Search Results

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.

Film remakes are often dismissed within critical discourse as unoriginal, derivative and inferior to their source texts, yet this mode of critique takes on additional layers of meaning when films are remade transnationally as this process raises further issues surrounding national and/or ethnic identity and questions of cultural power. In order to investigate these kinds of complexities, this chapter focuses its attention on the phenomenon of transnational film remakes and the wider social and cultural issues that they raise. What happens when a film is remade in another national context? To what extent can a film embedded within one cultural context be adapted for another? How might a transnational perspective offer us a deeper understanding of a specific socio-political context, and of the politics underpinning film remaking more generally? Given the increasing emphasis on reworking existing material within global film (and screen) culture, there is a pressing need for scholarship to address this phenomenon in a rigorous and systematic way.

This chapter examines the scale of the national used to occupy the central attention in film studies and argues that the resulting myth of a unified national cinema in a given nation-state must be demystified. It first reconceptualizes Chinese cinema in relation to the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies in both the theoretical and historical contexts. It then considers interdisciplinarity in Chinese film studies in the West and how it benefits audience study, along with the thorny issues of piracy and cross-mediality. It also discusses film studies from a different perspective than transnationalism and speculates on what might be gained from comparative film studies, arguing that it is a subfield larger than transnational film studies. The chapter urges scholars to move beyond the national cinema paradigm and to explore the transnational and comparative frameworks of film studies.

The introduction introduces the scope and approach of this book. It underscores the significance of a genealogical method that adequately accounts for the co-production as a “technology of production,” one that negotiates an assemblage of production scales, fissured marketplaces, and relational locations, imaginaries, and media capitals in East Asia.

This chapter examines the concept of transnationalism in contemporary Japanese cinema. The term “transnational cinema” has been posed as a substitute for “national cinema,” which has long been criticized for various reasons. While nationalism has been repeatedly invented in popular culture, national borders have become increasingly permeable. Global exchanges have noticeably accelerated with the development of communication technologies. In the case of film studies, the expansion of multinational finance and the diversified distribution beyond theatrical release has put the present framework of national cinema in a tenuous position. This chapter tackles the issue of the paradigm shift on the levels both of the critical discourses regarding Chinese-language and Nordic cinemas and the film texts, with particular emphasis on contemporary transnational films from the East Asian region. It also discusses global localization or glocalization as exemplified by the film Initial D. Finally, it considers what benefit, if any, the framework of transnational cinema brings us over that of national cinema through an analysis of the Japanese film, The Hotel Venus (2004, Takahata Hideta).

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.

Chapter four explores the contexts and practices through which Japanese independent and culture industry projects produced Tokyo as the central media capital through which to “conduct” or “organize” Asian film and media production from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions between consolidation and difference are evident in their efforts toward producing a more “locally” inclusive, yet convergent “Asian” film and media.

This chapter argues that Home Sweet Home’s central concern is the politics, both aesthetic and ideological, of depicting migration within a narrative film. More specifically, this film presents the official state position that the Chinese Nationalist Party held regarding students from Taiwan who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This claim is based on the film’s release by a state studio, CMPC, under state supervision and censorship, in order to further the state’s ideological project through visual media. In order to shed light on the nuances and inflections of Home Sweet Home, and frame it within a wider context, this chapter also discusses two contemporary films that represent migration on the global stage: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de …, 1966). Common features in these films include exquisite cinematic imagery juxtaposed with complex protagonists who create a space for individuality and expressions of subjectivity. Close readings of these three films help illuminate the ways that Bai Jingrui’s aesthetic choices work both in conjunction and disjunction with the intentions of the Taiwan government in 1970.

The introduction situates this study in the context of the two principal fields of enquiry with which it intersects, namely scholarship on the representation of the family in (predominantly Hollywood) cinema and the rapidly growing body of work on transnational cinema, more generally, and diasporic European cinema, in particular. The overarching argument of the book, which is outlined in the Introduction, is that the diasporic family on screen crystallises the emotionally ambivalent response to growing cultural diversity in Western societies. Constructed as Other on account of their ethnicity, language and religion, diasporic families are perceived as a threat to the social cohesion of Western host societies. At the same time, many diasporic family films reflect a nostalgic longing for the traditional family, imagined in terms of extended kinship ties and superior family values.

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1897, the character of Count Dracula has proven to be eminently adaptable, appearing in various guises in over 300 feature films – from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) through to Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012). As with other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Dracula has been freed from his roots in a source text and entered what Will Brooker describes as ‘the realm of the icon’. Yet, while there has been a considerable amount of scholarship on the canonical adaptations of Dracula produced in Hollywood, the UK and Germany, very little has been written on the numerous adaptations of the Count Dracula character that have appeared in other film industries. This chapter considers examples of transnational film remakes, including the 1953 Turkish film Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in Istanbul), the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro (The Vampire), and the 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). Paying close attention to the variety of ways in which the character is utilised across different cultural contexts, this chapter interrogates the complex issues that this raises in relation to the dynamic interplay of global and local within international popular cinema.

In recent decades, Austrian director and screenwriter Michael Haneke has become internationally known for disturbing and often brutal films that seek to undermine viewers’ expectations while holding them guilty for the crimes playing out on-screen. When Haneke’s German-language Funny Games premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, it shocked and polarised the film critical community. Yet Haneke has frequently pronounced that he had wanted to address an entirely different – an American – audience. He claims this to be the reason why he eventually decided to direct the almost shot-for-shot transnational film remake, Funny Games (USA, 2007). This chapter extends the idea that Funny Games is founded on the programmatic subversion of conventions and ingrained viewing habits to the mechanisms of cross-cultural remaking. Against the common allegation that US remakes of foreign films are a form of cultural imperialism, Haneke actually uses a Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) in order to have a wider distribution and to position his auto-remake within American entertainment culture. At the same time, he does not adapt Funny Games to an American cultural context but places virtually the same film into a culturally different environment.

This chapter studies how, amongst the significant trends emerging in French cinema in recent years, there has been a concerted desire by some film-makers to produce more transnational films inspired by the globalisation of culture and the representation of intercultural issues. Le Grand voyage (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2004) illustrates this trend and presents a specific manifestation of what it means to grow up in a multicultural context in French society today, namely the experience of second-generation young adolescents born and/or brought up in France whose parents came from North African countries. The film combines an unusual production history with surprising critical and public success, an aspect which facilitated its international distribution. What makes Le Grand voyage original is the way in which it veers away from the usual themes associated with 'beur cinema' in France from the 1980s as well as from the social problems identified in the films of the 1990s set in the 'banlieue' (suburbs), to focus instead on the notion of a journey of Self-discovery. The chapter then investigates a number of intercultural 'journeys' that the film engages with, those which inform the multicultural representation of contemporary France.

Chapter five investigates the valences and uses of “scale” and “place” through which regional co-productions have been predominantly billed from the turn of the millennium, as they negotiate the imperatives of “working through China” as an untapped market, seemingly unlimited production resource, and desired shooting location for Asian production.

Chapter three addresses so-called Sino-Japanese Friendship co-productions in relation to their production of “technological presence.” First initiated in Japan’s postwar reengagement with the PRC in the early 1970s, I explicate the ways in which these co-productions’ terms for overcoming a recent geopolitical past were aligned with the possibilities of new developments in film and media technologies.

Millions of movie lovers around the world have experienced a range of emotions upon viewing Albert Lamorrise’s 1956 French classic Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon). Many adulatory responses have been triggered but perhaps none other more clearly than Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon, France-Taiwan, 2007). Although lacking the fantastical interludes of the earlier film and filled with fewer flaneurial excursions through the alleyways of Paris, Hou’s feature-length work is no less compelling as a series of quotidian scenes concerning the interwoven themes of companionship, loneliness, memory, nostalgia, and the restorative power of art. Drawing upon phenomenological and memory-based studies of intercultural cinema, this chapter explores the relationship between recollections, references, and transnational film remakes, ultimately aiming to transnationalise (or “uproot”) nostalgia and show how twenty-first century cinephilia performs a similar cultural function to the remaking process.

Transnational film remakes present a variety of complicating issues – of geography, culture, translation, and temporality, among others. Directors have remade their own films, sometimes quite directly, other times by shifting genre, but the case of a director moving from one national situation to another and remaking an earlier film is rare. What makes such an auto-remake particularly interesting is that it calls into question issues of authorship. This chapter will look at the case of Nakahira Ko who made the influential Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit,1956) and later in his career remade the film (under the Chinese pseudonym Yang Shu-hsi) as Kuang lian shi (Summer Heat, 1968). The case of Crazed Fruit and its transformation into Summer Heat is interesting, partly due to the stature of the Japanese original and also due to some of the more obvious transformations, such as from Ishihara Yujiro in the original to a more generic male star in the remake. More significantly, while Crazed Fruit was part of a cycle of Japanese films examining post-war disaffected youth, the Hong Kong remake is far less implicated in a cultural moment.

Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) achieved only moderate success on its initial release in South Korea, but upon finding international distribution it attained much greater notoriety, winning a major prize at Cannes and attracting an unusually passionate and positive critical consensus. This chapter examines Spike Lee’s 2013 transnational film remake in terms of its critical reception, and the way in which the ‘reinterpretation’ was framed by its director in press interviews and public discourse. The chapter analyses how Lee attempted to escape the negative connotations of the ‘remake’ and brand his film as another entry in his own auteurist canon, despite the sceptical response from critics. This chapter further analyses the reception of the film in terms of the ways critics address the spectacle of violence, notions of taste, and the assumed cultural differences between American and South Korean audiences. Lee’s Oldboy thus offers the opportunity not only to examine the transformation of material from one director to another, but to interrogate broader debates over the intersection of the auteur as symbol/brand and the imagined (lack of) creative freedom afforded directors of remakes.