and partial victory case. Undoubtedly, as a popular culture, the potential of youth culture is amazing.
4. Localization and integration of western culture.
The western culture carried by Hollywood films has won the global market in an all-round way and become an example for local film learning. After experiencing introversion, China's films began a comprehensive outward transformation, focusing on the mainstream western and overseas markets, and began to change the strategy of showing ugly "pseudo-folk customs" to promoting universal values (such as peace, the world and benevolence), from catering to the western "China imagination" to presenting "China imagination" and presenting "Chinese dream" and China culture.
The success of China blockbusters, which started with Hero, is undoubtedly influenced by Hollywood's "high concept" film production mode. The business model of big investment, big production, big distribution and big market is exactly the business operation model of Hollywood movies gaining global market continuously. At the beginning of the rally, street fighting, hand-to-hand combat sign language, helmets and American armaments made people feel like watching an American blockbuster with the theme of World War II. "Red Cliff" was dubbed by some people as China's version of "Troy", which "accelerated the Hollywood process of China commercial blockbusters"; The Promise was ridiculed as "chaos" and "four unlike", and there were traces of foreign influence everywhere. ...
In terms of small and medium-sized films, the traces of localization are also extremely obvious. Since the new century, the "black comedy" with little people as the center, criminal behavior as the clue, social phenomenon as the background, recurring narrative structure and absurdity is becoming a popular form, and the audience has formed expectations for a film type. "[1 1] In addition, the characteristics of genre mixing are in line with the trend of world film development after classical Hollywood-genre boundaries are constantly blurred, and anti-genre films and" super-genre films "are constantly appearing.
Of course, the survival of mainstream movies is no longer a stage of simple confrontation between East and West, but a stage of mutual integration, mutual tolerance and mutual benefit.