Taylor Swift's Era Tour is still in progress, and the schedule is already full until 2024. At the same time, the big movie "Taylor Swift: The Age of Concert Tour" that recorded her concert in Los Angeles premiered in October last year and was released in China on the New Year's Eve. The box office has been booming everywhere it went. The box office performance of the
concert film in the film market has triggered widespread discussion. On the one hand, people marvel at the huge market energy and cultural potential released by the combination of film and the entertainment industry. As an alternative to a live concert, the movie version does not require the audience to bear the high ticket prices and travel costs, which is undoubtedly an attractive option especially for those popular concert tickets that are in short supply. At the same time, the immersive experience and sense of presence provided by the screen are unmatched by terminals such as televisions or mobile devices. But on the other hand, some people point out that concert movies are not movies in essence. This grafting model blurs the boundaries of film art and will also constitute a species invasion of the film market that originally had an independent system.
Obviously, we cannot simply treat concert movies as new things. In the process of communication and integration between movies and other literary and artistic forms, we have witnessed many similar morphological changes. Precisely for this reason, we should not stick to the inherent boundaries of a certain art form and refuse its changes and development. In fact, the real issue worth discussing is that although the concert film is not a new creation in form, it has given birth to a new cultural phenomenon. Concert movies not only allow the audience to feel the shock and passion of the concert in front of the screen, but also transform the cinema into a new venue with both presence and interactivity. How exactly does this film achieve this innovation? This is an interesting topic that we need to explore in depth.
Movies as Live Art
Concert movies provide a new way of viewing for fans who cannot be there in person. This model not only breaks through the geographical and time constraints of traditional concerts, but also brings the audience a completely different but equally fascinating viewing experience. Through the audiovisual language of film, concert films enhance the appeal of musical performances, making them a unique cross-media art form. This fusion is reminiscent of the lively discussions a decade ago about combining live theater with the movie screen.
National Theater Live (NT Live) is a striking example of the intersection of performing arts and film. Since its inception in 2009, NT Live, an initiative of London's Royal National Theatre, has become a pioneer in bringing live performances to cinema audiences around the world, enabling audiences around the world to enjoy them by screening live or recorded theatrical performances in cinemas Experience live performances of top stage productions such as London's West End and Broadway. Excellent works screened by NT Live such as "Hamlet" and "The Odyssey" have attracted enthusiastic support from countless audiences. This approach not only expands the theater's audience, but also provides those who are unable to visit the theater in person due to geographical location or physical limitations with the opportunity to watch high-quality plays. The secret of NT Live’s success is that it perfectly reproduces the shock and reality of live theater performances through satellite transmission, while combining it with the optimization of the big screen viewing experience to ensure that audiences can get the ultimate viewing experience whether in theaters or cinemas enjoy. It is worth mentioning that NT Live is not only a single-camera reproduction of live performances. On the contrary, it has been carefully designed and adjusted at the audio-visual language level to take into account the characteristics and needs of screen viewing, truly realizing the integration of live performances and movies. The perfect blend of technology.
In the rich history of Chinese film, the tradition of opera film is also an important part of the cross-media practice of film and live art. By bringing traditional opera art to the screen, opera films not only provide a new way for the dissemination of opera art, but also inject strong vitality into the evolution and diversification of Chinese film language; reinterpreting traditional opera through film technology provides audiences with It provides a new angle of art appreciation and deepens the audience's understanding and recognition of traditional culture.The recent Cantonese opera film "White Snake", which has been highly praised by the cultural circles, is a successful example of the combination of traditional opera and modern film technology.
Similar to these practices, concert films also adopt the strategy of transforming live concerts into immersive viewing experiences in movie theaters. "Taylor Swift: The Age of Concert Tour" not only gives fans the opportunity to relive the wonderful moments of the concert on the big screen, but also uses a unique film language to make up for the lack of being able to be there in person. In fact, Ang Lee tried to use high frame rate movie images to present the halftime performance of the Thanksgiving game in an immersive way in "Billy Lynn's Halftime Walk", allowing the audience to join the characters in the splendid performance. Feel the dizzying sense of the scene firsthand. It can be seen that the artistic innovation of film language and the application of 3D, high frame rate and other technologies have given the film a unique live art form in terms of audio-visual experience. This kind of liveness not only gives the audience a more realistic and profound movie-watching experience, but also further promotes the cross-border integration and development of movies and other art forms.
Film as Interactive Art
However, in a survey of NT Live, a striking statistic showed that up to 84% of NT Live theater audiences said they would feel comfortable knowing that the performance they were watching was performed in real time that night. Real excitement. This form of online live broadcast obviously plays a key role in creating a sense of liveness. But "Taylor Swift: Era Tour" does not meet this condition, so how do fans experience an atmosphere in a closed cinema that is no less intense than at a concert?
In fact, in the past fifteen years or so, although mainstream cinemas around the world have continued the unique multi-hall cinema architectural structure since the 1970s and 1980s, the basic functions of cinemas and screens have changed. Change. This change is especially reflected in the rapid development of social network media: today, although the interior of the theater still maintains a dark, closed cave-like layout, its path of meaning circulation is no longer limited to the light and shadow of the screen and the audience's thinking. direct interaction between. On the contrary, through the extensive interactive communication of social media, cinema has now been integrated into the huge and intricate information flow of the Internet and has become an indispensable node.
Today’s movies are no longer an isolated and self-sufficient system. Trailers, advance screenings, pre-sales and various related materials have already advanced the energy of the movie text before the movie is released, while online comments, hot searches, derivative topics, etc. The post-information also further continues the popularity and vitality of the text. Even when measuring the final performance of a movie, the importance of pre-sale box office has surpassed the real-time box office, which profoundly reveals that in today's information flow network, the movie itself is composed of elements such as trailers, Internet topics, and audience discussions. An ecological system that is intertwined and affects each other.
This is the key reason why sequels and spin-offs like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars series have become mainstream commercial film genres in the past decade. In these movies, the independent and self-contained movie story is not the main consumption motivation of the audience; on the contrary, the accumulated expectations and feelings of the audience are the important factors that attract them to the cinema. This is particularly evident in reaction videos on some video sites. Taking the "Star Wars 7" reboot as an example, some reaction videos use movie audiences in the dark as subjects, recording the reactions of the audience when classic characters, aircraft, scenes or lines from the Star Wars series appear. They may applaud. , or cheering, when the protagonist lights up the lightsaber for the first time, the audience also lights up their own lightsaber props, just like a cheering scene waving light sticks.
These mainstream commercial movies are actually giant Easter eggs made up of a large number of media fragments. They do not seek to provide complete meaning, but just write a program list for fans to participate in the carnival in the time stream.This functional transformation of movies has provided conditions for more open and interactive screen products, so that the form of concert movies can not only provide music fans with an offline live art as mentioned above, but can also Interacting with other music fans in a public space like a movie theater creates a sense of community and a collective experience. This is the important revelation that
concert movies bring to us: under the joint influence of the mobile Internet and interactive cultural context, the cultural function of movies is undergoing profound changes. If we can keenly capture this change and deeply understand the openness of cinemas and the interactive nature of the screen, then we have reason to believe that in this new technological era, cinemas and movies will release more dazzling cultural potential and provide more dazzling cultural potential. We bring a more colorful art experience. (The author of this article is an associate professor at the School of Film and Television and Media, Shanghai Normal University)
