Film Remakes

This special issue of 'Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies' offers an original and provocative contribution to debates around adaptation and appropriation in film, television and new media.

The issue is organised in four sections, each dealing with a different form of cultural borrowing. Part I examines 'Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation' and provides three complimentary historical accounts of the development of adaptation within US cinema. Part II looks to the future and examines the contemporary practice of 'Found Footage and Remix Culture'. Shifting focus onto more imitative forms of appropriation, Part III focuses on 'Modes of Parody and Pastiche.' Finally, in Part IV, the focus shifts away from the predominant focus on US media to consider the contribution that 'Transnational Screen Cultures' can make to our understandings of the adaptive act.

Contributors are: I. Q. Hunter, Jason Scott, Stijn Joye, Eli Horwatt, Emma Cocker, Sérgio Dias Branco, Brigid Cherry, Darren Elliott, Jordan Lavender-Smith, Austin Fisher, Neelam Sidhar Wright, and Pamela Atzori.

This special issue seeks to make an original contribution to seriality studies. It explores narrative, cultural, and historical dimensions of serial narratives in an effort to come to terms with their changing forms and functions within the field of popular culture. Altogether 13 essays from leading and emerging scholars in the fields of film and media studies, literary studies, cultural history, ethnography and American studies address questions relating to the production and reception of serial narratives in the past and present. How can the evolution of serial forms be understood within particular theoretical frameworks? How does the sprawl of serial narratives across different media challenge established notions of authorship, narrative closure, and cultural legitimacy? How does it work to increase audience loyalty and engagement? How do authors and producers respond to new modes of consumption that differ from the ritualized experience of daily, weekly or monthly installments? Do DVD sets, VOD services, and streaming demand new narrative strategies and storytelling techniques to satisfy the binge or repeat viewer of television series? What effect has the “second screen” on viewing experiences and (the semblance of) audience participation?

Horror Video Game Remakes and the Question of Medium: Remaking Doom, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil. In Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films Remade. Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz, eds. Lexington Books, 2008.

Over the past two decades, French artist Pierre Huyghe has produced an extraordinary body of work in constant dialogue with temporality. Investigating the possibility of a hypothetical mode of timekeeping - “parallel presents” - Huyghe has researched the architecture of the incomplete, directed a puppet opera, founded a temporary school, established a pirate television station, staged celebrations, scripted scenarios, and journeyed to Antarctica in search of a mythological penguin. In this first book-length art historical examination of Huyghe and his work, Amelia Barikin traces the artist’s continual negotiation with the time codes of contemporary society. Offering detailed analyses of Huyghe’s works and drawing on extensive interviews with Huyghe and his associates, Barikin finds in Huyghe’s projects an alternate way of thinking about history--a “topological historicity” that deprograms (or reprograms) temporal formats. Huyghe once said, “It is through the montage, the way we combine and relate images, that we can create a representation of an event that is perhaps more precise than the event itself.”

Barikin offers pioneering analyses of Huyghe’s lesser-known early works as well as sustained readings of later, critically acclaimed projects, including No Ghost Just a Shell (2000), L’Expédition scintillante (2002), and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). She emphasizes Huyghe’s concepts of “freed time” and “the open present,” in which anything might happen.

Bringing together an eclectic array of subjects and characters - from moon walking to situationist practices, from Snow White to Gilles Deleuze - Parallel Presents offers a highly original account of the driving forces behind Huyghe’s work.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-presents

Film Remakes is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the phenomenon of cinematic remaking. Drawing upon recent theories of genre and intertextuality, Film Remakes describes remaking as both an elastic concept and a complex situation, one enabled and limited by the interrelated roles and practices of industry, critics and audiences. This approach to remaking is developed across three broad sections: the first, remaking as industrial category, deals with issues of production, including commerce and authors; the second, remaking as textual category, considers genre, plots and structures; and the third, remaking as critical category, investigates issues of reception, including audiences and institutions. The film remake emerges as a particular case of repetition, a function of cinematic and discursive fields that is maintained by historically specific practices, such as copyright law and authorship, canon formation and media literacy, film criticism and re-viewing. These points are made through the lively discussion of numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the remaking of classics (Double Indemnity, Psycho), foreign art-films (Solaris, Le Samouraï), cult movies (Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Dead), and television properties (Batman, Charlie’s Angels).

Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining 1960 classic Psycho, three Psycho sequels (1983, 1986, and 1990), the television pilot Bates Motel (1987), Gus Van Sant’s much-maligned Psycho remake (1998), and the new television series Bates Motel (2013-) attest to an ongoing fascination with the story about the murderer Norman Bates and raise pertinent questions as to the narrative possibilities of innovative reproduction. The individual entries to the franchise function as serial installments in an ongoing narrative and draw attention to the impact remaking has on dynamic processes of meaning-making over time. This essay focuses on the most recent addition to the Psycho franchise: A&E's Bates Motel. It examines the new television series’ self-description as a contemporary prequel, and discusses aspects of the series that will shed light on both the cultural functions and narrative possibilities of Bates Motel within the Psycho franchise and the practice of remaking as such.

This article aims to address the largely negative critical response to Steven R. Monroe’s remake of I Spit On Your Grave (2010), by both analysing its themes in comparison to Meir Zarchi’s 1978 original film, and by positioning the new version within its own generic context. Using examples from feminist film theory which analyses Zarchi’s film (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Read 2000), I suggest that Monroe’s version not only interprets, but actively enhances the perceived feminist message of the original, and consider how role reversal during the revenge section of the film contributes to this. I also outline the way in which Monroe’s film can be understood as representative of recent trends in the horror genre – most notably, its inclusion of explicit, gory violence and themes of retribution. Ultimately, the portrayal of the remake’s female protagonist as less sexualized and arguably more monstrous than the original character works in conjunction with other changes and a torture porn aesthetic in order to position the film clearly within the context of contemporary horror cinema.

Este capítulo pretende analizar las características esenciales de la narrativa televisiva contemporánea para compararlas con las del largometraje cinematográfico tradicional. En consecuencia, explicaremos en primer lugar las diferencias que la ficción televisiva y fílmica tienen en cuanto a unidad narrativa y progresión dramática: la duración textual, el tiempo de consumo y la combinación de la “anthology plot” y la “running plot”. En segundo lugar, examinaremos los conceptos de adaptación y remake, en los que tanto la memoria como la originalidad juegan un papel crucial para el éxito de cualquier derivación diegética. Tras aclarar el marco teórico, aplicaremos la teoría al análisis de dos series de televisión recientes basadas en largometrajes de éxito: la primera temporada de Fargo (FX, 2014-), una suerte de remake-secuela de la película de los hermanos Coen del año 1995; y las tres de Hannibal (NBC, 2013-15), un reboot de la franquicia de El silencio de los corderos (The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme, 1991) que intenta llenar los huecos previos al nacimiento del personaje en la novela El dragón rojo, de Thomas Harris.

The point of convergence between cinema and constituents of the urban commons is the crowd and everything that the crowd connotes at any given point of time and in any discourse. Popular Telugu cinema is replete with examples of the crowd and what cinema does with it. This phenomenon of constituting and naming social formations and the misrecognitions it gives rise to are most instructive in a discussion of the urban commons. This paper analyses Eenadu, a 1982 Telugu film that is centrally concerned with crowds, to illustrate how cinema brings the mass gathered before the screen face-to-face with a version of itself on the
screen, framing a new mode of political participation pivoted on the popular appeal of larger-than-life superstars.

This book is devoted to study how the breakthrough representation of the connection between sexuality, criminality and sickness of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) has been being reworked for 50 years, according to changing cultural contexts and different personal and political agendas. The analysis focuses on eight case studies selected from the enormous number of works more or less closely inspired by “Psycho”: William Castle’s “Homicidal” (1961); Hitchcock’s “Frenzy” (1972); Brian De Palma’s “Sisters” (1973) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980); slasher horror movies from the 1970s and 1908s; Robert Bloch’s novel “Psycho II”; the three cinematic sequels produced in the 1980s; Gus Van Sant’s remake (1999); and Gary Orona’s pornographic version “Official Psycho Parody” (2010).
The download includes the introduction and the table of contents.

Indian film industries, like their counterpart in Hong Kong, frequently remake films produced by other industries. All films sourced from abroad are ‘unofficial’ remakes in that no royalties are ever paid and no acknowledgement made of the fact that the film at hand is based on another. It is a part of the film reviewer’s job to track the sources and educate the readers/viewers on the extent and brazenness of the borrowing. In this paper I discuss the instance of a remake and its source circulating in the celluloid versions in the same context to show how the original is made over into an incomplete or inadequate object, whose gaps various agents are required to fill.

El trabajo, tanto crítico como cinematográfico, de Víctor Erice es analizado bajo la perspectiva de su rigurosa continuidad, en la medida en que su obra está recorrida por un hilo conductor que pone de manifiesto la tensión entre lo individual y lo colectivo, entre la historia y el sueño. Desde sus primeros ensayos críticos hasta sus trabajos cinematográficos más recientes, pasando por sus largometrajes, la pasión cinefílica no impide el rigor con el que el artista intenta resolver la contradicción socialmente establecida entre memoria e historia.

For a long time, Hollywood has been interested in remaking films
of different countries. On the level of transnational cinema, a remake
can be considered as borrowing ideas, and adaptation of a work of one
cultural background to another society and country in modern period of
globalization. Hollywood tends to produce remakes of East Asian films
in 21st century while it had done mostly of European films in the
previous century. Among Hollywood remakes of East Asian films, the
case of Oldboy is noticeable. Korean Oldboy and its US remake made
by Spike Lee are two films which expressed the same feeling and
pursue of revenge in the same circumstances, but at the same time two
directors showed to spectators two different main heroes through
different narration and heroes' different representation within the
cinema. To discuss about two films, researchers of this article refer to
concepts of puzzle film studies, which deal with complex non-linear
narrative strategies in contemporary art films. This study examines and
compares two films in terms of complex narrativity, evolution of main
characters from an ordinary human to a monster, and the removal of
monstrosity in the conclusion.

In the theatre, the pretence of the fourth wall may be broken by metatheatrical devices. The film medium, however, which prides itself on its realism, rarely discloses its own enunciation and tends to deliberately ignore the spectators, permitting them to indulge in their voyeuristic fantasy. Mulvey calls it "a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience".1 The Hollywood aesthetics, as exemplified in the names of the studios, such as DreamWorks, is based on the presumption that the experience of watching a movie is similar to the state of dreaming. Does it mean, however, that the audience should always be kept at a safe distance and the illusion of the film world protected? Can they be awakened from "the dream" earlier on than in the final credits? Is metatheatre transferable to the new medium? It seems that the Brechtian revolution has to some extent reached the screen as well, and contemporary Shakespeare directors make use of distancing devices. They may want to direct a film pointing to its self-referential character or choose to ignore it and attempt a more realistic representation. In adapting Shakespeare to screen, the filmmaker must, therefore, respond to the plays' metatheatricality by either rejecting alienating devices or finding a cinematic counterpart to the theatre's self-reflexivity.

This chapter extends the idea that Michael Haneke's Funny Games is founded on the programmatic subversion of genre conventions and ingrained viewing habits to the mechanisms of remaking a film in a different cultural context, arguing that Haneke experimented with the meaning of the transnational remake itself.

VAMPIRE: MASKED IDENTITY, HIDDEN DEATH
The cinema has rapidly and in grand style absorbed the novel character of vampire Dracula, the dual creature combining the features of man and monster, a dead man and living person. The imagination of F. W. Murnau, W. Herzog, F. F. Coppola, T. Scott or N. Jordan has helped spectators get acquainted with a whole bunch of vampires. In the essay, Wałaszewski attempts to identify the source of fascination with vampires. He claims that the character expresses duality of the temptations of immortality and punishment, transgression of man's condition and an infringement of the laws of nature (lack of mirror reflection, sucking people's blood). According to Wałaszewski, this duality is a trap set for the first time by Bram Stoker's "Dracula"in 1897. In line with the folklore tradition, Stoker's vampires raising from tombs force us to symbolically face man's most primeval fear; an encounter with the death-heralding look-alikes. The cinema has turned the vampire into a character from pantheon of dreams about immortality.

As a big-budget adaptation of Katherine Paterson's 1977 Newbery Award-winning novel of the same title, the 2007 Walden Media/Walt Disney family film Bridge to Terabithia departs from its source material in telling ways, subtly shifting the motives, manners, and yearnings of the main adolescent characters while compounding the complexities of gender roles and class relations. In this essay, I triangulate three texts—the novel, the recent motion picture, and a little-seen Canadian telefilm of the same title (released in 1985)—so as to arrive at a better understanding of how different types of cultural production respond to questions of masculinity and femininity over time, in different historical periods.

This chapter examines a film cycle in contemporary Hollywood cinema that consists of remakes of beloved and iconic feature films and television series of the 1980s. Among them are, for example, The Karate Kid (1984/2010), The A-Team (1983-87/2010) and 21 Jump Street (1987-91/2012). Media discourses surrounding the remakes generally describe them as “part of a retro mood that has revved up the careers of baby-boom performers while providing comfort food for the audience” (Cieply A1). An entire generation of today’s filmmakers, actors and cinemagoers grew up with and still remembers these series and films of the 1980s (including their related lines of merchandise).
I suggest that the 1980s retro trend is openly nostalgic for a decade that directly precedes the radical societal and technological transformations of the 1990s and 2000s. When it comes to the originals, apparently none of the remakes in the 1980s film cycle resorts to what Thomas Leitch has termed the “rhetoric of disavowal.” Instead the films of this cycle almost seem to celebrate the originals and their 1980s aesthetic; they directly rely on their cult status and presence in the collective memory; and in a playful (postmodern) manner they do everything to draw attention to the earlier texts. This includes, for example, the unchanged (and therefore immediately recognizable) titles of the remakes, almost untouched scripts (e.g. in The Karate Kid), meta-references about the status of the 1980s series and the remake (e.g. in 21 Jump Street), repetition of the title music, trademark haircuts, accessories and lines (e.g. in The A-Team), and cameo appearances of the 1980s actors. I closely analyze these aspects with regard to the timeliness of the 1980s remake cycle and in relation to audience, culture, and production trends in other media.

Works Cited

Cieply, Michael. “In Hollywood, an ‘80s Moment.” New York Times 29 Mar. 2012: A1.
Leitch, Thomas. “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake.” Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2002. 37-62.

Las cinematografías de Argentina y México tuvieron durante el período clásico una relación signada por un fluido intercambio y por la disputa por los mercados regionales. Al mismo tiempo, cada industria sostuvo en su interior agitados debates en torno a su relación con su identidad nacional. La historiografía tradicional se ha detenido generalmente en estas discusiones a partir de las producciones que mejor los representan, ya sean películas de ambientación popular o de corte histórico.
Un lugar poco considerado han sido aquellas producciones que se pensaron, ya no desde una óptica regional, sino en relación con tendencias extra-regionales. Ambas cinematografías buscaron durante el período clásico posicionarse no sólo hacia dentro del ámbito hispanoamericano sino en el marco del cine global. Para ello recurrieron a diversas fuentes argumentales que permitieron plantear aspiraciones globalizantes. Estas tramas no provinieron solamente de las industrias fílmicas centrales, sino que ambos países compartieron un número importante de ellas en el marco de dinámicas de remakes y nuevas versiones.
Los relatos que formaron parte de este tipo de intercambio generalmente pertenecieron a propuestas universales de ambas cinematografías. Se alejaron así de sus localismos característicos –el tango y la ranchera- para hacerse parte de la discusión fílmica global. En momentos de transformaciones de los cines de cada país, estas películas plantearon nuevos caminos posibles, usualmente abriendo su representación y sus expectativas de recepción a las clases medias y altas de sus países. Asimismo, fueron vehículos donde se plasmaron representaciones de los procesos de modernización urbana de cada sociedad.

Desde principios de los años setenta, el impulso cultural de reutilizar imágenes, estilos y géneros del pasado de la historia del cine y convertirlos en nuevas formas ha crecido exponencialmente, siendo cada vez más evidente en todas las artes y medios de masas, extendiéndose también más allá de los Estados Unidos. Teóricos como Fredric Jameson han tratado de definir estas tendencias. Dentro de una práctica tan amplia y extendida, este trabajo supone una aproximación selectiva. Los filmes recientes de Martin Scorsese y Pedro Almodóvar, dos veteranos del cine autoreferencial e inventores de nuevos recursos, presentan interesantes revisiones a las cuestiones sobre cine y conciencia. En Shutter Island y La piel que habito, estos cineastas tratan la memoria, el sueño y los estados de locura. Scorsese y Almodóvar miran hacia la historia del cine, a conocidas películas que ya trataron en profundidad estas cuestiones, como El gabinete del doctor Caligari, Un perro andaluz y El doctor Frankenstein, y realizan significativas contribuciones. Esto se consigue mediante la cita, incorporación y comentario de obras anteriores, a las que añaden los nuevos recursos cinematográficos. Recurren a obras del expresionismo y el surrealismo alemán, además de ejemplos del cine de terror y teorías psicológicas sobre la estructuración del inconsciente. De esta manera, Scorsese y Almodóvar continúan homenajeando la historia del cine, sin dejar de explorar el potencial del medio. Ambos realizadores emplean recursos, como el narrador no fiable y las subjetividades cambiantes, para tratar estos temas, técnicas además que fomentan una posición autorreflexiva. Lo hacen, además, empleando avanzadas manipulaciones digitales de imagen y sonido. Aunque llegan a diferentes conclusiones, sus obras son gestos metacinematográficos, memorias del cine sobre la memoria, señalando al espectador el acto en sí de ver una película y las cualidades oníricas del propio cine.

Literature and film generate symbolic as well as economic capital. As such, aesthetic productions exist in various contexts following contrasting rules. Which role(s) do authors and filmmakers play in positioning themselves in this conflictive relation?

Bringing together fourteen essays by scholars from Germany, the USA, the UK and France, this volume examines the multiple ways in which the progressive (self-) fashioning of authors and filmmakers interacts with the public sphere, generating authorial postures, and thus arouses attention. It questions the autonomous nature of the artistic creation and highlights the parallels and differences between the more or less clear-cut national contexts, in order to elucidate the complexity of authorship from a multifaceted perspective, combining contributions from literary and cultural studies, as well as film, media, and communication studies.

Dealing with Authorship, as a transversal venture, brings together reflections on leading critics, exploring works and postures of canonical and non-canonical authors and filmmakers. An uncommon and challenging picture of authorship is explored here, across national and international artistic fields that affect Africa, Europe and America. The volume raises the questions of cultural linkages between South and North, imbalances between the mainstream and the margins in an economic, literary or “racial” dimension, and, more broadly, the relation of power and agency between artists, editors, critics, publics, media and markets.

For his 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese had the Bernard Herrmann score of the original adapted by Elmer Bernstein. This article first examines that Herrmann score, before showing how it was effectively 're-composed' for the later film, with Bernstein taking its basic components and redeploying them in often entirely new musical and filmic contexts, while also combining them with his own newly composed music and further pre-existing material from Herrmann's rejected score for Torn Curtain (Hitchcock, 1966). The motivations for the reuse of Herrmann's music, and issues of interpretation arising from the 1991 score's compilation status will be considered. The article aims to be relevant not only for scholars of music in moving-image media, but also for those interested in remakes and media intertextuality more generally.

in: The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference, eds. Tijana Mamula and Lisa Patti (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 317-334. This chapter argues that the linguistic turn in contemporary Flemish cinema professes the dual monolingualism of a discursive Flemish identity that rejects the, respectively, Dutch and French vernaculars of the Netherlands and Wallonia, while also defining itself linguistically in relation to these perceived adversaries. In addition, I demonstrate that the current Dutch-Flemish remake cycle signifies the social, cultural, and linguistic ties between Flanders and the Netherlands, yet simultaneously reveals the increasing erosion of the Dutch language area. In pursuing these two objectives, this chapter posits the dual monolingualism of Flemish cinema as a locus of multilingual negotiation.

O estudo teve como objetivo analisar as relações e conexões de consumo entre o cinema e a moda através de uma abordagem analítica do posicionamento dos jovens na pós-modernidade a fim de compreender o caminho de consumo de Lisbeth Salander, personagem da literatura criada por Stieg Larsson, em suas adaptações para o cinema, partindo do pressuposto das influências e inserções midiáticas na contemporaneidade a partir da análise da construção da protagonista da trilogia Millenium. Presente nos filmes Man som hatar kvinnor (2009), de Niels Arden Oplev e The girl with the dragon tattoo (2011), de David Fincher e a coleção de roupas das lojas H&M inspirada na personagem, descobrindo e trabalhando em cima de perspectivas que constroem uma antítese às ideologias da obra.

The film basically has a message to convey to the public especially for the cinema lovers. Messages in the film also affected the level of the local culture. Therefore it is necessary repackaged to be submitted to the global community whether the new packs become a better composition and can be distributed to a wide audience? This article will discuss the culture of communication through the film remake between Europe and Hollywood movie production with the first look at the history of their relationship. The author interested in discussing several films including The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo and L'Appartement and Wicker Park. The result shows that Hollywood films tend to sow in order to reach a market share of more spacious while European films tend to protect the local culture rather than universal reach.
Keywords: Film, Culture, Communication

Since the 1980s, feminist film theory has made the horror movie one of its main concerns because of the genre's focus on the body, its treatment of female victims, and the conspicuous transformation of female characters into heroines from the 1970s on. This article proposes to examine the extent to which feminist film theory has been taken into account in the Hollywood domestic horror remakes of 2000s, and more precisely, how the genre has become exemplary as the site of a tension between the second wave feminism that informed feminist film theory and the media phenomenon of post-feminism. The article attempts to assess the political contradictions of the adaptations regarding narrative, characterization and camerawork made to the original material, with particular attention to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003), Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) and I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010).

Like the term “blockbuster,” the phrase “blockbuster remake” can mean different things. Typically, blockbuster remake is an industrial term, one that refers to the production of large-scale movies adapted from previously filmed properties. In this definition, modest (cult) properties – such as, Planet of the Apes (1968, 2001), King Kong (1933, 1976, 2005), and War of the Worlds (1954, 2005) – are revived through massive production budgets as cultural juggernauts, with strong marketing campaigns and merchandising tie-ins. Less typical is a
description that accounts for the way in which a blockbuster movie is itself remade: that is, a definition in which a blockbuster becomes the cornerstone for the entire architecture of a blockbuster cycle. This article explores the idea of a blockbuster remake, and blockbuster initiated cycle, in and through a case study of the prototype of all modern blockbusters: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Specifically,
the article interrogates the way in which “Bruce,” the great white
shark of Jaws, initiated a rogue animal cycle consisting in the first instance of the Jaws franchise – Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws 4: The Revenge (1987) – and also a series of replicas that included Grizzly (1976), Orca (1977), and Piranha (1978).