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9063 results in Film

Page 207 of 454

  • 7 - Translating Cool: Cinematic Exchange between Hong Kong, Hollywood and Bollywood

  • from PART II - GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 118-129

  • Summary

    When the heist goes terribly wrong, the gangsters suspect a mole within their midst. Who else could have alerted the police about their robbery but a cop masquerading as a criminal? The newest member of the posse comes under suspicion. But the expectation that the jig is up makes all the gangsters turn on each other. This denouement concludes Sanjay Gupta's Kaante (2002), an unabashed re-creation of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), which closes with the familiar Mexican stand-off as well. Although there are some differences between them, Gupta's is clearly a replication of Tarantino's film. We might even think of Kaante as a good example of what Thomas Leitch calls a ‘true’ remake, as it reproduces its source so closely that it both invokes and disowns it completely. One might argue that Kaante imitates Reservoir Dogs too well, seeking ‘to annihilate the model’ by ‘eliminat[ing] any need or desire to see the film [it] seek[s] to replace’ (Leitch 2002: 50). In the process, Kaante establishes Bollywood on the global screen by replicating and then outdoing Reservoir Dogs in Los Angeles itself.

    But to truly understand the relationship between Kaante and Reservoir Dogs, we must first acknowledge that Gupta's twice-told tale is actually a thrice-told tale, because, as is now well known, Tarantino's film is itself a mostly true remake of Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987), which ends with a similar Mexican stand-off. Both Tarantino and Gupta have engaged overtly in the kind of avowal and disavowal that Leitch considers central to true remakes. When asked about its source text, Gupta does not deny Tarantino's influence, but then swiftly undercuts that claim by arguing that Kaante is ‘in the genre of films like Reservoir Dogs, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, City on Fire … [and] not a remake of any one film’ (quoted in Desser 2005: 221). Gupta, however, does not fail to remind us that Reservoir Dogs is itself a remake of City on Fire. Ironically, early reviewers of Tarantino's film didn't immediately notice that connection. When asked later by his biographer about Lam's influence, Tarantino admits his admiration for City on Fire, even acknowledges that ‘it's a great movie’, but then undermines that singular inspiration by professing a penchant for ‘steal[ing] from every single movie ever made’ (quoted in Dawson 1995: 91).

  • 7 - Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria

  • Stefanie Van de Peer, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    Negotiating Dissidence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 194-224

  • Summary

    Hala Alabdallah Yakoub has been the pivotal element that has held together some of the most important film-makers from the Arab world. She has assisted, co-directed, authored and produced several of the first independent or co-produced films from Syria, by Mohammad Malas, Usama Mohammad and Omar Amiralay. This triumvirate is often written about, their films often appear at Syrian film events, and in most academic discussions on Syrian film-making history theirs are the defining films when it comes to discussing dissident film-making under the Ba'ath Party. They knew each other, filmed one another, and collaborated on projects both in Syria and in exile. While their work is of huge importance for the historiography of Syrian cinema, both in fiction and in documentary films, it is equally important to look in more detail at the woman who inspired them, spurred them on and supported them in various roles behind the scenes. Feature-length fiction films by women are non-existent in Syria, and this pioneering woman of Syrian documentary only made her own first film in 2006, in exile. It is, perhaps surprisingly, mostly in documentary (and animation and other experimental genres) that women have been able to create a platform for themselves in Syrian cinema. This chapter looks at the artistic and specifically the poetic representation of a difficult, traumatic reality in Syria. Hala Alabdallah Yakoub's small filmography shows that negotiations with dissidence and political repression take shape on many different levels, including an experimental and subjective approach to her subjects and a strong belief in the power of art to deal with pain, fear and oppression.

    Hala Alabdallah Yakoub was born in Hama in 1956. She studied agricultural engineering in Damascus, and was a fervent member of the local cine club. This is where she realised the power of cinema as she watched Malas’ first films. She married artist Youssef Abdelké and became part of one of the many leftist organisations in Damascus. They were imprisoned for their activities, alongside some of her best friends. When they left prison fourteen months later, they decided to move to Beirut, later moving on to Paris, where they settled and continue to live.

  • 1 - Disrupting the Remake: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

  • from PART I - GENRES AND TRADITIONS
    • By Lucy Mazdon, Chair in Film Studies at the University of Southampton
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 21-35

  • Summary

    A key feature of the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century has been the global success of so-called ‘Nordic Noir’. Indeed, it was this very global success which led both to the ‘foreignising’ remake which this chapter will discuss and to the controversy it provoked. In the words of the website which is devoted to and named after the genre and which organises London's annual ‘Nordicana’ festival, ‘With its roots in the ground-breaking TV dramas The Killing, Borgen, Wallander and The Bridge, Nordic Noir has become a genre in its own right, influencing screenwriters far beyond the Scandinavian Peninsula’ (Nordic Noir and Beyond n.d.). While to non-Scandinavian eyes this wealth of successful crime fiction might seem like a new phenomenon, this is far from true. As Kerstin Bergman illustrates in her overview of Swedish crime fiction (2014), the Scandinavian countries, in particular Sweden, have a long and fascinating tradition of crime literature. Crime novels have attracted large domestic readerships since the early twentieth century. However, it was the growing awareness of social injustice and political corruption in Sweden of the 1960s and the increasing politicisation of intellectual and public spheres which arguably led to a form of crime fiction (Bergman 2014: 21), the police procedural featuring a critique of wider social issues, which would dominate for years to come, notably in the form of the so-called ‘Nordic Noir’. At the forefront of this sub-genre were the husband and wife writing pair, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. From 1965 to 1975 Sjowall and Wahloo published a series of novels, beginning with Roseanna (1965) and ending with Terroristerna (1975), all featuring Inspector Martin Beck. Set in contemporary Stockholm, the novels feature both physical and psychological realism embodied in the thoughtful but flawed central figure of Beck. As Bergman points out, what really made these novels stand out from their predecessors, and what made them so influential in terms of the ongoing development of the genre, was their ‘conscious inclusion of a critical perspective on Swedish society’, their politicisation of the police procedural genre (22).

    Despite this long and extremely rich history, it was not until Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy that Scandinavian, or more precisely Swedish, crime fiction achieved true global prominence.

  • 6 - Transformation and Glamour in the Cross-Cultural Makeover: Return to Eden, Khoon Bhari Maang and the Avenging Woman in Popular Hindi Cinema

  • from PART II - GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 103-117

  • Summary

    The popular Hindi film Khoon Bhari Maang (Blood-Smeared Forehead, Rakesh Roshan, 1988) is an unofficial remake of Return to Eden, an Australian television mini-series broadcast in 1983. An exemplary masala, Khoon Bhari Maang displays how Bombay filmmakers adapt foreign material for local audiences and ‘consciously heighten and intensify the differences between their films and the “originals”’ by expanding the narrative – adding back-story and a comic sub-plot – and inserting half a dozen song-dance sequences (Ganti 2002: 296, 290). The implantation of Indian values also plays a part in this process: Sheila Nayar has suggested that the Hindi remake inevitably reflects how popular cinema is ‘heavily circumscribed by the expectations and demands of its audience’, observing that characters and relationships – and particularly family and gender roles – are ‘rewritten to satisfy a culturally distinct ethos’ (2003: 74, 75). In this chapter I focus on the representation of femininity in Khoon Bhari Maang to explore how this Hindi remake repurposes foreign material – in this instance, Australian rather than American – and transforms the original text into a traditional popular film format, but so as to challenge rather than endorse dominant cultural ideology.

    As Iain Robert Smith has recently proposed, contemporary Bollywood remakes ‘should not be seen as resulting from a simple process of “Indianisation” but as transnational cultural exchanges in which globally circulating media forms interact with local narrative traditions and industries’ (2015: 118). Produced in the 1980s, Khoon Bhari Maang is an example of a transnational and trans-media adaptation that anticipates the more recent developments Smith identifies as characteristic of popular Hindi cinema in the global era. This chapter will address how film remakes, as Robert Stam has suggested of novel-to-screen adaptations, ‘can take an activist stance toward their source, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism’ (2000: 64) and even ‘de-repress’ their ‘latent feminist spirit’ (2005: 42). I shall discuss the global dialogism of the Australian source text and the local dialogism of the Indian remake, which complicate the central relationship between the mini-series and the film. Firstly, to refer back to Smith's terms, the ‘transnational cultural exchanges’ here precede the ‘Indianisation’ of the Australian mini-series since Return to Eden was itself a self-conscious emulation of the melodramatic style of US prime-time soap operas, and in particular Dynasty (ABC, 1981–9), and was subsequently extremely popular with both local and international audiences, and especially women.

  • 9 - A Tale of Two Balloons: Intercultural Cinema and Transnational Nostalgia in Le voyage du ballon rouge

  • from PART III - AUTEURS AND CRITICS
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 147-163

  • Summary

    Intercultural cinema moves through space, gathering up histories and memories that are lost or covered over in the movement of displacement, and producing new knowledges out of the condition of being between cultures.

    (Marks 2000: 78)

    A brief, seemingly inconsequential encounter between two anthropomorphised objects – one red, the other blue – occurs in Albert Lamorrise's Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon, 1956). That meeting, which has generally been overlooked by critics writing about this French classic of pre-New Wave cinema, occurs after the mid-point of the narrative, in the moments leading up to the film's initially tragic, eventually transcendent, ending. The camera, which has been tracking the street-to-street wanderings of a Parisian schoolboy named Pascal (who has befriended an inquisitive, mischievous balloon), suddenly pans from left to right to pick up the movement of a young girl and her own magically endowed balloon as they pass by the protagonist going in the opposite direction. Pascal turns on his feet and sees that his helium-filled companion has momentarily left him, drifting towards the other balloon much like it had sidled up to its own mirror-reflected image in an earlier scene set in an outdoor antiques market. The boy quickly fetches the red balloon by its string, an action that recalls his first encounter with it (climbing a streetlamp where it was stuck and descending with the thing in tow). Separated from its new ‘friend’, the girl's blue balloon pursues the red one, a paradoxically animated inanimate object whose mysterious driftings through Paris have thus far gone unexplained. Repeating Pascal's earlier action, the girl chases after her balloon, retrieving it and whisking it away, never to be seen again.

    This strange convergence, where red and blue, boy and girl, action and reaction, come together in the calm interlude that precedes the film's penultimate scene (showing the titular object being chased and eventually destroyed by a gang of street urchins), stands out for a number of reasons. In addition to suggesting a ‘shadow movie’ of sorts, one that follows not the young boy and his red balloon but rather the young girl and her blue balloon (an alternative story tucked away in the folds of Lamorrise's film, one whose outcome can only be imagined by the spectator), this encounter materialises an otherwise immaterial idea.

  • 4 - ‘For the Dead Travel Fast’: The Transnational Afterlives of Dracula

  • from PART I - GENRES AND TRADITIONS
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 66-84

  • Summary

    As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's ‘Lenore’. ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell’. (‘For the dead travel fast’.)

    (Stoker 1997: 17)

    In the opening chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker recounts his travels via Budapest and the northern Romanian town of Bistritz towards the castle of Count Dracula. He has been instructed to join a coach to the Borgo Pass where a driver and carriage will be waiting to take him on to the castle. In the scene quoted above, Harker meets the mysterious driver who he discovers has very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, and he overhears one of his travel companions whispering ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell’ (‘For the dead travel fast’). As Harker himself notes, these words reference the gothic poem ‘Lenore’ by the German author Gottfried August Burger, in which the eponymous heroine rides swiftly through the night on horseback accompanied by a stranger who looks exactly like her recently dead fiance William. This reference to that earlier gothic text is, of course, a hint at the vampiric status of the coach driver, but the quotation also resonates with the broader theme of travel and cultural encounter that runs throughout the novel. On the very first page, Harker reflects that ‘The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East’ (1997: 10), and that his travels were taking him ‘among the traditions of Turkish rule’ (1997: 10). The novel then repeatedly returns to this motif of travel in which Harker is venturing into an orientalised East, and it is notable that Dracula's later travels to London represent something of an inversion of this colonialist narrative, where it is now Dracula who is entering the West. The vampire figure, in Stoker's text and beyond, is positioned as a traveller – a threatening Other – who can transgress both physical and geographical borders, and it is important to note that this exploration of alterity was initially very much tied to its origins in late Victorian Britain.

  • 5 - Mai Masri: Mothering Film-makers in Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema

  • Stefanie Van de Peer, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    Negotiating Dissidence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 140-167

  • Summary

    Mai Masri was born to an American mother and Palestinian father in 1959 in Amman, in Jordan. She grew up in Amman, Algiers, Nablus and Beirut, and studied film in San Francisco, graduating in 1981. When she lived in Beirut, she was part of the student movement and was very interested in politics. She said: ‘I got the idea to study film because I thought film could be a medium that would combine several of my interests: as a Palestinian exposed to social events and politics, meeting people, the arts, travel, research. I wanted so desperately to escape boredom and normality’ (Hillauer, 2005: 224). In 1977, she met Jean Chamoun, a Lebanese film-maker, who, in 1986, became her husband. They founded Nour Productions and have co-directed documentaries for international TV channels such as the BBC, Channel 4, PBS and Al Jazeera Documentaries. They started to make films together during the siege of Beirut in 1982, but decided early on they would not make ‘classical documentaries’ (Hillauer, 2005: 225). Instead, they were committed to witnessing and testifying through documentaries without preconceived plans, ‘because people have short memories’. Mai Masri says about her film style that she likes to pay attention to details, which is reflected in her fondness for close-ups, faces and hands. From her first films Under the Rubble (1983) and War Generation (1989) onwards, she has focused on children and the influence of continued warfare on their psyches and bodies.

    This chapter focuses on how Palestinian documentary film-makers in general, and women in particular, look at and ‘use’ Palestinian children. The constant question of whether a nation consists of people and land, or people or land, and the overwhelmingly young demographic of this nation is central to this. ‘More than half the population living in the territory administered by the Palestinian National Authority since the signing of the Oslo Treaty are under sixteen years of age’ (Hillauer, 2005: 197). Young people and children are central to the political and cultural identity of Palestine, and Palestinian cinema. As a continuation of Gertz's and Khleifi's work for Palestinian cinema, this chapter intimately links landscape to the child's body, while it investigates how trauma and memory manifest themselves in the representations of Palestinian children in documentary.

  • 5 - The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou's A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

  • from PART II - GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
    • By Kenneth Chan, Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 87-102

  • Summary

    The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. In an era of relative cultural and political ‘openness’ after the Cultural Revolution, and during and after Deng Xiaoping's leadership in the People's Republic of China, a number of the Fifth and Sixth Generation graduates from the Beijing Film Academy have become celebrity fixtures in the international film-festival circuit, with more iconic directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke entering the global cinematic mainstream. These filmmakers have joined their Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Asian American counterparts – the likes of Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Johnnie To, Stanley Kwan, Peter Chan, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu and Wayne Wang – in generating a substantive body of work that constitutes a discursive Chinese cinematic presence in the global film histories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This Chinese cinematic presence seeps across national boundaries, as it rides transnational capitalist media flows, to permeate regional, diasporic and global networks. One could even go so far as to say, as Chris Berry does, that ‘it is precisely because the transnational is a world order that it plays a role in shaping all Chinese film-making activities today’ (2011: 15), producing both a material phenomenon and a critical perspective that Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has earlier classified as ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ (1997). It is within this context that I locate this chapter's examination of transnational Chinese cinematic remaking and, specifically, its critical analysis of Zhang Yimou's 2009 remake of the Coen Brothers’ feature film debut Blood Simple (1984) as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.

    Scholars of film remakes have rightly problematised the linear and hierarchical cultural relationship between an ‘original’ filmic source and its cinematic remake. Constantine Verevis, for example, questions how ‘textual accounts of remaking risk essentialism, in many instances privileging the “original” over the remake or measuring the success of the remake according to its ability to realise what are taken to be the essential elements of a source text – the property – from which both the original and its remake are derived’ (2006: 2). The complexity of this source–remake relation is further compounded in the case of cross-cultural remaking when one considers the cultural, economic and political power dynamics of filmic appropriation, reconfiguration and representation that such cross-cultural interaction demands.

Negotiating Dissidence
  • The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary
  • Stefanie Van de Peer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017
  • In spite of harsh censorship, conservative morals and a lack of investment, women documentarists in the Arab world have found ways to subtly negotiate dissidence in their films, something that is becoming more apparent since the ‘Arab Revolutions’. In this book, Stefanie Van de Peer traces the very beginnings of Arab women making documentaries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the 1970s and 1980s in Egypt and Lebanon, to the 1990s and 2000s in Morocco and Syria.

    Supporting a historical overview of the documentary form in the Arab world with a series of in-depth case studies, Van de Peer looks at the work of pioneering figures like Ateyyat El Abnoudy, the ‘mother of Egyptian documentary’, Tunisia’s Selma Baccar and the Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri. Addressing the context of the films’ production, distribution and exhibition, the book also asks why these women held on to the ideals of a type of filmmaking that was unlikely to be accepted by the censor, and looks at precisely how the women documentarists managed to frame expressions of dissent with the tools available to the documentary maker.

  • Introduction

  • Stefanie Van de Peer, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    Negotiating Dissidence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 1-27

  • Summary

    Film-making in the Arab world is often a matter of idealism and activism, especially for women making documentaries. In spite of many practical and ideological difficulties, women have found ways to supply and subtly negotiate dissidence into their films. As a result, all films in this book – whether they are experimental, essayistic or poetic – are political in nature. I trace the histories of women making documentaries in the Mediterranean Arab world, and the inspirational political and cultural statements these pioneers made for their subjects, their spectators and the documentary-making women who followed in their footsteps.

    Pioneers are not always necessarily the first: they are the most significant or most influential examples for those who came later. The time frame with which this book is concerned overs an almost a fifty-year period, spanning the early 1970s until the 2010s, and the documentary form has, at several points in this half century in the Arab world (and elsewhere), been contested, problematised and censored. Likewise, the positions of women in the societies under discussion have fluctuated markedly, from relative freedom to increased oppression or vice versa. It is therefore necessary to look at national circumstances as well as transnational developments in women's status and in film-making practices in the Arab world. To make matters even more complex, the term ‘Arab’ poses problems, in general and in this book, as we look here at countries in the Middle East and North Africa, not all wholly Arab, while one of the filmmakers is in fact Jewish.

    In this book I discuss seven pioneering women documentary makers: in chronological order I look at Ateyyat El Abnoudy from Egypt, Jocelyne Saab from Lebanon, Tunisian Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar from Algeria, Palestinian Mai Masri, Moroccan Izza Génini and Hala Alabdallah Yakoub from Syria. I call these women ‘pioneers’ for several reasons, most effectively illustrated perhaps with concrete examples. For instance, while Izza Génini was not the first documentary maker in Morocco historically (Farida Bourquia was, but Bourquia focused on TV documentaries), she has a consistent style and thematic preoccupation, as she looks at heritage, women, diversity and music in a filmography of more than twenty films.

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp viii-x

  • Summary

    General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

    Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

Transnational Film Remakes
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, Constantine Verevis
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017
  • What happens when a film is remade in another national context? How do notions of translation, adaptation and localisation help us understand the cultural dynamics of these shifts, and in what ways does a transnational perspective offer us a deeper understanding of film remaking? Bringing together a range of international scholars, Transnational Film Remakes is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. Using a variety of case studies, from Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book provides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address the truly global nature of this phenomenon. Looking at iconic contemporary titles such as 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' and 'Oldboy', as well as classics like 'La Bête Humaine and La Chienne', this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.

  • 3 - Selma Baccar: Non-fiction in Tunisia, the Land of Fictions

  • Stefanie Van de Peer, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    Negotiating Dissidence
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 83-109

  • Summary

    Tunisian Selma Baccar challenges the form of documentary film. The country has a solid reputation in film with its Golden Age in the late 1980s and 1990s, but due to censorship and restrictive and divisive official life, Tunisian film-makers usually remain in fictional territory. This chapter focuses on Baccar's first and most important feature-length film Fatma 75: a feminist essay film about women's roles in Tunisia throughout history. She has since also made Habiba M'Sika, a biopic of a Jewish singer who was immensely popular in the 1930s in Tunis, and Khochkhach, part biography, part fictional retelling of the life and times of Baccar's aunts. Between the main women film-makers in the country such as Moufida Tlatli, Nejia Ben Mabrouk and Raja Amari, Baccar was the first, and she remains the only one, experimenting with aspects of the non-fiction form. In her films she deals with extraordinary women whose voices are dominant and self-assured, as their looks and intersubjective relationship with the film-maker and spectator establish a feminist complicity and solidarity.

    Tunisia, known as the land of fictions, has struggled with serious censorship issues. Post-colonial cinema in Tunisia is known throughout the world for popular films like Férid Boughédir's Halfaouine, Nouri Bouzid's Bezness, and Moufida Tlatli's Les Silences du Palais from the so-called Golden Age in the 1990s. It has become known as a cinema that deals with women's sensuality and the magic and beauty of the old Tunis: palaces and labyrinthine medinas feature prominently as settings that determine the plot lines. In many historians’ eyes, such as Hedi Khelil and Férid Boughédir, Tunisian cinema is a cinema of the mythical feminine. Khelil calls Tunisian cinema ‘le cinéma au féminin’. Nevertheless, there is a much more problematic gendered spatiality going on in Tunisian cinema than most commentators care to illustrate. The identity politics in Golden Age films foreground women as the bearers of the nation's troubles, while Tunisia's liberal and democratic status in the Arab world denies even the existence of any troubles. Boughédir acknowledges that ‘the image of the family is at the heart of Tunisian cinema: the family is often the microcosm that represents the nation, and the generations that live together are therefore the representation of the schism between tradition and modernity’ (Gabous, 1998: 174).

  • 13 - The Transnational Film Remake in the American Press

  • from PART III - AUTEURS AND CRITICS
    • By Daniel Herbert, Associate Professor in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan.
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 210-223

  • Summary

    One need not look very hard to find someone denigrating Hollywood remakes of so-called ‘foreign’ films. In addition to a list of examples on a Wikipedia page, a quick Google search for ‘Hollywood remakes of foreign films’ will turn up: an article in Paste magazine entitled ‘10 Great Foreign Films with Horrible U.S. Remakes’ (Ryan 2014), a piece in Flavorwire called ‘10 Terrible Remakes of Great Foreign Films’ (Bailey 2014), and an article on Cheatsheet.com entitled ‘8 Great Foreign Films Remade Into American Movie Failures’ (Arnold 2015). In addition to such clickbait, one can find similar sentiments expressed in any number of film reviews appearing in established print publications. For instance, one critic wrote ‘Most Hollywood remakes of foreign films screw things up by dumbing things down’, in a review of Let Me In (2008), which he praises for being untypical in this regard (Lumenick 2010: 35). Another critic titled his review of Vanilla Sky (2001) ‘Open to Interpretation: Hollywood Versions of Foreign Films Rarely Live Up to the Originals’ (Fine 2001: F16). And lest anyone think this is strictly a contemporary phenomenon, an article from 1936 was entitled ‘Many Films from Europe Remade Here: Hollywood Versions Usually Inferior, Declare Critics’ (Scheuer 1936: C1). The author lists nearly a dozen examples of such remakes, and says of them, ‘Something – charm, lightness, power, what-not – is generally lost in transit’ (Scheuer 1936: C1).

    Nothing about this discourse should be surprising, especially to those who have studied transnational film remakes with any seriousness. Indeed, some of the scholarship about transnational remakes has aimed, explicitly or otherwise, to move beyond the evaluative and comparatively simplistic discussions of such films that appear in mainstream film reviews. Lucy Mazdon, for instance, begins her extraordinary study of Hollywood remakes of French films by indicating how film critics in England and France have dismissed film remakes in general, and Hollywood remakes of French films in particular, as commercially driven ‘“pap”’, and promises that her book will provide a richer, adequately complex account of the phenomenon (2000: 2). Likewise, in my essay about Abre los Ojos (1997) and Vanilla Sky I cite a review by critic Kenneth Turan as characteristically dismissive of Hollywood remakes of foreign films.

  • 10 - ‘Crazed Heat’: Nakahira Ko and the Transnational Self-remake

  • from PART III - AUTEURS AND CRITICS
    • By David Desser, Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies, University of Illinois.
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 164-176

  • Summary

    We might think of remakes as taking place along four axes. The two most familiar of these would be the remake within national circumstances, as for instance with Hollywood often remaking earlier American films, or the transnational remake, again with Hollywood frequently remaking foreign films. This is not to say that other cinemas do not remake their own films (Hong Kong is particularly prone to this), or that we cannot find transnational remakes across other national cinemas, for example from Korea to Japan, or to Bollywood from Hong Kong, and so on. Another, somewhat familiar, axis would be instances of directors remaking their own film within the same broad national context. These are cases that move beyond the typical auteur who persistently works in the same idiom or with the same motifs. Of course, remaking one's own film is an attractive option for directors who do, in fact, continually rework their own devices. Howard Hawks, for instance, certainly was one who was given to authorial repetitions. Still, there is the clear remake Ball of Fire (1941) into A Song Is Born (1948). Raoul Walsh undertook The Strawberry Blonde in 1941 and turned it back into One Sunday Afternoon in 1948 (the name of the original film version done in 1933 by Stephen Roberts). John Ford, another powerful auteur given to repetitions and variations, more closely remade, say, his Judge Priest (1934) into The Sun Shines Bright (1953). And then there are surely the least familiar, and certainly the least studied (if perhaps because the most rare), instances of directors remaking their own films in different national contexts. We could point to Denmark's Ole Bornedal, who remade his Danish original Nattevagten (1994) into the American Nightwatch in 1997. Shimizu Takashi made Ju-On (aka Ju-On: The Grudge) in 2002; in 2004 he was tempted by Hollywood into remaking his own film, again in Japan but with an American cast, as The Grudge.

    Each type of remake, as I have encapsulated them here, involves changes in both text and context. Even the auteur directors who remade their own films do not stand outside this duad. In the case of the Hawks and Walsh films mentioned above, the context shifts from pre-war to post-war; another context is genre – the shift from comedy to musical; another is aesthetic in the shift from black-and-white to colour.

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