Vortrag: The Dreamworlds of Barbie and Priscilla

VORTRAG mit Suzanne Ferriss Prof. em. Kulturwissenschaftlerin, Nova Southeastern University, USA

Vortrag und Diskussion in englischer Sprache

Two of the most recent films by women directors—Barbie and Priscilla—feature doll-like women who inhabit elaborately constructed dream homes. Join film scholar Suzanne Ferriss for an immersive exploration of how directors Greta Gerwig and Sofia Coppola use costume and production design to create the stylized worlds of their popular films.

Two of the highest profile films by women directors released in 2023 center on questions of artifice and authenticity. As disparate as they may be in tone and subject, both Barbie and Priscilla feature female protagonists from the 1960s who grapple with gender conventions that endure into the present. Priscilla Presley, as much as Barbie, is treated as a malleable object, transformed through visual markers of femininity from hair to clothing to shoes. Their cinematic worlds are equally stylized, with Graceland as much a dreamworld as Barbie’s. Gerwig and Coppola depict their heroines as experiencing genuine emotion as they seek freedom from patriarchal constraints. The contrast is deliberate and meaningful: to borrow Gerwig’s words, the films are “authentically artificial,” an encapsulation, in a sense, of the experience of women in contemporary culture.

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