Author: Li Mengxin
Recently, the preview and finalization of films such as "Spencer" and "Mei Yanfang" have increased the discussion around biopics. Biopics are an important type in film creation, with the performance of real people's life experiences as the core, and the plot generally revolves around one or more fragments of their lives, and on the basis of certain historical materials, a certain amount of imagination, polishing and processing is carried out.
There have always been filmmakers who have favored biopics, and there are many actors who have regarded starring in a successful biopic as the goal of their acting careers. There are even views that the level of biopics can be seen in the different colors of film culture. However, domestic biopics are rare masterpieces, and it is difficult to produce classics, why is this? How much room is there for domestic biopics?
Biopic creation: lively and depressed on the other
Since the birth of the film, film creators have been keen to bring historical celebrities and historical deeds to the screen. Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Wells, considered one of the greatest works in cinematic history, is a masterpiece of early biographical cinema. The emergence of a number of excellent biographical films such as "Lawrence of Arabia", "Gandhi Biography", "Barton Biography", "Mozart Biography", "The King's Speech" and so on has also contributed many classics to film history.
Biopics are frequent guests at major film awards. Looking back at the Oscar Best Picture shortlist over the years, the proportion of biopics is surprisingly high, especially in recent years, especially the 91st Academy Award, only 5 of the 8 films nominated for the First Prize for Best Picture are biographical films, namely "Black Party", "Darling", "Green Book", "Vice President", "Bohemian Rhapsody".
In contrast, the creation of domestic biopics has shown a depression, the box office is not enough to sell, the word of mouth is not satisfactory, and there are very few opportunities to enter the theater.
According to the relevant data of Maoyan Professional Edition, among the top ten box office of biographical films, overseas biopics occupy 3 seats, which are "Wrestling It!" Daddy", "Green Book" and "Hacksaw Ridge", of which "Wrestle! "Daddy" ranked second at the box office with 1.299 billion yuan. The remaining 7 are all biopics from China, with "Captain China" ranking first with a box office of 2.912 billion yuan, and "Revolutionary" at the bottom of the list with only over 100 million yuan.
However, what needs to be distinguished is that in the 7 domestic biopics, most of them have gone beyond the scope of the traditional definition of biopics, such as the highest-grossing "Captain China" strictly speaking, it is a biographical disaster film, "biography" and other genre elements are integrated, the commercial elements in the film are enlarged, and the biographical attributes are weakened. In addition, many films have been adapted on a large scale based on the original characters, events and times, and it may be more accurate to describe it as a second-degree creation, and relatively speaking, there are only a few pure biopics.
Literature, Ethics, System: The Innate Inadequacy of Biopic Creation
"Literature drives the film" is Zhang Yimou's golden sentence explaining how Chinese cinema has gone global in the 1990s, and it is also appropriate to understand the dilemma of domestic biopics. Literature is the foundation of cinema, and this is especially evident in biopics. Many excellent biopics are directly derived from biographical literature, such as "Lincoln" adapted from the biography "Lincoln and the Staff of the Fierce Enemy", and "Steve Jobs" is based on the only biography authorized by Jobs during his lifetime.
However, this phenomenon is extremely rare in our country. The lack of biographical literature has become a reason for the innate lack of biopic creation. Hu Shi once said, "For two thousand and five hundred years, the most lacking and least developed Chinese literature is biographical literature", and the cultural traditions and atmosphere that are very different from foreign countries have made the Chinese people rarely write books and biographies for themselves, which to a certain extent squeezes the space for autobiography to exist, and also makes the source of biographical films less than a large source.
On the other hand, the creation of biopics is also frequently interfered with by the traditional ethics of "keeping secrets for His Holiness". The intervention of the descendants of the master in the creation of the film has made the biopic always shake between the truth and the whitewash, and if you are not careful, you will bear the charges imposed by the younger generations. The movie "Confucius" was questioned by Confucius's descendants because of problems such as lines and plot handling, and even issued a sternly worded written statement requesting changes. Yan Hao, the director of "Rolling Red Dust", also talked about this problem in an interview with the media, "I also want to be self-critical. My biopics were not successful either, because the descendants of those people, the living people, came out and shouted, do you think I can make an objective biopic? ”
Some scholars have concluded that the biggest problem with domestic biopics is that they are bound by the relationships around the parties, which makes it less likely to have imagination in general, and most biopics are difficult to judge by art films or commercial films.
Domestic biopics have their own special soil for survival, compared with foreign countries, the type of biopic creation is relatively single, the repetition rate of the subject matter is high, and the artistry and commerciality are insufficient. But the main theme has never been the original sin, and it is also the use of biopics as a carrier of ideology, and many foreign films have been greatly successful. The crux of the problem is that in terms of ideological expression, some biopics are too superficial, afraid that the audience will not understand and feel it, and will do their best to render and expose it bluntly, but invisibly open the distance between the audience and the film. The proliferation of such biopics has largely caused the audience to have a stereotype of the biopic, and the general routine has been guessed without watching, and the resistance has been generated before watching, thus dragging down the reputation of the biopic.
Good biopic: The Truth of Cedar is dangerous
Although domestic biopics have various shackles that hinder development, for the creation of biopics, the most important thing to break through is the creative dilemma at the level of artistic ontology. The biopic is the special history of people, and it is inseparable from people, and what kind of person to talk about and how to talk about this person has become a problem that runs through the creation of biopics. The former involves the authenticity and multi-faceted nature of the master, while the latter is related to the way of storytelling.
"If biographical films are struggling to chronological order, just the process of a person's cradle period to the final grave, and try to cram a lot of 'big truths', they are doomed to a dangerous path." A director who dares to challenge the tradition of biographical cinema can, if lucky, a historic victory. Oscar winner for best documentary, Alex Gibney, said.
The complete and methodical approach to storytelling followed by traditional biopics represents a tendency in the creation of biopics, but nowadays, more and more biopics have broken the linear narrative mode and explored more experimental ways. American singer Bob Dylan's biopic "I'm Not There" is quite typical, the film uses six people to play Bob Dylan, six people, old people, children, men and even women, each with their own names, more like his split six personalities, the film uses this to try to find the real Bob Dylan from multiple dimensions. For this reason, this biographical film is hailed as "opening up a new field of biopics".
In addition, the people in the biopic are real people who exist in history, and the biopic also needs to find a suitable foothold in the historical and dramatic coordinates. The commercial failure of Xiao Hong's biopic "The Golden Age" is a living example. The film directly allows Zhang Xiuke, Bai Lang and 12 other relatives and friends of Xiao Hong to narrate Xiao Hong's story in front of the camera, interspersed with descriptive images about Xiao Hong's experience. At the same time, the narration of the film is also constantly changing, including the memories of friends, the self-descriptions of Xiao Hong's works, and the words in the memoirs of the parties.
"Just when I was about to enter fictionality, I was interrupted by authenticity, and when I first thought it was real, fiction entered a new cycle. I want the audience to know that we are playing this history. As screenwriter Li Fan said, the deliberately created separation effect does actually make the audience free from the film, and the film has almost become a visual expression of historical materials. Some people were happy to applaud this breakthrough, but most people did not buy it, and in the end, the film only received 51.51 million yuan at the box office. After all, watching coldly without emotion is not the current audience's expectation of the way of watching movies, they prefer to walk into the story and be moved by the story. Therefore, the dramatization based on historical truth and necessary is still the direction that current biopics need to work on.
In short, there is still a long way to go for domestic biopics to mature, and it is necessary to carry out a variety of explorations based on the ontological characteristics of biopics, and minimize external constraints in the allowable elastic space. Only in this way can biopics usher in their own spring. (Li Mengxin)
Source: Volkswagen Daily