Film Remakes Research Articles

Remaking Film

What is film remaking? Which films are remakes of other films? How does remaking differ from other types of repetition, such as quotation, allusion, adaptation? How is remaking different from the cinemas ability to repeat and replay the same film through reissue, redistribution and re-viewing? These are questions which have seldom been asked, let alone satisfactorily answered. This article refers to books and essays dealing directly with ‘film remakes’ and the concept of ‘remaking film’, from Michael B. Druxman‘s Make It Again, Sam (1975) to Horton and McDougal‘s Play It Again, Sam (1998) and Forrest and Koo‘s’ Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (2002). In addition, this article draws upon Rick Altman‘s Film/Genre, developing from that book the idea that, although film remakes (like film genres) are often ‘located’ in either authors or texts or audiences, they are in fact not located in any single place but depend upon a network of historically variable relationships. Accordingly this discussion falls into three sections: the first, remaking as industrial category, deals with issues of production, including industry (commerce) and authors (intention); the second, remaking as textual category, considers texts (plots and structures) and taxonomies; and the third, remaking as critical category, deals with issues of reception, including audiences (recognition) and institutions (discourse).

Remaking Spain: trans/national mythologies and cultural fetishism in The Devil is a Woman (Sternberg, 1935) and Cet obscur objet du désir (Buñuel, 1977)

Although in purely commercial terms, Spain has been marginal to much of the international traffic in film remakes, this essay seeks to bring into focus a complex history of artistic borrowings and less than equal exchange that has repeatedly cast Spanish culturescapes and character types as the exotic setting for European fantasies of psychic freedom and sexual excess. In analysing Sternberg’s and Buñuel’s film adaptations of Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin, itself arguably a ‘remake’ of Mérimée’s Carmen, this study examines the evolving role of one of the most pervasive and recurring mythologies of Spanishness. It argues that while nineteenth-century incarnations of the Carmen myth served to reinforce relatively stable national identities based on the opposition between self and other, male and female, France and Spain, the later versions by Sternberg and Buñuel propose more uncertain forms of decentred subjectivity increasingly shadowed by the threats and dislocations of the twentieth-century nation state.

Film Remakes As A Comparative View Of Time

s English: This paper examines the use of film remakes as a teaching resource to give a comparative review of time. It defines a remake and describes how the scenes discussed in the paper were selected. Film remake scenes from several films from the 1940s through to the 1990s are analysed to uncover similarities and differences in many sociocultural concepts. The paper also discusses differing sequences in using remakes for different teaching effects. The conclusions highlight the ways film remakes are a rich teaching resource for time comparisons.

FORGETTING GENOCIDE: OR, THE LAST OF THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

In the wake of the 1992 debates about Columbus, the discovery of the Americas, and whether terms such as ‘holocaust’, ‘genocide’, and ‘racism’ should be applied to what happened to Native Americans, Michael Manns film remake of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans continues a process of historical erasure or forgetting that Cooper and his contemporaries began. The sentimental racism expressed in Cooper's novel involves the ideas of the auto-genocide of ‘savagery’ and the inevitable extinction of all Native Americans - ideas commonly held about other so-called primitive races in other imperialist contexts (for instance, about the Maoris of New Zealand). Though Mann purported to take great pains in his film to be historically accurate, the film is only accurate in relation to trivial details. It thoroughly scrambles major aspects of Cooper's text, including converting the ageing Natty Bumppo into a young sex-symbol (Daniel Day-Lewis). More importantly, the film completely erases Cooper's sentimental racism by, for instance, turning Chingachgook rather than his son, Uncas, into the ‘last’ of his tribe, and thereby overlooking the motif of the futureless child central to that racism. But in eliminating Cooper's racism, the film in a sense perfects the novel, because the sentimentalism that softened the racism was already a form of erasure or forgetting.

Science fiction, fantasy and horror film sequels, series and remakes: an illustrated filmography, with plot synopses and critical commentary

Science fiction, fantasy and horror film sequels, series and remakes: an illustrated filmography, with plot synopses and critical commentary