The Concept of Film Remaking - Essay Example

?Film Remakes As society becomes progressively more comfortable with the immediacy and ready availability of commoditized visual entertainment (Blatt 2005, p.384), contemporary filmmakers are becoming inclined towards recycling source material for their films to meet the demand. Film remaking is both an elastic concept and complex situation especially because the interrelated roles and practices of the industry, critics, and audiences both enable and limit it, thus, to try and understand film remakes, it has been broken down into three major tiers. The first tier deals with remaking as industrial category (Verevis 2006, p.3), which entails issues such as production, including commerce and authors; the second tier is remaking as textual category, and it deals with the genre, plots, and structures. The third and final tier is that of remaking as critical category, which investigates issues of reception, including audiences and institutions; the film remake emerges as a case of repetition, a function of the cinematic discursive fields that is maintained by specific practices in history. For instance, some of the historical practices that actively maintain the concept of film remakes include but are not limited to things such as copyright law and authorship, canon formation and media literacy, in addition to film criticism and reviewing. In that case, the concept of film remaking is a common feature in the history of cinema and it entails a number of technological, textual, and cultural practices; however, film remake has since then been maintained as a separate phenomenon, yet connected. This paper seeks to address some of the crucial pertinent issues surrounding the concept of remaking, while trying to explore a broad theoretical approach that provides both an understanding of the concept of cinematic remaking, and individual film remakes in the contemporary times. Introduction For many years, the cinema has been repeating and replaying its own narratives and genres from the beginnings of time yet film remaking has hardly received any critical attention worth noticing especially because most of the pertinent questions surrounding this concept remain unexplored in film studies. For instance, some of the questions that have seldom been asked in film studies concern what film remaking really is, which films that are remakes of other films, how film remaking differs from other types of repetition such a quotation allusion, and adaptation, in addition to, the relationship between remakes and other commercial forms such as sequels, cycles, and series. Apart from these, other pertinent questions that need to be explored in film studies regarding film remakes concern how film remaking differs from the cinema’s more general ability to repeat and replay the same film as many times as possible through re-issue and redistribution. Additionally, film studies might also want to consider the interesting question of how film remaking differs from the way every film is remade- dispersed and transformed- in its varied contexts and reviewing; these and much more are some of the crucial questions that are hardly asked and answered in film studies. There exists several accounts of cinematic remaking, and most of them have provided different versions of definitions of film remakes, as new versions of existing films, and as films that to some substantial degree strike as being related to either one or several previous movies. Film remaking is not just about the simplistic cultural knowledge of the existence of, and nature of film remakes because when understood alongside the much broader concept of intertextuality, it can refer to the never-ending and fluid possibilities given forth by the discursive practices of a film culture. Ideally, the remake is distinguished not by the fact of its being a repetition, but by the fact of its being a typical institutional form of the structure of repetition…the citationality or iterability, that exists in and for every film” (Verevis 2006, p.1). Just like in the case of the genre, another fundamental problem that bedevils film remaking emerges from the traditional desire for a stable and easily definable set of analytical objectives, and the related attempt to reduce film remaking to a body of texts or set of textual structures. The presence of sufficient semantic and syntactic evidence suggesting that remakes are particular textual structures notwithstanding, film remakes just like genres often exist in excess of a body of works. Additionally, film remaking exists because of audience activity, and the complex interaction between the prior knowledge of previous texts and intertextual relationships, and the knowledge of broader universal structures and classes. Nonetheless, the afore-mentioned factors such as copyright law, rule formation, and reviewing of films, which are crucial to the reality and preservation of film remakes, both support and impinge on film remaking by limiting it to the discourses. In this respect, it need not be underscored that film remaking has a much more complex conceptualization than the simplistic quality of texts or viewers, as a by-product or the secondary result of broader discursive activity. Remaking as Industrial Category Remakes can be considered as industrial products in the material conditions of commercial filmmaking where plots are imitated and formulas used repeatedly because for filmmakers, remakes are perceived as suitable models (Nguyen, 2002), thus, they offer some sort of financial guarantee for the establishment of studio-based projects. Commercially, remakes are normally, to some extent, presold to their audiences because many people would probably have some background information, or in the least, an idea of the narrative of the original versions of the film, before filmmakers actually retell them. For instance, cult movies such as King Kong 1933, Godzilla 1954, and Planet of Apes 1954, which arguably typifies a remake gone bad (Olmsted, 2011), are brought back to life as remakes, through massive production budgets, strong marketing campaigns, and merchandising tie-ins (Verevis 2006, p.3). The movie King Kong (which was originally produced in 1933) was naturally remade in the 1970’s especially because of the immense success of its original, its ground-breaking effects and cult status in addition to, the opportunities it guaranteed for promotional relationships. Contemporary examples of cross-cultural remakes include Vanilla Sky 1997, which features Tom Cruise and remakes Open Your Eyes 1997 (Andy, n.d); The Ring 2001 and Insomnia 2002. These movies are dispossessed of foreign films’ traditional ‘local detail’ and ‘political content’ in the attempt by contemporary filmmakers to explore new English-language markets around the world. In this respect, remaking is evidence of Hollywood’s repetition, cultural imperialism, and terroristic marketing practices, which gives the remakes an emotional appeal that transcends class and nation (Miura 2008, p.2); the remake, alongside the sequel and series, has become a typical defensive production and marketing strategies in contemporary Hollywood. If the pervasive increase in remakes in contemporary Hollywood since 1970s is anything to go by, then the perceptions of Hollywood’s continually decreasing creative potential (Olmsted, 2011) that has resulted to the conservative plot structures, and automatic self-cannibalization could be tenable. Similarly, recent accounts of remaking have identified lack of creativity and laziness as the main motivations for studio remakes, and filmmakers’ dearth of ideas is subsequently due to their lack of imagination. The conglomerate ownership of Hollywood is also responsible for the film remaking trend because Hollywood studios seek to duplicate past successes while minimizing risks by emphasizing the familiar; unfortunately, recreating films that were once successful with slight changes often leads to films that are aesthetically inferior (Rainer, 2013). Nevertheless, Hollywood’s justification for remakes is the requirement that it has to deliver reliability (repetition) and novelty (innovation) in the same production; in this regard, the remake is depicted as a function of the industry’s narrative structure repetitive effects, and the more general repetition of exclusive stars, narrative patterns, and generic elements. Acknowledgement of copyright laws is essential to solving the dilemma of what counts as a remake though, this is further complicated by the flexibility of copyright laws, and confusion arising from other terminologies such as unacknowledged remakes, and non-remakes. In his dissertation, Druxman categorizes remakes into three: the disguised remake- updated with minimal changes but does not acknowledge original source (Perkins, 2008), direct remake (transformed and altered but acknowledges the original source of the narrative), and the non-remake (may go under the same tittle as a familiar property but have an entirely different plot). Film remaking as industrial category has been regarded as a function of the industry pragmatism that is driven by three major motivations: firstly, the industry demand for new material in the studio-dominated era between 1930s and 1940s, in addition to the attempts to justify the high costs of acquiring source material compelled filmmakers to consider remaking. The reasons for using previously filmed stories as sources is the desire to base films on pretested, low risk material that was famous and highly successful (Maidment, 2013), and the desire to acquire sources as inexpensively as possible, particularly in view of financial uncertainties. Secondly, the customary practice at the time of acquiring the rights to sources in perpetuity meant that a filmmaker was able to produce several versions of a given property without in curing additional expenses. The third motivation was the profit potential of redoing already established films in to incorporate new stars and emerging technologies; for instance, expanding screen technologies enable filmmakers to create convincing images as representations of reality. Consequently, these two reasons, the need to incorporate new technologies and, the ongoing appeal of casting star performers in established roles remain to be two of the most essential reasons for recasting previously successful films. The contemporary filmmakers are conservative on themes and subplots and are keen on duplicating past success by remaking the previously done films, to minimize risks of losses especially due to financial uncertainties. Remaking as textual category Industry and commerce matters regarding influence and authorship aside, film remaking and film remakes are located in the textual structures that are produced in line with the narrative inventions earlier films accordingly. However, the desire to restrict film remakes to a body of texts or some set of existing inter-relationships between texts often leads to contradictory notions of sharable terms and accurate description. In the context of remaking, therefore, this is expressed in terms of the conflict between a desire to provide comprehensive lists of film remakes and the desire to define the various categories of the remake truthfully (Verevis 2006, p.11). If share-ability tends towards exhaustive lists of remakes, accuracy is inclined towards categorizations, as proposed by Robert Eberwein who established an elaborate taxonomy of remakes that has 15 categories and subdivisions. A remarkable feature of remakes, as implied through Leitch’s conceptualization of remakes as legally sanctioned to use material from earlier models, is that they compete directly and without any sort of legal or economic compensation with other versions of the same property. In this respect, remakes exist in a triangular relationship with the original film versions, and the property on which both films are built upon; the nature of this relationship is that rather than paying adaptation fees to the originators of an earlier film, producers of a remake usually purchase adaptation rights from the source of the film material. Taking this approach then implies that any remake can define itself based on either with primary reference to the film it remakes or based on the material on which both films are based upon. On that account, regardless of whether a remake is defined as a new version of an earlier film or a new version of the original narrative of both films, it can retain the original conception of the original film or make alterations in that story altogether. Leitch goes ahead to propose his taxonomy of remakes that entails re-adaption, update, homage, and true remake; re-adaptations ignore earlier cinematic adaptations by conforming as faithfully as possible than other earlier film versions to an earlier literary property. Update remakes, unlike re-adaptations, which subordinate themselves to the essence of literary classics, compete directly with their literary source by adopting an overtly revisionary and transformational attitude i.e. a starker version of Little House on the Prair (Flynn, 2005). Homage remakes have slightly close inclinations to the re-adaptation remakes because they also seek to redirect the audience’s attention to their literary sources by situating themselves as a secondary texts to pay tribute to the original film versions. Unlike the homage remake that undeniably renounces any claim to be better than its original, the true remake challenges the contradictory claims of all other remakes by asserting that they are in fact only slightly different from their originals. In this respect, the true remake focuses on the cinematic original with an accommodative stance that seeks to make the original relevant by updating it, what Leitch calls a revisionary stance (Brickman 2007, p.20). Unlike all the rest, true remakes emphasize a triangular notion of intertexuality by ascribing their value to the earlier classic and protecting that value by invoking a second earlier film as betraying it. Nevertheless, contemporary remakes usually enjoy a more symbiotic relationship with their originals, especially with publicity and reviews often drawing attention to earlier versions, and the roles of communicating the narrative image of new films are undertaken by the industry itself. This is normally happens particularly in the earlier phases of a film’s public circulation by the publicity and marketing sections of the industry, in addition to the institutionalized discourses in the both the broadcast and print media. Normally, official film remakes will draw attention to the original films thereby instantly investing the new versions with a narrative image together with an aesthetic or commercial value; it is the tradition of filmmakers to enthuse about the timelessness attributes and classic status of the originals before describing their own value-added transformed versions. The impact of innovations in television technologies in shaping the relationship between a remake and its earlier versions can never be overestimated, and the ever-expanding availability of texts and technologies, alongside the unprecedented knowledge of film history among filmmakers and contemporary audiences is closely linked to intertextuality. The general concept of intertextuality refers to the in principle determination, which requires that texts be understood not as self-sufficient structures but as the repetition and transformation of other textual structures. In the discourses of intertextuality and film, the semantic fullness of a text is precisely the result of its ability to link itself to with other texts that came both before it and those that came later; in other words, film remaking can be regarded as a specific institutionalized aspect of the broader and more open-ended intertextuality. In this respect, film remaking could subsequently range from the limited repetition of a classic shot or scene to the quasi-independent repetitions of a single story or populist myth. Remaking as critical category Remakes, just like genres, exist in the expectations and knowledge of the receiving audience, and in the institutions that govern and support the specific reading strategies; intertextuality needs to be related to the rest of the factors already discussed. That is, the ever-expanding availability of texts and technologies, and the unprecedented awareness of film history both among filmmakers and among contemporary audiences. Additionally, intertextuality is explored in the context of the inclination of contemporary filmmakers towards combining the commercial necessity of generic patterns of repetition with direct borrowing through allusion and quotation. Through the historical development of the continuity system, the notion of direct intertextuality referentiality is mostly displaced by an industrial imperative for standardization, which emphasizes the intertextual relation of genres, cycles, and stars. In the remakes of contemporary Hollywood, the intratextual mechanisms of classical continuity are mostly respected, intertextual referentiality to genres, cycles, and stars is often accompanied by what is perceived within varied interpretive contexts, as the explicit and recognizable intertexual quotation of plot motifs and stylistic features found in earlier film versions. This kind of intertextual referentiality that is inherent in most of the contemporary American films is found in circulation in a historically specific context, and the identification of, and the commercial decision to remake an earlier film is found in particular extratextual, institutional, or discursive practices. For instance, the institutionally determined practice of film canon formation and its contributing projects include the determination to comment upon and conserve a film heritage and the discussion and citation of particular films in both popular and academic film criticism. Additionally, other practices include the selective release and re-release of films to distributional windows, and the proliferation of talks and websites on the internet, in addition to the decision of other filmmakers to evoke earlier films and recreate cinema history. Knowledge of the formation and maintenance of the film canon explains why remakes of highly institutionalized film noirs are discussed in relation to their originals yet others defer to the authority of an established literary canon instead of their little known or rarely seen earlier versions. An immense chain of endless connections that are both voluntary and involuntary characterizes film remakes because many aspects such as characters, persistent ideas, unanswered questions, in addition to deviants and cinematic landscapes are reincarnated as well. The intertext, a precursor to the text is hardly singular, or a moment of pure origin, thus, film remaking (quotation, allusion, and adaptation), like all other critical constructs including genre is established and maintained through the repeated use of terminology. Reviewers appeal to the original film versions for wanting to establish the relative worth of a remake, and to secure the value of the film medium by relating it to deeply rooted precursors, the canon. The suggestion that intertextual referentiality between the remake and its original is organized according to an extratextual referentiality located in historically specific discursive formations (film criticism and reviewing, among others) challenges purely textual descriptions of a remake. Particularly, the purely textual explanations that seek to locate the category in an inflexible dissimilarity between an original version of a film and its resultant remake is not entirely tenable. Nevertheless, demarcation along the storyline of a narrative and discourse is also challenged by the existence of remakes, which repeat the narrative style of an original while seeking to recreate the expressive design of that original at the same time. Even though a story can be retold in different ways while remaining unchanged, the identification of the fundamental elemental differences between a remake and the original a function of the discursive context of the film’s production and reception. The particular contextual forms of intertexuality, including the film industry and other public discourses are getting inclined towards the identification of an informative frame, from the exclusively demarcated textual identifiers. That is to say that whereas a general narrative and cinematic competence enables the construction of intratextually determined hierarchy of story descriptions, the establishment of a particular intertextual relation between a remake and its supposed original is a matter of interpretation. However, this interpretation is often limited and relative to the interpretive grid through which both the subject position and the subsequent textual relations are established; technically, the essence of an account of a remake lies, not in the detailed identification of particular intertexual sources functioning as retrospectively designated referential points, but in the determination of a more general discursive structure. Remakes and their related discourses need to make their audiences remember the adapted works or the cultural recollection of these works in order to impose their status as adaptations of earlier films accordingly, and not as originals themselves. Even though this process of recollection is realized through texts, and these two are inevitably inseparable, it is imperative to analyze those textual activators alongside textual descriptions. Insofar as remaking is concerned, the ability to recognize and cross-examine a remake results from both the prior knowledge of previous texts and intertextual comparisons, and from the extra-textual discourses that make the viewing experience. Remaking needs to be treated as a complex situation because it goes beyond the quality of film texts to those factors that influence audience expectations, construction of corpuses, and processes of labelling, and naming. These factors are the institutionalized public discourses such as press, radio or television; informal everyday discourses such as word of mouth, peer reviews or the internet; and the film industry discourses such as publicity, marketing, and exhibition. Insomnia (Christopher Nolan, 2002; Erik Skjoldbjaerg, 1997) Originally produced in 1997 by Erik Skjoldbjaerg, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia 2002 version of the original is perhaps one of the most successful remakes of our time; the success of this remake established Nolan on his way to becoming one of the blockbuster juggernaut (Cole, 2012). Nolan’s Insomnia remake compares with the original on a number of aspects; for instance, both films tell the story of a disgraced forensics expert who goes by the name of Stellan Skarsgard Engstrom in the original but Al Pacinos Dormer in the remake (Travers, 2002). The forensics expert is helping to solve the puzzle of a murder investigation in northern tundra during the long summer daylight hours, but when they try to set a trap for the suspect killer, each detective accidentally kills his partner and is entangled in a nerve-wracking blackmail scheme. Gradually, the titular insomnia that is attributable to the never-setting sun and suffocating guilt almost drives both men crazy but only a few tweaks change the plot with the aim of expanding the action, and differentiating the story. Additionally, the remake film introduces a meaningful moral change that entails making the protagonist’s collaborate an old friend who was complicit in his transgression, therefore, subtly suggesting the possibility that Pacino’s detective fulfills a subconscious desire when he inadvertently kills the other cop (Ebert, 2002). When it comes to the stylistic features, however, the two versions take a very divertive stance with Skjoldbjaerg opening his with raw, grainy footage of the crime in question, hands reaching from behind frame to throttle a terrified woman until her head slam on a protruding nail, and she stiffens. After the murder, the killer systematically disposes off the evidence in an equally frenzied manner, washing the victim’s hair and scrubbing his DNA from under her fingernails; this grim memory, vivid though abstracted with bleached light and cut in a fluidly overwhelming fashion sets the director’s visceral pace. Conversely, Nolan begins his movie with a latex-gloved-thumb rubbing at a blood-stained sleeve, with clinical coldness of shots that feels removed even in extreme-close-up captures Nolan’s arch style, while the inverted identity of the person unable to erase the stain depicts his love for narrative twists. Another remarkable feature that is evident in Nolan’s remake is his love for fetish realism because he casts the Alaskan hinterland in flat compositions and muted colours, subsequently bringing to fore the tedium that lulls Dormer even as it also keeps him awake. Nolan also visualizes Dormer’s sleep depriving thoughts through explosions of interposed flashbacks of his sins (Schwarzbaum, 2002), a literal-minded prevue into the protagonist’s mind, unlike Skjoldbjaerg who stylizes the world surrounding Engstrom through pure white light pouring in from every window as he walks around in a perpetual flop sweat and a slack face. Perhaps the clear difference between the original insomnia and its remake is the extent of the ambitions of their respective producers. Skjoldbjaerg seems to have had the sole purpose of making a unique noir with the inversion of light dynamics but in the almost coenesque anticlimax, and in the ironical communication of his protagonist’s release and relief by a plunge back into darkness. On the other hand, Nolan, due to his lack of the option of true originality (because he was merely remaking Skjoldbjaerg’s earlier film), is compelled to craft something suddenly, more banal and more grandiose, making a film that fits in the Hollywood’s remaking tradition. Overall, there is an urgent need for a detailed historical investigation and research into the concept of film remaking, encompassing all its contextualized definitions, legal-industrial, and critical-interpretive. Even in the dearth of understanding of the essence of film remaking, that makes it peculiarly cinematic, the pursuit of that which defines film remaking and its relationships with other repetition practices will have to include several aspects. Firstly, it will have to engage with the industrial nature of the cinema, the peculiarity of the cinematic genre, with the nature of cinematic quotation, in addition to the conceptualization of cinematic intertextuality as a question of cultural history. By transcending textual approaches to film remaking, going beyond the identification of ceaseless, proliferating patterns of repletion and difference, inquiring into the nature of the concept of film remaking should locate it in industrial fields, textual strategies. Additionally, such a review should locate film remaking in filmic discourses, in such historically specific technologies as copyright law and authorship, rule formation and media literacy, together with film criticism and film reviewing. This paper has managed to explore the various approaches to film remaking across the three main sections, the idea of remaking as an industrial category, remaking as a textual category, and finally, remaking as a critical category. 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