Transnational Remakes Research Articles

OVERLOOKING THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUES THROUGH THE TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN REMAKES MOVIES

This study explores the transformation of values in transnational remake movies, focusing on their popularity and the incorporation of new elements to suit target audience preferences. An analysis of The Lake House, a remake of the Korean film Il Mare, reveals shifts in values and the integration of American cultural aspects. These changes stem from audience demands, business considerations, and Hollywood's global influence. Remakes require more than simply reproducing original content; they involve capturing cultural nuances from both versions. Utilizing Hall's representation approach and qualitative methods, the study assesses transnational remakes and their conveyed values. The research identifies shifts from South Korean values to those of the American target market, such as the transition from interdependence to self-reliance and a preference for directness, assertion, and rationality. The American film industry should carefully evaluate the suitability of movies for its audiences, recognizing changes in scenes and messages. The establishment of American values in remakes is influenced by the success of original films and their formulas. As transnational products, movies must be repackaged for target audiences. The industry faces complex processes to align the values of popular films with audience tastes while maintaining the essence of original works.

Chinese Remake of Korean Films: Challenges and Strategies

This paper conducts an in-depth research and analysis on the challenges and dilemmas faced during the process of Chinese remake of Korean film, as well as the strategies to address these issues. Firstly, the paper reviews the historical development of cooperation between the Chinese and South Korean film industries, noting the rapid growth of the Chinese film industry around 2005 and the increasing collaboration with South Korea. However, with the changing times and the impact of political events, cooperation between the Chinese and South Korean film industries has gradually been restricted, leading to a shift towards transnational remakes. Subsequently, the paper explores the quality issues of Chinese remake of Korean film, analyzing aspects such as script adaptation, character development, and plot treatment. Particularly, focusing on the remake case of Sunny, it points out the shortcomings of Chinese remakes in retaining the essence of the original work, emotional resonance, and innovation. Finally, the paper proposes strategies to address these issues, including suggestions on emotional resonance and theme preservation, flexible plot adaptation and character development, and the incorporation of regional characteristics and innovative elements. By effectively applying these strategies, the quality and market performance of remake productions can be improved, achieving a win-win situation for both commercial and artistic endeavors.

Americanizing the Scandinavian Super Underdog in Eighteen Film Remakes

Americanizing the Scandinavian Super Underdog in Eighteen Film Remakes

Representation of Korean Values Sustainability in American Remake Movies

Globalization has triggered Korean movies more competitive. Many scholars and critics considered American and Korean popular culture domination. Hollywood has experiences in shaping the lifestyle of the world. This research aims to figure out sustainable values represented on American remakes of Korean popular movies. It also has purpose to find out the reason behind the sustainability. The study applied semiotic theories from Christian Metz. Representation approach was also applied to reveal the values beneath the transnational remakes supported by qualitative methods. The results revealed that there were several Korean values remain in the remake version of Korean American movies. It also revealed that the audience demands and taste mainly influence sustainability of values as well as universality of the values believed by the audience becomes the driving force of the sustainability represented in the remake movies.

Critical trends in transnational cinema: Inter-Asian productions and exchanges

ABSTRACT In light of the shift from the first phase to the second phase of transnational cinema studies, this special issue aims to examine a set of practices of transnational cinema that have been taking place within South and East Asia. In exploring transnational cinema activities in the form of transnational remakes, co-productions, cross-contamination of genres, diasporic and (post)colonial cinemas, as well as contemporary documentary film festivals, this issue puts the spotlight on critical trends in transnational cinemas occurring beyond the Western spheres of influences. Focusing on practical applications of case studies across China, Korea, India and United Arab Emirates, this special issue contributes to the debates on the definition and practical applications for research on transnational cinema studies.

System and Culture in Format Adaptation

This article explores strengths and weaknesses of common methods and frameworks in studying format adaptation, primarily in television series, but with some findings applicable for television entertainment formats as well. The article problematises how work on transnational remakes of television series as well as studies of format adaptation in general predominately focuses on either using text-based readings of cultural similarities and differences or explanations rooted in the media system such as, for example, a new channel’s profile or norms and traditions in the programming interface of a particular channel or country. The article examines the dominant literature and theories on the subject, illustrating that there is an ongoing debate among researchers as to which framework is more powerful and precise in accounting for format adaptation. It becomes apparent that studies favouring the one approach greatly over the other are often comparing apples and oranges. Finally, the article aims to show how existing research most often compares original and remake in their final forms, overlooking the creation process, the dilemmas of the creatives behind the transformations, and the effect their preconceptions have on the finished results.

Globalizing ‘a rage that never dies’ (but can’t stay the same): shifting dynamics of identification in the transnational remaking of Ju-On into The Grudge

ABSTRACT The Grudge was unique among transnational Japanese horror remakes due to several factors: Ju-On’s director Shimizu Takashi was retained for the Hollywood-financed version, as was its Japanese setting, even as the narrative’s protagonists were replaced with an American cast and the film’s plotlines restructured to accommodate this change. Using Iwabuchi Koichi’s notion of ‘cultural odor’ as a theoretical framework, and informed by scholarship on other J-Horror films and their transnational remakes, the explicit intentions of Ju-On/The Grudge’s producers and creators are contrasted with evidence from the texts themselves, and contextualized through an examination of critical and popular reception of the films as cross-cultural products. This investigation reveals fundamental shifts in dynamics of identification: In Ju-On the horror threat resonates with culturally proximate concerns, and the climactic sequence functions to create a circle of identification between the monster, the protagonist, and the viewer. Conversely, in The Grudge, the monster’s nature as culturally abject in relation to the central protagonist forecloses the potential for such identification, and foreignness itself becomes central to the horror affect.

Visions of Queer Anarchism: Gender, Desire, and Futurity in Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana

Modelled upon American slasher film tropes, Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (2007) is more than a transnational remake. It is a vision of a queer revolution, and imagines queer futures brought about through rural anarchy and violent eroticism. This article reads the masked killer of Zibahkhana as a monstrous queer agency armed with a queer (zombie) militia prepared to consume and transform the heteronormative matrix. Offering an unprecedented and unapologetic representation of queer aggression onscreen, Khan’s indie slasher explores queer articulations of desire and anarchy in the figure of the killer, Baby, a queer woman and a murderous cannibal. With Baby, Zibahkhana offers a queer anti-hero, the first of its kind for Pakistani cinema, that challenges normative modes of being, belonging, and desiring. Thus Zibahkhana not only offers a welcome revision of Western slasher film tropes, it blazes a trail for transgressive and incendiary portrayals of queer embodiments and intimacies in Pakistani visual media.

‘You Won’t Believe Her Eyes’: Gender politics, cultural reiteration and the cinematic other in the transnational remake from Gin gwai (The Eye) (2002) to The Eye (2008)

Abstract David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s 2008 transnational remake of the Hong Kong horror film Gin gwai (The Eye) (2002) into The Eye exemplifies an alternative cultural dynamics and gender politics in the border-crossing of cinematic texts. Moving away from the binary opposition of the original/remake and East–West analytical paradigms, this article argues that any attempt to employ cinematic transnationalism as an innovative and illuminating critical apparatus to analyse and investigate the increasingly popular global entertainment phenomenon of transnational film remakes needs to contextualize the films’ cultural discourses, gender politics and representational rhetoric within both axes of the national and the transnational. Therefore, this article adopts an alternative critical lens in transnational remake studies that recognizes both the reciprocity and the rivalry between the East Asian original and the Hollywood remake in order to tease out the contested gender politics and cultural dynamics in the re-articulation of a cinematic other. Accentuating a competitive symbiosis between Gin gwai and The Eye, this article argues that The Eye inscribes an ethnocentric feminist discourse to erase Gin gwai’s apparent patriarchal gender politics, but The Eye’s liberating feminist re-visualization only allows the American protagonist agency at the expense of her inferior Mexican other.

Copycat television? Gran Hotel/Grand Hotel (2011–13) and El hotel de los secretos/The Hotel of Secrets (2015–16)

Abstract This article examines a unique case of format translation in quality television: Mexican free-to-air broadcaster Televisa’s remake in 2015–16 of a period romance-cum-mystery series originally shown by the Spanish private network Antena 3. The article begins with an account of Copycat Television, Albert Moran’s pioneering study of transnational remakes, which defines the format not as a blueprint but as a loose and expanding set of programme possibilities, and goes on to explore tensions around genre, TV ecology and audience in both countries and series. Offering a close account of production, reception and textual detail, the article demonstrates that the Mexican version of the format is at once more politicized and more romantic than the Spanish original. Finally, both productions, broadcast as they were at a time of rapid technological change in their respective audio-visual industries, attempt to create an imaginary national harmony that is projected into the past and yet adapted to new contemporary audiences.

Remakes transnacionales: dinámicas industriales y estéticas

This article studies the industrial and aesthetic dynamics of transnational film remakes. If by «transnational remake» we understand that which «consists in making again a film in a different national context from the original one» (Berthier, 2007, p. 338), this research analyses both the production and circulation strategies and the narrative adaptation tactics involved in the remake process from a transnational perspective. In order to do so, we will examine the films ?Quien mato a Bambi? (Santi Amodeo, 2013), remake of the Mexican film Matando Cabos (Alejandro Lozano, 2004) and Kiki, love to love (Paco Leon, 2016), a version of the Australian The Little Death (Josh Lawson, 2014). These cases operate as examples of adaptation processes in the Spanish context as well as tokens of remake fluxes beyond Hollywood. Attention to these films allows us to consider the existence of a potential transnational model of producing film remakes, while attending to the complex network of agents at play in buying and selling remake rights. Finally, the article reflects on the importance of industrial and academic uses of concepts such as «auteur», «film genre» or «national cinema», all of them key categories within industrial and aesthetic dynamics of contemporary film remakes.

National cuisine and international sexuality: cultural politics and gender representation in the transnational remake from Eat Drink Man Woman to Tortilla Soup

This article investigates the cultural politics and gender discourses embedded in the transnational remake of Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) into Tortilla Soup (2002) as the latter remaps Eat Drink Man Woman’s (intra)national text, and challenges the dynamics between the national and transnational to further de-stabilize the intricate dialectics of the local and the global. Specifically, it argues that although both films focus on a dysfunctional family with a patriarchal father, Eat Drink Man Woman exploits the spatiality of a transitional Taipei and deconstructs the stereotypical Confucian father figure in its breaking away from a normative patriarchal tradition, while Tortilla Soup re-inscribes a patriarchal Latino cultural identity for the father, which must remain stabilized in a centrifugal cosmopolis of Los Angeles where national cultures have gradually given way to a cultural politics that announces the transnational and spatial as the new paradigm. In other words, while the source film’s nationalistic representation of the Chinese cuisine increasingly gravitates toward transnationality, the ostensibly transnational Tortilla Soup contextualizes patriarchy in a uniformly nationalized cultural environment. Juxtaposing these films as cinematic counterparts and cultural mirror images, this article explores their intertextuality as a critical lens to reveal the dialectics between the national and the transnational in cinematic representations.

Ringing One Missed Call: Franchising, transnational flows and genre production

Abstract Eric Valette’s 2008 remake of Miike Takashi’s 2004 J-horror film Chakushin ari / One Missed Call calls into question a simple East/West economic and contextual binary often assumed in cases of transnational remakes, regarding the purity of an original ‘exotic’ Other and the debased, impure ‘corporate’ American remake. One Missed Call cannot be so easily placed into national cinema categories when we explore the production and financial origins of the film however, given the transnational nature of the remake’s content and production. This article explores how transnational remakes engage with transnational flows of production and influence, thinking about how transnational modernity works with what Koichi Iwabuchi terms ‘cultural odor’. The article challenges the presence of an ‘original’ in the transnational franchising of the One Missed Call films, contending that Ring (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) have functioned as metatexts in both Miike’s and Valette’s versions of One Missed Call. In so doing, the article examines the characteristics of transnational media production on an economic and political basis.

The transnational remake: Crossing borders with Contraband

Abstract This short subject compares the Hollywood action film Contraband (2012) by Kormákur and the Icelandic ‘original’ Reykjavík Rotterdam (2008) by Jónasson, leading to a critical reassessment of remakes and the perceived differences between Hollywood and Icelandic cinema.