Remakes

Money, Copy, Quotation, Motive, Genre.
The treatise is a reflection on the phenomenon of the remake, which plays a very exposed role in cinema, puts it in relation to the other arts and tries to find a system behind the decisions of film directors and producers when a remake makes sense and when it does not.

Centered on Richard Dyer's model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series' inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

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.

During the last two decades more than a dozen Scandinavian films have been officially remade by US studios, and rights have been purchased for a number of others that have yet to receive a green light. While a remarkable increase on its own, the phenomenon reflects on a larger scale changing media industry considerations, story‐telling practices, and cultural assumptions in the Nordic countries and globally. Building on interviews with film practitioners undertaken in Scandinavia during the period 2009‐2013, this chapter analyzes 21st‐century film remake practice through a set of pan‐Nordic examples. The horror and vampire genres are among the most commonly remade film genres, arguably because, as evolutionary psychologists show, physiological and psychological responses to fear, appear to be largely universal, transcending linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. The chapter indicates that re‐make practice, process, and infrastructure provide excellent vehicles for conceptualizing global polyvocality in the entertainment industry.

Se hace un análisis de la película predecesora de "La seducción" de Sofía Coppola, de Don Siegel, con Clint Eastwood, en la que se estrena como actor de carácter y Geraldine Page, donde se muestra una tragedia a puerta cerrada, donde el infierno son los demás, en medio de una moral de la ambigüedad.

La literatura ha suministrado tramas, temas y argumentos al cine desde sus orígenes. Ya hace tiempo que desde el mundo académico se habla de un nuevo paradigma en las relaciones entre medios, pues los constantes trasvases que experimentan las historias nos obligan a entender la adaptación como un concepto amplio que no se limita a las relaciones entre literatura y cine. Vivimos en un mundo plagado de relatos y éstos se consumen de muy variadas maneras. Estas nuevas pautas de consumo han provocado a su vez que los creadores de historias sean cada día más receptivos a la posibilidad de pensar una obra como algo traducible o, cuando menos, reconducible a diferentes plataformas y soportes. El fenómeno de la adaptación es hoy más que nunca un fenómeno intermediático que debe estudiarse atendiendo a las diferentes plataformas y universos de referencia que proveen contenidos, temas y argumentos al cine, medio que, a su vez, es el origen de productos que se desarrollan en otros formatos y medios. No podemos entender correctamente la actual industria del entretenimiento sin analizar atentamente estos constantes trasvases.

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).

In current scholarship, remakes are almost always compared with former versions instead of their sources, and considered to have a complex relationship with earlier texts. While they are trying to achieve an independent textual status, they also use the existence of the earlier versions. This “triangular relationship they establish among themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are made” (Leitch 39), has become a decisive point in their analysis. Nejat Saydam’s My Friend Frankenstein (1975), a Turkish remake of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), has the potential to redefine the politics of remaking, since it does not fit this theoretical approach. The Turkish remake was first released before Mel Brooks’ film had been screened in Turkey or Shelley’s novel translated into Turkish. So the audience was unable to form such a “triangular relationship.” Moreover, it was only five years before the 1980 Turkish coup d’état, during a period when the Turkish military systematically oppressed the culture industry, including cinema, preventing almost any American films from being screened, and the ones who managed to pass the system were screened only for high prices, affordable only by the select few. By using the gaps in copyright laws, the Turkish film industry in this political climate adopted an anarchic approach towards these bans, remade Hollywood productions scene by scene, and made them available for the masses, producing something we may call activist remakes that have the potential to open discussions about different kinds of triangular relationships.

Rewriting, Remembering, Mechanising, Historising, Forgetting.
The article is a reflection on the phenomenon of the remake, which plays an exposed role in cinema, puts it in relation to the other arts and tries to find a system behind the decisions of film directors and producers when a remake makes sense and when it does not. It further discusses the role of overwriting and thus forgetting the original as opposed to remembering and memorialising it.

The essay begins by giving an economic and critical context to the frequency of American remakes of French films in what is termed ‘classical period’, 1930-1960 – particular attention shall be paid to the ‘ideology of the auteur’. The main body of this chapter then comprises analysis of key Franco-American remakes of the period, and discussion of practices shared amongst them. It looks at narrative organisation, ‘generic familiarisation’ and characterisation and then examines issues of class and the social in relation to war discourses (World War II separating many of the remakes from their French models), then issues of sexuality. It concludes by questioning the relative merits of approaches to examining remakes that take ‘circles of intertextuality’ or the opposition of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ as central.
This study has drawn directly on seven ‘original’ French films and their ‘Améremakes’: 'La Chienne' (Jean Renoir, 1931) into 'Scarlet Street' (Fritz Lang, 1945), 'L’Equipage' (Anatole Litvak, 1935) into 'The Woman I Love' (Anatole Litvak, 1937) , 'Pépé le Moko' (Julien Duvivier, 1937) into 'Algiers' (John Cromwell, 1938) and 'Casbah' (John Berry, 1948), 'La Bête humaine' (Jean Renoir, 1938) into 'Human Desire' (Fritz Lang, 1954), 'Pièges' (Robert Siodmak, 1939) into 'Lured' (Douglas Sirk, 1947), 'Le Corbeau' (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) into 'The 13th Letter' (Otto Preminger, 1951) and, finally, 'Le Jour se lève' (Marcel Carné, 1939) into 'The Long Night' (Anatole Litvak, 1947). I discuss films like 'La Chienne'-'Scarlet Street', 'Pépé le Moko' and its remakes far less than 'Le Jour se lève'-'The Long Nigh't and 'Pièges'-'Lured' because the former have had major studies devoted to them, while the latter are little discussed .

In 1972, Turkey was the third most prolific film producing country with 301 movies. Ninety percent of these films were remakes, adaptations or spin-offs of E.T., Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, the Exorcist, The Wizard of Oz, and many other American films. Ironically, in a survey MGM conducted about the popularity of various film genres, “Turkey was listed with India, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon as being among the countries with tastes almost diametrically opposed to those of American audiences.” Not only were the themes of these films irrelevant to the Turkish audience; genres like science fiction and horror were not even established in Turkish cinema. While recent scholarship on transnational remakes eventually leads to discussions about cross-cultural fertilizations, appropriations, or the domination of one culture by another, transnational Turkish remakes offer a new approach that prioritizes intercultural relationships among the industry, the public, and the government. These Turkish remakes were produced not in order to capitalize on the success of the films they were remaking but in order to avoid the resistance that would more likely greet more original Turkish films because of the political unrest caused by the 1960 and 1980 coups d’etat, which were widely considered the result of unrest caused by modernizing movements in the economy and popular culture. This paper discusses several examples of cross-cultural and transnational remakes in Turkish cinema in order to reveal the profoundly different kinds of relationships that revolve around nationalistic borders and offer new questions and perspectives in the scholarship of remakes.

The 2000s have seen a number of remakes in the horror genre. If critics have generally argued that Hollywood aims at erasing the original movie when it is foreign, the marketing strategy of domestic remakes relies on the audience’s awareness of the existence of the original film. As the prefix “re-” suggests, producing a remake generally rests on the belief that a profit can be made by improving on the original in terms of technique and technology. This article attempts to foreground some of the contradictions immanent to the remake by arguing that what Thomas Leitch calls its “stance” is, in effect, a disavowal of the very terms contained in the prefix. The remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)—are examined as paradigmatic examples of this disavowal through a study of both pragmatic and formal levels.

Cet article étudie comment les artistes qui ont été influencés par le vidéoclip dans les années 1990 ont anticipé certaines pratiques amateurs qui se sont ensuite développées sur Internet. Cela passe notamment chez ces artistes par la réutilisation d’images de clips musicaux célèbres, la création de remakes ou encore par la reprise des codes de ce format télévisuel. Leurs travaux s’inscrivent au sein d’une réflexion plus générale sur les images médiatiques, issues du cinéma et de la télévision, qui s’est développée dans les années 1980 et 1990. Par l’entremise du clip vidéo, ces artistes interrogent également plus largement leur rapport à la pop culture, aux industries culturelles et à leurs productions. Par l’étude de ce phénomène, est questionnée la position de l’artiste en tant qu’amateur de clips, entre relecture, critique et imitation de la forme « clip » et de certaines de ses productions les plus emblématiques.

RESUMEN Dentro del ámbito audiovisual, la expansión de los relatos se materializa a través de remakes, adaptaciones y franqui-cias ficcionales. En este contexto, los remakes o nuevas versiones son fórmulas muy recurrentes porque recuperan contenido familiar para la audiencia, y a la vez lo reinventan para captar la atención de nuevas generaciones. No obstante, la fórmula del remake ha ido cambiando en el nuevo milenio, adaptándose a las nuevas tendencias na-rrativas. Como consecuencia del auge de la intertextualidad y el valor en alza de la nostalgia, en los últimos años se han producido numerosas películas a medio camino entre el remake y la secuela, tales como Star Wars: El despertar de la fuerza o Terminator Génesis. En particular, el objetivo de esta investigación es realizar un análisis comparativo entre Parque Jurásico y Jurassic World, pues, aunque esta última prolonga el discurso original a modo de secuela, también ofrece una reinterpretación de la primera película. ABSTRACT In the audiovisual field, the expansion of the stories is, specifically, materialized through remakes, adaptations and franchises. In this context, the remakes or new versions are recurrent formulas because they recover familiar contents for audiences and, at the same time, they reinvent it in order to capture new generations' attention. Nevertheless, the remake formula has been changing in the new millennium, adapting to new narrative trends. In recent years, because of the rise of intertextuality and the increasing value of nostalgia, many films have been produced halfway between the remake and the sequel, such as Star Wars. Episode VII: The Force Awakens or Terminator Genisys. In particular, the aim of this paper is to make a comparative analysis between Jurassic Park and Jurassic World because, although this last film extends the original discourse as a sequel, it also offers a reinterpretation of the first film.

The article examines contemporary film remakes of 50s and 60s American family sitcoms, in particular how these films figure old media (primarily the TV console) and the con-structedness of the boomer sitcom family. The films include The Honeymooners (Schultz, 2005), The Beverly Hillbillies (Spheeris, 1993), The Addams Family (Sonnenfield, 1991), and Leave It to Beaver (Cadiff, 1997), with particular emphasis on Bewitched (Sony, 2005) as a case study. The article challenges popular perceptions of nostalgia as unproductive and regressive, as well as the reputation these films garner for being poor quality and derivative, in answer to larger questions on the function of nostalgia in convergence culture an important archival strategy for negotiating the digital transition and changing definitions of family and gender.

Intermedia 2017 - International Conference on Audiovisual Translation
25-26 September 2017, Poznań, Poland
Abstract:
Considering the variety of AVT practices in different countries, several factors mold each society's 'notion of what AVT entails': the traditional/major types of AVT produced (i.e. subtitling, dubbing); socioeconomic-political developments governing the entrée of new AVT (i.e. instigation of audio description with narrowcasting; new medium and media for transmission of AVT products); the societal perception management of the ruling elite, both in government and various media and their filtering (i.e. censoring; choice of product to be translated/transferred); and last but not least, the relative success of both the audiovisual production industry and the choice of translational activity instigated (i.e. if a product has higher viewer rates when dubbed/subtitled/remade; the technical and financial capabilities of production companies). These factors in turn are effected on the micro level (i.e. language, censoring) and on the macro level (i.e. choice of travelling story; norms of translation/ transcreation) by the linguistic, social, political, and economic realities of each new era in the society in question. Thus, each society's notion of what AVT entails, how it is practiced, and how to train translators is sometimes marginally, sometimes radically different and changes through time. In Turkey, the most widespread examples of AVT are dubbing and subtitling; but, Turkey also serves as a very good case study of the more marginal types of AVT prevalent in translational practices throughout certain geographies. With a rich history of adaptation-like-translations for the Westernization of the remnant of an essentially Eastern empire, even in Turkey today, for example, remakes are a major type of AVT practiced by professional translators exhibiting transcreational skills. The study we propose to present entails interconnected facets which are: an overview of the history of transcreational practices in the establishment of both the AVT and the cinema sectors in Turkey; current Turkish AV products and their ex-translations; and the focal point of the study, which is a translation-grounded sociological take on the transcreational processes in the production of current day remakes and most importantly the instigation of new courses in Turkish translation and interpreting departments to train 'creative translators' in line with these AVT trends. Under this final point, the study also aims to map systematic 'shift patterns' in modern day Turkish remakes, which in turn are analyzed as being factors affecting the way remakes travel across cultures and appropriation strategies. In a final section, examples are provided of a new course to train translators in transcreational AVT practices in line with local market trends. The aim of the study is to scout the borders of AVT in Turkey in an effort to provide insight into translational practices prevalent in a geography where AVT is defined with a broader perspective.

In the mid 90s, Brice Dellsperger began producing a series of videos in which cult sequences from the history of cinema are reenacted, usually shot by shot. Made up, fragmented, assembled and numbered under the generic title Body Double, the original films receive a complete make-over through Dellsperger’s paint brushes and powders.
Marie Canet, Brice Dellsperger / Arnaud Maguet (design graphique)

Through creating a highly controlled, aesthetically ‘authentic’ environment, Westworld attempts to offer an immersive nostalgic environment. The HBO show, which premiered in 2016, sets itself in a world dominated by the commodification and control of the nostalgic experience. The series’ concept of nostalgia goes beyond the “creation of visual pastness” that Christine Sprengler defines it as and towards a challenging of memory and cultural experience. This chapter argues for the idea of nostalgia presented in Westworld as a form of control; the restrictive and repetitive narratives offered to visitors in the park evidence the infliction of a controlled form of cultural memory, and by extension, historical identity. The examination of nostalgia is complicated by the aspect of the remake, which introduces another layer of control and remembering. Both remaking and repeating are evident in nostalgia – the return to a repeating memory or feeling – and evident in this text. The use of robot ‘hosts’ problematises discussions of nostalgia further – these robots are implanted with memories of a past they have not experienced, much like our current cultural experience of historical and nostalgia narratives. Is there something inherent in the trope of the robot which makes it apt to discuss notions of memory and nostalgia? This chapter explores this through debates on memory, identity and nostalgia, alongside a comparison with Bladerunner and the use of controlled remembering. By offering a world where childhood fantasies of the past can be played out, Westworld provides a different approach for the nostalgia industry by controlling and subverting reality. While the series fails to confront ideas about nostalgia focusing on the aesthetics of the past and ‘obliterating traditions’, it does provide a new way of looking at the cultural value of nostalgia and its future.

The following is the research essay written for my Film Studies MA, which studies the evolution of Hollywood's various approaches towards remaking international cinema. The featured case studies are City of Angels (the 1998 remake of Wings of Desire), The Grudge (the 2004 remake of Ju-On: The Grudge), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel, previously adapted to film in 2009).

There have always been remakes done of old movies, foreign movies, game show concepts and the like. But in recent years there has been a new development in television, to not just synchronize or to remake for language purposes, but to remake “English to English”. I aim to analyse reasons for such remakes, particularly culturally motivated remakes which aim at “localizing” a TV show for a country’s audience and to point out how these remakes are supposed to encapsulate a cultural identity.

Countless British shows have been remade for the US market, infusing something like an “American spirit” into the plot, the aesthetics etc. Of course there are also vice versa remakes, even though British networks tend to adapt certain reality or game show formats, rather than remaking a fictional series. In the first part of my analysis I want to focus on UK|USA TV remakes, while the second part will focus on other English to English remakes, that try to avoid the “west-to-the-rest” dynamics that come with the global practice of the cinema and television industries worldwide of buying screen products „made in Hollywood”.

A contemporary example for that is the remake of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES by the Nigerian TV network “EbonyLife TV”. While there are DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES remakes in Turkish, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, the African adaptation „is the only other one, that will be also done in English.“ Mo Abudu, the CEO of the network, plans to „put an African spin on it.“ by currently casting „pan-African“ talent, using African designers and musicians and by shaping the plot of the original to fit her audiences expectations. Abudu states: „There are some cultural issues, that you wouldn’t put in the Turkish version and there are some cultural issues you wouldn’t put in the African version.“

How and why these “issues” are chosen and changed is not explained in the interview, but is precisely the interest of the paper I want to propose. By close reading some of the originals and remakes I aim to point out reasons and manifestations of this trend back to national television, referring theoretic approaches from TV studies, cultural studies and globalization theories.

The 2000s have seen a number of remakes in the horror genre. If critics have generally argued that Hollywood aims at erasing the original movie when it is foreign, the marketing strategy of domestic remakes relies on the audience’s awareness of the existence of the original film. As the prefix “re-” suggests, producing a remake generally rests on the belief that a profit can be made by improving on the original in terms of technique and technology. This article attempts to foreground some of the contradictions immanent to the remake by arguing that what Thomas Leitch calls its “stance” is, in effect, a disavowal of the very terms contained in the prefix. The remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)—will be examined as paradigmatic examples of this disavowal through a study of both pragmatic and formal levels.

Na TV, o espetáculo não deixa nunca de fazer parte da fórmula de sucesso. E para sempre
garantir o sucesso do espetáculo, o termo vinheta, depois de um longo percurso na história da comunicação, foi adaptado para esse veículo se apoderando de uma linguagem
musical, plástica e cênica, ao passo que a telenovela foi se tornando objeto de paixão
apreciado por milhões de brasileiros. A vinheta de abertura serve para introduzir o
telespectador no mundo de uma determinada história. Elas trazem significados e
representações para ilustrar o que a trama vem a dizer. O presente artigo trata de apontar características da narrativa das vinhetas e investiga elementos nostalgizantes presentes em algumas vinhetas de aberturas de telenovelas que apostam na nostalgia como uma forma de atingir um público e provocar uma rememoração.