Jan Speckenbach
On the Remake. A cinematic phenomenon.
Part One. Money, Copy, Quotation, Motive, Genre.
Money is of little help
The answer one usually gets wondering about the existence
of the remake is a reference to the economic structure of
cinema. The producers - so the argument - take a story that
has had success and sell it again in a modernised version.
That sounds easy. The remake would be the logical result of
movie business, which is, as we know, all about making
money. But does that argument really explain anything?
Does it give information about the fact that sometimes the
remake is emphasised as such in order to promote a new
film as "the remake of" (let's take for instance Cape Fear by
Martin Scorsese) while sometimes everything is done to hide
or deny such a connection (as Anthony Manghella felt obliged
to put right that The Talented Mr. Ripley was a new adaptation of the novel by Patricia Highsmith, not a new making of
Plein Soleil by René Clément)? The argument obviously does
not do so or at least demands specifications (of the kind: an
adaptation of a novel sells better than a remake, a remake
done by a famous author sells better than one done by a
nobody etc.).
Actually, I believe that the money argument is of very little
help for an analysis of the remake. The phenomenon is more
complex. There seem to be millions of motivations to remake
a film, maybe as many as there are remakes (maybe even
more remembering that a film is not only done by its
producer. Director, actors and technicians will have their
reasons, too). Considering that multiplicity, the question for
the remake becomes equal with the question for film in
general. "What is cinema?" we can ask and it gets obvious
that "money", i.e. economy, would not be a satisfactory or
exhausting key for our matter.
However divergent the motivations for a remake might be
and however different the remakes on their own are there is
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one thing they all have in common: they are based on an
earlier film. Even if this observation seems evident constituting the very meaning of the word "remake" it is important
to insist on it. The facet that the remake does not represent
something entirely new makes of it a topos where originality
as principle of art does not have the first word: The remake
is always repetition. On the other hand it is produced because it differs from its reference point. In fact, the whole
idea of the remake is based upon the difference to its source.
We therefore find a creation that need not be inventive but
must be dissimilar. The remake has a rather paradoxical
disposition.
The remake need not be inventive but must be dissimilar
The moral indignation we often encounter in the reactions
towards a new remake has its roots in the violation of the
originality-principle. There is something of a sacrilege in the
act of remaking. Alain Masson for instance criticises Gus Van
Sant's Psycho. He has a closer look on the assertion of the
shot-for-shot-remake and finds a number of differences
between the two Psychos. His analysis now tries to show that
all of those distinctions are lowering in rank the film and he
comes to the accusation of the remake as a plagiarism. One
sometimes might agree with his arguments, e.g. concerning
the decision to let Norman Bates masturbate during the
shower sequence, which deprives the following murder of
being an act of substitute. Sometimes one does not necessarily have to accept Masson's grievance, as for the short cut
to some cows on a meadow during the death of the detective
in the stairwell (which I personally find very imaginative).[1]
But it is not the point whether Masson is right or wrong.
Criticising any difference to the film of Alfred Hitchcock,
Masson implicitly - and quite comically - tries to commit the
remake to its source much more consequently than Van Sant
ever could have done it. He lays claim to a Psycho that in the
end would be nothing but the Hitchcock film itself.
Masson's account is illustrating a popular position. A film,
being the result of a historical moment as well as the expression of a unique imagination (we do not need the auteur
theory to speak of the latter) should remain its own memorial. It should stay untouched. The more the reputation of
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the remade film is widespread, the more its protection seems
to be demanded like a moral affair. But not only spectators
feel a need for regulation. When at the end of the credits we
read: "This film is protected under the laws of ..." we find the
effectuation of that wish from the side of the makers.
Nobody may copy the film, steel from it, or use it for his own
benefit. The simple signature coming out of the visual arts
tradition, as we find the name of Georges Méliès in the
scenery of his films or the initials of D.W. Griffith in the
framework of the title links, quickly turnes out to be no
sufficient defence for clandestine misuse. To protect the
rights of the makers, i.e. the profit of the sellers, a rule for
the flow of products has to be installed.
The logic of invariable variability
We are used to see the beginning of History in the invention
of writing by the early Greek - at least for the occidental
culture. Any occurrence before that date is esteemed to be
prehistoric. Even if Plato's complaining about writing is
known (he sees in it the death of natural memory, Phaidros
274c-278b) the self-awareness of the occidental educated
man is connected to the capacity of writing. Writing is so
important, because it allows the fixation of an art of time. It
is the medium of literature that particularly with regard to its
origins has to be seen as a performing art: a choir or a
singer recites literature, its connection with music is obvious.
Writing is the somehow paradoxical possibility of an immobile
support for an amorphous, mutable, not precise content.
Even if writing has been developed out of a plastic art
expression (drawing), the invention of a reduced number of
letters signifies the decisive shift. Later, writing can get an
aspect of visual art again, be it the praxis of calligraphy or
the intentional composing of a text, e.g. a modern poem's
appearance. But first of all, writing differs fundamentally
from the media of plastic arts, because as a reduced system
of symbols (letters and marks) it will not become identical
with the content it presents. Of course, looking at musical
notation (that came out of writing) this observation has to be
put in perspective. The development of occidental music
cannot be separated from the development of the notation
system. But it is difficult to answer the question whether the
music demands the amelioration of the storing medium or
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whether the medium ameliorates the music - or whether
there is no amelioration at all, but only mutation. (The very
question does interest us with regard to the change of the
storing medium for cinema.) However, modern music has
brought the notation system in the 20th century to a break.
The electronic possibilities of sound creation at last can
hardly be written down.
Though writing is the first medium for literature and maybe
even for the arts of time in general, it quickly becomes a
prerequisite. The performing arts will be more and more
based on a written source. The importance of writing turns
out not only to consist in the fixation, but the foundation of
content. The arts of time can be described as the performance of a (written) source, as its revision, reinterpretation,
redirection, and re-production. In contrast to the plastic arts,
i.e. the arts of space, the performing arts do not deny the
distinction of their content and their form. They are based on
it. The performing arts therefore could be called reproducing
arts as well.
The medium as spatialisation
Performance and reproduction are deeply connected. Only in
the first one the aspect of change is more important, while
the latter - although having the same relation towards a
source - apparently has the opposite function, the fixation of
change. Reproduction has become a synonym for multiplication. What used to be unique becomes multiplied, what
used to be transient becomes repeatable. The reproduction
of the arts of time signifies a double shift: the reproduction
of the reproducing arts. Their fixation brings them closer to
the arts of space. We can talk of a spatialisation (Verräumlichung) of the arts of time. Its history begins with the
mechanisation of reproduction (again a double shift), i.e.
book printing. The necessity of copyright from this point on
underlines the fact that manual copying (having been practised before) can be seen as the prehistory of reproduction
and is therefore neglected in the discussion of reproducibility.
In fact, some twenty years after the invention of the book
press with identical and movable letters in the fifties of the
15th century, the first regulations are installed. The new
circumstance of fast and widespread book production and
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selling leads to regulations, which at that early state are
nothing but censorship in order to prevent the uncontrolled
spreading out of new and probably unwelcome ideas. However, already one hundred years later the problem of piracy
(verbatim copying) is concrete. The printers and booksellers
themselves now try to fix the rules. Though, until the 18th
century the misuse cannot be controlled. The English right
with the Statute of Anne in 1710 marks the beginning of
modern copyright. Nevertheless it still takes time to internationalise the law of the different countries. The Berne
Union in 1886 is an important date in that struggle, the
Universal Copyright Convention in 1955 another. Both conventions have been reviewed in 1971 in Paris. Following the
development of the media, however, changes are going on
until today.[2]
The frequent reviews of the copyright in the different
countries since the mid-fifties show the outcome of the new
media. Television first, video, games, and Internet later are
changing the mode of reception and professional usage. Not
haphazardly the United States join the International Union
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (with 77
country-members) in 1988 when the importance of the new
audio-visual market is predictable. All these dates signify
that the copyright in its modern form is a result of the mass
culture. On the one hand, the original is highly overestimated
(not so much for its originality, but for its affordability); on
the other hand the quote as the only way of free usage of
pre-existing ideas gets new value. Culture becomes a
deliverer of useful quotable pieces and can hardly be seen
any more as a tradition in which by definition ideas are
continued.
The inner distance of the quote
The post-modern discussion of the quotation as paradigm of
intertextuality is precisely reflecting that context. The quote
is an identical representation of a segment of a literary,
artistic or somehow different source. The citation historically
is used to prove the striking error of a reference point or more often - to guaranty the positioning of the own publication in a certain succession and to underpin an argument
with help of the authority of a commonly respected instance
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- be it the bible, a philosopher or another apodictic source.
Its exorbitant use, however, brings about the loss of the
quote's authority. The cited past masters formerly have been
the adjustment of the collective erudition. The quote now
gets the opposite motive: it can veil a source. It illustrates
the absence of a collective knowledge and expresses the
non-sense of the referring habit as a strictly formal matter.
This sense of absurdity in the quotation is already present in
the dadaist usage of the found object - if we agree to consider the latter as a citation of a segment of life. You will, of
course, find it again in pop art and literature of postmodernism.
The quotation within an artwork, nevertheless, is a juridical
most complicated field. It has to be shown that the inner
distance of the new work to the older one is sufficiently
important. In a way, this jurisprudence is unreasonable,
claiming the quote to do something that is against its own
definition: deforming the reference point. The jurisprudence
apparently has not complied with the changes that particularly in the arts have taken place during the 20th century.
The intertextual discussion has not yet reached the legislation (being an intertextual structure itself ...). On the other
hand, the jurisprudence somehow does take the quotation's
new role into account, when it is asking a quotation not to be
faithful. The irony as dominating figure of speech of the postmodern expression has found its way into law. Considering
the copyright as the direct consequence of the mechanical
reproducibility including its acceleration during the last
century, artistic irony therefore can be seen as the indirect
consequence of technical development.
The appropriation gesture
The problem with quoting in the arts is the missing of quotation marks. Their task is not so much to indicate the presence of a citation, but to stress the frontier between quote
and text, to isolate the quotation as a fragment within an
entity. The absence of inverted commas makes of the quote
an allusion. The allusion can grow. It can expand in all
directions until it reaches the size of the surrounding medium
itself and looses the fragmentary character. The quote
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becomes the repetition of the original it is referring to. We
are speaking of appropriation in that case.
In the age of reproducibility, the act of appropriating seems
absurd, since making a copy is not even a financial problem
any more. But the interest of the procedure is not there.
Claiming an object to be art, as in the readymade-method,
being - after Boris Groys - appropriation of first order, or
claiming an art object by copying it to be a new artwork, as
an act of second appropriation, is not manipulating the
material, but the context. Redoing an art object in a different
historical situation means to un-historise it.[3] The anachronistic performance of a manual copying process is replacing
the object by the act. The new artwork only signalises: "Look
at me. I am not what I am. I am the repetition gesture
having become form." The object becomes the trace of
something that has happened. Rosalind Krauss has shown
how Duchamp's concept of the readymade is based on the
photographic act. The readymade is a kind of imprint of the
reality.[4] One can easily turn around that conclusion and
say that the photography is a readymade, considering the
photo as found and a testimony of something more global
than itself.
If we accept the idea that the gesture of the first appropriation is a photographic one, the second appropriation (the
copying of an art object) becomes comparable with the
printing of a photography, i.e. the reproduction of a reproducing art. Modern society with its omnipresent reproductions in media, on walls etc. is re-performing again and again
the same play. It is not surprising therefore that the copy is
rehabilitated in that context. Since the arts of time deny the
difference between performing and creating, the arts of
space have to answer that way.
The copy plays an important role in the history of art, because it questions the notion of the original. In some cases,
the copy gets most interesting, namely if it is not clear,
whether it is one or not. Leonardo da Vinci is giving an
example. His painting of The Virgin of the Rocks exists in two
versions. One is exposed in the Louvre in Paris, the other in
the National Gallery of London. The dispute about the
original is entirely based on the question, which one of the
two paintings has been painted first. But could we not
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consider the first one as a sketch only and the copy therefore
as the original? And, actually, what does the knowledge
about original or copy change for our appreciation of the
painting? However, da Vinci's painting is teaching us one
thing about modern appropriation: it is entirely based on the
knowledge of the new artwork's copy character. If it were
bought as the original, it would loose all of its own artistic
meaning. Confusion about copy and original therefore never
is taking place. From that point of view, appropriation does
not un-historise the artwork. To understand anything of the
new artwork, we have to know the older. Appropriation is a
deeply historical method.
anachronistic repetition
In The Repetition, Søren Kierkegaard suggests that repeating
is to modern men what remembering was to the ancient.[5]
Well, appropriation seems to do exactly what he describes. It
is not an act of continuity like that of a traditional culture,
but rather an act of rupture by insisting on the distance between the original and its appropriation. The mise-en-abîme
of a particular style or motive refers to the past that is not
remembered, but repeated. Now, is the remake an appropriation? Even if the parallels are convincing, I feel that I
have to answer no. At least for the majority of remakes. If
we ask the question reversibly - is the appropriation a remake? - the answer would be much easier. In fact, the artist
is remaking an earlier artwork. But the cinematic remake
seems to have a much larger meaning. If it is true that the
appropriation is a self-reflective gesture and a historical
method, I would deny that for the remake in general. There
are examples in history where the opposite has been practised: Having remade Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (1939),
the RKO Radio Pictures Incorporated bought all copies they
could get of the French film and destroyed them in order to
bring out unperturbedly Anatole Litvak's The Long Night
(1947).[6]
The remake as anachronism: Psycho
It is the merit of Gus Van Sant to have done - to my knowledge - the only example of a remake that comes out of the
logic of the appropriation gesture. With Psycho he has done
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the "purest" remake ever and therefore the most fascinating
work. As a film on its own it does not convince, of course,
because the second appropriation object does not want to be
considered as an object, but an act. Watching Van Sant's
Psycho is like being in the wrong movie. The shots, the
montage, the music, the acting, the light, everything seems
wrong apart of, perhaps, the colours (being the invention of
the remake). We are watching a new film that appears at the
same time to be an old one. The impression to be the victim
of a deceit might be at the origin of the strong indignation
the film has caused. Reactions as Chris Bolton's remark that
"the 'recreation' of Psycho is the worst, most offensive idea
in the history of film", and the succeeding call for a boycott
of the remake ending with: "Tell the studio whore mongers
that you despise this cinematic grave-robbing by putting
your money where it belongs: in the original classic" show
that Van Sant apparently has broken a taboo.
Reshooting Hitchcock's film almost faithfully is bringing up
two consequences. The first one is the reflex of verifying Van
Sant's promise. The examination shows that he was not entirely faithful. He has taken the freedom to leave the model
concerning the colour, the casting, the camera movements in
the beginning and the end, some cuts, gestures, glances etc.
Doing so, Van Sant is practising a sacrilege, because "The
Master's" Psycho had already reached "visual perfection" (to
take once more two of Bolton's terms). Anything else therefore must be worse than the original and appears as a presumptuous correction of the original. The unfaithfulness of
Van Sant's remake will interest me later for once more. It
shows that his attempt to become a cinematic Pierre Menard
failed and had to fail.
Secondly, remaking Psycho shot for shot in the nineties has a
revealing effect on the film. All of a sudden, the lapse of time
between the film and us becomes perceptible. It gets evident
that Psycho is a result of its time and that its form - seen
with eyes of today - is awfully funny: the close up on Marion
Crane in her car, driving under the rain with the famous
music off; the insisting panning on the envelope with the
money; the static mise-en-scene; all that can be found in
bad television-series of today. In other words: the anachronism of Van Sant's Psycho does not only have an effect
on the remake, but, what is more, on the original. Hitch-
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cock's film is dateable. It is not visual perfection in a timeless
sense. Psycho belongs to the past.
The remake as the first cinematic invention
The remake seems to be the post-modern artwork par excellence. It refers to a previous source, it refuses originality,
and its interest lies in the intertextual discussion. It is not
surprising therefore that the post-modern theories lend
themselves to an analysis of the remake. Only, the remake
exists long before postmodernism appears. The entire work
of Auguste and Louis Lumière is already founded on the
remake. They send cameramen all over the world to film
again and again the same motives, i.e. to remake all over
again the same films: Trains arriving in Japan, people walking along roads in Russia, filmed in a diagonal angle, and so
forth, and so forth. The remake is the first cinematic invention after the technical realisation of the moving image.
At that state, when film and take still form a unity, the
remake seems the derivation from a habit of the pictorial
series, i.e. from a phenomenon of the arts of space. In painting, the repetition of a motive is widespread custom, be it in
the tradition of the icon (doing again and again a picture like
a meditative practise) or in the naturalistic correspondence
of painters specialised on landscape, portrait, interior, still
life, and so on. Photography continues that usage though
adding a new overtone to the serial practise: already Nadar's
portraits of celebrities, more explicitly August Sander's
portraits of representatives of the social classes show that
repetition of a similar motive creates a common base in
order to compare different elements. The serial photography
of Bernhard and Hilla Becher is the consequence of that
ambition. They look for motives that resemble but are not
the same. Their search is unlimited, the more found objects
they show, the more each of them looses its exemplary
aspect. Their pictures of hundreds of water towers equal the
cleaning out of the individual motive. The world is registered,
it is archived - another term of post-modern mythology. The
archive as an aesthetic idea stands for the general concept of
a structure. Its content does not matter.
The new overtone of repeating is due to the believe of
photography as testimony of a true moment. The accumu-
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lation of many single true moments therefore must lead to
the truth in general. One picture cannot represent an entity
any more not being a composition, but a fragment. The lost
general vision of the whole resembles an archaeologist gluing
together pieces of a vase. Mostly he does not have all the
pieces, but some already get him further. If he has found
and glued enough, he will have a general idea of what the
vase looked like. Since he wants to reconstruct one particular
vase, he is looking for similar pieces that nevertheless differ
in detail. The less the single piece is remarkable on its own,
the more the vase on its whole becomes perceptible.
The outer distance of the remake
What entity does the vase represent? The photographer
taking one portrait after the other, the painter making one
landscape after the other maybe are remaking one particular
motive, but they are not remaking one singular image. Each
picture is the realisation of a theme that does not find one
single expression. The totality of portraits of famous people
of the late 19th century gives the general idea of the upper
class's face of Nadar's time. The whole of cubist still lifes
refuses a harmonic and naturalistic vision of the world and
establishes a concept of a reality. The addition of Andy
Warhol's newspaper prints finally leads to a pathetic rising of
the journalistic photo while paradoxically at the same time
the figurative sign is undermined. One single picture would
not have been enough to capture the concept. The serial
principle of modern art reveals itself as the modern analogy
to the classical genre (i.e. the vase).
The repetition of the remake, however, does not function
with that logic, although the early examples of Lumière's
work seem to suggest so. The remake is not a genre. It
needs an outer distance towards its source that represents
the up to then single expression of a specific theme. That
distance towards the original can be historical, cultural/social, in regard to the genre or to the medium. (Most
of the following film examples are taken from the very
enriching publication Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes. [7])
1st, between the remake and its source lie several years.
The frontier is around 20 years, if we look at often-remade
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films like Dracula or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
(Dracula: Murnau 1922, Tod Browning 1931, Terence Fisher
1958, John Badham and Werner Herzog 1979 and Francis
Ford Coppola 1992. The only nine instead of 20 years that
lay between Murnau's Nosferatu and Tod Browning's Dracula
are due to the media shift to the sound film as well as to the
different culture Germany - America. Invasion of the Body
Snatchers: Don Siegel 1956, Philip Kaufman 1978 and Abel
Ferrara 1993.)
2nd, the remake and its original separates a different cultural
background. Classical examples are the Hollywood remakes
of French films that can almost be considered as an own
current of the Hollywood production. A closer look at the
remakes of the Lumière reveals that they fit into this category: the original French films are remade in new exotic
places. Two of Akira Kurosawa's Samurai films, finally, have
become Western classics (Shichinin no samurai 1954 gives
the American The Magnificent Seven 1960, Yojimbo 1961 the
Per un pugno di dollari 1964). This example leads to the
3rd category of the genre switch. A great part of musicals is
based on former films and may serve as example. (Show
Boat 1951 becomes State Fair 1962, The Philadelphia Story
1940 High Society 1956, Ninotchka 1939 Silk Stockings 1957
etc.) Another striking example is the mutation of Ingmar
Bergman's Jungfrukällan (1960) into Wes Craven's horror
debut Last House on the Left (1972).
4th, the new or modified medium as reason for a remake
becomes apparent with each technical important invention be
it the sound film, the advent of colour, the wide screen, television or multimedia. It quickly becomes uncertain, whether
the retakes still can be considered as remakes, when we look
at TV-series (M*A*S*H), cartoons (the children series of Men
In Black) or videogames (James Bond, Planet of the Apes
etc.). The original often only serves as deliverer of ideas.
The greater the distance of original and remake, the less
strong is the provocation the remake constitutes. If it differs
visibly from its original, the similarity of the story can be
more easily accepted. The first category however stays the
most ambivalent. Since I do not want to discuss the demarcation of the remake from the series, the sequel, etc. , I will
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concentrate on the remake whose only reason lies in the
time past since its original realisation.
End of part one.
Jan Speckenbach
© 05/2001
[1] See the leading article Améremake by Alain Masson of an
interesting dossier on the remake in the French monthly
Positif no. 459, May 1999, p. 78. Positif no. 460, June 1999,
pursuits the topic.
[2] Historical and juridical information from The Encyclopedia
Americana. International Edition. Vol. 7. Article on the copyright by Stanley Rothenberg. Danbury, Connecticut, 1983:
Grolier incorporated, and Collier's Encyclopedia. Vol. 7.
Article on the copyright by Jon A. Baumgarten. New York,
Toronto, Sydney, 1997: Collier.
[3] Boris Groys. Apropos Appropriation. In: der Schnitt. Das
Filmmagazin. No. 18, Bochum, Germany, February 2000. p.
10.
[4] In: Das Photographische. Eine Theorie der Abstände.
Transl. from French by Henning Schmidgen. Munich, 1998
[1990]: Fink.
[5] Søren Kierkegaard. Die Wiederholung. Ein Versuch in der
experimentierenden Psychologie von Constantin Constantius.
Transl. from Danish by Emanuel Hirsch. Gütersloh, 1998:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn. [Kopenhagen 1843.] p. 7.
[6] Jochen Manderbach. Das Remake - Studien zu seiner
Theorie und Praxis. Siegen: MuK 53, 1988. p.18.
[7] Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes. Edited by
Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal. With an Afterword
by Leo Braudy. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1998:
University of California Press.
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