Transnational film remakes: time, space, identity

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TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKES:

TIME, SPACE, IDENTITY

by

Daniel Herbert

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES))

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Daniel Herbert
ii
DEDICATION
for Anna

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation has been informed by my interactions with many people, all of
whom impacted my intellectual development significantly whether they knew it or not.
Marsha Kinder is the best advisor anyone could ask for and her influence on me and this
project cannot be measured. She encouraged me throughout my graduate career, and her
boundless support and rigorous attention to detail propelled me through the long,
arduous, and occasionally thrilling task of writing. Priya Jaikumar provided brilliant
insights into my work with great generosity and amiability. Akira Mizuta Lippit asked
provocative questions and pointed toward unexpected answers at critical moments
throughout this project.
Many others at USC were instrumental to me. Dana Polan shaped the way I think
about media and culture in ways that have become basic to me. Anne Friedberg provided
friendly and razor-sharp insights into my work. David James has been a tremendous help
and inspiration, overseeing my research into the Austrian avant-garde as well as Korean
cinema in particular. Jan Olsson inspired me greatly, and his readings of my work were
extremely encouraging, particularly my first draft of Part II. Luisa Rivi helped inspire the
beginnings of this project. Bill Whittington provided wonderful opportunities and
pointed advice throughout my time at USC. Linda Overholt was a delight. I am grateful
to them all. My classmates and colleagues in Critical Studies have been as important to
me as my faculty. I am deeply indebted to the many conversations I have had with
Daniel Chamberlain. He unfailingly read and gave astute feedback on countless pieces of
work. Jorie Lagerwey has been a loving friend from the very start and I am grateful for
iv
her careful and critical readings of the first half of this dissertation. Conversations with
James Leo Cahill, Kristen Fuhs, Chris Hanson, Bella Honess-Roe, Carlos Kase, Dave
Lerner, Paul Reinsch, Suzanne Scott, and Adrienne Walser have influenced my work
greatly.
Outside of USC, a number of people have provided much support and conceptual
help. I had the privilege of working under Susan Dever, Nina Fonoroff, and Ira Jaffe at
the University of New Mexico and they guided me through the process of applying to
graduate school. The late Gus Blaisdell was my first and most important inspiration as a
film instructor. Bryan Konefsky was a terrific teacher and is a dear friend. Fellow
remake scholar Constantine Verevis generously gave support as well as precise and
productive readings of several essays, while Lucy Mazdon was gracious and thoughtful at
our panel at SCMS in 2007. John Marmysz and Scott Lukas gave wonderful suggestions
about Chapter 13. The faculty in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan
gave much help, advice, and support. I am particularly grateful to Richard Abel, Hubert
Cohen, Eggo Mueller, Sheila Murphy, Markus Nornes, Lucia Saks, and Terri Sarris, who
participated in a mentoring workshop, while Catherine Benamou, Mark Kligerman, Chris
McNamara, Robert Rayher, and Gaylyn Studlar have been fantastic colleagues. Super-
student Zachary Schipono transcribed and formatted several of my interviews. Phil
Hallman, at the Donald Hall Collection, was invaluably helpful in securing films for my
research that would have otherwise been unavailable.
Similarly, Sandra Lee (Joy really is her middle name!) and Taylor Nygaard were
infinitely helpful at the Warner Bros. Archive, as was Ned Comstock at USC’s Cinema
v
Library. The librarians at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences were accommodating, while those at the Japan Foundation
Information Center Library in Tokyo were especially helpful. A number of industry
professionals and filmmakers generously gave me time for interviews, conversations, and
emails, and I am very thankful to Martin Arnold, Chiho Asada, Jennifer Fukasawa, Taka
Ichise, Roy Lee, Christopher Nolan, Darcy Paquet, Nick Roe, Steve Susco, Peter
Tscherkassky, and Todd Williams. My conversations about movies with good friend
Adam Turner have been exciting and rewarding, and he got me in contact with Roy Lee.
Friends Ben Rogerson and Matt Watkins were cheery companions during my undergrad
and tremendous sounding-boards about much of this dissertation. Jennie Chamberlain
gave great feedback while I wrote and many snacks while I worried. Gabe Lichstein was
a jovial co-conspirator.
Most of all I thank my family, whose support was unwavering and whose love
was warm. My father, Patrick Herbert, raised me to be a thinking person rather than
some other sort. My mother, Susan Cogar, told me I could do anything, so I wrote this
dissertation. My stepparents Liz Buckner and Ron Cogar provided much love along the
way. I have had great conversations about art and movies with my aunt Rita. My brother
Charlie and I have always talked endlessly about film and he was always eager to talk
through the latest ideas for this dissertation. Gary and Karla Sampson gave much love,
support, advice, and inspiration, as well as a comforting place for much-needed escapes
from Los Angeles. More than anyone, though, I thank my wife Anna, who left family
and a good job in Albuquerque to come to Los Angeles so I could pursue my graduate
vi
degrees. She has sacrificed so much of her time, energy, and thought to this project. She
is an excellent critic and an enthusiastic supporter, and I love her dearly.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract ix

Introduction 1
Introduction Notes 12

Part I – The Transnational Film Remake in the Age of Globalization 13

Chapter 1 – Defining the Remake 13
Chapter 1 Notes 35

Chapter 2 – Globalization, Transnationalism,
and the Transnational Cultural Industries 39
Chapter 2 Notes 88

Chapter 3 –The Transnational Film Remake: Both Symptom
and Privileged Articulation of Globalization 96
Chapter 3 Notes 119

Part II – A History of Repetition: The Transnational Film Remake
as a Product of Institutional and Critical Forces 121

Chapter 4 – Film Remakes and the Transnational Cinema Industries 124
Chapter 4 Notes 169

Chapter 5 – Transnational Film Remakes as a Historical Discursive Category 176
Chapter 5 Notes 207

Part III – Remaking Europe: Transnational Transformations 212

Chapter 6 – Historical Flows 214
Chapter 6 Notes 274

Chapter 7 – Sky’s the Limit: Transnationality and Identity
in Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky 277
Chapter 7 Notes 300

Chapter 8 – Rivals and Departures: The Austrian Avant-Garde
as Counter-Remake 303
viii
Chapter 8 Notes 328

Part IV – Pac-Rim Transnational Film Remakes 331

Chapter 9 – As the World Turns (Toward Asia) 331
Chapter 9 Notes 351

Chapter 10 – Circulations: Technology and Discourse in The Ring Intertext 354
Chapter 10 Notes 378

Chapter 11 – Contemporary Pac-Rim Transnational Remakes:
Trends and Issues 382
Chapter 11 Notes 395

Chapter 12 – Agents of Change? The Business(men)
of Transnational Film Remakes 396
Chapter 12 Notes 413

Chapter 13 – Trading Spaces: Transnational Dislocations
in Insomnia/Insomnia and Ju-On/The Grudge 414
Chapter 13 Notes 441

Conclusion: Remarks – Transnational Film Remakes and Marks of Failure 446
Conclusion Notes 457

Bibliography 458

Appendix A – Films Viewed and Referenced 490

Appendix B – Interview with Martin Arnold 509

Appendix C – Interview with Takashige Ichise 517

Appendix D – Interview with Roy Lee 527

Appendix E – Interview with Stephen Susco 537

ix
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines transnational cinema and cultural exchange through
the lens of “transnational film remakes,” or films made in one nation and remade in
another. Looking at Hollywood remakes of European and East Asian films, as well as
remakes that circumvent Hollywood, I argue that transnational remakes are privileged
articulations of globalization, and as such, demonstrate struggles for power in a
transnational field. Using a combination of critical political economy, textual analysis,
and intertextual theory, I define these films as formal, institutional, and discursive
objects. I engage in a number of intensive case studies that resonate with
reconfigurations of time, space, and identity rendered under globalization.
Part I begins by examining film remakes in relation to adaptations and
intertextuality. I then argue that the notion of “national cinemas” must give way to
“transnational cultural industries,” of which Hollywood is a particular example. I then
assert the interrelation between transnational remakes and globalization. Part II engages
in a historical study of the institutional and discursive forces through which the
“transnational film remake” came about as a category. Industrially, this demonstrates
remakes’ relation to film piracy and to multi-language film versions, while the criteria for
evaluating transnational remakes in popular criticism underwent distinct changes. Part III
looks at transnational remakes between Hollywood and Europe, noting historical trends
and points of ideological overlap and tension. I then analyze the films Abre los Ojos
(1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), paying particular attention to issues of “transnational
identities.” The last chapter in Part III examines the contemporary Austrian avant-garde
x
as a cinema of “counter-remakes.” Part IV marks the recent increase in Hollywood
remakes of East Asian films. I engage in a historical survey of Hollywood-East Asian
remakes followed by an analysis of “The Ring Intertext.” I also examine alternative
tendencies within the contemporary cycle of Pacific Rim remakes, as well as some of the
specific individuals who shaped this cycle. The last chapter of Part IV examines the shift
from Euro-American to Pacific-Rim remakes in relation to “transnational space.” The
Conclusion looks at remakes in terms of “failure” and “remarkability.”

1
INTRODUCTION
…every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.
-Marx
1

Two events in the last week of February 2007 appeared to illustrate the diverse
functions and effects of contemporary globalization. On Tuesday, February 27 the New
York Stock Exchange fell by 3.3 percent, the largest drop since the market opened
following the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001; the fall coincided with
similar drops in the markets in London and Tokyo. Indeed, there appeared to be a
domino-like cascade of market drops across the globe, each one’s downturn prompting a
downturn in the others. Earlier that day the Shanghai stock market had fallen by nearly 9
percent following an announcement that the Chinese government was going to set new
limits on stock investments. The booming Chinese economy was argued to be an
artificial “bubble,” built and sustained by over-eager speculators who were, in some
cases, taking out second mortgages to invest in the market.
2
In fact, this dramatic
downturn in the Shanghai market was cited as the source for this global market downturn
in numerous news stories.
3
Yet, rather than simply remarking upon the global power of
the Chinese economy (although some did),
4
these events prompted discussion about the
global reach of the world’s stock markets in general. CNN quoted Hugh Johnson,
“strategist at ThomasLloyd Global Asset Management,” as saying the “selloff
demonstrates somewhat starkly the inter-connectedness of stock markets around the
world.”
5
He asserted that “markets can decline in one seemingly isolated part of the
world and that decline can be transmitted to other parts of the world through the
2
psychology.”
6
Indeed, this rapid sequence of market dips appeared to demonstrate the
impossibility of isolation within the contemporary world economy, which surpassed the
borders of individual nation-states and composed a single “world market.”
Two days earlier, on Sunday, February 25, the 79
th
Annual Academy Awards
were held at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California. The Departed (2006), the
year’s Oscar-winner for “Best Motion Picture,” “Achievement in Directing,” and “Best
Adapted Screenplay,” among other awards, was at least doubly noteworthy. The film’s
director, Martin Scorsese, had been nominated for an Academy Award five previous
times yet had never won, constituting what was understood as a serious oversight on the
part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With Francis Ford Coppola,
George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg presenting him the Best Director award, it appeared
that Scorsese was finally brought into the fold of great American directors of the 1970s
and that his contributions to cinema were properly, if belatedly, acknowledged.
Yet The Departed was equally noteworthy for being a remake of the Hong Kong
gangster film Infernal Affairs (2002). Produced by John Chong and the Media Asia
Group,
7
Infernal Affairs broke box office records in Hong Kong and went on to become
an outstanding economic and critical success throughout East Asia in 2002 and 2003.
8

Following its extraordinary regional success, Hollywood agents and studios waged a
bidding war for the film’s remake rights, which were ultimately bought by Warner Bros.
and Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B for $1.75 million.
9
Bringing together an
ensemble of top Hollywood actors, including Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon, Mark
Wahlberg, and Jack Nicholson, The Departed transformed the slick Hong Kong gangster
3
blockbuster into a double-barreled Hollywood prestige picture. Whereas Infernal Affairs
depicted a new and shiny Hong Kong full of glimmering skyscrapers and super-sharp
tailored suits, The Departed relocated this narrative to Boston, which was depicted as a
rusty, brick-and-mortar world crumbling under the pressures of time and corruption.
Despite this remake’s extreme narrative fidelity to its source, The Departed could not
have looked more different or felt like more of a departure.
The Departed was not the first remake to have been nominated for or win an
Academy Award, such as with the 1959 version of Ben Hur, which won Best Picture and
many other Awards and was a remake (or re-adaptation) of the 1925 silent film of the
same title. Nor was it the first Hollywood remake of a foreign film to earn the
Academy’s attention, such as with Scent of a Woman (1992), which was a remake of the
Italian film Profumo di Donna (1974) and earned nominations for Best Director, Best
Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Yet The Departed was the first Hollywood
remake of a foreign film to actually win Best Picture since The Sound of Music (1965),
10

signaling the importance of this category of films within contemporary Hollywood. The
novelty of this situation was compounded by the film’s deriving from a Hong Kong film,
reflecting the growth in popularity of Hong Kong films in the United States during the
1990s and the increased international popularity of East Asian cinemas more generally.
Viewed together and yet in contradistinction, these two proximate events speak
volumes about contemporary globalization. On the one hand, economies around the
world have apparently been connected into a single world market, one in which events
rapidly affect the system as a whole. The world economy has not only made itself fully
4
manifest, but its movements and effects happen almost instantaneously. The February 27
market drop also signaled the importance of China, and East Asia more generally, within
the world economy. Even if China’s rapid selloff and market decline was not the only
cause of the other stock market drops, its perception as the cause signaled the general
conception that China functioned as the engine behind the current world economy.
The Departed, on the other hand, also reflected many of these issues, yet also
demonstrated the often dissymmetrical relation between base and superstructure, between
the “purely economic” and the “purely cultural” levels of society. On the one hand, the
pan-Asian popularity and eventual remaking of Infernal Affairs demonstrated the
increased levels of cultural contact and interpenetration characteristic of contemporary
cultural globalization. Indeed, Hollywood’s production of The Departed testifies to the
contingent interrelation of cultural industries in disparate parts of the world, linking these
areas and making their relation perhaps not so distant, as the film simply could not exist
if Infernal Affairs had not gained Hollywood’s attention. On the other hand, The
Departed equally displays the imbalanced forces that motivate and infect cultural
globalization. In winning several Academy Awards, The Departed now represents the
very epitome of Hollywood, as the very height of American cinematic achievement. Yet
this cultural legitimization threatens to efface the cultural confluence through which it
came about. As a remake, The Departed speaks of the need for revision of Infernal
Affairs; it demonstrates the earlier film’s inability to gain such success within the
English-language market and recognition by the Academy. For all that it generated The
Departed, Infernal Affairs was unable to gain the same kind of success as its remake,
5
demonstrating how cultural revision functions alongside cultural flows. Whereas the
stock market panics of February 27 illustrated the global connectivity of “national”
economies, The Departed and its Oscars implicated the strategic forms of contact,
division, transformation, and revision that inflect global cultural flows.
Most saliently, this case signifies the fundamental importance of film and media
within globalization and further indicates some of its characteristics in a particular
crystallized form. Much contemporary media is characterized by two categorical
descriptors: the transnational and the remake. As the financing, production, and
exhibition of film and television so consistently surpass national boundaries, there is
continuing need to consider cultural processes and identities within a transnational
frame. Likewise, the preponderance of cinematic remaking, from Peter Jackson’s King
Kong (2005) to the “appropriation” films of Craig Baldwin, demands a fuller appreciation
and theorization of remakes within their institutional, intertextual, and discursive
contexts. This dissertation examines these two issues, transnationalism and film remakes,
in their conjoined form: transnational film remakes, or films made in one national or
regional context and then subsequently remade in another. In this regard, it examines a
particular cinematic form, the remake, and also investigates transnational cultural flows
and exchanges that pervade contemporary society. In this endeavor, this dissertation
examines complex connections among different films as well as connections among these
films and diverse social conditions and cultural contexts.
Although film remakes have been produced since the beginnings of cinema, and
although different nations have remade films from all over the world throughout this
6
history, this dissertation will primarily look at cases produced and circulated from around
1990 to the present. Several factors prompt this historical demarcation. Primary among
them is my overall intention to draw clear relationships between transnational film
remakes and the greater forces of transnationalism and globalization, which have
substantially increased their overall effect upon the world during this period. Although
forms of transnational social, economic, and cultural exchange have an extremely long
history, the contemporary period has witnessed the rapid development and profound
intensification of systems of connection across the globe; by the 1990s, many of these
forces crystallized and became observably dominant. This has radically reshaped
existing social conditions in many parts of the world, as places and peoples have come
into new geographic and cultural relation with one another.
Throughout the twentieth century, cinema played a prominent role in the
transnationalization of cultures. Cinematic technologies quickly spread across the globe
from their beginnings, drastically altering the relations among diverse nations and
cultures. As various nations developed film industries, particularly those in Europe and
the United States, the cinema became vital for the formulation and dissemination of
culture. Along with radio and later television, the cinema played a vital role among the
“mass media,” which at once helped to both formulate national culture and, through the
development and exploitation of widespread distribution channels, facilitated
transnational cultural exchanges as well. That is, the cinema was intricately intertwined
with the intense cultural and social changes that occurred in the twentieth century,
reflecting and shaping radical changes in human experience and collective social
7
organization, particularly through the formulation of national culture and identity and set
these into transnational relation.
In the recent period, the “postmodern” or “post-industrial” period, the forms of
transnational connection have grown substantially, and the contemporary cinema has
undergone changes that accord with these broad social transformations. This is not only
to suggest that cinema produced cultural interchanges through its forms of production and
circulation, but moreover, that it was affected by macro-level changes in society.
Whereas the post-World War II period saw the fragmentation of the Hollywood studio
system, the development of “national cinemas” in myriad locations throughout the world,
and the development of an incredibly diverse range of aesthetic practices within the
cinema, the more recent period saw a coherent transformation in the relations among
these tendencies. The cinema of postmodernity constitutes a historically delimited
phenomenon, exhibiting distinct patterns of ownership, production, distribution,
consumption, as well as cultural and social interrelations.
Some prominent tendencies of contemporary world cinema can be observed. One
of the most notable trends has been the apparent growth of film remakes,
11
or films
derived in some direct way from previous films. Particularly in Hollywood, remakes
appeared alongside genre films, adaptations, sequels, and “franchise films” as part of a
broad-based industrial strategy that relied on the exploitation of existing materials. This
should not suggest that either remakes or cinematic intertextuality were new phenomena
in Hollywood or in cinema more generally. Instead, and as numerous film and cultural
critics have observed, the cinema of postmodernity witnessed a strategic intensification of
8
processes of intertextual reference. This “industrial intertextuality” worked alongside
and, in many cases, in coordination with the changes in the composition of the film
industries, particularly as these industries were “globalized” and incorporated within
larger industrial structures. The interrelation of these transformations provides the
ground for understanding contemporary transnational remakes, and conversely, the
transnational remake provides a coherent point for the analysis of this general
transformation of film within the contemporary cultural industries.
Part I of this study begins with a conceptual examination of the film remake,
particularly as it relates to issues of adaptations and intertextuality. I then argue that the
notion of “national cinemas” must give way to one of “transnational cultural industries,”
and situate Hollywood as a particular kind of transnational cultural industry. The final
chapter in this Part asserts the central thesis of this study, that transnational film remakes
function as symptoms and privileged articulations of globalization, and as such,
demonstrate cultural alignments and struggles for power in a transnational field.
Part II engages in a historical study of the discursive and institutional forces
through which the “transnational film remake” came about as a discrete category.
Looking first at industrial contexts, I show how this category went through a number of
moments of crisis, where the definition of the remake was unclear, and that through
various legal and institutional processes it became clearer. This history reveals the
alignment, at various moments, of the film remake with film piracy and with multi-
language films. The next chapter examines how transnational film remakes have been
defined in popular discourses, primarily derived from film reviews. Transnational
9
remakes have been denigrated consistently, but the evaluative criteria have changed
significantly over time.
Part III looks at transnational film remake exchanges between Hollywood and
Europe, which historically have been the most numerically prolific and culturally
important. Reflecting this, the majority of existing examinations of transnational film
remakes look at Hollywood-European exchanges, and in fact have looked almost
exclusively remake exchanges between Hollywood and the French film industries, such
as with Lucy Mazdon’s Encore Hollywood and Carolyn Durham’s Double Takes.
Likewise, the collection Dead Ringers, edited by Jennifer Forrest and Leonard Koos, is
mainly aimed at transnational film remakes, the majority of which are Hollywood-
French. In light of this tendency, this dissertation will mainly avoid French-Hollywood
remake exchanges. I briefly survey the history of transnational remakes between
Hollywood and Europe, noting particular historical trends as well as important points of
ideological overlap and tension. I then engage in a detailed analysis of the
Spanish/European film Abre los Ojos (1997) and its Hollywood remake Vanilla Sky
(2001), paying particular attention to issues of personal and cultural identities. The last
chapter in Part III examines the films of Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky as
representative of the contemporary Austrian avant-garde and, more vitally, as
representative of a counter-tendency within the overall logic of European-Hollywood
transnational film remakes.
Part IV marks the most important defining trend among contemporary
transnational film remakes, namely, the increase in number and importance of Hollywood
10
remakes of East Asian films. I engage in a historical survey of Hollywood-East Asian
remake exchanges, followed by a detailed analysis of “The Ring Intertext,” or the many
textual iterations of Ringu (1998) and the transnational system they evoke and construct.
I also explore alternative strategies and tendencies within the contemporary cycle of Pac-
Rim transnational remakes, as well as examine some of the specific individuals who
shaped the trend of Hollywood remakes of East Asian films. The last chapter in Part IV
examines the shift from Eur-Am to Pac-Rim transnational film remakes through the trope
of “transnational space,” looking specifically at the Hollywood remake of the Norwegian
film Insomnia (1997) and then turning toward East Asia with an examination of the
Japanese film Ju-On (2003) and its Hollywood remake The Grudge (2004). The
Conclusion looks at remakes in terms of their “failure” and “remarkability.”
As is evident, this dissertation has a number of noteworthy exclusions. Although
I seek to provide a general discussion of transnational film remakes, my case studies
almost entirely avoid remake exchanges among important geo-cultural regions: India,
South America, the Middle-East, and Africa. This is both a matter of practicality as well
as of argumentative focus. This dissertation, in other words, examines transnational film
remakes primarily among the first-world cultural industries in the northern hemisphere.
Somewhat similarly, the majority of my close case studies reflect a limited range of
genres, particularly thrillers, noir or neo-noir films, and horror films. Although it would
be tempting to assert the globalism or transnationality of these genres, in fact films from
numerous other genres consistently get remade transnationally, such as comedies,
melodramas, and romances. At least in part, my focus on thrillers, noir films, and horror
11
films reflects these genres’ dramatic resonance with the larger categories of time, space,
and identity, themes that guide this analysis more than questions of genre. Nevertheless,
I will also show in several places that thrillers, noir films, and horror films developed
within cycles of transnational exchange among cultural producers. In this respect, the
dominance of thrillers, noir films, and horror films among transnational remakes aligns
with larger historical and cultural tendencies. My attention to them attends to their
prominence.
Despite these noted exclusions and points of focus, this dissertation aims to
provide a general analysis of contemporary transnational film remakes. Much in the way
that any film is subject to dissemination and cultural re-inscription, particularly through
reproduction, so too have transnational forces remade the world through a process of
reproduction, transformation, and interconnection. Globalization and remakes equally
vacillate between being nouns and verbs, between being objects and subjects.
Transnational film remakes. Transnationalism remakes film. Film remakes the
transnational. As processes, both have complicated interactions with one another, and it
is the aim here to survey and clarify them.

12
INTRODUCTION NOTES

1
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 711.

2
Adam Davidson, “U.S. Stocks Dive After Chinese Market Rattles,” All things considered, National Public
Radio, 27 Feb. 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7626834.

3
Subsequent news stories also correctly blamed a computer error in New York as one of the major culprits
of the NYSE drop. Malden Read, “Stocks Have Worst Days Since 9/11 Attacks,” Yahoo Finance, 27 Feb.
2007. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070227/wall_street.html. Nevertheless, it remains very interesting that the
initial discussions of the world market crash were quick to blame China and the interconnection of stock
markets around the world.

4
Davidson.

5
Alexander Twin, “Brutal Day on Wall Street,” CNNMoney.com, 27 Feb. 2007.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/27/markets/markets_0630/index.htm?postversion=2007022718.

6
Twin.

7
“John Chong,” Business Week 3891, (12 July 2004), 61.

8
Claude Brodesser and Cathy Dunkley, “Scorsese takes on Hong Kong Gangs,” Variety.com, 12 Feb.
2004. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117900068.html?categoryid=1236&cs=1; Nelson H. Wu,
“‘Affairs’ Kops Kudos,” Variety.com, 14 Dec. 2003.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117897164.html?categoryid=13&cs=1.

9
Karen Mazurkewich, “Hollywood Sees Starry Eyes in Asian Movies,” Wall Street Journal, 11 July 2003,
B.1.

10
The Sound of Music (1965) was a Hollywood a remake of the German Heimat-film Die Trapp-Familie
(1956).

11
This assertion is actually untrue, as observed by Constantine Verevis, among others. Constantine
Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3-4.

13
PART I – THE TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKE IN THE ERA OF
GLOBALIZATION

CHAPTER 1 – DEFINING THE REMAKE
My Introduction stated that film remakes are one part of a lager system of
“industrial intertextuality.” Yet if this is the case, then what is their exact relation to the
industry and other practices of cinematic intertextuality? How are remakes different from
adaptations, for instance? How can we conceive of film remakes in the context of myriad
forms of imaging technologies, many of which in their own way have “remade” the
cinema itself? How can we define the remake as an object of study? What do we mean
to say that a film comes from another film, or is based on another film? That is, quite
broadly, how do film texts come from previous texts?
These questions raise a number of interconnected issues, which pertain to four
key concepts: intertextuality, adaptations, intermediality, and remakes. Ultimately, film
remakes must be understood within specific cultural, historical, discursive, and industrial
circumstances. Part II of this dissertation will examine the history of film remakes within
their industrial contexts and popular discourses. At present, it is necessary to survey the
theoretical and conceptual ground of film remakes, particularly as they are positioned
within academic discourses.

TEXTS AND INTERTEXTUALITY
14
The question of a film’s relation to another raises theoretical questions of
intertextuality, a term now commonly used throughout cultural analysis. Central to this
question is that of the text. Emerging from structuralist and post-structuralist analytical
discourses, the notion of the text and of textual analysis was saliently elucidated by
Roland Barthes; he provides his most exhaustive theorization of the text in S/Z
1
and his
most pointed account in the essay “From Work to Text.”
2
In the latter especially, Barthes
broadens the possibilities for objects of analysis by resituating them within a new
methodological system. Barthes moves from analyses of cultural artifacts as discrete
objects, as “works,” and repositions them within a network of reference and productive
critical interpretation. Whereas a work is a discrete object, “a fragment of substance,”
3

the “text” describes the active interweaving of a cultural object, or multiple cultural
objects, and the activity of their circulation and interpretation. If a work is a thing, then a
text is a process. If a work is finite and clearly delimited, then a text spills out and
disseminates. If a work has a self-contained meaning, then a text reveals contradictions
and polysemic excesses. The text weaves culture and people together.
Barthes states “the metaphor of the Text is that of the network,”
4
thereby
reiterating the interconnectivity of the text (as process), and implicating a broader system
of interconnections among texts in general. Indeed, if the text is a weaving together of
people within a symbolic system, then every text is also an intertext, comprised by and
within a web of texts, or culturally legible objects. He addresses intertextuality proper
when he states that every text is:
woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what
language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through
15
and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is
held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused
with some origin of the text.
5

For Barthes, not only do texts interweave people within a symbolic network, but they also
comprise a larger network of their own. Here, intertextuality points toward a set of
relations among texts, which, quite remarkably, Barthes implies, are as legible as a text.
In his book Palimpsests,
6
Gérard Genette thoroughly and systematically analyzes
intertextuality as a set of relations. There, Genette supplants the term intertextuality with
“transtextuality,” or “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed,
with other texts.”
7
He then delineates five types of transtextual relationships. These are:
intertextuality, or “a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several
texts”
8
or further “the actual presence of one text within another” through quotation or
direct allusion;
9
paratextuality, or related textual “secondary signals” like titles, subtitles,
prefaces, etc.;
10
metatextuality, or commentary of a text proper, such as with a film or
book review;
11
architextuality, or the genre(s) or mode(s) of discourse in which a
particular text occurs;
12
and finally hypertextuality, whereby certain texts, hypertexts,
refer to previous works, hypotexts, in such a way that the latter are transformed to some
degree.
13
Genette acknowledges that these general modes do not preclude one another
and that several may operate simultaneously and/or inconsistently within a text. But with
these five general categories of relation established, Genette elucidates numerous
particular forms of hypertextual transformation, including the imitative functions of
pastiches,
14
as well as the textual continuations of sequels.
15
In total, Genette provides a
16
highly useful categorization of relations and set of terms for describing these almost
infinitely diverse relations.
Nevertheless, Genette’s work encounters two interrelated limitations. First, his
use of the term text appears regularly to correspond to discrete literary objects; Genette’s
use of the word “text” corresponds more closely to Barthes term “work,” thereby
neglecting the interweaving of the text and reading subject as elucidated by Barthes. In
this regard, Genette neglects the role of human agency in the production of texts. This
leads to the second and larger limitation of Genette’s analysis: the cordoning off of the
social element in textual and cultural dissemination. As indicated already, Genette limits
the hypertextual to “all that sets the text in a relationship…with other texts” (emphasis
added). This definition ignores how social forces interact with textual production,
circulation, and reference. This omission occasionally slips in to Genette’s work, raising
questions that he does not attempt to answer.
16

The work of Julia Kristeva provides one route to resolving this issue. In fact, she
is credited with introducing the term “intertextuality” into critical discourse. Drawing
upon and elucidating the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of “dialogism,”
Kristeva discusses the intersections among literary works as well as among these texts
and social subjects. In Kristeva’s account, Bakhtin demonstrates that all language
weaves together at least two social subjects in a dialogue as well as an existing body of
words – in literature, everyday language, etc.
17
In this interweaving of people and
language(s), Kristeva states “the notion of intertextuality replaces that of
17
intersubjectivity.”
18
However bold, this formulation indicates one of the primary aims of
intertextual theory: to analyze and theorize connections among texts and the social world.
Although in her account dialogism operates as a subversive and radical force in
texts, Bakhtin’s development of the concept of dialogism is fairly precise in its dual
theorization of text-text and text-social subject interrelations. Particularly in his
theorization of the novel as a literary genre, “Discourse in the Novel,”
19
Bakhtin
constitutes dialogism as a fundamental aspect of culture and of cultural dissemination.
He states that the novel “can be defined as a diversity of social speech types…artistically
organized”
20
and that the “distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and
languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types…its
dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.”
21

This formulation entails a huge swath of human communication. Bakhtin’s
theory means that everyday language and verbal discourse is dialogic from the start, as
social subjects address one another within and anticipating some particular recipient, who
is also embedded within a particular social reality.
22
This suggests how people draw
upon and use different languages for different social interactions. Someone will speak
differently to one’s employer than one would speak to fellow employees, for instance.
As a literary genre, the novel draws upon, represents, puts into material form, and
transforms a wide range of these socially-embedded languages. The novel is
constitutively dialogic by interweaving these languages in one work. For instance, when
an author writes of a character, say a salesperson in a department store in late-nineteenth
century France, that author enters in a dialogic relation with the language of that social
18
type. In representing that character’s interactions with other characters of different social
types, the author of a novel creates a dialogue among social types, and thereby represents
a particular social reality; this is the art of the novel.
23

In this way, Bakhtin integrates the relations among social and artistic languages.
Combined with Genette’s extensive typology of different modes of transtextuality, one
perceives the possibility for a range of different relations among texts that can be
understood within particular historical and cultural contexts. However, this conceptual
“dialogue” reaches certain limits in the analysis of cinema and film remakes. Bakhtin’s
analysis seems quite specific to verbal languages and literature. Genette, for his part,
briefly mentions film and filmic intertextuality, what he provocatively calls
“hyperfilmicity,”
24
but he engages in no real analysis that properly addresses film as a
particular medium or cultural form. How do films “dialogue” with language, with other
films, or with society? Are there kinds of intertextuality particular to cinema?

ADAPTATIONS AND INTERMEDIALITY
Within film scholarship, the most common form of intertextual analysis is that of
adaptations. Indeed, much film analysis has referenced its relations with the other “arts,”
such as painting, literature, live theater, etc. In his very early discussion of film,
Ricciotto Canudo regularly related it to (but mainly differentiated film from) theater and
painting, with the purpose of identifying film’s “unique” aesthetic properties.
25
Sergei
Eisenstein extensively compared film to literature and other cultural forms, particularly in
his analysis of the films of D.W. Griffith in relation to the writings of Charles Dickens.
26

19
Admittedly, Eisenstein’s goal was to reveal a historical trajectory of the process of
montage, but it is notable that his connections draw parallels across media forms. Yet
both of these discourses do not deal with adaptation as it is commonly understood now,
but rather with comparative analyses of two or more media—a mode of analysis that
bears heavily but indirectly upon discussions of film adaptations.
Emerging out of earlier discourses of film’s relation to the other arts, film
adaptations have most commonly been understood as film versions of narratives that
existed previously in another medium. The majority of these discussions examine film
versions of novels. George Bluestone’s landmark study Novels into Films in many ways
marks the official beginning to adaptation studies as they are commonly understood.
27

There, Bluestone engages in a series of comparisons of Hollywood films and the novels
from which their stories derive, including Wuthering Heights (1939) and The Grapes of
Wrath (1940). Yet this study, and the majority of similar comparative studies it helped
initiate, analyzes the intertextual relations between a book and a film according to
fundamental differences between film and books as particular media with specific
properties.
28
In this respect, the study of film adaptations, the dominant mode for the
analysis of cinematic intertextuality, intersects with the issue of intermediality, or the
movement from one medium of expression or cultural form to another. Sometimes the
issue of intermediality occurs overtly in these analyses and at other times it provides a
“structuring absence.” This suggests how discourses of film adaptation draw upon the
discursive legacy that sought to establish film as an art, and as a consequence, it demands
20
a larger understanding of how discourses of filmic medium specificity and intermediality
must be sorted through in order to understand filmic intertextuality in general.
It may be, at this point, a fallacy or an exaggeration to say that adaptation studies
are plagued by a valorization of literature at the expense of film. The truism that “the
book was better” simply does not occur with any seriousness or regularity in popular or
academic criticism, especially in proportion to claims that this criticism is leveled.
Nevertheless, so-called “fidelity criticism” has plagued adaptation studies throughout its
history, wherein the comparative analysis of book and film situate the film as a lesser
work. Most typically, this results from the seeming total aesthetic differences between
film and the other arts; more importantly, it has curtailed understandings of the range of
intertextual possibilities for film adaptations.
The work of Dudley Andrew and Robert Stam provide two different yet
extremely productive examples of how intertextuality and intermediality come together in
adaptation studies. Andrew allows for a wide (“hopelessly broad”)
29
range of practices to
be included under the designation “adaptation,” which he defines as “the matching of the
cinematic sign system to prior achievements in some other system.”
30
Under this
umbrella, and limiting himself to films overtly derived from existing texts, Andrew
delineates three intertextual modes of adaptations: “borrowing,” or the relatively loose
referencing of another work or image, such as with a ballet made out of a play;
“intersecting,” wherein one work represents another without attempting any intermedial
accommodations or analogical transformations, and “fidelity of transformation,” where
every effort is made to re-create an existing work in another medium, sometimes through
21
the creation of intermedial analogies and at other times by keeping as much of the
original intact as possible.
31
In all of these cases, Andrew strains to contend with
different intertextual modes as dictated by intermedial relations.
For Robert Stam, the basic process of making a film derived from a novel means
that any attempt at maintaining “fidelity” is lost, and therefore any critical assessment
along these lines is misguided. In asserting this, Stam relies upon an argument about
medium specificity, stating that “each medium has its own specificity deriving from its
respective materials of expression.”
32
In the case of film, for Stam, this specificity is
marked by a “synthetic” incorporation of the other arts, an incorporative type of
intermediality that positions the cinema with a greater number of possible “tracks” for
artistic expression. Yet if film incorporates the other arts in its material means of
expression, what then becomes the purview and objective of adaptation studies (if not to
denigrate one medium at the expense of another)? Stam draws upon a large number of
alternative analogies, or “tropes,” including translation, transformation, transmutations,
etc. With the purpose of deflecting fidelity criticism, Stam draws upon theories of
dialogism, intertextuality, and transtextuality as put forward by Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia
Kristeva, and Gérard Genette, respectively,
33
stating that “film adaptations can be seen as
a kind of multileveled negotiation of intertexts.”
34
Building upon this, Stam ultimately
proposes that adaptation studies engage in what he calls a “comparative narratology,”
which examines the medium-specific applications of order, duration, and frequency, as
well as narrative additions, eliminations, condensations, and other changes occurring in
22
the adaptation process.
35
In this formulation, narrative stands as the trans-medial point of
analysis, the analytical common ground.
What this leaves unformulated, or at least not fully sorted through, is the status of
“the medium” as a category, consequently leaving questions about adaptations, as
intermedial intertexts, open. The issue of medium specificity, as an apparent requisite of
issues of intermediality, has a long and troubled legacy. As noted, many of the early
theorizations of film sought to deal with film’s relations to other cultural forms as well as
with film’s particular capabilities and limits. Some of these analyses were incredibly
productive, such as with Eisenstein. Other examples, such as the work of Rudolph
Arnheim,
36
result in conceptually limited, aesthetically proscriptive rules for film in
general.
37
In all these cases, the search for medium specificity and the endeavor to define
a “medium” appears aligned with a greater modernist tendency within cultural analysis.
As a tendency of this mode of thinking, which seeks out a fundamentally ordered and
coherent conception of the world, each medium has clear demarcations, typically aligned
with their material properties. In many accounts, these properties determine fairly
directly the social functions, modes of use, and psychological effects of the media.
Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the most notable theorist of media and their
interrelations, his discourse emerging from mid-century modernist impulses but
resonating and continuing strongly into the present. Looking at the technological basis
and capabilities of several media, but prompted by and particularly engaged in the
televisual apparatus, McLuhan presents a theory of intermedial relations and the relations
among media and society. His first remarkable claim is that “the ‘content’ of any
23
medium is always another medium,”
38
thus conflating divisions between “form” and
“content” and, more importantly, creating a semi-teleological, progressive model of
intermedial incorporation. He states “the content of writing is speech,”
39
and, in direct
relation to film adaptations, says that “the content of a movie is a novel or a play or an
opera.”
40
McLuhan encapsulates these claims with his now-clichéd and much abused
assertion that “the medium is the message,”
41
summing up a large part of the modernist
analysis of art, culture, and society. Sociologically, McLuhan claims that “the ‘message’
of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it produces
into human affairs.”
42
As media technologies extend the physical and psychological
boundaries of the human, that is, extend the human sensorium into new rates and
volumes, they cumulatively represent and, in fact, circumscribe human social relations at
a given moment. This set of homologies, then, situates any particular medium as a
culturally legible object that wholly entails or interweaves human relations.
Raymond Williams presents the most pointed and useful rebuttal to this stance,
particularly in his rejection of the notion that a medium of communication determines
“not only the ‘content’ of what is communicated but also the social relationships within
which the communication takes place.”
43
While not denying that “there are of course
specific characteristics of different media…related to specific historical and cultural
situations and intentions,”
44
Williams asserts that McLuhan’s formulations constitute
nothing less than a technological determinism that abstracts human intentions and
relations and effaces historical processes, thereby limiting potential sites of analysis,
practice, and change. Instead, Williams argues that media, like any technology, must be
24
seen in their relation to human practices; although a medium will have been designed and
produced for specific purposes, its uses can vary widely. In this respect, any medium
must be understood within and as an important part of a greater cultural practice,
comprised of a range of possibilities. Sometimes these elements correspond, at other
times they conflict, and yet at other times they have only vague or distant relations. A
primary objective of analysis, then, is to look at actual forms of practice and sort through
this range of possibilities in order to provide a fuller, more complete, and complex picture
of culture and cultural processes. Rather than seeing the media or a medium as a fixed
set of materials with an inherent set of properties, and thus a proscribed range of effects
or expressive possibilities, Williams mandates that critics look closely and precisely at
the historical practices in which the media are made, circulated, and consumed. Only in
this analysis of media as cultural practices can scholars and critics properly understand
the complex interrelations among media, culture, and society.
What does this mean for the analysis of intermediality and, more precisely, of
film adaptations? If media cannot be understood outside of their complex social
functions, then intermedial exchanges and transformations must also be seen in their
social and cultural practices. Intermediality is, in fact, a certain kind of cultural practice
in relation to media technologies in general. Film adaptations, as particular forms of
intermedial relationships, thus constitute a particular cultural practice in relation to the
cinema and another medium, where both are understood as already intertwined with
historically and culturally specific contexts and relations of power. Rather than
surveying a broad field of “adaptations” as an ontological aesthetic abstraction,
25
adaptations should be examined as precise forms of intermedial cultural practice done by
specific people and/or groups toward a range of ends and with a range of uses and
circulations.
45
This recalls Dudley Andrew’s proposal that “it is time for adaptation
studies to take a sociological turn.”
46
Thus the various sources for film adaptations
should be viewed not as static objects of analysis, but instead as interwoven in a greater
cultural fabric, specifically as a result of their being adapted by and into film.
There are several immediate consequences of taking this approach. First, it
remains in question just what exactly is being adapted, that is, what is the trans-medial
unit of overlap and comparison. Is it a narrative, an image, a style, or mode of discourse?
As noted, for Robert Stam, among others, narrative is the trans-medial unit of analysis.
However, as indicated by the “borrowing” section of Dudley Andrew’s three modes of
adaptation, the intertextual connection across different media can be sometimes just an
image; an example of this is the use of the Mona Lisa in The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Somewhat similarly, we might return to the early discourses of film and intermediality to
understand how rhetorical tropes or even entire modes of discourse might transfer and
transform across media, such as Eisenstein’s comparison of montage techniques in
Dickens and Griffith.
47
The interchanges among literary and cinematic genres, such as
“horror” or “thrillers,” provide an additional example of transtextual intermediality that
exceeds narrative as a unit of analysis. This should indicate that the five modes of
transtextuality described by Genette could be operative in an intermedial relationship.
However, these relations do not correspond in a direct or fixed way; the adaptation of a
book into a film does not necessarily render specific forms of transtextuality. Rather,
26
intermediality in general, and film adaptations in particular, demand the complex and
simultaneous analysis of all these forces.
This raises the second consequence of taking a sociological or, more accurately, a
“culturalist” approach to adaptations, namely, the issue of what adaptations adapt to. The
movement from one text to another across media, one must account for both the
transtextual relations between them as well as the technical alterations that have occurred.
Yet both of these processes must be seen in their coordination with social processes and
formations. If a particular person or corporate entity engages in the adaptation of a book
into a film, then we must chart and differentiate the diverse cultural meanings of novels
and of films and examine what it means to adapt that novel at that moment by those
parties. As the novel, the cinema, and any other medium have not “meant” the same
thing throughout their histories, have not been made or used uniformly over time, then we
must situate them within their historical and cultural contexts.
Adaptations thus require the correlation of two different cultural forms in two
different cultural and historical contexts. What an adaptation adapts to is an alternate
cultural context in a dialogic manner. That is, the adaptation is the conjoining of two
contexts through the repetition and transformation of two related texts. The movement
from one medium to another renders particular but contingent transformations in the
texts, based on the meanings and uses of those media at a given moment in a given
culture. This approach transposes the object of analysis for a cultural process involving
different technologies. Rather than studying the adaptation of a book into a film,
27
adaptation studies should examine the intersections and exchanges between literary
cultures and cinematic cultures.
Although the transtextual relations between these texts do not correspond in a
determined way to the relations between the contexts from which they come, they do
indicate the “pressures and limits” of the respective contexts and the bounds of the
relations between them. As cultural texts brought together through a complex process of
repetition and transformation, adaptations illustrate the pressures and limits of a link
between two different historical-cultural contexts; while they do not wholly represent the
similarities and differences between the “source” and “receptor” social contexts, they
reveal the boundaries that delimit the possibilities of cultural continuities and changes.
This approach toward cinematic adaptations has implications for the more general
study of intermediality as well. Indeed, the scholarship on adaptations and on
intermediality, also called “convergence,” seems strongly related, yet their interrelations
have remained largely unexamined. Adaptation studies bring to the fore the issue of
intermediality, as it appears impossible to discuss adaptations without discussing the
properties and interrelations of different media. In this respect, adaptation studies
demand a fuller theorization of intermediality in general. The reverse is equally true;
adaptation studies have engaged in some of the most persistent and thorough analyses of
the relations among different media. In this respect, the ongoing theorization of
intermediality, particularly the current discourse of “convergence,” could benefit from
looking to the work already accomplished in the field of adaptation studies, as it shares so
many similar concerns. And a culturalist approach could facilitate the “convergence” of
28
these intellectual tracks. As the context for any intertextual practice is inevitably related
to the technologies people use to communicate and express themselves, and as these
technologies are inevitably intertwined with their particular uses in culture, then
intermediality and intertextuality, including film adaptation, must be seen as eminently
important cultural practices.

FILM REMAKES
If cinematic adaptations have been plagued by numerous discursive and
theoretical conflicts, then film remakes have suffered equally, if not more. As a rule, film
remakes have consistently been denigrated in both academic and popular criticism since
their inception. Yet despite this discursive legacy of conflict and disparagement, film
remakes have played an important role in the history of cinema that demands fuller
appreciation and understanding.
Upon first consideration, film remakes comprise a cinematic category almost
entirely determined by particular intertextual relations. For many scholars and critics,
remakes bear a close relation to film adaptations; indeed, many characterize remakes as a
subset of adaptations. If we take adaptations as cinematic texts with particularly strong
intertextual relations with another text or set of texts, then remakes certainly compose a
part of this grouping. However, many theorists of adaptations and remakes, respectively,
limit their object of study. Robert Stam explicitly avoids considering remakes in his
exhaustive account of film adaptations,
48
and conversely, Robert Eberwein acknowledges
29
that his taxonomy of film remakes does not address the interrelation between remakes
and adaptations.
49
So what are the relations between adaptations and remakes?
In textual terms, the remake almost inevitably means a theatrically-released film
derived from a previously made and theatrically-released film. In their introduction to
the collection on remakes Dead Ringers, Jennifer Forrest and Leonard Koos define the
remake in just this way.
50
Similarly, Thomas Leitch states that remakes are “new
versions of old movies,” and as opposed to other media, “only movies are remade.”
51

These definitions rely upon a certain notion of filmic medium specificity. Michael
Brashinsky asserts this cinematic medium specificity when he states that the remake “is
nothing but a film based on another film that is itself a system of narrative and cinematic
properties,” and that the remake “interprets the work of the same medium.”
52

This reveals that, within their theoretical constructions, adaptations are
intermedial intertexts with an “end product” as a film, and film remakes constitute intra-
medial intertexts, where the primary intertextual relation is between two or more
cinematic texts. That is, film remakes are cinematic texts with a dominant and
determinant intertextual relation with another cinematic text. This contrasts with film
adaptations, which can and should be understood as cinematic texts with a primary
intertextual relation with a text in a medium other than film. The apparent simplicity of
this distinction is complicated by alternative intertextual and intermedial networks. Such
is the case of films made twice or more based on the same novel, like Wuthering Heights
(1939, 1954, 1992, etc.) or Solaris (1972, 2002). Similarly, this model is complicated by
films derived from television programs, like Charlie’s Angels (2001), as well as by
30
special releases, as with the Star Wars films in the late 1990s, or director’s cuts released
on home video or DVD, like Blade Runner (1982). Numerous other typological
exceptions occur or are theoretically possible.
However, working within the bounds of this definition of remakes, films with
dominant and determinant intertextual relations with another film, several scholars have
proposed typologies of film remakes. In his groundbreaking analysis, Thomas Leitch
defines remakes as films with a “triangular” intertextual relationship, comprised of
“themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are
based.”
53
Not only does this raise the pressing issue of copyright in relation to definitions
of film remakes, it also generates his four-part intertextual typology of film remakes.
These are: readaptations, which take “a well-known literary work whose earlier
cinematic adaptations the remake ignores or takes as inconsequential,”
54
updates, which
“are characterized by their overtly revisionary stance toward an original text they treat as
classic, even though they transform it in some obvious way,”
55
homages, “whose primary
purpose is to pay tribute to an earlier film rather than usurp its place of honor,”
56
and
finally true remakes, which combine “a focus on a cinematic original with an
accommodating stance which seeks to make the original relevant by updating it.”
57

This raises several immediate problems. As I and others have pointed out
previously,
58
this typology necessarily demands that film remakes involve non-cinematic
sources somewhere in their intertextual chain, when in fact remakes may derive from
films with no previous iteration. Conversely, the category of readaptations quickly
appears to extend beyond Leitch’s triangular intertextual structure, as many classic novels
31
are adapted numerous times in multiple media.
59
Also, as often happens with typologies,
Leitch’s categories overlap, in some cases considerably, such as when he uses the term
“update” as a category as well as a descriptor within the “true remakes” category.
Perhaps most notably, Leitch maintains a rhetorical distinction, perhaps inadvertently,
between “original” and “copy,” thereby reinforcing a hierarchy of precedence of an
existing text over the remake. This valorization of originality has been one of the main
obstacles in the theorization and criticism of film remakes, as it obeys a neo-Romantic
emphasis on creative expression. Instead, as theories of dialogism and intertextuality
make clear, any text intersects with, reassembles, and transforms a host of existing texts;
every text is an unoriginal intertext, including the “original” texts from which adaptations
and remakes purport to derive. Remakes, in fact, make this process so evident that they
preclude discourses of originality from the start.
Constantine Verevis surveys and critiques Leitch’s typology of remakes, as well
as those by several other scholars and critics, including Nowlan and Nowlan
60
and
Michael Druxman,
61
in his book Film Remakes. Verevis proposes his own typology of
remakes based on particular intertextual relations, drawing upon the theorization of film
genres put forth by Rick Altman. Altman organizes films according to two textual
categories, their semantics, or those discrete elements that comprise a film like
“characters, shots, locations,”
62
and their syntax, or the “constitutive relationships
between undesignated and variable place-holders.”
63
One might rephrase this as a
division between a film’s objective content and the way in which this content is situated
32
in reference to itself. Verevis uses these categories to differentiate three kinds of film
remakes:
[C]lose or direct remakes (‘faithful adaptations’) are those that seek to
reduce difference between themselves and their originals by sharing both
syntactic elements (plot structure, narrative units, character relationships,
etc.) and semantic elements (specific names, settings, time frames,
etc.)…transformed or disguised remakes (‘free adaptations’) are those that
might only make minor alterations to key syntactic elements, but more
substantially transfigure the semantic elements, altering character names,
gender and/or race, cultural setting, temporal setting and even genre of the
original…A third category, non-remakes, describes those films that open
up so substantial a difference – semantic and syntactic – between
themselves and their designated originals that they even may have more in
common with the narrative attributes of a genre or production cycle than
with a particular precursor text, even though the remake may have a like
title and credit a common source.
64

Verevis augments the utility of these categories by extending Altman’s division between
semantic and syntactic elements, which privilege narrative analysis, by including style
within the purview of intertextual analysis. For example, Verevis argues that the films of
Brian De Palma stylistically remake those of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly through the
use of similar “point-of-view” structures.
65
Thus, for Verevis, “lexicon, syntax and
style…provide a key to understanding hypertextual relationships,” making his the most
exhaustive and productive textual categorization of film remakes that currently exists.
Yet one angle of analysis that remains implicit in Verevis’ account, and perhaps
even more overt in others, is the issue of a film remake’s singular mode of intra-
cinematic intertextuality. I asserted above that a film remake bears a dominant and
determinate intertextual relationship with another film. What this description neglects, of
course, is that any given film will have myriad intertextual connections with other films
and texts in many different media. What is particular about the film remake, then?
33
Intertextually speaking, film remakes are distinctive for purporting to take another single
film as their dominant and determinate point of reference.
66
This corresponds directly
with Genette’s model of hypertexts and hypotexts.
This may appear to be a willfully naïve assertion, yet its consequences are great
and resonate throughout the discourses about film adaptations and remakes. This means
that film remakes generally solicit comparative and/or intertextual analysis with only one
other film text, and indeed, the majority of case studies about remakes take the relation
between two films, an original and its remake, as the primary unit of analysis. In this
respect, film remakes evade or efface their greater transtextual relations, whether by
design or by accident. This recalls Thomas Leitch’s claim that remakes operate
according to a process of “disavowal,” or “the combination of acknowledgement and
repudiation in a single ambivalent gesture,”
67
which remakes manifest in their attempt to
be just like their model, only better.
68
In his account, some remakes disavow the previous
film by drawing heavily upon their literary or theatrical sources, and in this respect they
evade or efface their characteristically intra-cinematic mode of intertextuality. However,
even in cases of readaptations, the proper and full analysis of film remakes must attend to
this particularity. As “only movies are remade,”
69
this singular mode of intertextuality
remains a primary definitive criterion for the form. Once this is accepted, then what film
remakes are seen to disavow is their broader transtextual and dialogic relations. Film
remakes require film, thereby privileging film, as it is their constitutive medium.
However useful these textual and intertextual classifications appear, they
nevertheless do not adequately address the complex interrelations between film remakes
34
and broader culture and cultural processes. Anne Friedberg draws attention to this when
she states “the intertextual referentiality between a remake and its ‘original’ is largely
extratextual, outside the film text itself in the historical or discursive context of the film's
production or reception.”
70
Similarly, Verevis situates his three-part textual typology
within a larger, multi-faceted categorization of film remakes, situating them as an
industrial category, as a textual category, and as a critical category.
71
In this way,
Verevis relates film remakes to processes of production, circulation, and reception,
revealing the multiple and sometimes conflicting forces that inflect them. Drawing upon
the assertions made above regarding cinematic adaptations and culture, and in light of the
remake’s specifically cinematic form of intertextuality, we can assert that the film remake
dialogically conjoins alternate cinematic cultures through the repetition and
transformation of related film texts.
Nevertheless, questions remain regarding the interactions between remakes and
culture, between the cinemas they conjoin and the larger cultures in which they are made
and circulated. Just as any film cannot simply reflect nor instruct culture as a whole, so
too is it that film remakes cannot wholly indicate or construct cultural flows. Yet these
are strongly related. But what does it mean to investigate film remakes culturally, to
examine the interrelations between cinema, intertextuality, and culture? What culture?
What are or have been the characteristics of culture that bear upon the cinema and film
remakes, and conversely, what is the culture that film remakes weigh upon?

35
CHAPTER 1 NOTES

1
Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

2
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), 155-164.

3
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 156.

4
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 161.

5
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 160.

6
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude
Dubinsky, (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 1997).

7
Genette, 1.

8
Genette, 1.

9
Genette, 2.

10
Genette, 3.

11
Genette, 4.

12
Genette, 4-5.

13
Genette, 5-7.

14
Genette, 20-29, 105.

15
Genette, 206-207.

16
For instance, he indicates that the parody genre requires a knowing reader when he writes: “One could, of
course, read Chapelain décoiffé without knowing Le Cid; but one cannot perceive and appreciate the
function of the one without having the other work in mind or in hand. The requirement of reading forms a
part of the definition of the genre and…a part of the perceptibility and therefore the existence of the work.”
Genette, 18-19. Here, Genette invokes a “reader” as a general category outside of any historical or cultural
context, thus uniformly and idealistically. Elsewhere, Genette re-encounters this limit, when he defines
pastiche as an intertextual genre. He implicates the need for “sufficient cultural competence” on the part of
readers, and further, says that the writers of pastiches usually warn their readers of the status of their
writings through an overt acknowledgement, or “pastiche contract.” Genette, 86. Genette thus presents an
implicit portrait of a social network through an intertextual relationship; here, despite his appeal to the
broad category of “culture,” he limits the relation to that between authors and readers. But might there not
be general “contracts” embedded in every intertextual relationship, even every text?

17
Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), 36-37.

18
Kristeva, 37.

36

19
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981): 259-422.

20
Bakhtin, 262.

21
Bakhtin, 263.

22
For instance, he states, “the way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by dialogic
interaction within the object between various aspects of its social-verbal intelligibility.” Bakhtin, 277.

23
Bakhtin, 358.

24
Genette, 156.

25
Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler,
(London: Routledge, 2002), 13-24.

26
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay
Leyda, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), 195-255.

27
George Bluestone, Novels into Film, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

28
James Naremore notes this as well, ascribing it to a “modernist” tendency within cultural analysis. James
Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore,
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 6-7.

29
Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press), 29.

30
Andrew, 28.

31
Andrew, 30-31.

32
Robert Stam, “The Dialogics of Adaptations,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 59.

33
Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to
the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005), 8, 26-31. This is an extension and revision of the previous essay, “The Dialogics of
Adaptation.” Although there are substantial passages that are repeated, Stam eliminates a few sentences
that, to me, clarify his point better in the earlier essay. I cite both essays here equally, feeling that they hold
equal weight.

34
Stam, “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” 67.

35
Stam, “Introduction,” 32-34.

36
Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art, (Berkeley: University of California, 1957).

37
Noël Carroll provides an extensive critique of Arnheim in his critique of medium-specificity theories in
“The Specificity Thesis,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5
th
Edition, ed. Leo Braudy
and Marshall Cohen, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 322-328.
37

38
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: Signet, 1964), 23.

39
McLuhan, 23.

40
McLuhan, 32.

41
McLuhan, 28.

42
McLuhan, 24.

43
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 159.

44
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (New York: Schocken Books, 1974),
127.

45
Kyle Edwards examines adaptation in precise historical terms, as a particular practice (in this case
industrial) rather than as a conceptual conundrum. Edwards looks at the production circumstances of,
publicity material for, and textual features of the film Rebecca (1940) in order to show how these elements
signal a specific industrial strategy by David Selznick’s Independent Pictures to offset the problems of
independent film production through product differentiation and branding. Although this case focuses
squarely on the commercial production of a literary adaptation, it provides an excellent example of how
adaptations can be understood as very particular practices toward particular ends. The essay is path-
breaking and admirable for its level of specificity and analysis of adaptations within and shaping particular
cultural circumstances. Kyle Dawson Edwards, “Brand-Name Literature: Film Adaptation and Selznick
International Pictures’ Rebecca (1940),” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (2006): 32-58.

46
He cites various moments when the field of adaptations was remarkably diverse range of practices and
where adaptations were particularly fraught by sociological and cultural conflicts, indeed, where these
conflicts were expressed through various practices of cinematic adaptation. Andrew, “Adaptation,” 35.

47
Eisenstein, 215-223.

48
Stam, “Introduction,” 45.

49
Robert Eberwein, “Remakes and Cultural Studies,” in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed.
Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 31.

50
Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, “Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction,” in Dead Ringers: The
Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002), 2-3.

51
Thomas Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” in Dead Ringers, 37.

52
Michael Brashinsky, “The Spring, Defiled: Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s Last
House on the Left,” in Play It Again, Sam, 162-163.

53
Leitch, 39.

54
Leitch, 45.

55
Leitch, 47.
38

56
Leitch, 47.

57
Leitch, 49.

58
Daniel Herbert, “Sky’s the Limit: Transnationality and Identity in Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky,” Film
Quarterly 60, no. 1, (Fall 2006): 37 n27; Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 14-15.

59
For instance, the novel La Dame aux Camélias, the opera La Traviata, and the many film versions of
Camille.

60
Robert Nowlan and Gwendolyn Wright Nowlan, Cinema Sequels and Remakes, 1903-1987, (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1989).

61
Michael Druxman, Make it Again, Sam: A Survey of Movie Remakes, (South Brunswick, N.J.: A.S.
Barnes, 1975).

62
Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” in Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing,
1999), 219.

63
Altman, 219.

64
Verevis, 84-85.

65
Verevis, 85.

66
Even if one upholds Thomas Leitch’s “triangular” structure, the definitive criteria of a remake, as
opposed to an adaptation, remains its singular intertextual relation with another specific film.

67
Leitch, 53.

68
Leitch, 44.

69
Leitch, 37.

70
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 175-176.

71
Verevis, 2.
39
CHAPTER 2 – GLOBALIZATION, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND THE
TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

CONTENDING WITH GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM
The most significant social transformation in the late twentieth century, weighing
heavily if unevenly upon many parts of the world, is the combination of processes
referred to as “globalization” or by the related term “transnationalism.” As a political
process, globalization can be seen in numerous sea-changes. Preeminent among them is
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in the Soviet Union and the
Eastern Bloc in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms. This
radically altered international relations around the world, as it effectively dissolved the
“three-world” global division of political powers. Similarly transformative, 1992
witnessed the official formation of the European Union, emerging from the existing
structure of the European Commission into a genuinely, if contested, supranational, inter-
governmental and economic conglomeration of European nation-states. In East Asia,
South Korea moved rapidly through dramatic political changes, from authoritarian
military rule in the early 1980s to holding their first democratic elections in 1987 to the
election of Kim Young-Sam in 1992, the first civilian leader in South Korea since 1960.
In Japan, the death of Emperor Showa signaled the official end of the Japanese imperial
rule from the earlier half of the twentieth century, replaced by democracy and integration
with the “international community” of Western capitalist states.
40
As an economic process, intimately interconnected with the political,
globalization greatly increased the mobility and flexibility of capital and resources. As
David Harvey notes, the elimination of the gold standard transformed the world economy
into a virtual confidence game, completely intertwined with the interconnected,
hyperactive stock markets, such as in New York and Tokyo.
1
The demise of the planned
economies of the Eastern Bloc also marked the spread and apparent global dominance of
capitalism. Numerous “free-trade” coalitions formed, such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in North America and The Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) in Southeast Asia, which sought to eliminate tariffs among nations
within regional groupings, realigning longstanding political relations under the universal
sign of commerce. But the supreme organization of economic globalization is the World
Trade Organization (WTO), which officially formed in 1995 out of the terms of the
General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the series of multi-party trade
negotiations taking place over the second half of the twentieth century. Upholding the
mission to establish universal trade rules and to reduce trade barriers among member
nations, and with the ability to enact punishments upon “anti-competitive” offender
states, the WTO has effectively established itself as the regulatory body over the
capitalist “world-system,”
2
no longer an abstraction but now made manifest. Under
economic globalization, nations and regions across the world now clearly comprise
particular components of a massive macro-system, with capitalism as its driving force
and with a resulting complex, geographically-imbalanced division of labor.
41
As a sociological process, as a process of human relations conjoining the political
and the economic, globalization saw people increasingly on the move and, as a result of
their new mobility, coming together in new social formations. During the second half of
the twentieth century, various peoples across the world traveled extensively. Tourists
traveled to “exotic” and remote locations for leisure and pleasure. Political refugees fled
their locations of habitation to escape wars and famines, such as Laotians fleeing the
geographic excesses of the Vietnam War or those who fled the genocide in Rwanda
during the 1990s. Still others remained mobile in their search for wage labor, often
exploiting differences in the economies of contiguous states, as in the case of Mexican
migrant farm-workers and day-laborers in the USA. Displacement and movement
functioned as the de facto norm for increasing numbers of peoples across the globe. Yet
many came together in new diasporic communities as well, which forged new relations
among geography and ethnic and cultural groupings. One thinks of the community of
ethnic Koreans in the Los Angeles area or of the large number of ethnic Japanese residing
in Brazil. These communities demonstrate at once the new mobility of ethnic groups
under globalization, as well as the formation of transnational collectivities, as they
maintain a sense of national displacement ameliorated by continued cultural coherence.
Given the breadth and depth of these interrelated changes, there is severe risk in
assigning to globalization and transnationalism too much agency in contemporary social
relations, in diluting the efficacy of these terms by making them a catch-all for every
sweeping change in recent history, or similarly, of situating these phenomena only within
recent history. To understand globalization fully, it must be seen in its historical
42
specificity, which necessarily requires understanding its historical roots and precedents,
as well as its precise articulations in politics, economics, and culture.
Globalization, as both cause and effect, as a process, implicates the highly
escalated levels of interconnectivity and exchange among peoples, resources, and
information across the globe, making each of these areas and the relations among them
increasingly characterized by fluidity and mobility. Indeed, these increased levels of
movement, interaction, and interpenetration correspond with a general transformation in
social arrangements of space and time as well as the hyper-mobility capital in the global
markets.
Transnationalism, on the other hand, describes those flows of peoples, resources,
and information that occur between and in excess of the nation as a socio-political
formation. This relates to but ultimately contrasts with the “international,” or those
exchanges between two nations that maintain the internal coherence of each, the
“multinational,” which is comprised of multiple national forces yet that still adheres to
national lines of sovereignty, and the “supranational,” or those systems and structures that
conjoin multiple nation-states into blocks, typically regional, yet that also uphold the
independence of the individual member states. The “trans” in transnational signals its
particularity; the transnational consists of movements between nations that radically alter
nations and that ultimately evade or exceed national lines of power and sovereignty. As
globalization reconfigures the power of nation-states in general, in some cases eroding
their power and in other instances giving them new abilities and forms of power, we can
assert that transnationalism is a possible effect of globalization.
43
If globalization and transnationalism characterize social conditions since the late
twentieth century, then these forces alter the conditions of the nation-state and
nationalism, the social arrangements that analogously characterize modernity. Benedict
Anderson and Ernest Gellner provide the most salient, if now contested, theorizations of
nations and nationalism. For Gellner, “nationalism is primarily a political principle,
which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”
3
Whereas the
state is “that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement
of order…such as police forces and courts,”
4
nations are formed by people of the same
“culture,” who “recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their
shared membership of [the nation].”
5
In this regard, nations are constructed,
horizontally-structured socio-cultural groupings. Nationalism is the ideological drive
toward constructing this grouping and making it identical with the state.
Vitally, Gellner argues that nations and nationalisms are intricately intertwined
with industrialism, that is, with the adoption of industrial mode of production in
modernity, that “nationalism is indeed an effect of industrial social organization.”
6
This
dualistic development relates to the commonality of peoples under the nation in the
following way: “[c]ontrary to what Marxism has led people to expect, it is pre-industrial
society which is addicted to horizontal differentiation within societies, whereas industrial
society strengthens the boundaries between nations rather than those between classes.”
7

The division of labor and arrangement of power characteristic of industrial societies gives
rise to the horizontal commonalities that engender nationalism.
44
Benedict Anderson provides a different account of nationalism, yet one that is
similarly “constructivist” and interrelated with modernity. In what is now a commonly
cited formulation, Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community –
and imagined as bother inherently limited and sovereign.”
8
Nations are “imagined
because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-
members…yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
9
Nations are
“limited because even the largest of them…has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond
which lie other nations.”
10
Nations are sovereign as they displace religious/dynastic
forms of rule; and nations form a community because “regardless of the actual inequality
and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,
horizontal comradeship.”
11
Importantly, Anderson argues that these forms of social
imagining and relational arrangements came about through the antagonistic relation
between colonies and their colonizers, such as the United States’ succession from the
UK, rather than the rationalizing force of the Enlightenment or the internal economic
organization of the state. Although Anderson does not link industrialization to
nationalism as does Gellner, they both theorize nations similarly – as coherent, if flexible
and yet totalizing, socio-cultural groupings characteristic of the modern period.
Anderson characterizes nationalism as “modular,” asserting that after its
origination in the liberation struggles in North America, etc., nationalism could be and
was adopted by other groups in other parts of the world. He states “the ‘nation’ proved
an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for
pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands.”
12
In fact, not only was
45
nationalism theoretically transportable, but, in Anderson’s account, it did travel through
history and around the globe. He states “since the end of the eighteenth century
nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation, according to different
eras, political regimes, economies and social structures. The ‘imagined community’ has,
as a result, spread out to every conceivable contemporary society.”
13
In this respect,
despite its apparent geo-socio-cultural coherence, nationalism has been explicitly mobile
and flexible, imbricated within a larger, global system of relations. Moreover, and in
direct relation to this study, it is vital to note that Anderson’s characterization of
nationalism raises many of the same issues as adaptations and film remakes.
Specifically, both nationalism and adaptations are “essentially” mobile and flexible,
finding their exact articulation(s) within specific historical and cultural contexts. In this
respect, nations and nationalisms are “texts” like any other, embedded within a web of
intertextual, transtextual, and contextual network of relations.
The supposed internal coherence the nation’s political, ideological, and cultural
being has been significantly undermined by theorists and historians with a variety of
agendas and approaches. Their critiques appear all the more poignant in light of the
histories of imperial colonialism,
14
as well as the contemporary trend toward
transnationalism and globalization. In each instance, the nation is structured in relation to
some other, ultimately more determinate social-political-economic arrangement. These
systems of exchange, interpenetration, and transformation demonstrate the historical and
cultural contingency of nations and nationalism. In their clearest articulations, they
demonstrate the contingency and even arbitrariness of nations and nationalism as social
46
constructions. A primary issue among these critiques is the unit and axis of socio-
cultural analysis. The most prevalent and pervasive are politics, economics,
technologies, and culture. As these categories are analyzed in relation to globalization
and transnationalism, a vitally important discursive rift occurs. Whereas some theorists
argue that globalization is a force of homogenization, others assert that it engenders
increasing differences and disparities.
Looking at economics, for example, Masao Miyoshi theorizes the contemporary
situation of transnational capital and, as a consequence, the formation of a transnational
class.
15
Miyoshi argues that the post-World-War II period witnessed the development of
the “transnational corporation” (TNC), defined as a corporation that is not “tied to its
nation of origin but is adrift and mobile, ready to settle anywhere and exploit and state
including its own, as long as the affiliation serves its interest.”
16
Not only did this
process accelerate during the 1980s, but moreover, it is characteristic of a general
transnationalization and weakening of the power of the nation-state in contemporary
society. Yet for Miyoshi this development finds its historical precedent in the social,
economic, and political systems of imperial colonialism, going so far as to say
“colonialism is even more active now [in 1993] in the form of transnational
corporatism.”
17
In this formulation, the juridical power of the UN and the imperatives of
capitalism laid the groundwork for a complex system of interconnections that obscure
national borders.
David Harvey theorizes the shift in the contemporary historical and cultural
moment of postmodernity through the shifting relations among economics, culture, time,
47
and space. He asserts that the world has undergone a profoundly increased phase of
“time-space compression,”
18
by which he means a speeding up of time and a reduction in
the size or relevance of geographic space. According to Harvey, this has occurred in
relation to the advent of a “post-Fordist” economy of “flexible accumulation,”
19
which
has prompted a more fluid and rapid flow of capital across the globe and which in turn
displaces peoples and strains traditional modes of aesthetic representation. In this
economic shift, capital threatens to move more rapidly than individuals and social groups.
Although this does not negate the power of the nation-state entirely, Harvey observes that
“[g]eopolitics and economic nationalism, localism and the politics of place, are all
fighting it out with a new internationalism in the most contradictory of ways.”
20
Thus the
formation of the European Economic Community as a supranational economic system
occurs in 1992, the same moment that “Thatcherism still proclaims itself as a distinctive
national project resting upon the peculiarities of the British.”
21
Thus, in Harvey’s
formulation, transnational economic forces engender more substantial interconnections
and rapid exchanges across the globe, significantly altering the conditions of nationalism
if not eliminating them entirely.
Manuel Castells has similarly argued that the world has recently undergone a
transformation that is fundamentally new and definitional, calling this new formation the
“Network Society” or the “Informational Society.”
22
This society is built upon the advent
and widespread deployment of information technologies (IT) which produced an
“informational” economy
23
that is a global (real-time) economy rather than a “world
economy.”
24
As a consequence, space is significantly altered within the Network
48
Society, increasingly operating according to a logic of flows.
25
That is, the “space of
flows” has impeded upon and displaced the “space of places” (where we are bodily,
contiguity), and this shift weighs heavily upon relations of power. Power in the network
society operates according to two sets of binaries: first, a system of inclusion/exclusion in
relation to the network, and second, the ability to change the “program” or objective of a
network.
26
Castells states that the growth of Western states and their technological
development is “inextricably linked to imperialist ambitions and inter-imperialist
conflicts.”
27
Although, Castells’ conceptualization of recent historical changes relies
heavily upon technological determinism, he provides a detailed analysis of social and
technological transformations in the contemporary period, both of which radically
transform the power of the nation-state.
Yet if Miyoshi and Harvey place determinant importance on the market, and if
Castells places too much importance on technology, other writers have posited important
correctives in discussions of globalization and transnationalism. Arjun Appadurai
provides a productively multi-faceted theorization of globalization. He “argues for a
general rupture in the tenor of intersocietal relations in the past few decades,”
28
asserting
that media and migration are the dominant agents within this transition.
29
While the
relationship between these two forces is variable, it shapes the relations between time and
space in the contemporary period.
30
Further, he notes that “globalization is a deeply
historical, uneven, and even localizing process,”
31
indicating a differential deployment of
spaces, times, and relations of power. This complex dynamic prompts Appadurai to
theorize five axes of global flows: ethnoscapes (flows of people), mediascapes (flows of
49
culturally significant symbols), technoscapes (flows of technology and technologies of
flow), financescapes (the global market), and ideoscapes (flows of ideas put into
practice).
32
These interconnected and contingent flows threaten the sovereignty of the
nation-state and impinge upon the supposed coherence of national or local identities.
Notably, this schema encapsulates many of the determining factors that other theorists,
such as those described above, use as their primary determinant. In this respect,
Appadurai’s theorization of globalization avoids the threat of singular determination.
Conversely, theories of globalization and transnationalism must account for
particular and embodied changes in human experience as well as macro-level economic,
political, technological, and cultural changes. As Dana Polan argues, “globalism is not
an abstraction but a concrete activity whose mode of being has its effect on the local
body.”
33
Doreen Massey asserts “the usual interpretation [of globalization] is that it
results overwhelmingly from the actions of capital, and from its increasing
internationalization…surely this is insufficient.”
34
Massey argues that structures of race
and gender are at least as determinate as the force of capital. Conceptualizing
globalization in this embodied and situated way allows Massey to assert the heterogeneity
of global and local spaces, the positive potentialities of this situation, as well as the
experiential and epistemological contingencies of the increasing interpenetration of the
global and the local. “What we need,” she says,” “is a global sense of the local, a global
sense of place.”
35

Whether viewed in their particular manifestations or in their systemic totality, the
multiple and sometimes contradictory interactions among economic imperatives,
50
technologies, and political systems contributing to globalization and transnationalism
have set the conditions for a number of general transformations in social relations. In this
respect, globalization and transnationalism constitute historical processes that demarcate
time, as they differentiate the contemporary period from previous eras. Yet as historical
processes, they are characterized by important continuities as well, and a dialectical view
will attend to both continuities and changes in social relations under globalization and
transnationalism. Similarly, globalization and transnationalism manifest themselves
powerfully, perhaps most powerfully, through the reconfiguration of space. What is
globalization if not a new spatial arrangement of peoples and societies, surpassing vast
distances, realigning and transcending the borders of the traditional nation-state, and
engendering new forms of cultural heterogeneity through the mutual interpenetration of
the local and the global? As they significantly alter the production and uses of social
spaces, globalization and transnationalism constitute geographic processes. To be clear:
globalization and transnationalism occur as social arrangements of space and time, that is,
as geographic and historical processes.
Yet this is complicated by the category of culture. Indeed, culture has special
importance for globalization and transnationalism. In its more restrictive sense of being
“meaningful signs and forms of communication,”
36
culture overtly comprises a central
component of globalization, as the vastly increased geographic spread and mobility of
signs, information, and artistic works brings peoples across the world into new relation
with one another. Conceived as a “whole way of life,”
37
which brings together peoples,
technologies, practices, and beliefs, culture can never be separated fully from historical
51
processes or social relations. Conceived even more broadly, culture remains central to
these processes, as in Appadurai’s formulation where culture flows transnationally
through mediascapes and ideoscapes, etc. David Morley and Kevin Robins assert the
vital importance of culture to globalization, such as when they state “the globalisation
[sic] of economic activity is now associated with a further wave of cultural
transformation, with a process of cultural globalisation.”
38
They argue, “increasingly we
must think in terms of communications and transport networks and of the symbolic
boundaries of language and culture – the ‘spaces of transmission’ defined by satellite
footprints or radio signals – as providing the crucial, and permeable, boundaries of our
age.”
39
In this formulation, cultural flows are both agents and products of globalization;
technological and economic changes associated with globalization have coincided with
the increased geographic circulation of information – communications and artistic works
– engendering new forms of interaction among cultural groups. Indeed, this spread of
information transforms the size, locations, and limits of cultural groups.
This bears out two vital consequences. First and most broadly, cultural
globalization radically alters the conditions of identity. Along with time and space,
identity constitutes a fundamental category of human experience that globalization and
transnationalism reconfigure. Yet just as time and space are organized socially into
history and geography, so too is “identity” not an empty category but rather constructed
through social relations. In this respect, culture is fundamental. As Morley and Robins
state, their “concern is with collective cultural identity,” which necessarily “involves the
achievement, by individual actors or by social groups, of a certain coherence, cohesion,
52
and continuity…through time…[and] across space.”
40
Thus, through their
transformations of time and space, the processes of globalization in general and cultural
globalization in particular create an “identity crisis.” We can now assert that
globalization and transnationalism constitute historical, geographic, and cultural
processes that remake (a process of repetition, transformation, and interconnection) time,
space, and identity.
The second issue raised by Morley and Robins has two parts. First, there is the
question about the relation between cinema and constructions of cultural identity. As
their analysis investigates electronic media and the political economy of media
conglomerates, they do not engage in a sustained discussion of cinema or its relation with
cultural identities. How do communities create and consume film? How does film
interpellate them and organize them into particular formations? What kinds of
communities come together around films and organize the social apparatus of cinema?
Are these groups national, sub-national, or transnational? Secondly, there is the issue of
cinema’s contemporary identity itself. In the contemporary moment, cinema appears
displaced by myriad other media and cultural forms, such as satellite and cable television,
home-movie formats like VHS and DVD, as well as video games. Further, the ownership
and production processes for many cinemas throughout the world have undergone
substantial change, forcing changes in the ways that cinema is conceived and discussed.
What is the contemporary cinema? How have technological changes in the greater media
sphere impacted how cinema is made, distributed, and consumed? Has globalization
caused an “identity crisis” for the cinema similar to those among cultural identities?
53
These are interrelated question that, in order to answer them, require a transformed
understanding of cinema in general and of “national cinemas” in particular.

FROM NATIONAL CINEMAS TO TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL INDUSTRIES
Cinemas outside the United States have been primarily understood within an
academic discourse of “national cinema.” According to the general theoretical precepts
of “national cinema,” the films produced within any particular nation-state reflect and
shape the identity of that nation. As Gellner states that nationalism strives to render the
political and the national unit congruent,
41
and as Anderson asserts that nations are
communities imagined through forms of mass culture, then the aim of “national cinema”
discourses is to theorize and assert the congruence between a nation-state’s cinema with
the political and national unit of that nation-state. Although there are disparities among
the different approaches taken by these studies, in part prompted by the differences
among the individual cases, analyses of national cinemas most commonly investigate
relations among aesthetic, economic, and ideological factors in the production and
circulation of different cinematic industries.
Susan Hayward and Andrew Higson provide perhaps the most paradigmatic
theories of national cinema in their respective studies of French and British national
cinemas. Susan Hayward theorizes the forces that formulate national cinemas as “seven
discernible typologies.”
42
These are: narratives, or the stories that either originate from
an existing “indigenous” text like a novel or that overtly construct an image of the nation;
nationally popular and typical film genres; codes and conventions, or representational
strategies that arise from nationally-particular modes of production; gesture and
54
morphology, or habits of performance that signal nationally-typical behaviors; the star as
sign, or the specific film performers who signify a nation’s culture during a specific
period; cinema of the center and cinema of the periphery, or the variable relations of
power and cinematic standardization among Hollywood, the indigenous cinema, and
marginal cinemas within the indigenous nation; and finally cinema as the mobilizer of the
nation’s myths and the myth of the nation, which is to say or to reiterate that a nation’s
cinema will always reflect (upon) that nation’s mythic construction within a range of
possibilities based on historical context or position of power.
43
Hayward draws upon the
work of Benedict Anderson as she posits that these seven “typologies” interweave to
constitute the “imagined community” of the nation through film.
While these seven categories appear to delimit an extensive range of options for
cinematic analysis, they raise a number of troublesome issues. Most evidently, there is a
dramatic change in order among the categories, as the first five designate specific textual
features whereas the last two designate institutional and ideological functions of the
previous five. In this respect, they appear not as categories but rather synthetic forms of
analysis in their own right. Further, the first five categories lend themselves to such a
general level of cinematic analysis that their delimitation to “national” paradigms appears
limiting. For example, are genres not modular by definition, available to repetition and
revision in all manner of locations and contexts? Cannot codes and conventions travel
transnationally and/or encompass transnational cultural formations? Finally, Hayward
neglects the role of economics as well as that of the audience in her schema, although she
mobilizes these factors at other points in her book.
55
Andrew Higson’s theorization of national cinemas addresses many of Hayward’s
categories as well as some of those that she neglects, as he states that national cinemas
have been organized economically, textually, around exhibition, and around criticism.
44

Higson notes that existing discourses aim to assert the unity, “imaginary coherence,” and
specificity of a nation’s cinema either by comparing and contrasting that cinema to
another, typically Hollywood, or through an “inward-looking process,”
45
whereby one
asserts a cinema’s “relationship to an already existing national political, economic and
cultural identity…and set of traditions.”
46
Higson advocates this inward-looking
approach, but in a broader configuration, suggesting that “national cinema needs to be
explored not only in relation to production, but also in relation to questions of distribution
and exhibition, audiences and consumption, within each nation state.”
47
Thus, in order to
properly acknowledge the internal diversity of a nation-state’s cinematic practices and
cultural identities and to demonstrate cinematic nationalism as an ongoing process of
construction, Higson’s schema automatically includes Hollywood (or any other
“external” cinema with nationally-popular appeal). Ultimately, Higson advocates what
can be called a cultural approach to national cinemas that takes “into account the film
culture as a whole, and the overall institution of cinema.”
48
Although he maintains the
interdependence of cinematic production and texts toward the construction of a
nationalist “structure of feeling,” this must be coordinated in relation to filmic circulation,
audience reception, and film criticism within any particular nation-state.
However, the theorization of national cinemas is constantly and increasingly
antagonized by the categories of the transnational and the global. Given the variable
56
circulations of production finances and film texts, and given the variable locations and
mobility of rights-holders and audiences, why does the nation factor at all into the
relation between film and cultural identities? Some other theorizations of national
cinemas contend with this problem in various ways. In her examination of British and
Indian films from the late imperial era, for example, Priya Jaikumar asserts, “we must
abandon the rubric of national cinemas if we are to consider the multiple, conjunctural
pressures applied by decolonization on the political entities of an imperial state and its
colony.”
49
In her extensive study of Spanish cinema through the second half of the
twentieth century, as another case, Marsha Kinder implicates the cracks and limitations of
national cinemas generally. Kinder’s textual/ideological analysis takes a transnationally
relational approach, situating Spanish films within their “international dimensions” by
illustrating how texts migrate and vary in different (national) contexts.
50
For instance,
she shows how Spanish filmmakers of the 1950s worked in textual dialogue with the
conventions of the Italian neorealist and the Hollywood commercial cinemas to
accommodate as well as subvert the fascist ideology of the Franco regime.
51
Spanish
films mobilized tropes of melodrama in their conflation of these “Hollywood and Italian
conventions,”
52
and were “Spanish” to the extent that they were “inflected with fascism
and Catholicism.”
53
Thus, Kinder demonstrates how film texts operate within an
international network of conventions, how these conventions can be mapped onto a
national ideological grid, and ultimately how text-based approaches to cinema can reveal
tensions between national and transnational forces. Moreover, the historical dimension
of Kinder’s study implicates limits to the power of the nation in constructing cultural
57
identities through cinema; her study occurs primarily within the post-war period, but this
model becomes increasingly complicated by forces of transnationalism after the adoption
of democracy in Spain and economic liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the
last section of Blood Cinema investigates the role of “regionalism” in Spain, both
“microregionalism” (Catalan) and “macroregionalism” (Europe), which are directly
related to globalization.
54

In a later essay of his, Andrew Higson also raises general problems related to
aligning culture and a cultural economy strictly to the shape of the nation. In a genuinely
astounding conceptual turn, Higson significantly devalues the relationship among the
nation, cinema, and cultural identities. He states “the concept of national cinema is
hardly able to do justice to the internal diversity of contemporary cultural formations or
the overlaps and interpenetrations between different formations.”
55
Although he admits
that “it would be impossible – and certainly unwise – to ignore the concept [of national
cinema] altogether,” he concludes that, given the variability, mobility and multiplicity of
factors and forces involved in cinematic production, distribution, and exhibition, “the
contingent communities that cinema imagines are much more likely to be either local or
transnational than national.”
56

And indeed, not only has globalization radically transformed the relations among
cultural identities and cultural forms, but further, transformations in cultural production,
distribution, and exhibition – including those within the world’s cinema industries –
constitute a fundamental component of globalization and transnationalism. Along with
changes in economic, political, and technological structures throughout the world, culture
58
as such is globalization, interpenetrating these other factors in a complex “geography” of
dynamic, multi-directional flows, and increasingly functioning transnationally rather than
conforming to the ideological and geographical boundaries of nation-states. This is, in
fact, the premise of Morley and Robin’s book Spaces of Identity, which thoroughly
analyzes multiple and diverse ways that globalization and the mass media intersect and
facilitate one another.
This transformation has had myriad effects among media industries in diverse
locations and of a variety of structures. Among the existing traditional “national cinema”
industries, where public funds are diverted toward the production of a nationally
“indigenous” cinema, there has been a general move toward economic liberalization and
commercialization. In addition to, or rather than, creating and promoting works with
nationally-resonant narratives and themes, the imperative has increasingly been toward
creating economically profitable products. This trend has also facilitated the
consolidation of the mass media, including film, into a number of “global” media
corporations, such as Sony, News Corporation, and Disney. In this regard, film,
television, and other cultural forms are increasingly owned and operated by a limited
number of parties that are able to distribute and exhibit their products over a
geographically larger area and to culturally varied audiences. This creates a radical new
relation within the media industries as well as among these industries and cultural
groupings. Specifically, the media industries are increasingly characterized by “post-
Fordist” structure aimed at economic flexibility. This may manifest itself through a
corporation’s ownership of an incredibly diverse range of businesses, such as bottled
59
water and cable television, and/or through a corporation’s ownership of a “vertical” chain
of media businesses including those of production, distribution, and exhibition, and/or
through a corporation forming loose and contingent ties to all manner of sub-contracted,
related businesses so as to offset economic risk. As these arrangements consistently take
place in a number of different nations and cultural contexts, it is evident that such
business restructuring indicates the economic globalization of the cultural industries.
Simultaneously with this reorganization of the media, the patterns of consumption
and use have also radically changed in many parts of the world. It is simply no longer the
case that people watch films or television programs made in their nation of residence.
Just as populations across the world have become more diasporic, so too have media
become more mobile and/or taken up “mobile” forms of address. On the one hand, and
as discussed by Morley and Robins, this has promoted a certain “globalization,” a
virtualization, and abstraction of identity from its social contexts. However, they and
others note the simultaneous rise of reactionary and vehement new nationalisms or re-
nationalisms. As Morley and Robins argue, these “neo-nationalisms” present a struggle
for “wholeness and security” against globalization;
57
“a struggle that is being waged in
the context of a world in which it is increasingly impossible to avoid strangers; a world in
which the fiction of ‘our’ community is therefore always going to be exposed and
vulnerable.”
58

But their analysis pertains primarily to new electronic media and not cinema per
se. So what specific roles does cinema play within this process? Writing about the
contemporary European cinematic context, Tim Bergfelder writes “apart from individual
60
and collective processes of migration, industrial imperatives add further agency to the
cross-cultural transaction between European cinemas.”
59
Further, he adds that within
European cinemas, “the processes of dispersal, incursion and dissolving of
boundaries…are evident not simply at the level of production, but equally at the level of
reception.”
60
This position leads him to assert that “once filmic texts enter the context of
transnational transfer and distribution, they become subject to significant variations,
translations and cultural adaptation,”
61
and ultimately that “a transnational history of
European cinema thus might focus precisely on the strategies and practices by which
filmic texts’ travel and become transformed according to the specific requirements of
different cultural contexts and audiences.”
62

With the advent of new electronic networks of media distribution, such as cable
and satellite, and with a predominance of visual narratives being made for television
rather than traditional cinema theaters, and moreover with the lines between “television”
companies and “film” companies becoming more and more blurred, such as with Canal+
throughout Europe and HBO in the United States, the cinema as we know it has been
radically reconfigured throughout the world in the contemporary period. Which is not to
say that film production, distribution, and consumption has “died,” but rather that it now
works in a variable relation of interdependence with numerous other forms of mass media
and culture. This condition bears upon both the structures and institutions through which
media are produced, owned, and circulated, as well as the patterns of use through which
cultural groupings come into formation.
61
In order to ascertain a fuller conception of these processes, in both their historical
novelties as well as their continuities, discourses of “national cinema” should give way to
one of “transnational cultural industries.” This phrase, “cultural industry,” cannot help
but evoke the “culture industry” and the eponymous theoretical formulation of Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
63
yet it signifies a different object of analysis as well a
different approach toward that object. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry
comprised all those profit-driven businesses in Western nations that produced, owned,
and circulated “cultural” goods that functioned symbolically, like “films, radio, and
magazines”
64
or television or popular music. With the aim of conveying a sense of the
social totality, Horkheimer and Adorno assert that together these industries “make up a
system which is uniform as a whole and in every part,”
65
wherein “the specific content of
the entertainment itself…only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.”
66

They assert that capitalism has so objectified, standardized, and homogenized the modes
and forms of cultural production that it has effaced, “whatever involved a distinction
between the logic of the work [of art] and that of the social system.”
67
Further, this
standardized cultural production engenders standardized forms of consumption and,
consequently, of social processes. Echoing Marx’s assertion that “a definite form of
production determines definite forms of consumption, distribution and exchange as well
as definite relations between these different elements,”
68
Horkheimer and Adorno state
“the culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in
every product.”
69
Thus the processes of the culture industry create stable, rationalized,
62
and standardized forms of social interaction that facilitate continued capitalist
exploitation of people.
Of course, this model of cultural production and social reproduction does not
properly account for the range of possibilities and differentiations within this structure,
for the ways in which its constitutive parts interpenetrate, and consequently for the
dialectic struggles of domination and resistance within this structure. It does not account
for or explain social or cultural change. Towards a corrective, we must supplant
Horkheimer and Adorno’s “circle of manipulation and retroactive need”
70
with the
“circuit of culture” proposed by Paul du Gay, et. al., comprised of cultural production,
consumption, regulation, representation, and identity.
71
As these writers observe, “whilst
cultural production is [indeed] ‘industrial’, so too is industrial manufacturing
‘cultural’.”
72
Thus the people who own studios, design advertisements, light television
studios, etc., are a relatively heterogeneous collective with a diversity of (sometimes
conflicting) backgrounds, interests, and motives. These “cultures of production,” or
social arrangements of people in specific formations, are as contingent and variegated as
any other part of the social totality. In this respect, they do not “reproduce” culture as a
form of social replication of the same, but rather react to and contend with the “limits and
pressures” of the society at large.
If we take it that society is dynamic and malleable within certain limits, and if
cultural production is a fundamental component of a dynamic society, then the social
arrangements of cultural production as well as the specific aesthetic forms that it
manifests are equally subject to transformation. Thus, as these social arrangements are
63
cultural in their own right and have as their object the industrialized manufacture and
circulation of cultural goods, they can be properly designated as cultural industries. And
further, these industries should be understood as “cultural” in another sense as well; in
their totality they produce and circulate a wide variety of cultural forms of which the
cinema is only a part, and in this way they displace the cinema and the “film industry”
within a larger collective of cultural industries.
It is in this light that Nicholas Garnham provides an excellent, if slightly more
restrictive definition of cultural industries. He defines these as, “those institutions in our
society which employ the characteristic modes of production and organization of
industrial corporations to produce and disseminate symbols in the form of cultural goods
and services, generally, though not exclusively, as commodities.”
73
This study will draw
upon this definition yet expand it in accordance with the theoretical and analytical
interventions of du Gay, et. al., with their broadening of the object of study to include
textual particularities, patterns of use, “external” discourses of representation and
definition, etc. “Culture” occurs in the broad sense of the creation of meaning and of the
formation of collective social identities, relayed and interrelated with the industries that
manufacture and circulate symbolic goods.
As noted, these industries are increasingly transnational in organization, scope,
and form. The interpenetrating elements of the “circuit of culture” no longer adhere to
the limits of the nation-state, and it is only conditionally true that they ever did. Instances
of “transnational film” abound, occurring in and transforming the relations among every
part of the “circuit of culture.” At the level of film financing, international and
64
multinational co-productions, comprised of production companies, banks, and other
financial institutions in different nations, have occurred for many years, but have become
more common as the primary form of financing films in Europe and elsewhere.
Numerous film productions are transnational, not only in their numerous locations but
more vitally in the composition and arrangement of their labor; the director of a film may
be of British descent, the “below the line” labor may come from New Zealand or
Australia or whatever locality where the film is shot, and the post-production editing and
special effects work may be done in northern California. Patterns of distribution are
equally transnational, starting with the important international film festivals, such as
Cannes, Berlin, or Pusan, where films both large and small garner vital critical acclaim
and make themselves available to the commercial film distribution market.
74
There are
also forms of regulation that are transnational and even global. On the one hand, the
cultural industries in many parts of the world increasingly treat rights and licensees as
their “product” and are regulated at the transnational level through the auspices of the
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Agreement on Trade Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organizaition
(WTO). On the other hand, there remains resistance to such globalization of the
Intellectual Property industries, as with “cultural exception” established during the
Uruguay round of the General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). Media
consumption is likewise transnational, from the variable popularity of different cinemas
in different regions, to the complex processes of localization and “indigenization” of
Hollywood’s supposedly universal and globally popular films.
65
All of these cases and trends point toward the mutual interrelation between
globalization and the contemporary cinemas of the world. Globalization has profoundly
affected the cinema industries, changing its very identity. At the same time, although not
in direct correlation, the film and cultural industries comprise a fundamental part of
globalization, and in this respect reconfigure the relations among peoples, places, and
cultural identities. In light of these observations and theoretical interventions, it would
not be incorrect (although a bit provocative) to transform the title of this dissertation,
Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity, into an assertion of its own:
transnational film remakes time, space, and identity.

CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD AS TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL INDUSTRY
Although the primary interest of this dissertation is the production, circulation,
and reproduction – the remaking – of cinemas and film texts around the world, it may
ultimately be about contemporary Hollywood, as most cases of transnational film
remakes that it examines are Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films. In fact,
Hollywood’s remakes of foreign films, films primarily identified with nations or regions
other than the United States, constitute a dominant form of contemporary transnational
remakes.
This situation raises a number of important questions. What is contemporary
Hollywood? Where is it? How is it organized? Should Hollywood be primarily
understood as a business, or set of businesses, or instead as a set of aesthetic tendencies?
If so, are these tendencies and conventions historically durable or shifting? If there are
66
typical conventions that characterize Hollywood, then do they have ideological
motivation and effect? What are the relationships among Hollywood’s division of labor,
its aesthetic tendencies, and its ideological motivations and effects?
Yet because this dissertation deals with transnationalism, transnational cinema(s),
and the interrelations among productive cultural industries in diverse parts of the world, it
raises another set of important questions about Hollywood, questions that might be
neglected if Hollywood were understood “on its own.” What is Hollywood’s relationship
with film and media industries in other parts of the world? Similarly, what is
Hollywood’s relationship with “national cinemas” around the world, or with the very
conceptual constitution of “national cinemas”? Is Hollywood itself a national cinema, the
national cinema of the United States? Or, as some argue, is Hollywood “global,” and if
so, in what respects?
In fact, the first and second set of questions must be asked in unison. To ask how
Hollywood is currently organized as a business and as a “division of cultural labor”
demands that we ask about its relation to other cinemas around the world. To ask about
the relation between Hollywood’s aesthetic tendencies and their ideological motivations
and effects is also to ask how Hollywood is “global.” The reason: Hollywood is a
transnational cultural industry,
75
and in fact, Hollywood is a transnationally dominant
cultural industry. In the contemporary period, Hollywood’s contest to maintain and exert
dominance requires that it operate transnationally, while it simultaneously exerts much of
its cultural power through its transnationality, as transnationalism. Indeed, Hollywood’s
position of power is always inflected by the various, myriad forces that struggle against
67
it, and Hollywood’s organization and practices should be seen as efforts to quell or
appease them.
This characterization of contemporary Hollywood alters our understandings of the
relations between it and “external” cultural industries around the world, which have
typically been designated as “national cinemas.” Hollywood presents one the greatest
problems in discourses around national cinemas, and by extension, transnational cinemas
as well. Too often, Hollywood is positioned as the globally “universal” cinema,
specifically in contrast to the national delimitation and hence marginalization of, for
instance, British cinema, French cinema, or German cinema.
76
Andrew Higson addresses
this issue when he says that “Hollywood is…an integral and naturalized part of the
national culture, or the popular imagination, of most countries in which cinema is an
established entertainment form.”
77
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that this conceptual
conundrum would be significantly improved by relegating Hollywood to serving only as
an American national cinema.
78
The notion that Hollywood serves as a strictly American
institution is increasingly difficult to sustain, as Hollywood has for many years and in
various ways negotiated a flux of international and transnational forces. Contemporary
Hollywood demonstrates a transnational geography in many respects, including labor,
financing, technological infrastructure, and patterns of reception. Further, it remains true
that Hollywood products dominate the media landscapes of many parts of the world.
79

In terms of “national cinema,” contemporary Hollywood is a relational term that
only selectively functions as an American national cinema; part of Hollywood’s power
within the global cultural industries relies on its intermittent alignment with the state
68
apparatus of the USA, but also the support of various other governments as well. Rather
than functioning as a national industry or ideological practice, Hollywood should be seen
as strategically flexible and adaptive. Although this idea threatens to re-inscribe
Hollywood’s dominance throughout the globe, seen in a different light, Hollywood’s
flexibility could also indicate its increased subordination to an array of antagonistic
forces. In this struggle to maintain dominance, Hollywood can be seen as potentially
alterable and by definition its dominance becomes contingent, limited, and historically
specific. Thus, Hollywood’s trend toward transnationalism indicates the legitimate
power and threat posed by a great number of players within the global cultural industries.
As it will be discussed throughout this dissertation, “contemporary Hollywood”
functions as a transnational cultural industry with its managerial and decision-making
apparatus located mainly in Los Angeles or nearby cities. This class of cultural agents
functions in two distinct power centers, which generate and structure the overall
operation of the Hollywood system: “the studios” and the talent agencies. Historically,
the Hollywood studios were operated as vertically-integrated, centralized loci of
cinematic power in the United States. Having labor under contract, owning production
equipment and facilities, running film processing and distribution operations, and owning
cinema theaters throughout the country, the classical-era Hollywood studios, such as
Warner Bros., Paramount, or Fox, held extreme power over cinema labor.
However, as will be described in more detail below, since that time the studios
have undergone fragmentation and numerous corporate realignments. At the time of this
writing, “the studios” consist primarily of the following corporate entities: 20
th
Century
69
Fox (owned by News Corp.), NBC Universal (a.k.a. Universal Pictures, owned by
General Electric), Paramount Pictures (along with DreamWorks SKG and owned by
Viacom), Sony Pictures (owner of Columbia Pictures and MGM/UA and owned by Sony
Corp.), Walt Disney Pictures (a.k.a. Disney or Buena Vista), Warner Bros. (subsidiary of
Time Warner), and an additional number of smaller studios. These studios are integrated
with larger multinational corporations involved in a wide range of media businesses, such
as publishing, music, or video games, and numerous other forms of business. Further,
there are many film production companies with variable ties to these studios, creating a
network of content providers that are subsequently bottle-necked through the studios,
which function as financiers, marketers, and distributors for the films.
The talent agencies and management companies, on the other hand, organize and
represent “above the line” talent in Hollywood, such as writers, directors, and actors. The
largest and most powerful Hollywood agencies include: Creative Artists Agency,
Endeavor Talent Agency, International Creative Management, United Talent Agency,
and the William Morris Agency, but there are numerous others as well. Through these
agencies, film projects are organized into “packages,” often putting together a script or
script idea with a director and/or actors and actresses, which are then brought to
independent producers or the studios for consideration. In many cases, film projects are
organized among talent within a specific agency in order to maximize internal
productivity and efficiency, but other projects involve collaborations between talent
agencies. Whereas the studios market, distribute, and ultimately own the rights to
Hollywood films, the talent agencies help to put the films together in advance. Together,
70
the studios and the talent agencies centralize and largely control Hollywood media
production.
This current organization of “the business” derives from a complex history of
economic and cultural strains; whereas the new form of business consolidation contends
with globalization in specific ways, in the past the relation between Hollywood’s division
of labor and cultural resonance was different. For example, in his extensive study Movie
Made America, Robert Sklar investigates the relationship between Hollywood cinema
and American culture.
80
He suggests an extremely strong relation between the two,
arguing for instance that American cinema’s earliest organization served the polyglot,
culturally diverse, urban immigrant population of the early-twentieth century.
81
This
account of Hollywood’s relation to popular culture in the United States remains coherent
and relatively unimpeded through the immediate post-World War II period, yet
encounters disturbances with the introduction of television, and more importantly here,
with the relative disintegration of the major Hollywood studios during the 1960s
(although this process was set in motion with the Paramount decision in 1948).
In his analysis of New Hollywood, Thomas Schatz refers to the mid-1970s as a
period of “restabilization” for the movie studios, which were preceded by a period of
“uncertainty and disarray” caused by the fragmentation of the film audience, the
widespread deployment of television, as well as the shedding of production as a
component of their business.
82
This restabilization in many ways took the form of
increased corporate consolidation and conglomeration beginning in the late 1960s. This
shift in ownership and corporate relations presents one of the biggest changes that
71
occurred in Hollywood in the contemporary period. Richard Maltby illustrates the
instability of the studios when he notes that “between 1966 and 1969 most major motion
picture companies merged with or were taken over by conglomerates that were attracted
by their undervalued stock, film libraries, and real estate assets.”
83

In this respect, the Hollywood studios were subject to much greater economic
pressures, particularly in the face of cultural and technological change. In many cases,
the purchasing conglomerates had little to do with the film industry and rarely anything to
do with the cultural industries overall. A good example is when Paramount was bought
by Gulf + Western in 1966, a conglomerate that “owned or had interest in a range of
unrelated industries such as sugar, zinc, fertilizer, wire and cable, musical instruments,
real estate and scores of others.”
84
Similarly, Robert Gustafson details how Warner
Brothers was transformed into Warner Communications Inc., which has since become the
largest media conglomerate in the world, as a result of corporate mergers and the
diversification of business interests.
85
In this respect, although there was a new
consolidation of the movie industry (at the level of the distributors), they often became
components of much larger economic entities. This indicates the relative weakness of the
studios rather than their strength, as they were so susceptible to greater economic forces.
Importantly, Tino Balio notes that during the “second wave” of consolidation
during the 1980s, a number of the corporations bought Hollywood studios that were
foreign-owned or multinational in composition.
86
Australian-born News Corporation
owner Rupert Murdoch made an unsuccessful attempt to buy Warner Brothers in 1984,
but after gaining US citizenship in 1985, Murdoch bought the parent company of 20
th

72
Century Fox and gained control of the studio. Similarly, Japanese electronics firm Sony
bought Columbia studios from the Coca-Cola Company in 1989 and “Japan’s Matsushita
Electric Industrial Company, the largest consumer electronics manufacturer in the world,
purchased MCA for $6.9 billion” in 1990.
87
(They subsequently sold the studio).
These two purchases in particular raise two important issues related to
Hollywood’s recent transnationalization. First, although initially this shows how
increasingly grand flows of transnational capital flooded into Hollywood, illustrating its
transnational composition at the level of corporate ownership, this moment of mergers
also raised significant resistance along “national” lines throughout the American press.
Following a decade of thinly-veiled anti-Japanese sentiment most often expressed in
relation to the Japanese automobile industry, the purchase of the studios was often met
with concern about the relationship between culture and corporate ownership.
88
A story
on this topic in The Wall Street Journal began by asking, “Now that Sony owns
Columbia and Matsushita is to acquire MCA/Universal, will American movies take on a
Japanese cast?”
89
In this case, we see an American nationalist response to the
transnational economy around cultural production.
Second, this wave of conglomeratization is commonly understood to be an effort
to create “synergies” between hardware and software manufacturers. In this respect, and
especially in the light of the ultimate failure of the Matsushita purchase but the eventual
success of the Sony effort, these mergers demonstrate how Hollywood cinema itself was
subject to deep changes in the patterns of technology use, especially home video and
console video games. This illustrates the interrelation of technological pressure aligning
73
with the imperatives of capital, which significantly alters the shape of the industry,
highlighting its transnational character.
Labor and production comprise another major component of the increased
transnationalization of Hollywood. Primarily, this relates to the issue of “runaway”
productions, or films that are shot outside the United States but that are financed by
Hollywood. In a vast number of cases, this occurs as a result of a combination of three
factors: macro-economic issues that endow the US dollar with disproportionate buying
power in a foreign country (exchange rates), cheap and/or non-union labor in the nation
that hosts the film’s production, and/or a system of government tax breaks or low-interest
loans.
90
Production labor is no small economic issue. In his classic analysis of the
economics of the entertainment industries, Harold Vogel states that film production
budgets can be reduced by as much as 40% by shooting in “non-union or flexible-union
territories.”
91
This issue is centrally important to Toby Miller and the other writers of
Global Hollywood. As they note, the trend of Hollywood production outside the US
increased rapidly during the 1990s. They specifically note that “the number of big-
budget pictures made overseas went from none in 1990 to twenty-four in 1998,”
92
and
further cite statistics that show that a majority of US television movies are now made
outside the US.
93
On the one hand, this should indicate a new transnational deployment
of labor by Hollywood. No longer is the issue merely a matter of Hollywood hiring and
importing above-the-line talent like directors (Milos Forman, Christopher Nolan) or
actors and actresses (Greta Garbo, Antonio Banderas), which demonstrated Hollywood’s
transnational power for some time. Now, in addition to this selective importation of
74
creative talent, the Hollywood industry regularly outsources manual (but highly
specialized) labor into cheaper “labor markets.”
For the writers of Global Hollywood this is an example of how transnational
corporate interests, represented by movie studios, have specifically responded to
globalization through an increased exploitation of variations in labor markets. And on
this count, there admittedly seems to be a distinct asymmetry in power expressed along
national borders, thinking of the nation as a juridical and economic regulatory body. In
fact, much of these writers’ theorization of the “New International Division of Cultural
Labor” (NICL) revolves around the particular transnational organization of the industry
which leaves labor increasingly dispersed across a wide and varied geo-cultural space,
unable to move with the flexibility or speed of Hollywood’s financing or decision-
making apparatus.
Further, these writers contend that various regulatory systems among a number of
governments facilitate this asymmetrical geography of power. In addition to cheap labor
and beneficial exchange rates, a number of governments offer tax incentives and/or a
system of grants to entice Hollywood productions to shoot in their nation. For instance,
take the recent and remarkable case of New Zealand. As part of their effort to attract
outside investment, the New Zealand Film Commission overtly emphasizes the non-
union status of their workforce, which helped entice the production of the television
shows Hercules (1995-1999) and Xena (1995-2001) there during the 1990s. Further, also
through the Film Commission, New Zealand offers a “one-year, 100 percent write-off for
investment in the production of films which have ‘significant New Zealand content’.”
94

75
This clause was thoroughly abused in the case of Peter Jackson’s production of The Lord
of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The
Return of the King (2003), one of the biggest and most remarkable adaptations in cinema
history. In the deals leading to the productions of these films, Hollywood mini-studio
New Line, the state of New Zealand, and a bank in Australia played an astounding shell-
game with the films’ copyrights and diverted $100 million from the New Zealand tax
base toward the production of the films.
95
This example demonstrates, on the one hand, a
mobilization of “national” labor in a transnational fashion, and on the other hand, the
collusion between private finance and the state apparatus in cultural production.
However, this story should be contrasted with the “local” effects of the production
of these films. According to people who worked in the film industry in New Zealand at
the time that the Lord of the Rings films were in production (although not on those films),
by all accounts the local reaction to the flood of money and new jobs was positive.
“People built their houses on the backs of those movies.”
96
Perhaps more substantially,
the outstanding success of the Lord of the Rings films enriched and raised the profile of
the films’ director, Peter Jackson, who has used much of the financial windfall to increase
the competitive power of his production company and digital effects companies, which
are located in New Zealand. Here, the flood of capital from Hollywood into the “weak”
cultural economy of New Zealand facilitated the growth and development of a localized
cultural industry that is transnationally competitive. Following the production of the
Lord of the Rings films, Jackson’s WETA digital effects company has done effects for
other Hollywood films such as I Robot (2004), King Kong (2005), and X-Men 3 (2006).
76
On the one hand, one can view WETA as a fully integrated continuation of the
Hollywood industry, in which case one’s conception of Hollywood is fundamentally
transnational and not specific to the United States. On the other hand, WETA can be
viewed as a competitor with Hollywood within the greater landscape of the global
cultural industries. In this light, the arguments made in Global Hollywood require a
revision that explains the ways that Hollywood’s transnational flexibility can engender
new sites of competition and even lead to its own dis-integration.
In addition to ownership, distribution, and labor, Hollywood has increasingly
changed its patterns of exhibition in ways that contend with transnational forces. The
conditions and patterns of movie exhibition have undergone perhaps a more radical
change than any other facet of the industry since the 1970s, given the advent and
widespread deployment of VCRs, DVD players, cable television, satellite-based
communications and television broadcast, and most recently the internet. Indeed, the
tremendous technological changes that have greatly diminished the overall importance of
theatrical exhibition have been a significant part of “the end of cinema.”
97

Since at least the end of World War I, Hollywood films have dominated cinema
screens in many parts of the world, creating a durable and significant trade imbalance in
cultural goods.
98
As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes, “in the past fifty years [until 1998]
the share of the box-office acquired by Hollywood has ranged from 30 percent to 80
percent in the majority of European markets, while European exports to America have
never captured more than an insignificant share of the market in the US.”
99
This situation
worked in conjunction with the strategic “support” of the US government. Specifically,
77
although the 1948 Paramount case detached the exhibition holdings from the Hollywood
studios, this was only true within the USA. Crucially, this allowed the Hollywood
studios to maintain their vertical integration in foreign markets, allowing them to
leverage power in these regions. Thus as television drew audiences away from theaters
after WWII, Hollywood relied increasingly on the revenues gained in these foreign
markets. David Cook notes that during the 1970s, although the “key focus” of the
Hollywood studios was on the North American market, the overseas market became
“increasingly important as the domestic market declined.”
100
During the 1990s and
beyond, the role of the foreign markets has been even more pronounced. The percentage
of international markets in Hollywood’s overall sales rose from 33% in 1984 to 46% of
the total in 2002.
101

Yet these figures are only measurable against the extreme hold that Hollywood
films have on the US theatrical market, and moreover, the role of this market in
configuring the industry overall. Hollywood films dominate US theaters so completely
that the US market for foreign films seems impenetrable. For example, in 1992 European
countries spent $3.7 billion on US-produced media while the US only bought $288
million of European media.
102
Further, the United States theatrical market is the largest
in the world, and in many respects Hollywood’s operation mirrors the “domestic” market
in the US. Economic studies have shown that the relative size of Hollywood film budgets
correlate directly with the overall size of the US theatrical market; because the US has the
largest movie-viewing population, not in terms of actual people but rather in terms of
potential purchasing power, this allows Hollywood producers to inflate production
78
budgets because of the genuine possibility of recouping their expenditures.
103
This
nationally-specific market characteristic has unsurprising transnational effects. Namely,
Hollywood is able to leverage this power in a “virtuous circle,” or positive feedback loop,
and quell foreign competitors abroad as well as within the US.
104

Recent technological and regulatory changes have inflected this tendency.
Jennifer Holt notes that significant changes in US media regulations allowed the
Hollywood studios to re-enter the exhibition sector, effectively ending the reign of the
Paramount decision of 1948,
105
and allowing once again for vertical integration at the
exact same moment that the studios were undergoing “merger mania,” in Stephen
Prince’s terms.
106
Holt, along with John Caldwell among others, asserts that although
“cinema as we know it” may be undergoing a serious identity crisis, for the time being
not only does Hollywood cinema remain viable, but moreover, theatrical exhibition
provides the engine behind the many subsequent windows and platforms of movie
delivery.
107
Thus the imposition of new media technologies upon the theatrical market
has also prompted very specific patterns of behavior among Hollywood studios, both
nationally and abroad. Specifically, there has increasingly been the trend toward
“saturation booking” wherein a single film floods movie theaters nation-wide. More
recently, Hollywood has shown its susceptibility to piracy by extending the tactic of
saturation booking worldwide, in a “day-and-date” release pattern than attempts to extract
money from international markets before criminalized competitors intervene.
108

Further, at the same time that the Hollywood studios re-entered theatrical
exhibition in the 1980s, this sector attempted to “come back” from the damage done by
79
the VCR and cable television through the widespread implementation of multiplex
theaters.
109
These multi-screen theaters quickly dominated the market, eliminating the
vast majority of all single-screen theaters. Notably, almost all art-house theaters were
single-screen theaters, and most foreign films were shown at such venues.
110
There was
much discussion from the industry publicity machine and within the press that the
increase in the number of cinema screens resulting from the multiplex “revolution” would
facilitate an increase in the diversity of films.
111
Specifically, there would be an increase
in the exhibition of foreign films in US theaters as a result of the increase in screen
number. Instead, the opposite has proven to be true. The advent of the multiplex merely
meant that there have been more screens showing the same Hollywood-produced films
for an ever-shortening duration of theatrical release.
112

This trend had profound effects on Hollywood’s relationship to American culture
and transnational cultural geography. Outside the United States, Hollywood employed
this tactic to further expand into Europe and Asian media markets.
113
Along with
continued practices of “block-booking” in foreign markets and the expansion of extensive
marketing strategies, the multiplexing of foreign film markets helped increase overall
revenue for Hollywood in these markets. Within the US, on the other hand, the growth of
the multiplex effectively relegated a significant portion of all “foreign” film exhibition to
home-video, including videotape and more recently DVD, cable, and satellite
television.
114
Although many cities throughout the United States still have theaters that
specialize in showing foreign-language films, some single-screen but more often multi-
screen “specialty multiplexes” such as those of the Laemmle Theater chain or the now-
80
defunct Madstone Theater chain, the vast majority of foreign films find US exhibition in
non-theatrical venues and platforms.
However, rather than simply demonstrating another example of Hollywood’s
alignment with America, this trend more accurately fits with an overall internally mobile,
diverse, and segmented audience within the US. As Hollywood dominates the theatrical
market within the US, and as these theaters predominantly show big-budget films aimed
at a “mass audience,” the general migration of “foreign” films onto home-media
platforms could reflect the increasing fragmentation of the “home” market and its
increasingly transnational character. Indeed, whereas the number of single-screen
theaters radically declined through the 1980s, the number of video specialty outlets in the
USA went from 2,500 in 1980 to a peak of 30,000 in 1990.
115
Further, as Chris Anderson
asserts, the “long tail” economic model of such rent-by-mail services as Netflix allow
them to maintain an enormous library of specialty films, including foreign films, and in
this way maintain and engender a home-video market for foreign fare.
116

As a more anecdotal example, the growth and relative success of the Criterion
Collection line of DVDs, originally a line of laserdiscs, demonstrates the creation of a
specialty, “art-house” home video market within the general growth of the home video
media market – art house literally in the house. The importance of the Criterion
Collection in particular is demonstrated by their partnering with Janus Films,
117

historically one of the most important distributors of foreign-language films in the United
States. In this case, one sees a substantial restructuring of foreign film exhibition in the
recent period, in response to Hollywood’s increased power in the theatrical market as
81
well as in response to technological changes. Although Hollywood commands the
theatrical market within the US and leverages this power around the world, the increased
importance of the DVD (for the present moment at least), and the “foreign” market
within this, indicates an important point where changes in technology accord with new
patterns of reception to create a new transnational cultural formation. In the United
States, Hollywood is American in theaters; foreign cinema resides in the home.
In all these respects, labor, corporate structure and financing, and exhibition,
Hollywood operates transnationally. Although Hollywood holds a unique and apparently
increasing hold on the United States media market and leverages this power over markets
around the world, its need to expand and maximize economic efficiency subjects it to
serious crises and ruptures. As with any capitalist enterprise or system, crises and
ruptures force Hollywood to change in order to continue, albeit in a transformed manner.
As Hollywood’s pressures largely derive from the increasing need to operate globally, or
at least in select, affluent, and media-prone markets such as Japan and Germany, these
represent one of the most important areas of crisis and ultimately of potential change.
Yet this political-economic analysis does not clarify Hollywood as a set of
aesthetic tendencies or the ideological motivations and effects of such tendencies. And
indeed, it lies outside the scope of this dissertation to provide a comprehensive account of
these interrelations. This results in part from existing contestations among critics and
theorists as to the aesthetic conventions of contemporary Hollywood as well as their
ideological resonance. What can be determined is a range of arguments made about
contemporary Hollywood, its stylistic and ideological differences from the past as well as
82
its continuities, and additionally, several aesthetic forms and tendencies distinctive to the
contemporary Hollywood cinema.
In their now-classical formulation, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson assert the relative aesthetic unity and narrative coherence of the “classical
Hollywood cinema.” Coincidental with the relative stability of the Hollywood studios,
films from the mid-1910s through the 1960s were characterized by balanced pictorial
compositions, narratives with three-act structures and clear conclusions that operated
within a clear moral universe where the “evil” were punished and the virtuous rewarded.
This model has been criticized for numerous problems, first among them being that, in
asserting the aesthetic unity and narrative coherence of classical Hollywood films, the
authors efface the range of aesthetic practices taking place at that time. As Murray Smith
states, “Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson tend to downplay [processes of
experimentation and the adoption of alien forms within the Hollywood system] in favor
of the ultimate assimilation of ‘alien’ elements.”
118
Secondly, the positing of a
“classical” Hollywood period demarcates historically their assertions about aesthetic
tendencies, aligning potential aesthetic totalizations with the problems of historiographic
periodization. That is, if the “classical” occurs seamlessly as a given aesthetic practice
during a specific time, then any deviation in practice or time period become
abnormalities. These are questions of continuity and change.
119

David Bordwell asserts the continuity between classical and contemporary
Hollywood. He states that “in representing space, time, and narrative relations (such as
causal connections and parallels), today’s films generally adhere to the principles of
83
classical filmmaking.”
120
He notes four general stylistic changes, including faster
editing,
121
extreme camera focal lengths,
122
closer shots during dialogue scenes,
123
and
wildly free-ranging camera movement. From this perspective, although there have been
general stylistic changes in Hollywood films, there remains persistent organizations of
narrative and relatively stable means of representing diegetic worlds. Most of the shifts
that Bordwell notes are creative integrations of new cinematic technologies of production
and post-production. Further, Bordwell explicitly asserts that these continuities and
stylistic shifts are not exclusive to Hollywood films but rather may be and regularly are
used in a variety of cultural contexts.
124

In many respects, Bordwell’s essay responds to critics and theorists that assert the
novelty of Hollywood’s fractured narrative and aesthetic tendencies coincidental with the
advent of the new industrial organization of “New Hollywood” and changes in American
culture of the time. Robin Wood, for instance, notes that in the wake of the industrial
shifts within Hollywood during the 1970s and in response to the cultural uncertainties
brought about by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, Hollywood films became
increasingly “incoherent” beginning in the 1970s.
125
Films like Taxi Driver (1976) or
Cruising (1980) do not provide clear conclusions to their narratives or the issues they
raise; “they do no know what they want to say.”
126
Alternatively, Thomas Schatz
remarks upon the incoherence of “blockbuster” films in the “New Hollywood,” films that
rely heavily upon special effects and the exploitation of new cinema technologies,
following the path set by Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
127
Further, Schatz correlates
the organization of the industry to the aesthetic tendencies of Hollywood films and their
84
interrelations with other media and cultural forms. As Hollywood blockbusters are
involved in a wider circuit of commercial texts, including ad campaigns and spin-offs,
Schatz asserts that “while many (perhaps most) New Hollywood films still aspire
to…narrative integrity, the blockbuster tends to be intertextual and purposefully
incoherent.”
128
Correlating aesthetics, narrative structures, and business operations, these
“strategically ‘open’” films favor “multiple readings and multimedia reiteration.”
129
In
this respect, Schatz correlates new forms of narrative and aesthetic organization within
Hollywood films with their industrial conditions of production and circulation. Vitally,
he correlates this with strategically produced intertextual relations among the films as
well.
Somewhat similarly, Justin Wyatt has analyzed one of the distinctively new
modes of Hollywood film, “the high concept film,” which synthesizes the emphasis on
marketing into a specific aesthetic and industrial form.
130
Such films, or film packages,
are distinctive, “in two major ways: through an emphasis on style within the films, and
through integration with marketing and merchandizing.”
131
In their attempt at product
differentiation, these films typically rely on excessive stylistics in their mise-en-scène,
excessive marketing in other media, myriad forms of ancillary merchandizing such as
toys and soundtrack albums, and simple narratives that are easily and quickly
summarized.
132
In this respect, Wyatt indicates the new forms of intertextual relations
distinctive to the industrial conditions of the contemporary Hollywood.
Indeed, among other distinctive tendencies and conditions, contemporary
Hollywood cinema appears characterized by an “industrial intertextuality,” wherein the
85
patterns of production and marketing coincide with strategically-produced narrative or
aesthetic links with other cultural products. This should not suggest that intertextuality is
new to Hollywood or filmmaking in general; intertextuality is the general condition for
all textual production. Rather, we can assert that Hollywood has increasingly sought to
commercialize the intertextual relations among their films, television programs, and other
cultural products. Indeed, Marsha Kinder has argued that although intertextuality has
worked as a commodity for some time, stating, “by the 1980s this [commerce-driven]
intertextuality and its commodification had been greatly elaborated and intensified,”
creating an intertextual/commodity “super-system.”
133
She connects this process of
“networked texts” and other commodities (toys, fast food, etc.) to the corporate
consolidation (in the face of intense competition) on a global scale.
134
Likewise, P.
David Marshall states that “intertextuality…is connected back to the industrial process”
and that “closely connected to these intertextual links is the concentration of media
ownership,” producing what he calls “the new intertextual commodity.”
135

Most recently, this trend has been analyzed under the larger rubric of “media
convergence,” which has been most prominently discussed by Henry Jenkins. Bringing
together a swath of tendencies in media and culture, Jenkins defines contemporary
convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation
between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior or media audiences who
will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they
want.”
136
Thus convergence entails the (often haphazard) conglomeration of businesses
in the cultural industries, the (often equally haphazard) interactions among media
86
technologies, “transmedia storytelling” which demands that “to fully experience any
fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down
bits of the story across media channels,”
137
and the active participation of fans in the
production of a cultural circuit. Although Jenkins acknowledges that convergence has
historical precedents, he strongly asserts the novelty of the contemporary forms of media
and cultural convergence.
Although there is no firm agreement about the relationship between Hollywood’s
aesthetic and narrative tendencies with its economic base or institutional structures, two
trends in both arenas are observable. First, I have argued that Hollywood constitutes a
transnational cultural industry in its ownership and financing, in its forms of production
and division of labor, as well as in its distribution flows and exhibition sites. In fact, I
have argued that Hollywood constitutes a transnationally dominant cultural industry, one
that strategically operates transnationally and yet which selectively aligns with national
and/or cultural borders in order to exert its power. Conforming to Castells’ description of
the operation of power within a network, Hollywood exerts power through control over
the conditions of national/transnational cultural and economic flow. The second trend in
Hollywood is the increased and profound interactions among cultural producers, texts,
and consumers, fans, or audiences; integral to this interaction and cultural formation is
“industrial intertextuality.” As shown above, there is widespread agreement about this
trend, even if the details or points of emphasis vary. There is equally agreement that this
commercialization and commodification of intertextual relations is connected to the
87
restructuring of Hollywood and the cultural industries more generally. Together, these
tendencies suggest that contemporary Hollywood is vitally transnational and intertextual.

88
CHAPTER 2 NOTES

1
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 141-147, 160-164.

2
Immanuel Wallerstein theorizes “world-systems” as total social systems, either “world empires” or
“world economies.” He states, “the only kind of social system is a world-system, which we define quite
simply as a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems.” Immanuel Wallerstein, “The
Rise and Demise of the Capitalist System,” in The Essential Wallerstein, (New York: The New Press,
2000), 75. He also states that “in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been only one world-
system in existence, the capitalist world-economy.” Wallerstein, 74.

3
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1.

4
Gellner, 4.

5
Gellner, 7.

6
Gellner 40.

7
Gellner, 12.

8
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
Revised Edition, (London: Verso, 1991), 6.

9
Anderson, 6.

10
Anderson, 7.

11
Anderson, 7.

12
Anderson, 67.

13
Anderson, 157.

14
Post-colonial theorists provide a striking critique of nations and nationalism by undermining its claims to
internal cultural, economic, and political coherence. Cutting nationalism across class lines, for example,
Aimé Césaire states in Discourse on Colonialism that “the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon” amidst a
wider ranging deconstruction of the colonizer/colonized binary. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism,
trans. Joan Pinkham, New Edition, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 74. Partha Chatterjee, as
another privileged example, demonstrates the Eurocentrism of nationalism and theorizations thereof by
demonstrating that Benedict Anderson describes nationalism as a Western phenomenon that is
subsequently adopted by colonized and decolonized states. The Nation and its Fragments, (Princeton
University Press, 1993); Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, (London:
Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986). Chatterjee argues that as nations are imagined, and as
nationalism is Western, postcolonial powers have their imaginations colonized. Further, according to
Chatterjee, anticolonial nationalisms undermine the Eurocentrism of modernity and nationalism, and
demonstrate a system of ideological and economic interpenetration that occurs in among powers.
Postcolonial theory, then, shows how “modernity” and nationalism are typically spatialized in Europe and
historically contingent with colonialism. Thus one of the major interventions of postcolonial theory is to
say that colonialism was not the product of nationalism in Europe, but rather that European nationalism was
the product of, or at least interdependent with, colonialism.
89

15
Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the
Nation State,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4, (Summer 1993): 726-751.

16
Miyoshi, 736.

17
Miyoshi, 728. Thus Miyoshi compares colonialism to the activities of TNCs, as both “operate over a
distance,” specifically organized the flows of resources between distant locations, as well as “homogenize
regions.” Miyoshi, 749.

18
Harvey, 240, 284.

19
Harvey, 147.

20
Harvey, 358.

21
Harvey, 359.

22
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Second Edition, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), 21.

23
Castells, 18, 164.

24
Castells, 101.

25
Castells, 408-409, 442.

26
Manuel Castells, “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: a Theoretical Blueprint,” in
The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Manuel Castells, (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar,
2004), 31-32.

27
Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 35.

28
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2.

29
Appadurai, 3.

30
Appadurai makes this clear when he states that the “mobile and unforeseeable relationship between
mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the
modern.” Appadurai, 4.

31
Appadurai, 17.

32
Appadurai, 35.

33
Dana Polan, “Globalism’s Localisms,” in Global/Local, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake,
(Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 258

34
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
147.

90

35
Massey, 156.

36
Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 15.

37
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958),
xviii.

38
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural
Boundaries, (London: Routledge, 1995), 111.

39
Morley and Robins, 1.

40
Morley and Robins, 72.

41
Gellner, 1.

42
Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, 2
nd
Edition, (London: Routledge, 2005), 8-9.

43
Hayward, 14-15.

44
Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 36-37.

45
Higson, 38.

46
Higson, 42.

47
Higson, 42.

48
Higson, 44.

49
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.

50
Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 6.

51
Kinder, 18, 38.

52
Kinder, 62.

53
Kinder, 71.

54
Kinder, 388-390.

55
Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort
and Scott Mackenzie, (London: Routledge, 2000), 70.

56
Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” 73.

57
Morley and Robins, 188.

58
Morley and Robins, 188.
91

59
Tim Bergfelder, “National, Transnational, or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film
Studies,” Media, Culture, and Society 27, no.3 (2005): 322.

60
Bergfelder, 324.

61
Bergfelder, 326.

62
Bergfelder, 326.

63
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, (New York: Continuum, 1969).

64
Horkheimer and Adorno, 120.

65
Horkheimer and Adorno, 120.

66
Horkheimer and Adorno, 125.

67
Horkheimer and Adorno, 121.

68
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. from the Second German Edition
by N. I. Stone, (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Company, 1904), 291; as cited in Georg Lucács, “”What is
Orthodox Marxism,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 13.

69
Horkheimer and Adorno, 127.

70
Horkheimer and Adorno, 121.

71
Paul du Gay, et. al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, (London: SAGE
Publications, 1997), 3.

72
du Gay, et. al., 81.

73
Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication, (London: SAGE, 1990), 155; cited in Luc Véron,
“The Competitive Advantage of Hollywood Industry,” Los Angeles: The Center for International Studies,
School of International Relations, University of Southern California (March 1999).
http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/vel01.

74
Lucy Mazdon discusses the Cannes festival as a transnational space in “The Cannes Film Festival as
Transnational Space,” Post Script 25, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2006): 19-30.

75
Indeed, my attraction to the phrase “cultural industry” derives in large part from Luc Véron’s analysis of
Hollywood as a cultural industry, who cites Nicholas Garnham’s definition in Capitalism and
Communication.

76
See Stephen Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John
Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.

77
Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” 39.

92

78
However, important work can be done along these lines. See Ulf Hedetoft, “Contemporary Cinema:
Between Cultural Globalization and National Interpretation,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and
Scott Mackenzie, (London: Routledge, 2000). In particular, Hedetoft demonstrates how the film Saving
Private Ryan (1998) was interpreted as a specifically American text in France and Denmark. Hedetoft,
294.

79
The example of Bollywood’s dominance throughout India and many parts of the Middle East and Asia
should caution strongly against claiming Hollywood’s “global” dominance.

80
Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Revised and Updated,
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

81
Sklar, 3-5.

82
Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hillary
Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins, (London: Routledge, 1993), 10.

83
Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2
nd
ed., (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 187.

84
Tino Balio, “‘A Major Presence in All of the World’s Important Markets’: The Globalization of
Hollywood in the 1990s,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith,
(London: Routledge, 1998), 61.

85
Robert Gustafson, “‘What is Happening to Our Pix Biz?’ From Warner Brothers to Warner
Communications Inc.,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio, (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985). He details the many components of the business in particular on page 580.

86
Balio, 62-64, 68-70.

87
Balio, 63.

88
Stephen Prince in particular notes the “xenophobic” reaction to these consolidations in A New Pot of
Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), 69-70.

89
Kathleen Hughes, “Uncertain Role: Japan’s Past Ventures in Hollywood are Mostly Less than Stellar,”
Wall Street Journal, 27 Nov. 1990, A.1.

90
This conforms to Audrey Droesch’s findings regarding Hollywood films shot in Canada. Audrey
Droesch, “Hollywood North: The Impact of Costs and Demarcation Rules on the Runaway Film Industry,
unpublished thesis, Stanford University, 2002, 5-6. Available at http://www-
econ.stanford.edu/academics/Honors_Theses/Theses_2002/Droesch.pdf.

91
Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, 6th ed.
(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93.

92
Toby Miller, et. al., Global Hollywood, (London, BFI Publishing, 2001), 59.

93
Miller, et. al., 60.

94
“Certification as a New Zealand Film,” New Zealand Film Commission, (20 Jan. 2005),
http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/cert.php.

93

95
Gordon Campbell, “Lord of the Deals,” New Zealand Listener, 21 Oct. 2000. This article explains the
financial arrangement between New Line and New Zealand, and I deduced the actual figure of $100 million
based on the production budgets of the films and looking at NZ tax law.

96
Annabelle Honess Roe, development coordinator working for the New Zealand Film Commission at the
time that the Lord of the Rings films were made.

97
Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multi-media and Technological Change,” in Reinventing Film
Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, (London: Arnold, 2000), 440.

98
Janet Wasko notes that the World Wars benefited Hollywood’s position in many international markets.
Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1995), 179-180.

99
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Introduction,” in Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National
Identity: 1945-95, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci, (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 1.

100
David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 21.

101
Vogel, 58. However, it should be noted that this figure has shown amazing stability over a long
duration, floating typically between 40 and 50 percent for the last fifty years.

102
Sharon Waxman, “France Fears U.S. Will Smother its Cinema,” Chicago Tribune, 3 Oct. 1993; cited in
Steven Wildman, “Trade Liberalization and Policy for Media Industries: A Theoretical Examination of
Media Flows,” Canadian Journal of Communication 20, no. 3, (1995): 2.

103
Wildman, 10.

104
This is a tricky claim to make, as Arthur De Vany in particular argues that production budgets do not
have a positive correlation with theatrical box-office performance. Arthur De Vany, Hollywood
Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry, (London; New York: Routledge, 2004),
69. However, it is my contention that inflated production budgets and inflated marketing budgets
effectively distinguish Hollywood films from external competitors. Although budgets may not ensure
success, they help eliminate competition.

105
Jennifer Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan-Era
Hollywood.” Film Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2001): 22-29.

106
This is the title of Chapter 2 of Prince’s Pot of Gold.

107
Holt, 28; John Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (television),” Cinema Journal 45, no.
1, (2005): 92

108
For example, see Elizabeth Guider and David McNary, “Hollywood vs. Home Movies,” Variety, 28
Dec. 2006. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117956373.html?categoryid=2464&cs=1

109
Prince, 79, 85.

110
For a history of the relationship between “art cinema” and “art house theaters” in the United States, see
Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001).
94

111
For instance, in an interview from 1993, theater-chain owner James Edwards Sr. claimed to be devoting
two screens in an 18-screen multiplex to foreign films. Quoted in Debora Vrana, “Theater Owner Gives
Preview of New Attraction Entertainment: Edwards chain founder discusses his plans to build an 18-screen
cinema complex in Irvine,” Los Angeles Times (Orange County edition), 29 Aug. 1993, 1; Terry Pristin,
“‘Chocolate’s’ Success: A Sweet Era for Imports?,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Nov. 1993, 1.

112
As an “alternative,” this could mean American-produced, English-language “specialty films.” Aljean
Harmetz, “Now Playing: The New Hollywood,” The New York Times, 10 January 1988, A1.

113
For example, see Yumiko Ono and Laura Landro, “Time Warner, Nichii Establish Venture to Build
Multiplex Theaters in Japan,” New York Times, 10 May 1991, A5A. Even in years that foreign films did
well in their nationally domestic markets, Hollywood made big revenue due to their use of multiplex
exhibition. See Adam Dawtrey, et. al., “Old World Charms B.O.,” Variety, 24 Dec. 1997.
http://www.variety.com/vstory/VR1117343321.html?categoryid=38&cs=1.

114
Peter Nichols, “Fast Forward; Foreign Films May Translate into Rentals,” New York Times, 16 July
1989, A28; Wilinsky, 134.

115
Barry Monush, ed., International Television & Video Almanac, 39
th
Edition, (New York: Quigley
Publishing Company, 1994), 693.

116
Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired.com, 12.10, Oct. 2004.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

117
James Kendrick, “What is the Criterion? The Criterion Collection as an Archive of Film as Culture,”
Journal of Film and Video 53, nos. 2-3, (Summer 2001): 127; Bradley Schauer, “The Criterion Collection
in the New Home Video Market: An Interview with Susan Arosteguy,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2005):
32.

118
Murray Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema,
ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith, (London: Routledge, 1998), 61. Smith is specifically responding to
criticisms of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson made by Henry Jenkins.

119
One point of debate opposes narrative and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood films. Geoff King
clarifies the opposition between the two, stating that “two dimensions of film-viewing compete. Narrative
is understood primarily in terms of the telling of a coherent and carefully developed character-based story
throughout the course of the film. Spectacle is seen as a source of distraction and interruption.” Geoff
King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 179. He
also characterizes film spectacle as “images at which we might wish to stop and stare.” Geoff King,
Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 4. Thus,
some argue that contemporary Hollywood relies increasingly upon special effects, creating spectacles in
films that diminish their narrative coherence and complexity. This trend begins with films like Jaws and
Star Wars during the 1970s, moves through hyper-macho action films like Rambo: First Blood Part II
(1985) and Die Hard (1988) during the 1980s, to the epic blockbusters of the 1990s that rely upon
computer-generated-imagery (CGI), like Terminator II: Judgment Day (1992) Jurassic Park (1993), and
Titanic (1997). Nevertheless, King and others argue for the narrative and aesthetic continuity of the new
Hollywood with its “classical” formation. King argues that “spectacle has always been an important part of
the equation in Hollywood.” King, New Hollywood Cinema, 181. Elsewhere King states that although
these forms are opposed, Hollywood cinema consistently organizes spectacle and narrative in concert with
one another. King, Spectacular Narratives, 33.Further the strict division between narrative and spectacle
needs complication. For instance, in his characterization of Hollywood, Richard Maltby elides the notion
95

that contemporary cinema is more spectacular than its classical formation by asserting that the narratives of
Hollywood films are a means to an end; their primary goal is to provide emotional satisfaction, pleasure,
and entertainment. Maltby, 453. In this respect, Maltby draws continuities across Hollywood’s history that
effaces the apparent historical disruptions when narrative coherence is emphasized, such as with Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson.

120
David Bordwell, "Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film," Film Quarterly
55, no. 3, (2002): 16.

121
Bordwell, 16-17.

122
Bordwell, 17.

123
Bordwell, 19-20.

124
Bordwell, 21.

125
Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 46-
50.

126
Wood, 47.

127
Schatz, 23.

128
Schatz, 34.

129
Schatz, 34.

130
Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994), 7.

131
Wyatt, 7.

132
Wyatt, 20-22.

133
Marsha Kinder, Playing With Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 40.

134
Kinder, Playing With Power, 156, 167.

135
P. David Marshall, “The New Intertextual Commodity,” in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries,
(London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 69, 70.

136
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 2.

137
Jenkins, 21.
96
CHAPTER 3 – THE TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKE: BOTH SYMPTOM
AND PRIVILEGED ARTICULATION OF GLOBALIZATION
Having now characterized film remakes, globalization and transnationalism, film
industries within cultural industries, and the contemporary Hollywood cinema, it is now
possible to define contemporary transnational film remakes and situate them within larger
cultural processes. As defined at the beginning of this Part, transnational film remakes
are those films made in one national, regional, or cultural context and which are
subsequently remade in another. In this process of production, circulation, reception, and
– definitive of the form – reproduction, transnational film remakes manifest and
demonstrate many of the complex dynamics of contemporary cultural globalization.
Although this dissertation will engage in a diverse range of topics, analyses, and
interpretive readings, my general argument throughout can be summarized as:
transnational film remakes are both symptoms and privileged articulations of
contemporary cultural globalization, and as such, demonstrate cultural alignments and
struggles for power in a transnational field.

TRANSNATIONAL REMAKES AS SYMPTOMS
There is a long and diverse history of cinematic remaking, with many examples
from a variety of contexts. There is equally a long a varied history of remakes crossing
national and cultural boundaries. For instance, the multi-language film versions made by
Paramount at their studio in Joinville, France during the early 1930s constitute a certain
kind of “transnational remake.”
1
In some cases, a prominent auteur has remade a film by
97
another in a different nation, such as when Fritz Lang remade Jean Renoir’s La Chienne
(1931) as Scarlet Street (1954),
2
or the film Diary of a Chambermaid, which was made
by Jean Renoir (1946) and later remade by Luis Buñuel (1961). In other cases, a director
has remade their own film in a different national context, such as with Hitchcock’s
British and Hollywood versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956).
Throughout history, much transnational remaking derived from the international
movements of filmmakers or screenwriters and also from institutional or cultural
boundaries existing among cinema-producing nations. Thus one finds that several films
from Weimar Germany were remade in other cultural contexts, such as Mad Love (1935),
which featured Peter Lorre in one of his earliest English-speaking roles, a British
remaking of the German film Orlac’s Hande (The Hands of Orlac, 1924). Similarly,
Joseph Losey remade the German masterpiece M (1931) for Columbia Pictures in 1951
before he emigrated from the United States. Likewise, from the late 1970s through the
early 1990s, Hollywood remade a cycle of domestically-popular French genre pictures.
These included many comedies, like Trois Hommes et un Couffin (1985) remade as Three
Men and a Baby (1986), Le Grand Blond avec une Chaussure Noire (1972) remade as
The Man with One Red Shoe (1985), and La Cage aux Folles (1978) remade as The
Birdcage (1996). Others were dramas and period pieces, such as Le Retour de Martin
Guerre (1982) remade as Sommersby (1993) or La Femme Infidele (1972) remade as
Unfaithful (2002). Still more were thrillers, such as La Totale! (1991) remade as True
Lies (1994), Les Diaboliques (1955) remade as Diabolique (1996), and perhaps most
famously Nikita (1990) remade as Point of No Return (1993).
98
Coincidental with this apparent surge in Hollywood remakes of French films
beginning in the late 1970s, Hollywood intermittently remade films from other select
European nations as well. Hollywood remade the Dutch thriller Spoorloos (1988) as The
Vanishing (1993) and remade the Danish thriller Nattevagten (1994) as Nightwatch
(1997), and in both cases the director of the original film also directed the remake.
Similarly, Hollywood made the Spanish psychological thriller Abre los Ojos (1997) as
Vanilla Sky (2001), the Italian romance film Swept Away (1974) under the same title
(2002), the German art-house hit Der Himmel Uber Berlin (1987) as the metaphysical
romance City of Angels (1998), as well as the Russian science-fiction film Solyaris
(1972) as Solaris (2002). Although these cases were not as systematic or as abundant as
the Hollywood remakes of French films of the period, they indicate Hollywood’s
increased cinematic borrowing from and exchange with a broader geographic and cultural
domain.
Since the late 1990s and the turn of the millennium, Hollywood has been even
more “global” in its transnational remakes. For instance, Hollywood remade the
Argentinean caper film Nueve Reines (2000) as the modestly-scoped drama Criminal
(2004). But more pointedly and systematically, Hollywood has recently engaged in an
intense cycle of remakes of East Asian films, following an earlier wave from the middle
of the twentieth century with such films as Seven Samurai (1954) being remade as The
Magnificent Seven (1960). This recent cycle began with the outstanding success of
horror film The Ring (2002) in US theaters, a remake of the Japanese film Ringu (1998),
which had been a success in domestic theaters upon its initial release. Drawing upon the
99
cycle of low-budget horror films made in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Hollywood companies remade Ju-On (2003) as The Grudge (2004), remade Dark Water
(2002) under the same title (2005), and remade Kairo (2001) as Pulse (2006). But this
“Asian turn” in Hollywood’s transnational remakes quickly expanded beyond the
confines of the horror genre. These latest remakes include the adventure film Eight
Below (2006), a remake of the Japanese hit Antarctica (1983, Japanese title: South Pole
Story), as well as Shall We Dance? (2004), a remake of the male melodrama Shall We
Dance? (1996), which at the time of its release was the most successful foreign-language
film in US theaters. This cycle of Asian remakes expanded beyond Japan as the single
national-cultural source. For instance, the Taiwanese family melodrama Eat Drink Man
Woman (1994) was remade by Hollywood as Tortilla Soup (2001), the South Korean
metaphysical love story Il Mare (2000) was remade as The Lake House (2006), and, as
described above, the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs (2002) was remade as The
Departed (2006).
Lest this narrative privilege Hollywood’s remakes too much, it is vital to note the
transnational remakes produced in numerous locations and cultural contexts around the
globe. For instance, before Hollywood remade Nikita as Point of No Return, a Hong
Kong remake had already been made under the title Black Cat (1990). Likewise, before
Hollywood remade Ringu as The Ring, the film had already been remade in South Korea
under the title Ring (1999, English title: Ring Virus). Perhaps even more notable are
transnational remakes that, for the time being, completely circumvent Hollywood. A
recent example of this is Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), which
100
remade the quirky South Korean film The Quiet Family (1998) into a genuinely
outrageous film featuring musical numbers and an extended stop-motion animation
sequence. Similarly, the South Korean psychological thriller Oldboy (2003), which was a
huge domestic economic success and international critical hit, was remade as the
Bollywood film Zinda (2006).
3

And moreover, there are cases of Hollywood films being remade by “foreign”
cinemas. The Hollywood remake (2005) of The Longest Yard (1974) was preceded by
the British film Mean Machine (2001), which transposed American football for “real”
football, that is, soccer. Many more examples occur in the extremely productive
Bollywood film industry, where remakes often borrow narratives from Hollywood film
unofficially. Examples of this include Kaante (2002) which remade the US indie smash
Reservoir Dogs (1992), which itself substantially lifted from Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong
action masterpiece City on Fire (1987), as well as Raaz (2002), which remade the
Hollywood thriller What Lies Beneath (2000). Often rapidly produced and apparently
never curtailed by legal action, these Bollywood remakes of Hollywood films exploit the
cultural and institutional barriers between the US and South-East Asian cultural markets.
In light of the long history of transnational film remakes and in light of the
diverse range of cultures in which they are made and through which they circulate, it
would be difficult to align them with a uniform or transhistorical cultural process.
Indeed, as I argue that contemporary transnational remakes are symptoms and
articulations of globalization, then by default the history of transnational film remakes
could prompt us to better historicize what is called globalization and to see processes of
101
cultural transnationalism occurring much earlier than in just the present moment of global
capitalism and American global imperialism. As transnational film remakes have
occurred before contemporary globalization, they should inform us as to the transnational
cultural flows, as well as the imbalances among these flows, occurring before the
contemporary period.
Nevertheless, contemporary transnational film remakes can and should be seen as
deriving from, as symptoms of, contemporary cultural globalization. Objectively, these
films result from the coming into contact of different cinematic cultures, of cultural
agents working in different cultural industries, from different parts of the world.
Transnational remakes necessarily require some person or group to have become aware
of a film from a different, culturally-aligned cinema, and to have exerted agency in
somehow apprehending this film, and finally to have set the conditions for this film’s
revised reproduction, its remaking, in a different cultural context. As an industrial
process, transnational film remakes necessarily require the coming into contact of cultural
agents from disparate contexts, however temporarily or contingently. This speaks to the
geo-cultural interconnection among supposedly disparate peoples, demonstrating their
proximity within the new geography of globalization.
Although some form this process has occurred for some time, its contemporary
manifestation is historically distinct, increasing in rate and range. It also has been
thoroughly connected with broader economic and policy shifts among cultural industries
around the world. As described above, there is increasing interpenetration among the
film industries with all manner of other media industries and, more vitally, increased
102
interaction among these cultural industries around the world. This situation of new
proximity and increased rate in interaction among cultural producers sets the ground for
the production of transnational film remakes. This coincides not necessarily with an
increase in number of transnational film remakes, although anecdotally this appears to be
the case, but rather with a genuine increase in the importance of transnational remakes to
the cultural industries that produce them. In Hollywood, for instance, the outstanding
success of The Ring prompted the production and equally tremendous success of The
Grudge. Both films gained much attention for being remakes in critical discourses and
among film fans. These films stood out as remakes at the same time the stood out as
Hollywood successes; they stood out as transnational remakes. In this combination, they
demonstrate the importance of this category of films and the cross-cultural exchanges
across distant spaces.
These exchanges take numerous forms and follow many different paths. Through
such venues as international film festivals, international film markets, through the spread
of both professional and amateur film reviews, or through the loose social/professional
network of cinema executives, agents, and producers, film texts circulate through a vast
network that makes them available for purchase. In the form of their rights, film and
media texts exist as commodities, which once purchased may be exploited in a variety of
ways. The remake is one way of exploiting a film’s underlying copyright, specifically
through the revised reproduction of some definitive element of the film, such as narrative,
story concept, title, etc. In the case of the transnational remake, this process connects
103
film texts and cultural agents from different nations and/or cultural contexts, thereby
exceeding these contexts, becoming transnational and cross-cultural.
It is no accident that the majority of recognized, prominent transnational film
remakes occur within regionally or even globally dominant cinemas, such as Hollywood,
as in these cases the industry as such wields power over the geography of cultural
production and dissemination. Hollywood exerts its power through transnationalism, that
is, through its exclusive hold upon the US theatrical film market and its dominance over
film labor, marketing, distribution, and exhibition throughout much of the world.
Through its own process of globalization, Hollywood developed new forms of
transnational interconnectedness, specifically, a strategically secured and maintained
dominance over the means of cultural production. This allows Hollywood, or any
regionally dominant cinema, to set the terms of textual circulation; within a “networked”
logic, Hollywood exerts its power by allowing/disallowing the flow of cultural texts and
further by engendering the revisions which these texts must undergo in order to continue
circulating. Thus, although they have a longer history, contemporary transnational film
remakes appear fully entwined with Hollywood’s increased reliance upon labor and
media markets outside the United States and in light of the increased transnational
coordination of cinema industries throughout the world; they come about through these
structural changes. Such films are symptoms of contemporary globalization inasmuch as
they derive from the industrial and cultural dynamics characteristic of the period.

TRANSNATIONAL REMAKES AS ARTICULATIONS
104
Transnational film remakes are privileged articulations of contemporary
globalization. They are articulations in at least two senses of the word. The sixth,
seventh, and eighth meanings provided in the Oxford English Dictionary all define
“articulation” as a meaningful utterance or expression, specifically one in which its
constitutive elements are rendered particularly clear. Yet the primary and historically
older definition for articulation reads: “the action or process of jointing; the state of being
jointed; mode of jointing or junction,” and as a secondary meaning, “a jointed structure or
series.” These definitions may be combined to mean: a meaningful expression that
conjoins distinct elements.
Exactly these meanings have been productively used in cultural analysis. Stuart
Hall, in particular, uses this double meaning, stating that although “‘articulate’ means to
utter, to speak forth, to be articulate,” an articulation is equally “the form of the
connection that can make a unity of two different elements.”
4
Paul du Gay, et. al., use
this concept in their proposed methodology for cultural analysis and in their construction
of the “circuit of culture.”
5
As a a form of expression that conjoins socially and
symbolically meaningful elements, any articulation functions only, as Hall states, “under
certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and
essential for all time.”
6
As any articulation brings together disparate elements, it forms
only contingent connections and thus cannot proscribe future possibilities. Just as much
as any articulation expresses social issues and tensions, through the act of conjoining
elements it also excludes other possible influences or contributing elements and moreover
effaces other possibilities for each of the elements that it does bring together. Thus, an
105
articulation is a meaningful expression and a conjoining of different elements, but it is
also a delimitation of the expressive possibilities of its elements as well as an exclusion
of elements.
Transnational film remakes operate as articulations at (at least) four distinct
levels: in the films’ production(s), in their individual textual features, in their intertextual
relations, and in their critical reception(s). At the level of production, many films bring
together capital and labor across a transnational space, and further, many films
increasingly bring together both private and state finances toward their creation. A
director may come from Brazil, while its funding comes from German tax shelters, while
the film is shot in Toronto – all in a “Hollywood” film. Conversely, Hollywood firms
may provide the majority of funding and serve as global distributor for films that, having
met the legal conditions of the particular government, achieve support from a nation-state
and thus bear its cultural stamp – a “Spanish” film made by Spanish labor, starring an
Australian actress, and funded by Hollywood, for instance. Transnational remakes
compound these forms of articulation by, as noted, bringing together agents of cultural
production from alternate cultural industries toward the reproduction of an existing film.
At the textual level, transnational remakes consistently articulate issues and
themes characteristic of contemporary globalization and transnationalism; the most
salient of these will be detailed below. But it is necessary to note that these films have an
uncanny way of regularly depicting overtly transnational dramas, characters, settings,
themes, and issues. Perhaps this is a general condition of contemporary cultural
production, which seeks to resonate with the hopes and fears of movie audiences.
106
Nevertheless, given the fact that transnational film remakes necessarily come about
through an intersection of disparate cultural industries and given the particular
intertextual manifestation of this intersection (detailed below), these films’
representations of transnationalism and globalizations take on singular interpretive
importance. Following David James, who argues that “as every film…internalizes the
conditions of its production, it makes itself an allegory of them,”
7
we might extrapolate to
say that as every remake internalizes the conditions of its reproduction, it makes itself an
allegory of them. This sets the hermeneutic bounds of the individual transnational film
remake throughout this dissertation.
Yet this should not imply the self-identical containment of the remake, as any
“film not only speaks of what it is, it speaks of what it is not, it speaks of its other.”
8
In
the case of transnational film remakes, this other is primarily and determinately a single
previous film, one that may equally articulate a transnational mode of cultural production
and circulation. As film remakes are connected to their source through a complex
structure of repetition and variation, transnational film remakes repeat, transform, and
ultimately connect transnational cultural relations. It is in this respect that the intertextual
relations among transnational film remakes articulate, quite overtly, their transnational
conditions.
Yet any single film’s meaning(s) is not wholly determined by its immanent
content or, further, by its intertextual relations. Indeed, as the film remake “disavows” its
broader intertextual relations by designating a single film as its primary point of origin,
the remake implicates the limits of comparative intertextual interpretation. Instead, and
107
as Constantine Verevis persuasively demonstrates, remakes derive much of their
“meaning” through the forms of their circulation and in their critical receptions.
9
It is
beyond the scope of this dissertation to engage in ethnographic audience analyses in
order to evaluate the ways that social subjects view, respond to, and create meanings for
film remakes, particularly in light of the geographically immense scope of the project.
Nevertheless, it is vital to gain some sense of the ways that transnational remakes get
discussed and have their meanings developed, clarified, and complicated in surrounding
discourses. The most obvious site of discursive revision for film remakes is in film
reviews, film advertising and marketing materials, as well as in seemingly more distant
forms of commentary, such as newspaper articles and gossip columns. In these
discourses, individual film remakes and the entire category of film remakes get
rearticulated with larger critical and cultural protocols that shape and adjust their
meanings. In fact, Part II of this dissertation will examine in detail the critical criteria,
which were themselves permeated through and through with ideological imperatives and
interests, through which transnational film remake became clarified in specific ways in
specific historical contexts. In the particular area of transnational film remakes, however,
there has been an increasing drive toward looking at critical reception as a vital
component of analysis; Lucy Mazdon in particular has argued strongly that the marketing
and reviews of transnational remakes outside their nation of production constitutes an
important form of transnational cultural exchange and the transformation(s) of the
meaning(s).
10
Yet, even in cases when divergent critical criteria appear to separate a
remake from its source, which in the case of transnational film remakes most consistently
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occur according to nationalist ideological lines, the fact remains that the transnational
circulation and reproduction of these texts consistently becomes a prominent feature of
the critical discourse. In sum, the discourses of these films constitute another level
articulation, as they assess and evaluate the textual meanings of these films within a
broader public sphere. The reviews speak of the transnational and the national, which
themselves consistently become available to forms of circulation that transcend the
national and cultural boundaries in which they are produced.
In light of this model of the interaction and interpenetration of production,
textuality, intertextuality, and reception of transnational film remakes, I further argue that
such films are privileged articulations of globalization, and for several reasons. They are
not the only cinematic articulations of globalization, as in fact one could argue that
almost any film produced in the contemporary period and circulated across national
borders articulates globalization to some degree. Nor are transnational remakes the most
abundant cinematic articulations of globalization. Indeed, when compared to other
recognizably “global” genres and cinematic formations – from the contemporary
Hollywood blockbuster, to the internationally co-produced art-film, to the international
cult-film – transnational film remakes appear comparatively quite rare. Nor, finally, are
transnational film remakes always the clearest articulations of globalization, as in many
instances their narratives or stylistics do not overtly take up themes or conventions
associated with globalization or transnationalism.
However, due to the particular way that film remakes bring together cultural
agents from different industries and parts of the world, combined with the particular
109
intertextual relation they establish between cinematic hypotexts and hypertexts, these
films take on singular, privileged importance. Through the process of repetition,
transformation, and interconnection across national boundaries, these films resonate with
the very conditions of globalization and transnationalism, which should also be seen as
processes of repetition, transformation, and interconnection in the social sphere. If Arjun
Appadurai is correct when he states that “the central problem of [globalization]…is the
tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization,”
11
then what
articulates this tension better than the transnational remake—the very form of cinematic
difference-in-similarity that traverses cultural boundaries? Of course, just as no single
film or cultural work can give expression to the entire range of human experiences or
cultural realities, no remake can entail the entirety of a cultural or historical relation.
Nevertheless, as the industrial and intertextual relations that these films remakes
necessarily require are overtly transnational, they illuminate conditions of
transnationalism.
Transnational film remakes articulate not only interconnections but also, through
their industrial process of reproduction and through a textual process of transformation,
they also demonstrate myriad negotiation, tensions, ruptures, and struggles in the cultural
sphere. As every remake engages in processes of transformation and revision, such films
overtly function as strategic exercises in cultural power. On the one hand, remakes can
occur among industries that seek to apprehend and subvert dominant cultural powers.
Looking specifically at the Chinese cinematic context, for instance, Yiman Wang has
examined what she calls “subaltern film remaking,” or “the practice of remaking an
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originally dominant film by people occupying a less privileged position in the socio-
political and cultural hierarchy.”
12
Although this formulation threatens to reinforce
unsustainable binaries between original and copy as well as between “dominant” and
“less privileged” social subjects, the point is well taken; some people and cultural
industries have subordinate positions to others, some peoples and industries work actively
or implicitly to subvert dominant power structures, and the apprehension and
transformation of cinematic texts is one way of exerting this subversive power. Wang
convincingly exemplifies this in her examination of the Chinese remakes of the
Hollywood film The Phantom of the Opera (1925), including the 1925 film Ye ban ge
sheng and the Hong Kong film of the same title from 1995. These cases demonstrate
cultural resistance through repetition and transformation, and indeed, there are many
similar cases of industries remaking Hollywood films to assert their own power.
However, transnational remakes primarily occur as Hollywood remakes of
“foreign” films, which typically garner derision in popular criticism as examples of
“cultural imperialism.” And indeed, Hollywood’s nearly exclusive hold on the United
States’ media market, combined with their dominance over global film distribution and
exhibition, appears to give the studios a structural advantage in remaking “foreign” films
rather than allowing these films to enter the United States through distribution. Because
production and distribution companies in many other nations cannot match the
consolidated power of Hollywood, they rely upon Hollywood for global distribution.
This system enables Hollywood not only to distribute and profit from foreign rivals, but
also to strengthen its production capabilities and control over worldwide marketing by
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remaking those films that prove successful in world markets. In this way, the
transnational Hollywood remake is a practice in domination, one that reacts to the
competition posed by select films and foreign production companies.
However, the simultaneous actions of repetition and transformation manifested in
the remake make for a duplicitous cultural politics, one that cannot be yoked into
simplistic binaries or established hierarchies of power. In her study of Hollywood
remakes of French films, Encore Hollywood,
13
Lucy Mazdon cautions against seeing
such films within simplistic binaries of artistic originality or cultural authenticity.
Instead, these films signify a complex form of cultural exchange.
14
Thus in the case of
Hollywood, the transnational remake indicates Hollywood’s transnationality in terms of
sources of content, division of labor, mode of production, and scope of distribution. By
remaking a film from an external cinema, Hollywood reveals its reactivity to alternative
and often competing forces. Viewing Hollywood this way not only troubles simplistic
notions of cultural imperialism, but further indicates possibilities for change within its
institutional and textual strategies. In this respect, Hollywood should be understood as a
global institution, in part as a result of economic liberalization of cultural sectors in many
parts of the world, among other factors. Conversely, the transnational remake must also
be understood as a form of provincialism on the part of Hollywood, as these remakes aim
to satisfy the cultural demands of the domestic market in the United States. In this way,
the transnational remake attempts to synthesize Hollywood’s transnational economic and
cultural composition with its domestic operation in an imbalanced two-way cultural flow.
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As privileged articulations of cultural globalization, transnational film remakes
resonate with particular strength according to three categories of human experience: time,
space, and identity. These categories conform to Edward Soja’s assertion that “just as
space, time, and matter delineate and encompass the essential qualities of the physical
world, spatiality, temporality, and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions
which together comprise all facets of human existence.”
15
As noted above, globalization
and transnationalism occur as historical, geographic, and cultural forces, which more or
less reflect the social practices of time, space, and identity. These serve as the dominant
themes dramatized in many transnational film remakes as well as the primary categories
through which transnational remakes articulate their struggle for power among
heterogeneous forces.
As a condition of their production, film remakes necessarily occur at a different
historical moment than the film from which they overtly derive. This circumstance
dictates that a remake will resonate with a different historical moment than that with
which the previous film resonates, rendering the relation between a film and its remake
necessarily historical, even in cases that only a short time passed between the production
of the “original” and the remake. Further, time, temporality, and historical setting
constitute a primary area of textual revision in film remakes. Most prominent, perhaps,
are updates, or remakes that re-set an earlier narrative in an historical period closer to the
moment of the remake’s production and initial release. But all manner of temporal and
historical revisions are possible within the overall logic of cinematic reproduction. Thus,
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time and history function as a major category for understanding film remakes’
production, textual features, and intertextual relations.
Similarly, transnational film remakes necessarily occur in different geographic
spaces. In a basic way, one might assert that transnational remakes occur between
different nations or national spaces, and indeed, much of the existing literature on what I
call transnational remakes examines such films along these lines: Lucy Mazdon examines
the relations between French films and their Hollywood remakes, as does Carolyn
Durham in her book Double Takes, who is perhaps more direct in associating Hollywood
with America than Mazdon,
16
and Andrew Horton locates the film Time of the Gypsies
(1988) as a Yugoslav remake of The Godfather I and II (1972, 1974), specifically in
contradistinction to Hollywood and America.
17
In these cases, the remakes are
transnational inasmuch as they link and move across two distinct national spaces.
However, in the contemporary period, even this working premise requires revision, as
any individual film is consistently produced in a transnational space already, before it is
remade. Such is the case in many Hong Kong films, before or after the handover, as the
space of that city quite literally always integrated multiple inflections and political and
cultural forces, or in Europe with any film that is funded and filmed in multiple nation
states, or in Hollywood, which shoots its films all over the world. Such films are quite
literally produced in transnational spaces, spaces that exceed and largely circumvent the
space of individual nation-states.
Further, like time and historical context, a film’s space and geographic setting
constitutes a major area for textual revision in its cinematic remaking. Even in cases
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when a remake takes up the same setting as its source, such as with the remakes Algiers
(1938), The Grudge, or Eight Below, they transform those settings through their
reproduction and through various differences in their depictions; we might say that such
films consistently take up a different set of “structures of attitude and reference,” as
described by Edward Said.
18
More commonly, transnational film remakes relocate their
narratives in new geographic settings with different cultural associations. In all these
cases, the spaces depicted in films and their transnational remakes take on an overtly
transnational cast through their mobility and transformation.
Finally, and perhaps most complexly, transnational film remakes trouble notions
of coherent and fixed identities. Indeed, in just the same way that film remakes trouble
issues of artistic originality, so too do transnational remakes trouble issues of cultural
authenticity. As Lucy Mazdon asserts regarding Hollywood remakes of French films,
issues of identity lie at the very heart of the remake. Critique of the
practice tends to be centered around attempts to define straightforward
national and cultural identities for both French and American cinema and
yet the very act of remaking calls these identities into question, revealing
the instability and hybridity which constitute the filmic text.
19

In terms of their cultural identities, transnational film remakes automatically trouble
internal coherence and stability. For instance, many films and their remakes are funded
by sources in multiple nations or directly by state-funding in multiple nations, and this
practice throws into question a film’s cultural association. A film’s subsequent
circulation among culturally diverse audiences, who may identify or resist identification
with the film, its narrative, its characters, or its setting, equally troubles internal, national
coherence of its cultural identity.
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Even more problematic is the issue of language, as language is a vitally important
part of cultural identity and many transnational film remakes occur in languages different
than that of their source. This necessarily raises the issue of translation, a process that
might be seen as equally important as adaptation, remaking, and intertextuality described
above. However, as is made clear in the introduction to a recent issue of Journal of
Visual Culture devoted to the topic of translation, it is a conceptually and historically
mammoth category of numerous processes that exceeds the bounds of this project;
20
it is
impossible here to repeat or properly interrogate the many concerns and debates around
translation in general. Suffice it to say, however, that as a process of transferal and
transformation, translation bears many conceptual and practical similarities to adaptation
and cinematic remaking. And indeed, various critics and theorists have overtly compared
or equated adaptation and remaking with translation. Constantine Verevis, for instance,
conflates all three processes of adaptation, remaking and translation;
21
Lucy Mazdon
discusses transnational remakes in relation to practices of translation in an essay that
followed Encore Hollywood, asserting how they are intertwined and embedded in larger
ideological struggles;
22
Lara Grindstaff raises similar concerns and comparisons;
23
David
Wills analyses how transnational film remakes elide the overt displays of translation that
occur in the subtitling of foreign-language films,
24
and many more examples abound. If
taken as an act of generative connection rather than as the distortion or mutation of a
“source” into its “target,” much in the way that remakes connect “originals” with
“copies,” then translations are similarly not self-identical. That is to say that, if seen as
116
an analogy for adaptation or remaking, translation equally problematizes clear divisions
between cultures.
This should not efface the genuine practicalities of translation that occur in
transnational film remakes or the struggles for cultural power thereby articulated. The act
of translating a film’s spoken language indeed demonstrates an exercise in cultural power
that transforms the cultural valences and associations of a film. But the mere act of
translation is not necessarily the sole activity that dislocates a film’s language from a
national/cultural context. One thinks immediately of the transnationality of Francophone
cinemas or of Spanish-language, pan-Hispanic cinemas. These cases are lingually
transnational without being translated, as the cultural identities they imagine, construct,
and resonate with are not bound by the nation. Thus, the transnational remakes that
engage in literal acts of translation only compound or highlight the already strained
and/or variable relations among languages and cultural identities, rather than disrupting
these relations on their own.
If in the processes of production and circulation transnational film remakes
articulate tensions among cultural identities, then these issues are equally if differently
present in the film texts themselves. Many transnational film remakes pose questions
about their characters’ identities as one of their primary dramas. Intertextually, the
transformation of identity in remakes occurs overtly in the consistent re-casting of the
lead roles in the film. In the majority of transnational remakes, the identity of the
characters is transformed by their being performed by another actor. (Although in some
cases actors reprise their roles or take up new roles in the remakes). Again, this is very
117
much a condition of the remake itself, as a reproduction of an earlier film; and in this
respect, the remake becomes observably akin to a theatrical performance, where the script
serves as a score from which all manner of individual iterations proliferate. In their
textual and intertextual constructions of identity, then, transnational film remakes dis-
articulate role from body and singular performance, abstracting it.
And indeed, among the categories of time, space, and identity, transnational film
remakes work consistently in abstract ways. Although many films and their remakes deal
with specific historical contexts, geographic settings, and cultural identities, the
sociological particularity of these constructions often gives way to a de-socialized
rendering of abstract categories of time, space, and identity. This tendency toward
abstraction seems characteristic of transnationalism and globalization, which seek to
efface particularities and draw broad-based connections among places and peoples.
Despite the title of this dissertation, one of its goals is to explore the historical,
geographic, and cultural particularities of numerous films and their remakes rather than
solely deal with the asocial categories of time, space, and identity. Yet, it is actually one
of the particularities of transnational film remakes that they tend to generalize, thus the
tension between particularity and abstraction becomes a central concern throughout; this
is the tension between the historical specificity of contemporary globalization and the
“timeless time” of the “Network Society,” the tension between the local and the global
that appears both reinforced and deconstructed in the contemporary period, as well as the
tension between social being and individual identity rendered so acute by the new
confusions of globalization. Just as the transnational remake demonstrates struggles for
118
power through these three categories, they also demonstrate the struggle for power
through the tension between abstraction and specificity.

119
CHAPTER 3 NOTES

1
Dudley Andrew details this industrial history in “Sound in France: The Origins of a Native School,” Yale
French Studies (1980): 94-114; Ginette Vincendeau also engages in a thorough analysis of multi-language
versions in “Hollywood Babel: The Multiple-Language Version,” Screen 29, no.2 (Spring 1988): 24-39.

2
Trisha Welsh analyzes these films’ audio-textual relations in “Sound Strategies: Lang’s Rearticulation of
Renoir,” in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 127-149.

3
David Desser provides an excellent analysis of the circulation of this text, from Japanese manga to South
Korean blockbuster to illegal Bollywood remake, in his unpublished paper, “Noir as Global Currency:
Oldboy From Manga to Mumbai,” presented at the 2007 SCMS conference.

4
Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” ed. Lawrence Grossberg, in Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, (London: Routledge, 1996), 141.

5
Paul du Gay, et. al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, (London: SAGE
Publications, 1997), 3. For instance, these authors examine how the the Sony Walkman articulated
processes of production with patterns of use and consumption in a particular, contingent fashion. du Gay,
et. al., 52-59.

6
Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141.

7
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989), 12.

8
James, 12.

9
Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), particularly chapter five.

10
Lucy Mazdon, “Cinematic Traffic and the Remake,” unpublished paper presented at the 2007 SCMS
conference.

11
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32.

12
Yiman Wang, “The Phantom Strikes Back: Triangulating Hollywood, Shanghai and Hong Kong,”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12, no. 4 (2004): 317.

13
Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2000).

14
Mazdon, Encore Hollywood, 26-27.

15
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, (London:
Verso, 1989), 25.

16
Carolyn Durham, Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes,
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).

120

17
Andrew Horton, “Cinematic Makeovers and Cultural Border Crossings: Kusterica’s Time of the Gypsies
and Coppola’s Godfather and Godfather II,” in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew
Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 172.

18
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage, 1993), 52.

19
Mazdon, Encore Hollywood, 125.

20
Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra, “Editorial: Acts of Translation,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 5, (2007):
2-8.

21
Verevis, 82-84.

22
Lucy Mazdon, “Introduction,” Journal of Romance Studies 4, no. 1, (2004): 1-3.

23
Laura Grindstaff, “Pretty Woman with a Gun: La Femme Nikita and the Textual Politics of ‘The
Remake’,” in Dead Ringers, 277-284.

24
David Wills, “The French Remark: Breathless and Cinematic Citationality,” in Play it Again, Sam, 149-
150.
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PART II – A HISTORY OF REPETITION: THE TRANSNATIONAL REMAKE
AS A PRODUCT OF INSTITUTIONAL AND CRITICAL FORCES

Poetic history…is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets
make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for
themselves.
-Harold Bloom
1

There’s always a political motive behind any misinterpretation.
-Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
2

The majority of academic discussions describe “the remake” in industrial and
textual terms as a theatrically-released film derived from a previous theatrically-released
film. In popular criticism, the remake remains a second-rate cinematic form. There
persists a discourse of Hollywood’s economic vampirism and lack of creative
imagination; this is especially true of Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films. Together,
these discourses construct the remake as a specific kind of cinematic intertext that is
denigrated for its lack of originality and also for inappropriately changing source texts.
In the case of transnational film remakes, these issues regularly coincide with simplistic
binaries that reinforce stereotypical notions about national cultures.
This Part traces the institutional and critical histories through which the
transnational film remake has come to be understood in this way. I propose that any
conception of the textual or intertextual tendencies of transnational film remakes must be
122
weighed against the historical processes, which shaped these understandings. Moreover,
tracing these histories clarifies how contemporary definitions of the remake are not only
inflected by ideologically-delimited institutional and discursive forces, but further how
these forces quite literally construct the category of the remake as we know it. Many of
the textual, intertextual, national, and transnational criteria by which the transnational
remake is conceived result from particular crises occurring in specific moments.
Constantine Verevis has argued that film remakes must be understood as an
industrial category, a textual category, and a critical category.
3
Verevis constructs
remakes as a critical category by locating them “in such historically specific technologies
as copyright law and authorship, cannon formation and media literacy, film criticism and
film reviewing.”
4
And indeed, Verevis investigates remakes in relation to the origins of
film copyright law,
5
in relation to marketing and promotional material produced by the
studios,
6
and film reviews in trade magazines.
7
For the most part, he uses this material to
demonstrate the broader cultural discourses through which film remakes gain resolution
and operate as a coherent category. Although I do not want to directly contest any of his
assertions here, I do find it remarkable that Verevis does not address the issue of
transnationalism even though a large number of the case studies he uses to discuss
“remakes as a critical category” are transnational remakes. He discusses Thomas
Edison’s rip-offs of films made by Georges Méliès,
8
the promotional websites for
Insomnia (2002) and Vanilla Sky (2001),
9
the “bonus” material included on the DVDs for
Italian Job (2003) and Solaris (2002),
10
film reviews of Unfaithful (2002), The Good
Thief (2002), and The Ring (2002), as well as the cinematic exchanges between the
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French New Wave and Hollywood centered on A bout de souffle (1960) and the
Hollywood remake from 1983.
11
Throughout these discussions, and indeed throughout
his entire book, Verevis refrains from analyzing the specifically transnational cultural
conditions of these remakes.
My intention here is to survey the development of remakes within a specifically
transnational frame. Institutionally, I will situate the transnational remake within four
phases, each of which is characterized by a crisis and a subsequent resolution.
Discursively, I will periodize transnational film remakes according to dominant critical
criteria by which they were evaluated during specific periods. At times the relation
between the transnational remake’s institutional status and its critical status had a fairly
direct correlation; at other times, each area had “relative autonomy” from the other.

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CHAPTER 4 – FILM REMAKES AND THE TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA
INDUSTRIES
As a legal and economic entity, the contemporary transnational remake comes
about through various historical moments of crisis and categorical overlap, into which
various institutions and apparatuses interceded. Primarily, this means the US legal
apparatus, but it also includes international legal frameworks, international market
conditions, technological change, as well as self-regulation and definition by production
companies and studios. Drawing upon the trope of “doubling” implicit in the film
remake, this chapter will show that during these crises the transnational remake was two
things at once. In the process of differentiating the remake from other cinematic
processes and forms, various institutions defined the remake according to specific
ideological criteria. In exploring these moments of doubling, crisis, and confusion, this
chapter presents the possibility of widening definitions of the remake, revealing its
hidden relations and evading the assumptions that currently inform definitions.
Verevis has proposed a thee-part institutional periodization of film remakes,
“defined primarily in relation to a body of copyright law.”
12
These are:
1. the early cinema before the establishment of the Hollywood
mode of production (pre-1917);
2. the ‘classical’ Hollywood of the studio era (1917-60);
3. contemporary Hollywood cinema (post-1960).
13

Although this model engages with actual institutions and industrial practices that
encapsulate a large proportion of film remakes, it does not adequately account for
transnational cinematic traffic and so cannot be applied wholesale to transnational film
remakes. Instead, based on the moments of institutional and industrial crisis and the
125
subsequent sorting out of these confusions, I propose the following periodization for
transnational film remakes:
1. pre-1907; cinema’s emergence
2. 1907 – early 1930s; silent era
3. early 1930s – late 1970s; classical cinemas, national cinemas
4. late 1970s – present; post-cinema, transnational cinemas
Like any periodization, this elides important historical conditions and determinations;
nevertheless, these periods conform to dominant trends that have defined the
transnational film remake. The first moment of crisis arises in the very emergence of
cinema, when the various players in disparate parts of the world (primarily in France and
the United States) competed and when cinema’s powers of “mechanical reproduction”
confused traditional modes of artistic production and ownership. This phase was largely
resolved when film was incorporated in the United States’ copyright law.
The second moment of confusion came in the introduction of sync-sound cinema
technologies throughout the world, which presented an economic challenge to film
companies that had to invest in new technologies and a cultural challenge to maintain the
transnational flow of films. This moment of confusion was resolved in the
implementation of dubbing and subtitling in different film markets throughout the world.
The latest phase comes about with the advent and broad-based use of domestic cinema
technologies, such as the VCR and the DVD, compounded by the increasing saturation of
digital cinema technologies in the home through the personal computer and internet.
These technologies supplanted theaters as the primary site of cinematic exhibition and
126
transformed the ways that cinematic texts could be physically altered by social subjects.
This phase is still in development, but the relations between these contextual factors and
transnational remakes are fairly clear; in the contemporary institutional, industrial, and
discursive context, transnational film remakes appear almost like an anachronism,
outdated and outmoded. Although the remake would appear to be a process of contextual
updating and accommodation, they are in fact a form of transformation ossified in earlier
periods.

THE EMERGENCE OF CINEMA AND TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKES
The film remake constitutes a split subject, rendered into definition through a
violent process of competition and institutional interdiction. Drawing from the work of
André Gaudreault and Jennifer Forrest, among others, Constantine Verevis has discussed
how the remake initially became a discrete category during the early days of cinema;
14

yet given his lack of emphasis on transnational cinematic exchange, these interventions
merit re-contextualization.
With the aim of examining the “extremely common” practice in early cinema of
“film piracy,”
15
Gaudreault sorts through the decisions in a number of legal battles that
vitally shaped the cinema, which in fact conceptualized the cinema in very specific ways
and gave birth to an entire “theory of cinema.”
16
He states that “all producers [during the
early days of cinema] enthusiastically pirated (by duping a print) the films of competitors
who had not taken the precaution of copyrighting them with the Library of Congress.”
17

He shows that film copyright underwent significant development through a number court
127
cases. As a result of the first two major copyright litigations over cinema, “Thomas A.
Edison vs. Sigmund Lubin” and “American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. vs. Edison
Manufacturing Co.,” three vital distinctions were made. First, film consisted of more
than just single “photographs.” Second, film duplication differed from the re-filming of
similar staged scenes and events. Third and contingent with this, film constituted a
narrative form.
The second of these distinctions indicates a vital confusion, one that aligns the
remake, as it is conceived today, with another cinematic process, making the remake
something else at the same time. The second distinction reveals that, in the emergence of
cinema, there was no conceptual or practical difference between the mechanical
reproduction of film prints and the re-photographing of similarly staged events or scenes.
Jennifer Forrest also examines this issue, specifically in relation to the beginnings of the
film remake. Following the terminology of contemporary trade magazines, she refers to
mechanically-reproduced film prints as “dupes” and re-staged and re-filmed scenarios as
“remakes.”
18
Like Gaudreault, Forrest demonstrates how remakes and dupes were
conceptually and practically interchangeable until around 1906, and argues that the
separation of these two forms occurred as film was incorporated into US copyright law.
19

Thus it took legal action to differentiate between mechanical reproduction (dupes)
and textual reproduction (remakes) in the cinema. Both forms of cinematic repetition
were used legitimately and illegitimately to create and commercially exploit film prints.
On the one hand, both duping and remaking were used to continue the exhibition life of a
film, to prolong its dissemination. For example, the Lumières photographed multiple,
128
extremely similar versions of a train pulling into a station. L’Arivée d’un train à la
Ciotat (1895, “Lumière no. 653”) depicts a train come to a stop at a station, moving from
the right of the screen to the left at a diagonal to the camera. This version is
distinguished by featuring a man in a light-shaded suit with a bow-tie and a short beard
who comes off the train and looks directly at the camera; it also depicts a group of men in
suits entering the frame from the right to board the train.
20
L’Arivée d’un train (1895), on
the other hand, differs notably as it begins with a man pushing a cart, who leaves the
frame to the right, before the train pulls in to the station. When the train pulls into the
station, it does so at a very similar angle as in the film described above; yet it differs also
by depicting many women approach the train to board it.
21
But beyond these very subtle
differences, the films appear identical and were likely intended to do so.
On the other hand, both duping and remaking were used as a form of piracy, as
films were duped or remade and exploited by new producers. As Charles Musser
describes and as recounted by Jennifer Forrest, early film producers in the Untied States,
such as Edison and Biograph, consistently duped prints of European films and profited
from their exhibition in the US by selling or showing them as their own.
22
Not only was
this practice more economically efficient than producing their own new films, but it also
allowed these companies to respond quickly and flexibly to the voracious, shifting, and
somewhat unpredictable desires of American film audiences.
23
The films of George
Méliès were duped, in the words of Charles Musser, “by every major American
producer.”
24
And Edison was not discriminating, duping films made by Pathé Frères and
the British Sheffield Photo Company as well.
25
Eventually, Méliès sent his brother to
129
New York, where he opened an office to distribute the Méliès films in the US and
copyrighted some of these films as well.
26

Transnational remaking occurred simultaneously and similarly to these acts of
transnational duping. As Robert Sklar notes, “the Edison company began making direct
or very close copies of Méliès films with Vanishing Lady in 1898, Strange Adventure of a
New York Drummer in 1899 and Uncle Josh’s Nightmare in 1900,” all of which were
trick films.
27
Likewise, in addition to his unrelenting practice of duping foreign
producers’ films,
28
Edison arguably made his own “version” of L’Arivée d’un train as
Black Diamond Express (1896), which “was [itself] remade several times over the next
six years,” creating multiple versions.
29
In this film, the camera is located in a rural
outdoor setting and depicts the titular train approach the camera from the right of the
screen. It then curves slightly toward the camera before exiting the screen, again on the
right, while a group of men stands next to the train tracks on the left of the screen.
Although this film has obvious differences from L’Arivée d’un train, the primary conceit
and attraction of Black Diamond Express remains the same: the thrilling view of a train
rushing toward a camera – so thrilling, in fact, that there is evidence that some audience
members fled from their seats in a theater that screened the film.
30

By today’s understanding, both practices, duping and remaking, constitute piracy.
Indeed, the initial confusion between mechanical reproduction and cinematic remaking
demonstrates the strong relation between remaking and distribution as well as between
remaking and piracy. For a moment, these processes were practically the same, and
contemporary distinctions among them should attend to this proximate relation.
130
Moreover, this demonstrates that the general conceptual confusion between duping and
remaking was imbricated in a larger struggle among film producers on both sides of the
Atlantic, who sought to gain economic advantage at the cost of the other. That is, these
practices not only served to benefit American producers at the cost of Europeans, but
further entrenched the American companies within the emerging American film market,
as heterogeneous as it was at the time. That is to say, the remaking and duping of
European films helped to protect or at least insulate the American film market from
European producers. And just as these processes were conflated in a general way, they
were further conflated as transnational practices of cinematic competition and exchange.
Culturally, the process of duping created a strange dynamic whereby American film
producers “Americanized” European films by duplicating them and selling them under
their own company name with English titles. In this respect, the process of duping in
early cinema was not only generally conflated with cinematic remaking, but it functioned
practically as a form of transnational remaking in its own right, as the films that were
duped were defined by their trans-Atlantic transit and fluctuating cultural associations.
The third distinction regarding film as a narrative art is similarly vital, as it
demonstrates a confusion about the practical and aesthetic functions of the cinema. As
Charles Musser has asserted, cinema engaged in a presentational rather than
representational mode during its emergence.
31
Similarly, Tom Gunning has described
how early cinema emphasized its spectacular machinery rather than relying upon
narrative logics of continuity, etc.
32
Over time, films got longer and there was an
increasing number of films that depicted staged scenarios of increasing length and
131
narrative complexity. Although the cinema of attractions and a narrative cinema existed
side-by-side for a “transitional” period, staged narrative films eventually became the
norm.
Not only were remakes vital to the emergence of the early “cinema of attractions,”
as described above, they were perhaps even more important to the development of the
narrative cinema, that is, longer films with logics of visual continuity and clear
time/space relations based on cause-effect relationships. In one historically significant
case, the development of cinematic narrative was comprised of a set of transnational
remakes, namely Pathé Frère’s The Physician of the Castle (1908, a.k.a. A Narrow
Escape) and D.W. Griffith’s film made at Biograph, A Lonely Villa (1909). These two
films have been extensively described and compared by Richard Abel and Tom Gunning,
respectively,
33
and my analysis intends to slightly recontextualize the relations between
these films. Both films tell the story of a bourgeois doctor who is called away from his
home and family by bandits on a fictitious medical call. Once the doctor is away, the
bandits invade the home, and the remaining family barricade themselves within the home,
moving ever deeper as the bandits progress further. Eventually, the wife manages to call
the doctor and alerts him to the threat. The doctor races back to his home and, with the
aid of the police, subdues the bandits just as they reach the family, saving them in a last
minute rescue.
Most of the differences between these two films appear superficial. For instance,
whereas in A Narrow Escape the bandits deliver the initial telegram to the doctor via a
legitimate postal worker, in A Lonely Villa one of the bandits poses as a messenger and is
132
thus able to enter the villa and remove the bullets from a firearm. Yet other differences
between the films demonstrate a development of cinematic narrative and connote
important ideological differences. For instance, whereas the interior geography of the
home in A Narrow Escape is somewhat vague, showing the family retreating first from
stage right and later to stage left, A Lonely Villa maintains a more consistent arrangement
of space, with the family retreating from room to room exclusively to the right of the
frame. Perhaps most importantly, Griffith’s film extends and elaborates the cinematic
logic of A Narrow Escape, which itself made “sustained use of alternation or parallel
editing.”
34
As Gunning describes in detail:
Whereas parallel editing makes a dramatic appearance in the early Pathé
film, it is limited to a sequence of ten shots. In Griffith’s film, parallel
editing functions throughout the film, involving more articulation within
sequences. The Lonely Villa contains fifty-two shots compared to thirty
for A Narrow Escape.
35

In Gunning’s view, this kind of elaboration was fundamental in the construction
of a cinematic “narrator system,” which had moral implications as well as narratological
significance. The elaboration of parallel editing in A Lonely Villa intensified the level of
suspense in the film by further clarifying the interrelation of the different spaces in
different shots. Indeed, all of Griffith’s additions to this narrative serve to increase
suspense and impending danger. For instance, unlike A Narrow Escape, the Griffith film
shows one of the bandits cut the telephone line by which the wife and the doctor
communicate, making the danger she faces much more immediate. Likewise, the Griffith
film has the doctor’s automobile break down, causing him to be delayed as he solicits the
aid of someone with a horse and carriage, which they eventually use in the race to the
133
home. Notably, both these examples represent failures of technology, whereas A Narrow
Escape depicts the smooth functionality of new technologies of communication and
travel. Further, the sense of impending danger developed in A Narrow Escape takes on
significant gender associations in its remake; whereas A Narrow escape features a mother
and a young boy being assailed by bandits, A Lonely Villa depicts a family comprised of
a mother and three daughters. In this respect, the “American” version of the story is
moved from merely the protection of home and family – of the domestic – toward the
protection of a specifically feminine domestic sphere.
In a broader context, these examples reveal the transnational traffic of remakes at
a pivotal moment in the development of cinema, as it moved increasingly toward longer
films with increasing narrative complexity. These particular examples also reveal how
certain categories of social experience, the feminine, the domestic, etc., were transferable
and yet alterable across a transnational cultural space precisely through the repetition of
cinematic narratives and conventions. Although it is historically important to note the
historical precedence of styles, conventions, and narrative tactics, as do Gunning and
Abel, what seems more important in this context is the transnational space in which
cinematic narratives were elaborated. As A Lonely Villa clearly reveals an expansion of
cinematic narrative technique, though not the invention of this technique, it serves as an
eminent example of how the transnational film remake vitally shaped the formation of
cinematic narratives more generally – staged and restaged actions with increasingly
causal relations.
134
This conception of film, as a medium for the representation of staged narratives,
became inscribed within the US legal apparatus as well, specifically in the legal decision
for the “American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. vs. Edison Manufacturing Co.”
36

Remarkably, this lawsuit dealt with Edison’s film How a French Nobleman Got a Wife
Through the New York Herald “Personal” Columns (1904), a remake of Personal (1904)
made by Biograph. The opening title of How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through
the New York Herald “Personal” Columns identifies the pseudo-protagonist as a
Frenchman in New York, constructing a world of cosmopolitan romance. This film and
the original, Personal, depict the man chased through a sequence of different locations by
a large number of female suitors. Not only was Edison’s film a remake, however, but in
fact this film was itself remade in France by Pathé Frères under the title Dix femmes pour
un mari (1905).
37
This example once again demonstrates the complex exchanges that
occurred between film producers across the Atlantic that specifically involved cinematic
remaking and struggles over ownership and copyright.
As Jennifer Forrest demonstrates, the notion of film as a narrative form was made
fully manifest in the results of a later court case, “Harper Bros. et. al. v. Kalem Co. et.
al.,” which revolved around the cinematic adaptation of the novel Ben Hur made in
1907.
38
In the resolution of this case, US copyright law associated film narratives with
copyrighted, written sources.
39
On the one hand, this mandated that film is a narrative
form, and thereby further defined the film remake as a re-production or re-filming of a
previously produced cinematic narrative. On the other hand, this decision also conflates
135
remakes and adaptations, as all remakes derive their narratives from a source in a written
medium.
40

Thus the legal apparatus of copyright helped situate the remake as a cinema-
specific form of textual, and not mechanical, repetition and reproduction, as they
differentiated remakes from literary adaptations as well as from dupes.
41
Further, these
cases clarified the film remake as a specifically narrative intertextual form, as they
responded to changing film conventions, which with increasing length and extended
narratives made literature the primary source for filmed content. This would appear to
automatically privilege the subsequent “classical” Hollywood mode of production, which
centralized ownership, production, and exhibition of extended film narratives that
mobilized a textual pattern of intermittent repetition and variation with the aim of product
differentiation. However, as part of a greater effort to highlight these sites of confusion
and tension, it is vital to note the transnational arena in which these conflicts occurred.
Although the lawsuits that eventually “settled” film into copyright law and that codified
the film remake occurred in the United States, the tensions preceding and surrounding
this were international in scope.
Ultimately, this period of confusion and heterogeneous cinematic production,
distribution, exhibition, and reproduction came to a close through a period after 1907.
With the formation of the Motion Picture Patent Company in 1908, Edison and its
licensees standardized film technologies and excluded many independent companies
inside the US and, notably, foreign competitors from the market. Although Pathé,
Gaumont, and Eclipse were signatories and thus had privileged access to the American
136
film market among foreign production companies,
42
Edison would still “make a
percentage from the sales” of these foreign producers’ films.
43
The MPPC was broken up
in the middle of the next decade, but for a moment the strategic legal split between
cinema’s mechanics and its texts, between the medium and the content, still functioned to
eliminate or at least bottleneck foreign competition within the US. This further
punctuates the transnational context for the emergence of the cinema in general and of the
film remake in particular.
This period of confusion offers productive insights into the transnational remake
and important ways of reconceptualizing the category. First, the split between machine
and text in the cinema, between the mechanical reproduction of the world and the
mechanical reproduction of mechanical reproductions, should be seen as closer than
previously considered. This could open possibilities for looking at how duping and film
distribution in general could function as a process of remaking. Second, the close
affiliation between cinematic remaking and film piracy should also take on new
conceptual and critical importance. On the one hand, film piracy itself could be seen as
an unsanctioned, furtive, and subversive mode of cinematic remaking. On the other
hand, cinematic remaking absolutely should be seen as film piracy by another name,
legitimated by the institution of copyright law but functionally and historically
indistinguishable. This view reverses the naturalized conception of the film remake,
implicating the contest for power embedded in the practice during the emergence of
cinema.

137
THE TRANSITION TO SOUND: MULTI-LANGUAGE FILM VERSIONS AND
TRANSNATIONAL REMAKES
As is well established, film producers in the United States gained worldwide
dominance by about the end of World War I, for a host of complex reasons. Remarkably,
just as Hollywood began producing longer films with a “classical” narrative structure,
these films also became the globally dominant cinema. This would appear to expand
upon Verevis’ periodization of remakes, which he says entered a stable phase in 1917, by
aligning the stabilization of film remakes with the global rise of Hollywood narrative
cinema. However, the more accurate demarcation for the transnational remake occurs
with the implementation of sync-sound technologies in the production and exhibition of
feature films. Indeed, the advent and worldwide implementation of sync-sound
technology stands as the second moment of crisis through which the transnational film
remake becomes defined, emerging from this moment as a distinct institutional category
and a cinematic form aimed at appeasing global cultural diversity.
The advent of sound film across the world created new structural/cultural barriers
among film markets; with the advent of sync-dialogue, the issue of spoken language
constrained the relatively fluid flow of film texts across national and cultural borders. As
Kristin Thompson asserts:
On the one hand, the hundreds of European patents seemed to offer a
means of forcing the American firms out of Europe or at least of curbing
their power. On the other hand, the problem of translating English
dialogue into a variety of foreign tongues suggested that trade barriers
might automatically appear and that American films might be confined to
markets like Britain and Australia.
44

138
Although Thompson argues that the worldwide economic depression at the time “had
more of an adverse impact on American exports than did problems relating to sound,”
45

the transition to sound nevertheless caused widespread uncertainty about future
possibilities for the transnational flow of films.
This uncertainty prompted a number of responses among film producers who
sought to overcome or accommodate the linguistic diversity among film audiences
around the world, especially those in lucrative markets. Some studios attempted to dub
films in different languages, overlaying dialogue in the local language, but these early
experiments were technically, critically, and economically unsuccessful.
46
They also
tried leaving the English-language soundtrack intact but added subtitles in the local
language, but these films were similarly unsuccessful, in some cases causing riots among
audiences.
47
And these were just some of the more regularized forms of accommodation
among a host of various strategies; the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of film
audiences, particularly within the European markets, prompted an almost equally
heterogeneous number of technical approaches.
The most concentrated and numerically prolific strategy was the multi-language
film, also known as the multilingual,
48
the multi-language version (MLV),
49
or the
foreign language version (FLV),
50
among other names. Nataša Ďurovičová states:
these films (mostly, but far from exclusively, of American origin) were
made…by a given country in one or several languages other than its own,
in a production process that involved reshooting the entire “original” film
with actors fluent in the relevant languages.
51

To achieve this, as Ginette Vincendeau describes, “one of two strategies [was] adopted:
importing directors, scriptwriters, and actors from each country to Hollywood (the MGM
139
method) or setting up production centres in Europe (the Paramount method).”
52
She
further describes that:
MLVs were usually shot simultaneously, in one of several fashions:
Where a film was shot in two or three languages only, the director was
often the same…For higher numbers of versions (up to 14), particularly at
Paramount, each version could have a different director …For actors the
permutations were as numerous. When polyglot actors were used, the star
of the film could remain the same while the rest of the cast (except extras)
changed…In other cases, the whole cast was different…There is a second
type of MLV: films made from the same material, but with a short time
gap.
53

Two caveats must follow these characterizations. First, although Hollywood was
most active in producing MLVs, it was certainly not the only industry to do so. For
example, E.A. Dupont at British International Pictures produced Atlantic (1929) in
England, possibly the first feature-length MLV ever made,
54
and UFA in Germany made
a number of MLVs as well, including the classic film(s) The Blue Angel / Der Blaue
Engel (1930). Second, the system of producing MLVs so discombobulated associations
among cinematic financing, labor, geography, and culture that it is extremely
unproductive to refer to “countries” producing such films, as Ďurovičová does. Instead,
the companies should be acknowledged as the productive agents, and they should be
collectively viewed as transnational cultural industries in this context.
Alfonso Pinto has catalogued many of the MLVs produced by Hollywood,
specifically Hollywood’s Spanish-language versions,
55
and later the French-language
versions.
56
His accounts make it clear that almost every major Hollywood studio
produced MLVs, as did a number of independent production companies in the US.
Paramount was the most prolific, producing films not only within the USA but also
140
opening a production studio in Joinville, France, a Paris suburb, an endeavor which has
gained much attention among analyses of MLVs.
57
But, as noted, MGM produced multi-
language films at their studio in the US, as did RKO, which released these films through
United Artists.
58
Warner Bros. produced a handful of MLVs within the US and also in
Germany; their most notable MLV produced abroad was G.W. Pabst’s The Threepenny
Opera (1931) which was made in German as well as in French under the title L’Opera de
Quat’sous (1931). Pinto observes that “among the foreign-language talkies made in
Hollywood just after sound came in, those is Spanish were by far the most important
numerically (no less than 113 were made [between 1930 and 1935]).”
59
Yet, rather than
aiming at Spanish-speaking audiences within Europe, the intended destination for almost
all other MLVs, these Spanish-language films aimed at the “immense Latin-American
bloc which spoke this language,” which due to technical cinematic underdevelopment
was “unrivaled.”
60
But Hollywood studios also produced over fifty films in French,
61
a
number of films in German, and Paramount produced films at Joinville in up to fourteen
different languages, “ranging from German to Polish to Japanese.”
62
All told, MLVs
entailed an enormous effort that characterized much cinematic production during the
transition to sound.
Pinto asserts that “the essential reason for [MLVs] being made, at least in the
beginning, was fear,”
63
and Vincendeau asserts that “US-generated MLVs are, under
close inspection, symptomatic…of a great deal of disorganization.”
64
The MLV should
thus be seen as an articulation of this commercial panic and industrial confusion. This
confusion was prompted by a desire to organize cultural production so as to anticipate
141
and address the linguistic and cultural diversity of global film audiences; this confusion
was about cultural globalization. Vincendeau states, “[MLVs] are located at the point of
contact between the aesthetic…and the industrial dimensions of cinema,”
65
implicating
how MLVs functioned as articulations, films that conjoined their commercial and
cultural imperatives in both their industrial protocols and aesthetic organizations. In this
respect, MLVs functioned as cinematic articulations of cultural globalization. Their
mode of production speaks to the apparent contradictions of cultural unity in a world of
globalized cinematic flows. As Ďurovičová writes, “in its attempt to combine the
industrial imperative of efficiency with the linguistically motivated need to duplicate the
performance, the FLVs met these practices about halfway.”
66
Thus the studio-based
mode of production was at pains to assimilate film laborers of multiple national
affiliations, cultural backgrounds, and linguistic capabilities in an efficient or
standardized way.
The MLV articulates these tensions and confusions in several, sometimes indirect
ways, which like the transnational film remake occurs in large part in tensions between
repetition and transformation, between sameness and difference. For one, the MLV
completely conflates differentiations between “original” and “copy” in cinematic
production, as many of these films were produced simultaneously. Indeed, for the most
part these films completely conflate issues of temporality and historicity of the film text,
as they occur as a multiplicity at the same time.
For instance, the Warner Bros. film Those Who Dance (1930) was scheduled for
production over twenty-four days beginning December 17, 1929,
67
whereas a German-
142
language version of the film was produced from August 9 to August 29, 1930,
68
a
French-language version was produced from August 14 to September 4, 1930,
69
and a
Spanish-language version of the film was produced from August 18 to September 8,
1930.
70
The production of the Howard Hawks film The Crowd Roars (1932), starring
James Cagney, was even more temporally compressed with its French-language version,
which starred Jean Gabin in the lead role. According to the film’s “Daily Production and
Progress Reports,” the “foreign” version was produced simultaneously with the English
version scene-by-scene, take-by-take. For instance, from 5:10 pm until 5:25 pm on
Thursday, December 31, 1931, the crew for the film first shot scene J-698 for the
“foreign” and then shot the “print;” that is, they made the same scene twice, once in
French and once in English.
71
The report states that they next shot scene J-699 from 5:25
until 5:40 pm, and has the note “Insert – No foreign Made…Enough on Take 1 for
foreign,”
72
indicating that the same shot would be used – repeated – in both versions of
the film. According to these reports, this simultaneous scene-by-scene schedule was
maintained throughout the entire production, entirely collapsing the temporal difference
between the English- and French-language versions of this film. In this respect, and as
exemplified by these cases, one of the typical definitional criteria of the film remake –
that a remake follows its source historically – comes to the fore as particularly arbitrary
and is, perhaps, functionally and conceptually negated.
This disruption of the typical temporalities of cinematic production and
reproduction bears out two related consequences. First, the collapse of time in the
differentiation of individual MLVs highlights the category of space. On the one hand,
143
the production of MLVs typically occurred in centralized studio locations, placing the
original and the copy in the same place. But the cultural geography that MLVs produce
is much more complex, even at the level of production. In bringing together film
financing and labor from across geographically distant locations and culturally
heterogeneous affiliations, the centralized and supposedly “standardized” spaces where
MLVs were produced were rendered radically not-self-identical, culturally hybridized,
cosmopolitan spaces of cultural production.
These films’ cultural geography is even more complex at the level of distribution
and exhibition. Although they were made at a handful of select locations where diverse
peoples were centralized, the products of their labor – the films – aimed at and largely
circulated within semi-distinct cultural spaces. That is, in searching out and playing for
linguistically homogenous groups, these films articulated a very specific mode of
“transnational cinema,” one based on the geographic dispersal of peoples of a shared
language.
73
This can be glimpsed in the release pattern for the various versions of the
MLV The Bad Man (1930).
74
Whereas the English-language version of The Bad Man
played in Bermuda, Malta, the Philippines, and Jamaica, Lopes Le Bandit (the French-
language version of the film) played in Turkey and Haiti, and El Hombre Malo (the
Spanish-language version of the film) played in Columbia, “Spain and Portugal,”
“Central America,” Venezuela, and Argentina. This example demonstrates how
individual nations were encapsulated within greater language-determined regions, or
“territories” in industry speak. In this respect, the circulation of MLVs was transnational,
but differently so than was the production of these films.
144
Thus these films complicate simple associations among language, culture, and
authenticity in much the same way that they complicate distinctions between “original”
and “copy.” As these films were made with no necessary temporal priority, they
similarly have no necessary claim to cultural priority, unity, or coherent authenticity.
Produced as a simultaneous multiplicity, MLVs’ cultural associations are multiple and
hybridized at their very “origins.” There is nothing that privileges, for instance, the
German-language version of Anna Christie (1930) over the English-language version
(1930). As an indication of the lingual and cultural heterogeneity among these films,
there is even disparity among the languages of scripts for these films. For example, the
script for the Spanish-language version of Call of the Flesh (1930) provides English
dialogue and camera directions on the left-hand page of the script while the right side
features Spanish-language dialogue and camera directions.
75
Similarly, whereas the
script for the French version of Those Who Dance features French and English dialogue
and staging directions side-by-side on the same page,
76
the German-language version
only features English-language dialogue.
77
While the script for the Spanish-language
version of this film features Spanish and English dialogue side-by-side on the same page,
it only features English-language blocking and camera directions.
78

Moreover, MLVs attest to the extremely problematic association between
language and culture. As Nataša Ďurovičová asserts regarding Paramount’s MLVs
produced at the Joinville studio, “the ideology of culture is reduced to a contrast between
different-sounding languages.”
79
This reductive approach caused all kinds of cultural
incongruities in performers’ accents as well as the names, locations, and modes of social
145
interaction within the diegetic world(s) represented in these films.
80
Joseph Garncarz
similarly notes how the disparity between language and culture, including narrative
conventions, characters’ patterns of behavior and social interactions, and overt issues of
nationality, caused ruptures within the texts and failed attempts at “cultural adaptation.”
81

Yet at Warner Bros., for example, the writers or translators of MLVs were
sometimes hired to continue their translation work through the production process as well
as through the promotion of the films. For example, in his contract to write the German
dialogue and titles for Those Who Dance, Heinrich Fraenkel was also hired to assist in the
rehearsals of the script as well as to help translate promotional material for the film.
82

Similarly, Guillermo Yeme was initially contracted to translate the script for The Sacred
Flame (1929) into a Spanish-language version (1931),
83
yet he worked for an additional
three weeks on the production as an “interpreter.”
84
Yeme was later hired as a
“prompter” on the set of the Spanish-language version of The Lady Who Dared (1931),
for which he had already written the Spanish-language script.
85
In these cases, one finds
that the studio made efforts to ameliorate possible disruptions within the languages
spoken in their films.
Nevertheless, issues of cultural diversity generally hampered MLVs and created
tensions between spoken languages and more ephemeral cultural associations. Such
tensions evoke the diversity among MLVS, as there was a range of practices and
possibilities among these films. Similarly, the range of cultural issues these films address
and evoke is quite broad. For instance, there was a Spanish-language version of Dracula
(1931) titled Drácula (1931), produced by Universal Pictures on the same sets as the
146
famous English-language version directed by Todd Browning and starring Bela Lugosi.
This Spanish-language version was shot at night, when the “main” production was gone,
and it is textually remarkable for a number of reasons. As might be expected given the
concurrent productions and use of the same script and sets, the two films are highly
similar. Actor Carlos Villarías, who plays the role of Dracula in the Spanish-language
version, delivers his lines with many of the same pauses and much of the same
overdramatic weight as Lugosi, such as when he states “Soy…Drácula” or “Yo nunca
bebo…el vino.” Many of the variations that do occur are minor, such as the re-location
of certain scenes (which themselves are nearly identical in content) within the house, or
the transposition of certain lines of dialogue from one character to another.
86
Notably,
however, Drácula is substantially longer than Dracula, as a result of the slower pacing of
its dialogue as well as of the inclusion of a number of scenes not found in the English-
language film.
87
In this respect, Drácula provides much more narrative development and
explication. Strikingly, the female characters in this film all wear much more revealing
dresses and nightgowns than those in the English-language film; although it might be
tempting to attribute this to different cultural attitudes regarding sexuality among
Spanish-speaking audiences, one must remember that the film was produced in
Hollywood by a major studio with an English-speaking director. (In fact, he had to use
an interpreter in order to work with his actors).
88
This should emphasize a larger point
about this film and perhaps MLVS in general; any similarities and differences among
these versions do not correspond in any direct way with a cultural reality, but rather with
a dynamic, dialogic cultural process involving production and reception.
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Anna Christie was a multi-language version made by MGM in 1930, the
production(s) taking place on the MGM lot. The film was initially produced in English
and then immediately afterward in German. These films were remarkable for starring
Greta Garbo in her first sync-dialogue role(s), as she played the lead in both. All the
other roles, however, were played by different performers in the two different versions,
and much of the crew differed between the productions as well. For example, whereas
Clarence Brown directed the English-language version, Jacques Feyder directed the
German-language version, who had previously directed the US-based MLV production of
The Unholy Night (1929), also for MGM.
89

Based on the 1922 play by Eugene O’Neill, Anna Christie is a family melodrama
set in New York City amongst recent US immigrants. Similar to many of Nataša
Ďurovičová’s observations about the multiple versions of The Lady Lies (1929),
90
the
versions of Anna Christie reveal tensions among the cultural associations of the
performers, their roles, and the diegetic world(s) the films construct; that is, the films
raise issues regarding cultural spaces and identities. The two films were shot on the same
soundstage, thus almost all of the scenes are nearly identical in content as well as staging
and camera blocking. Set on a coal barge in New York (that travels to Massachusetts,
among other places), the cultural spaces of the diegesis in the English-language version
map out urban, working-class, immigrant spaces. Garbo’s father is a Swedish immigrant
who brought his daughter over to the US but abandoned her as a child; the film
dramatizes their troubled reunion. Likewise, Garbo’s love interest in the English-
language version is an Irish immigrant played by Charles Bickford. His ethnic
148
background becomes a dramatic point when he asks Anna to swear upon his mother’s
cross and when he makes an issue about Anna’s not being Catholic like he is. In the
German-language version, however, this suitor is played by Theo Shall. Given that he
speaks German throughout the film and no mention of his ethnicity is made, it is safe to
assume that he plays a German immigrant. As a result, no mention of religion is made
whatsoever, as he is most likely protestant.
This transposition notably demonstrates different modes of cultural
accommodation, each of which reveals a different approach toward representing cultural
diversity and transnational exchange. In both films, New York is a space of diverse
cultures coming into contact, even romantic interrelation. In making the film in both
English and German, the actual productions of these films somewhat similarly addresses
issues of cultural diversity and transnational exchange. Indeed, although one of the
objectives of MLVs was to maintain non-English-speaking audiences outside the US,
they could equally play among non-English speaking immigrants within the US. For
example Warner Bros. had made a number of German-language short films intended not
for Germany but rather for German speakers in the US.
91
Thus the immigration narrative
of Anna Christie – both versions – could have played among diverse audiences within
and outside the US, formulating a complex cultural geography intertwined with but not
wholly determined by language.
Alternatively, the simultaneous production(s) of Der Blaue Engel and The Blue
Angel by UFA in Germany maintained the same cast and crew in both films, including
director Josef von Sternberg, the renowned actor Emil Jannings, and actress Marlene
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Dietrich, whom this film turned into a star. These films, even more than those detailed
above, are markedly similar; in almost all cases the staging of action, the framing and
timing of shots are the same, and the performances do not noticeably differ in any way.
92

Perhaps the most notable detail along these lines is the translation of the songs that
Dietrich sings throughout the film. Yet, perhaps as a result of this extreme level of
duplication at the level of production, there are intense ruptures in the films’ cultural
connections. Both versions are set in contemporary Germany, rendering the German-
language version most “natural” and the English-language version out of place.
Although Dietrich’s English is clear and although the English spoken by the students is
diegetically justified by their studying English, the rest of the cast has accents so thick
that they are nearly incomprehensible, including Jannings. Further, many lines in the
“English” version are nevertheless spoken in German. Here, the degree of similarity
between the two films produces a linguistic and even cultural dissonance within one of
them.
Thus these films, and MLVs more generally, reveal substantial textual
connections and yet also important points of disturbance. These textual conditions
resonate with the tension between standardization and variation occurring among the
different ways that these films were made. As MLVs aimed at centralizing cinematic
production and yet also aimed to address geographically and culturally diverse audiences,
these films were particular “articulations” of cultural globalization in both their
productions and their textual compositions. Very much like transnational film remakes,
these films confound national affiliations, conceptions of artistic originality, and
150
assertions about cultural authenticity. Also similarly to transnational film remakes,
MLVs articulated the tensions of cultural globalization by problematizing the categories
of time (through the simultaneous production of multiples), space (by centralizing
cinematic production but seeking and circulating among variegated geo-cultural
audiences), and identity (as no individual film necessarily had priority over its other
versions, their cultural associations are rendered similarly fragmented and multiple).
Of course, the contradictions and tensions of MLVs were too severe and
ultimately these films failed to sufficiently articulate cultural globalization. This genre of
films was not historically durable and film producers quickly halted the production of
MLVs in the early 1930s. Many have cited economic reasons for their demise, as they
were substantially more expensive to produce than non-MLVs. For instance, Ginette
Vincendeau estimates that hiring and bringing to Hollywood “more than 60 foreign
actors, scriptwriters and directors” cost MGM alone an additional “40,000 dollars a
week.”
93
Further, almost all critics and historians note that MLVs were not popular
among various audiences, thus severely curtailing their ability to recoup their costs.
94

A “Supplementary Statement” within an internal ledger at Warner Bros. Pictures
from 1943 paints a slightly different picture.
95
The document details the negative costs of
several MLVs as well as the gross income for these films in foreign markets, which were
consistently higher than their negative costs. According to this document: the French
version of Alias the Doctor (1932, French version titled La Cas du Docteur Brenner) had
a negative cost of $40,000 and a foreign gross income of $50,000; the French version of
Crowd Roars had a negative cost of $34,000 and a foreign gross income of $54,000; the
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French version of High Pressure (1932, French version titled Le Bluffeur) had a negative
cost of $36,000 and a foreign gross income of $45,000; and the French version of Local
Boy Makes Good (1931, French version titled L’Athlete Incomplet and released in 1932)
had a negative cost of $33,000 and a foreign gross income of $54,000.
96

Admittedly, there appears to be some discrepancy among these figures and the
estimated production budgets for a number of other MLVs made at Warner Bros. at the
time. Some examples include: the “total cost” for the Spanish-language version of The
Bad Man was $73,027.94,
97
as compared to the “total cost” of the English-language
version of $253,561.46;
98
the “total cost” of the English-language version of Those Who
Dance was $161,383.59,
99
while the “total cost” for the French version was $77,
603.50,
100
and the “total cost” for the Spanish version was $76,800.93;
101
the “total cost”
of the English-language version of The Lady Who Dared was $180,484.72,
102
while the
“total cost” for the Spanish-language version was $64,738.92;
103
the “total cost” for the
Spanish-language version of Sacred Flame was $67,465.83;
104
the “total cost” for the
French version of The Aviator (1931) was $83,941.89.
105
Of course, the first thing one
notices is the great discrepancy between the English-language versions and their
“foreign” language counterparts; in some cases the foreign version was produced for one
third the expense of the English-language film, which confirms established notions that
MLVs were cheap knock-offs.
More importantly, these budgets also appear substantially higher than those
appearing on the “Supplementary Statement.” However, given that these budgets were
merely estimated and given that the “Supplementary Statement” was written a
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considerable time after the release of these films thus had the clarity of hindsight, it
nevertheless appears to be a genuine evaluation of the costs and returns of several MLVs
made by Warner Bros. Based on this document, none of these films appear to have been
blockbusters. Nevertheless, and although this ledger does not integrate the costs of
marketing, print production, shipping, etc., by any standard these films appear to have
been economically successful. And although this ledger only documents a selection of
MLVs produced by a single Hollywood studio, the economic viability of MLVs it reveals
should nuance claims that economics were the sole reason for their demise.
Instead, the problematic cultural dissonances of many of these films worked with
their generally increased cost of production to render them unsatisfying for producers as
well as for audiences. As a result, film producers sought more economically efficient
means of making their films accessible to linguistically diverse audiences. As Kristin
Thompson notes, “by 1931…the language problem was largely a thing of the past:
subtitles and dubbing provided the two standard solutions.”
106
Although subtitling and
dubbing could not fully accommodate or overcome issues of cultural specificity and only
provided an imperfect technical solution to linguistic diversity, subtitled or dubbed films
were economically rewarding throughout Europe and quickly became standard. This
should not suggest, however, that cultural differences were completely obliterated
through a homogenous practice of technological linguistic accommodation. As Nataša
Ďurovičová notes, dubbing became the norm in Italy under Mussolini because his
government required that all sync-dialogue films screened in Italy had to be in Italian.
107

Analogously, Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey note that “subtitled movies found a
153
satisfactory response in several markets, particularly in Latin America, where they were
often preferred to those dubbed, or indeed produced, in standard Castilian Spanish.”
108

These facts would suggest that although local languages may have been displaced, there
was some degree of cultural specificity at work in the adoption of subtitled or dubbed
films upon the advent of sync-sound and the failure of MLVs.
More vitally, however, the demise of the MLV provided the conditions for the
transnational film remake. Indeed, this category finds its fullest and clearest institutional
definition at this historical juncture and, in fact, the transnational film remake remains
more or less consistently defined from the demise of the MLVs through to the present
moment. Both Ginette Vincendeau and Joseph Garncarz assert explicitly that, as film
companies abandoned their efforts to produce MLVs, they selectively produced film
remakes as an alternative but analogous strategy.
109
Likewise, Lucy Mazdon writes, “the
[transnational] remake can to a certain extent be perceived as a continuation of multi-
lingual production.”
110
Among the first wave of these transnational remakes was First a
Girl (1935), a remake of Viktor und Viktoria (1933), Algiers (1938), a remake of Pepe le
Moko (1937), and Mad Love (1935) a sync-sound remake of the silent film Orlac’s
Hande, also knows as The Hands of Orlac (1924). As such films aimed at different
linguistic and cultural markets than those of their source films, they are quite distinctly
transnational remakes. Garncarz even asserts that, as opposed to MLVs or processes of
subtitling or dubbing films for linguistically-segmented media markets, transnational film
remakes were able to adapt better to cultural variations and particularities in addition to
linguistic diversity.
111
In this explanation of their origination, it is precisely their ability
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to be different from one another that makes transnational film remakes more culturally
and economically feasible than MLVs.
But this internal difference, this alterity, evokes the threat of the self-sameness of
MLVs as well as the momentary conflation of MLVs and transnational film remakes.
Similarly to the way that many MLVs were produced as a multiplicity at the same time,
so too were transnational remakes simultaneously MLVs during this specific historical
moment. This is both conceptually as well as practically the case. For instance, a
number of MLVs were remakes of earlier films or were later themselves remade. For
example, The Bad Man of 1930 was not only an MLV produced in French and Spanish,
the film was also a remake of the 1923 silent film of the same title.
112
Warner Bros.
appears to have remade this picture under the title West of Shanghai in 1937, whereupon
they sold the rights to all versions of The Bad Man, but not those to West of Shanghai, to
MGM in 1940.
113
MGM then made their own remake of the film(s) in 1941 under the
title The Bad Man. Likewise, the MLV Local Boy Makes Good was a remake of the
silent picture The Poor Nut (1927),
114
whereas the MLV High Pressure was remade in
1936 as Hot Money.
Yet, if for a moment in the late 1920s and early 1930s transnational remakes and
MLVs were the same thing, what were the conceptual and practical criteria that separated
them when they later became differentiated? In her comparison and differentiation of
these forms, Vincendeau asserts “remakes as we know them now tend to copy an older
text, appealing to the cinematic memory of the spectator. The relationship between the
two versions (e.g., of Scarface, A Star is Born, Breathless) is diachronic, in MLVs it is
155
synchronic.”
115
That is, time was (re-)asserted as a fundamental definitional criterion for
film remakes and therefore, in this case of transnational film remakes, interacted in
complex ways with myriad other geo-cultural issues.
This differentiation bears out a number of vital consequences that greatly shape
the category of transnational film remakes in general and that still inflect the category of
films today. In the (re-)emergence of time as a fundamental category, in the necessary
historical rupture between cinematic production and reproduction, issues of originality
once again come to the fore and inflect the entire category. Moreover, originality largely
gets aligned with historical anteriority, and further still, originality as such gets (re-
)conflated with authenticity. Making a film first meant making the “original” and/or
“authentic” version of the narrative. However, the category of space became
reconfigured in this transition as well. Rather than reproducing the same narrative in the
same studio space for exhibition in linguistically-segmented regions of the world, as with
many MLVs, transnational film remakes were largely produced in different parts of the
world as well as at different times; like MLVs, they also aimed to circulate within distinct
and separate geo-cultural spaces. In seeking audiences with particular linguistic and
cultural commonalities and in excluding audiences bonded by other languages and
cultures, transnational remakes (like MLVs) would appear to effectively construct or
reinforce associations among geography, language, and culture. This dynamic resonates
with the general cultural/spatial turmoil prompted by the advent of sync-sound and
dialogue film, as, in a general way, the transition to sound facilitated the creation of
156
“national cinemas.” As a consequence, remakes that crossed these zones were
necessarily transnational remakes.
Just as importantly, however, the reinforced association between temporal priority
and artistic originality now intersected with the new cinematic alignments of language,
culture, and geography. That is, the transition from MLVs to transnational film remakes
engendered a new and strong association between the temporality of production –
originality – and cultural authenticity. Making a film first meant making the authentic
version, and this authenticity was largely understood in cultural terms. This complex
alignment of the temporality of a film’s production with its geo-cultural associations and
genuine circulations remains in effect to this day.
However, the historical connection and eventual differentiation between MLVs
and transnational film remakes should alert contemporary critics to a number of relatively
arbitrary notions that get embedded in the conceptualization of transnational remakes.
Just as the origin of the film remake implicates confusions between duping and remaking
as well as between piracy and remaking, so too does the differentiation of MLVs and
transnational remakes prompt several interventions. First, the historical anteriority of a
film’s production in relation to that of its remake should not necessarily lend that earlier
film authenticity, cultural or otherwise. Instead, the historical disjuncture between the
films should be treated as an arbitrary effect of the commercial and cultural vagaries of
cinematic production in general. The historical separation of “original” and “remake,”
rather than simply generating a division between “original” and “copy” that might serve
moralistic, cultural, or ideological judgments, is better understood as a particular
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historical fact in its own right. In this respect, the historical specificity of each film must
be correlated to the historical bridge that the films construct.
Second, the seemingly apparent connection between spoken language and lived
culture, as a larger pattern of behaviors and understandings, must similarly be dismantled.
Without dismissing the very important role of spoken language in film, and without
dismissing the genuine cultural battles that take place regarding language in cinema, the
case of MLVs indicates the relative autonomy of language and culture. Thus in
transnational film remakes, the difference between the two films’ spoken languages is
typically not nearly so important as other forms of revision. Moreover, as transnational
remakes succeed where MLVs failed – in cultural rather than mere linguistic
accommodation – the changes that occur between a film and its transnational remake
further confound ideologically-based notions of artistic originality.
Third, and as a continuation of the previous two points, contemporary critics must
attend to the relative autonomy of geography and culture in the cinematic production and
circulation of transnational film remakes. Unlike MLVs, which typically centralized the
production of original and remake and yet segmented cultural spaces of reception through
the exclusive circulation of one version in a given area, transnational remakes disconnect
processes of production and reproduction in addition to spaces of circulation and
reception. This “disorientation” demonstrates the high degree of geo-cultural mobility of
cinematic texts, thereby undermining strong assertions regarding any transnational
remake’s stable, coherent, or fixed geo-cultural identity. Although such films get
produced and circulated in specific places for particular reasons, which should be
158
accounted for, the juxtaposition of transnational mobility and fixity within these films is
more vital and definitive.

POST-CINEMA AND TRANSNATIONAL REMAKES
Once differentiated from the dupe and the MLV, the transnational film remake
has retained a fairly stable institutional definition until the present day. The practices
whereby transnational film remakes are produced, circulated, and regulated within the
cultural industries do not fundamentally change. In practice, the remaking of Pepe le
Moko into Algiers occurs more or less similarly to the remaking of La Cage aux folles
(1978) into The Birdcage (1996) or the remaking of L'Ultimo bacio (2001) into The Last
Kiss (2006). Yet the present surrounding context of circulation of film remakes in
general and transnational film remakes in particular has dramatically changed over the
last thirty years, and this change appears to fundamentally alter the conditions by which
transnational film remakes operate in global culture. That is, although the processes
behind the production of transnational film remakes may appear historically stable, the
surrounding media context has changed and thereby changed this “stable” category.
Although dramatic, these alterations in the contemporary mediascape are still emergent,
and this section only aims to survey them briefly; it is beyond the scope or ambition of
this project to fully assess them.
Despite these rapidly changing conditions, several general characteristics can be
identified. First, the advent and widespread dispersal and use of home-video
technologies, VHS and more recently DVD, have effectively created an immense,
159
popularly-available “commodity archive” of cinema. Although there are and have been
huge amounts of cinema that have been excluded from this “archive,” the general
transition from a theater-based cinema to a domestic, commodity-based cinema has
allowed general viewers in much of the first world unprecedented access to films from a
greatly increased historical range. That is to say, beginning in the late 1970s with the
commercialization of home video, video consumers have had new and privileged access
to films from a much longer history. This has effectively created a situation where
“original” films and their remake(s) are more equal in their availability to viewers.
Remakes now have a very different temporal relation to their sources, as they are no
longer separated from one another in the same way by time lags in their dissemination in
movie theaters.
This general objectification, commodification, and domestication of the cinema,
at least within a number of first-world media markets, bears out two important changes
regarding film remakes. First, by potentially collapsing the temporal lag that traditionally
separated original from remake, the role of space and geography takes on much greater
importance regarding division between them. In some cases, this means that original and
remake might exist side-by-side; this is literally the case in some instances in video rental
stores that organize their films alphabetically, where The Thing from Another World
(1951) might sit alongside John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) in the horror section.
Perhaps more interesting is the relatively recent practice of placing remake pairs together
in the same DVD package, such as the case with the films The Maltese Falcon (1931)
160
and Satan Met a Lady (1936), the two preceding versions of the well-known crime
thriller starring Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon (1941).
However, this spatial reorientation of film remakes functions somewhat
differently for transnational remakes. One the one hand, it remains true that although
foreign films decreasingly play in United States’ theaters and that many such films do
find some distribution on home video, they are regularly corralled into “foreign” sections
of these video stores or else are relegated to boutique video stores that specialize in
foreign, independent, and/or “cult” movies. In this respect, the simultaneous availability
of a “foreign” original and its Hollywood remake occur in slightly divergent spaces,
problematizing the transnational character of their intertextual relations. Although this
spatial arrangement may allow some audiences new access to a remake and its source via
home video, it also threatens to augment some of the cultural disconnections among
them, to valorize the Hollywood version at the expense of the remake.
The recent transition from VHS tape to DVDs as the dominant platform by which
films circulate in the home video market has an even more complex and insidious spatial
component. Embedded in the advent of DVD technologies, of both the players and the
discs themselves, was a geographic “regionalization” that limited the access of different
discs to different parts of the world. As Brian Hu has described:
Under this system, the world’s markets are carved into six geographic
zones: U.S./Canada (Region 1), Japan/Europe/South Africa/the Middle
East (Region 2), Southeast Asia/East Asia (Region 3), Australia/New
Zealand/Pacifica/Latin America (Region 4), Eastern Europe/Russia/North
Korea/India/Africa (Region 5), China (Region 6). A DVD player coded in
one region cannot play DVDs coded in another region. For example, a
Region 2 DVD player in France cannot play Region 1 discs purchased in
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the United States. The primary purpose of region coding, according to
studio statements, is to protect geographic windows.
116

This system re-segments the world according to digital codes; although there is no
necessary correspondence between these regions and the DVDs that circulate within them
in terms of cultural identity, the implementation of these codes effectively function as
barriers to distribution that get exploited for commercial gain and have cultural effects.
As Hu further points out:
Region coding enforces economic and political censorship by denying the
option to see alternative films or alternate versions with alternative
languages… region coding enforces local censorship and makes it illegal –
or at least difficult – to import unapproved versions. For foreign film fans
[in the USA or abroad], region coding makes it impossible to gain access
to films undistributed in one’s own country for economic or legal
reasons.
117

Specifically in relation to transnational film remakes, the regional coding of
DVDs, as a spatialization of media flows, further facilitates a transnational segmentation
of original and remake according to the commercial imperatives of the cultural industries.
That is to say, the regionalization of DVDs, which does not correspond to the geographic
or supposed cultural borders of the nation but rather to relatively arbitrary and massive
geographic borders, corresponds with the transnationality of the cultural industries more
generally. As the various cultural industries around the world continue to create technical
divisions among films, the construction of these “borders” helps to differentiate
“original” and “remake” in a mediascape that is otherwise less divided by temporal
divisions. Although audiences hypothetically have equal access to films from a greater
historical range, and although films flow transnationally in the form of DVDs, there are
new boundaries that facilitate their separation. Within this arena, transnational film
162
remakes take on particular significance, as they strategically exploit and surpass these
divisions and even rely upon them to some extent.
In addition to these (re-)spatializations, the commodification of cinema into home
video platforms prompted a second major historical shift, one that equally and
fundamentally alters the conditions in which transnational film remakes operate and gain
definition. Specifically, there has been the increasing possibility for audience-based
manipulation of film texts as various technologies of cinematic duplication and alteration
have become popularly available. That is, there has been a greater and increasing
dispersal of the means of media reproduction, and this has normalized all manner of
practices of media revision, cinematic remaking among them.
Beginning in a rudimentary way with the implementation and dissemination of
Betamax and VHS recorders as well as of video editing decks, people were able to take
any commercially-made film, as it was distributed on video, and reproduce and/or edit it.
The technical capability of duplication and alteration increased immensely with the
digitalization of media; in music, compact discs (CDs) and more recently MP3 files have
been important platforms; with movies, DVDs were quickly adopted as the dominant
platform. In both cases, personal computers have been paramount, as they have
increasingly taken on the functions of entertainment media devices and made the
processes of duplication and transformation much more feasible. Indeed, the personal
home computer has made the processes of “cut” and “paste” a regular component of
everyday life and a fundamental way in which computer-users engage with information.
Although there remain limitations to the duplicability of media through the computer, in a
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general way it has become much more common to be able to distribute and alter media
among general audiences. This dispersal of the means of duplication and alteration has
made every film much more remake-able, which in turn situates “official” or studio-
produced remakes all that much more arbitrary and contingent. That is, there has been an
increase in the degree of “versionality” among media texts as they are distributed and
reproduced in general circulation.
118

Among general audiences, this shift has prompted all manner of alteration of
media texts. One prominent example is the “Phantom Edit” of Star Wars Episode I: The
Phantom Menace (1999). This version of the blockbuster film was made from a VHS
copy of the film, which was edited to eliminate undesirable scenes and plot points,
particularly those that appeared infantile or which contrasted with the editor’s vision of
the Star Wars diegetic world.
119
This video was then distributed to some extent among
Star Wars fans through a network of fan community blogs and chatrooms. More recently
and pervasively, the website Youtube.com and others like it have hosted innumerable
fan-produced edits of popular media texts. Typically these are shortened clips of films,
music videos, or “trailers” for altered versions. One of the most pervasive trends among
these texts has been to recut scenes from popular films to the soundtrack of the film
Brokeback Mountain (2005) and to insinuate homosexual relationships among the
characters. For instance, one can find “Harry Potter (Brokeback Mountain)” and
“Brokeback Hogwarts,” which construe suppressed homosexual relations among
characters from the Harry Potter films (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007),
120
or “Brokeback
to the Future,” which constructs a hidden romance between male characters in the Back
164
to the Future films (1985, 1989, 1990).
121
These particular examples implicate a general
condition, of the extreme malleability of movie texts and the ability to distribute these
“remakes” widely.
This intensified versionability of media texts in the wake of digitalization has
affected “legitimate” media production as well. In particular, the advent of DVD
technologies has engendered and/or facilitated increased textual variability within
individual media products. Specifically, many DVDs include “alternate takes” and
“alternate endings” to the films that they commodify, scenes that were not shown or
included in the theatrical release of the film. Of course, this kind of versionability
occurred earlier with the release of “director’s cuts” of films in theaters and on VHS, but
this tendency to release film versions other than the theatrical version onto home video
has increased with DVD. Additionally, the versionality of DVD technologies also has
transnational cultural consequences. Specifically, through the multi-tracking capabilities
of DVD technologies, audiences are able to select alternative language tracks to be heard
and/or variable subtitles in different languages – within the limits of the offerings of the
individual DVD package, of course. Thus, for instance, Sony Pictures’ region-1 DVD
release of House of Flying Daggers (2004), which featured a multi-national cast who
spoke Mandarin in the theatrical film, can be viewed with “Chinese,” English, or French
dialogue as well as with English subtitles, French subtitles, or none at all. This example
contrasts with the Criterion Collection’s region-1 DVD release of Akira Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai (1954), which (only) features Japanese dialogue of the theatrical release
and optional English subtitles.
165
Although these examples reveal obvious discrepancies in the lingual mobility of
each disc, they reveal the general possibility for linguistic versionality embedded in DVD
technologies. That is to say, that the cultural industries have sought to address polyglot
audiences in a single cultural commodity specifically through the strategic use of the
technical capability for versionality in the DVD. Some DVD distributors have, on
occasion, specifically addressed transnational film remakes in particular in the packaging
of DVDs and in the use of “extra features.” For example, Kino Video’s 2001 DVD
release of The Blue Angel includes discs for both the English-language and German-
language versions of the film, and additionally, includes a side-by-side comparison of one
scene from both films as one of its extra features. Similarly, The Criterion Collection’s
DVD release of Pepe le Moko includes a scene-by-scene comparison of the film with its
Hollywood remake, Algiers. Perhaps most overtly, The Criterion Collection released
DVDs for a pair of transnational remakes as part of the same package, placing Jean
Renoir’s film Les Bas-fonds (1936) in the same package as Akira Kurosawa’s The Lower
Depths (1957), both of which adapt Maxim Gorky’s theatrical play. These examples
demonstrate a combination of the objectification of cinema with the textual multiplicity
embedded in DVD technology, drawing together transnational cinematic intertexts that
were previously separated by time and space, history and geography. Although these
examples are exceptional, they indicate outcomes of the contemporary commodified,
digitalized cinema. Although it is extremely likely that DVDs will disappear as the
platform of choice among media producers and consumers in next several years, the
166
overall tendency toward versionality in media products, and the use of versionality
toward the accommodation of cultural diversity, remains noteworthy.
The tendency toward versionality has altered the overall mediascape in which
remakes exist, in many ways making every film a remake of sorts and implicating how
relatively strict is the form of repetition and alteration that we continue to designate “film
remakes.” This contemporary tension between official or legitimate cinematic remaking
and illegitimate forms of media repetition get articulated in two prominent, interrelated
ways: in the attempt to regulate digital media through copyright within the USA and the
attempt to globalize copyright more generally. With the passage of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the US government sought to revise existing
copyright laws in response to the facility with which informational goods could be copied
and distributed in a digital environment. Perhaps more vitally, this Act worked in
response to decisions made by the World Intellectual Property Alliance (WIPO), which
aims to, among other things, harmonize copyright laws globally. This push toward global
copyright regulation and enforcement, especially in the face of the digitalization of
media, demonstrates the increasing importance of media in the global economy and the
new levels of interconnection made possible by new digital technologies.
In this arena, where media can be duplicated, altered, and distributed with great
facility, near instantaneity, and across a vast transnational space, the transnational film
remake becomes a highly schematized and relatively conservative, even anachronistic,
cinematic intertextual and transcultural form. Yet, just as the cinema remains an
important component within the overall operations of the transnational cultural industries,
167
so does the film remake comprise an important mode of industrial intertextuality. In light
of the institutional history presented here, the transnational film remake in particular
reveals noteworthy intertextual and industrial imperatives within a transnational arena.
Indeed, as this history reveals how the transnational film remake became defined through
a number of moments of industrial crisis and competition, particularly among players in a
transnational arena, it becomes clear how and why this category of films now articulates
transnational rivalries and exchanges in very particular ways. Following the very
emergence of cinema, when duping, remaking, and piracy were conflated, the
transnational film remake became a “legitimate” form of transnational cinematic
intertextuality, and a specifically re-staged narrative form in particular. With the advent
and implementation of sync-sound and dialogue film, transnational film remakes were
produced consistently as multi-language versions, which sought to bring Fordist
production practices to bear upon the cultural and linguistic diversity of global film
audiences. As this system came to a close, the time lag between “original” and “remake”
was forcefully reasserted, in conjunction with the geo-cultural disjunctures of producing
films in different parts of the world for different cultural and linguistic communities. In
the present moment, where cinema has been substantially remade among other
technologies, indeed where these technologies regularize the remaking of cinematic texts
as part of the new status quo of circulation and reception, the transnational film remake
appears as a very specific and ossified form of cultural accommodation in the cinema.
Although the transnational film remake appears to accommodate diverse cultures across
168
divergent spaces, in fact the practice of producing (and reproducing) transnational film
remakes has its own historical and cultural particularity.

169
CHAPTER 4 NOTES

1
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Second Edition, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 5.

2
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “On A Thousand Plateaus,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin,
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1990), 23.

3
Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2.

4
Verevis, 29.

5
Verevis, 96-100.

6
Verevis, 131-135.

7
Verevis, 144-147.

8
Verevis, 98.

9
Verevis, 133-134.

10
Verevis, 135-137.

11
Verevis, 158-170.

12
Verevis, 96.

13
Verevis, 96.

14
Verevis, 96-100.

15
André Gaudreault, “The Infringement of Copy-Right Laws and its Effects, (1900-1906),” Framework 29,
(1985): 3.

16
Gaudreault, 14.

17
Gaudreault, 4.

18
Jennifer Forrest, “The ‘Personal’ Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema,” in
Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002), 92, 115 n8.

19
Forrest, 90, 92. Forrest notes, importantly, that “no company pursued a rival company’s dupe or remake
for copyright infringement until 1903.” Forrest, 99.

20
This film can be found on the “Landmarks of Early Film” laserdisc distributed by Image Entertainment.

21
This film can be found on the video “The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, Vol. 2”
distributed by Kino Video.

170

22
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 364-366; Forrest, 92.

23
Forrest, 92; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 331, 364-365.

24
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 364. This is also noted by Verevis, who draws from Musser and
Gaudreault. Verevis, 98; Gaudreault, 5.

25
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 365.

26
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 364-365.

27
Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Revised and Updated,
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 23.

28
Charles Musser writes that “of the thirty-four pictures listed in Edison's January 1904 catalog, nineteen
were dupes. In the September 1904 catalog thirty-six of fifty-two were dupes. Many of these were
dramatic headliners and many also were made by Pathé Frères of Paris.” Charles Musser, Before the
Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), 277.

29
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 96.

30
The following description appears at the very end of an anonymously written review the play “Jim the
Penman” at the Burbank Theater in Los Angeles from 1897: “The cenisgraphoscope was an added feature,
several new scenes being introduced. The Black Diamond express train running seventy miles an hour was
so realistic last evening that several persons vacated their seats in fear of being crushed beneath the
wheels.” Anonymous review, “At the Playhouses,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Feb. 1897: 6.

31
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 3-4.

32
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early
Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, (London: BFI Publishing,
1990), 56-62.

33
Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914, Updated and Expanded Edition,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 193-195; Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of
American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1991), 195-204.

34
Abel, 194.

35
Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 204.

36
Gaudreault, 12.

37
Abel, 110; Forrest, 107. Buster Keaton “remade” these films yet again in 1925 as Seven Chances, which
depicts the protagonist chased through the streets by a mob of would-be brides. Seven Chances was
remade in turn as The Bachelor in 1999, which also features the protagonist chased by hundreds of
potential brides.

38
Forrest, 108-110.
171

39
Forrest, 110.

40
Forrest, 112.

41
Forrest, 108-110.

42
Abel, 44.

43
Forrest, 93.

44
Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34, (London: BFI
Press, 1985), 148.

45
Thompson, 148.

46
Martine Danan, “Hollywood’s Hegemonic Strategies: Overcoming French Nationalism with the Advent
of Sound,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-
1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 231.

47
Danan, 230.

48
Danan, 229.

49
Ginette Vincendeau, “Hollywood Babel – The Multiple Language Version,” Screen 29, no. 2 (Spring
1988): 24-39.

50
Nataša Ďurovičová, “Translating America: The Hollywood Multilinguals 1929-1933,” in Sound Theory /
Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

51
Ďurovičová, 139.

52
Vincendeau, 24.

53
Vincendeau, 25-26.

54
Andrew Higson, “Polyglot Films for an International Market: E.A. Dupont, the British Film Industry,
and the Idea of a European Cinema 1926-1930,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”, 284.

55
Alfonso Pinto, “Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Films: A Neglected Chapter of the American Cinema,
1930-1935,” Films in Review 24, no. 8 (October 1973): 474-483.

56
Alfonso Pinto, “Hollywood’s French Language Films: A Neglected Chapter of the American Cinema
1930-1935,” Films in Review 29, no. 1 (January 1978): 29-35.

57
Both Andrew and Vincendeau focus almost exclusively on the Joinville productions.

58
Pinto, “Hollywood’s French Language Films,” 35.

59
Pinto, “Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Films,” 474.

60
Pinto, “Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Films,” 474.
172

61
Pinto, “Hollywood’s French Language Films,” 31-35.

62
Ďurovičová, 143.

63
Pinto, “Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Films,” 474.

64
Vincendeau, 29.

65
Vincendeau, 25.

66
Ďurovičová, 143.

67
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Those Who Dance,” 18 Dec. 1929. Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

68
Production script, Those Who Dance special German-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

69
Production script, Those Who Dance special French-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

70
Production script, Those Who Dance, special Spanish-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

71
“Daily Production and Progress Report: Roar of the Crowd,” 31 Dec. 1931. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

72
“Daily Production and Progress Report: Roar of the Crowd,” 31 Dec. 1931. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

73
Interestingly, Dudley Andrew’s analysis of the MLVs in relation to film sound in France points toward
the creation of the national cinema there. He asserts, “Paramount’s presence in France at this time [during
the late 1920s and early 1930s] was the single most important force in the industry,” as “many young
directors, soon to become crucial to France, received excellent training in this hectic system” and older
polyglot directors found work there as well. Dudley Andrew, “Sound in France: The Origins of a Native
School,” Yale French Studies (1980): 101. That is to say, the breakup of the cosmopolitan production
space of Joinville facilitated the creation of the national industry; this works in conjunction with the
production of transnational remakes as the child of MLVs.

74
As will be described again, the rights for the film The Bad Man were sold by Warner Bros. to MGM in
1940. Amidst the paperwork for this sale held in the Warner Bros. Archive, there is an undated document
listing all the foreign territories in which the various versions of this film played. The information
presented above comes from this document. Presumably, MGM required this information so they would
not send their remake into these same markets if these markets were still screening the “original” film.
Also, although the document is undated, it can be assumed to have been produced in 1940, as all Warner
Bros. inter-office communications regarding the sale as well as the contract for the sale itself were all dated
1940.

75
Production script for Spanish-language version of Call of the Flesh, a.k.a. Singer of Seville, 6 Aug. 1930.
Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

173

76
Production script, Those Who Dance special French-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

77
Production script, Those Who Dance special German-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

78
Production script, Those Who Dance, special Spanish-language version. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

79
Ďurovičová, 144.

80
Danan 234; Ďurovičová, 144-147.

81
Joseph Garncarz, “Made in Germany: Multiple-Language Versions and the Early German Sound
Cinema,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”, 262-266.

82
Letter from Warner Bros. Pictures to Heinrich Fraenkel, 15 May 1930. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

83
Contract between Warner Bros. Pictures and Guillermo Yeme, 13 Aug. 1930. Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

84
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Sacred Flame (Spanish Version),” 17 Sept. 1930. Held in the Warner
Bros. Archive.

85
“Budget Report: The Lady Who Dared (Spanish Version).” Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

86
For instance, in the English-language version, John Harker remarks to Lucy of the “millions of stars in
the sky” while they talk on a patio, whereas Lucia remarks upon the “millones y millones” of stars to Juan
Harker in the Spanish-language version.

87
For example, Drácula shows the vampire enter Lucia’s room for the last time to finally make her a full
vampire, whereas Dracula omits this scene and just shows the results, picking up with Lucy as a vampire.

88
Actress Lupita Tovar Kohner, who plays Lucia, states this in her interview included on the Universal
Legacy Series, 75
th
Anniversary Edition DVD of Dracula.

89
Vincendeau, 29.

90
Ďurovičová, 144-146.

91
Danan, 228. Notably, Heinrich Fraenkel was hired to translate six “short subjects” into German shortly
before he was hired to write the German-Language version of Thos Who Dance. Some of the titles of these
shorts were: Always Faithful (1929), Letters (1930), Good Time Charley, The Maid’s Night Out, and The
Pay Off. Letter from Warner Bros. Pictures to Heinrich Fraenkel, 15 May 1930. I am not aware of whether
these films were shown among German-speaking communities in the USA or not.

92
One important exception to this is an edit that was most likely made for reasons of censorship. During
one of the song and dance numbers, when she sings about wanting a “real man,” in the German-language
version, Dietrich wears a voluminous skirt. As she sings a particularly suggestive line, she dances in a
small circle and reveals her underpants, as the skirt has no covering in the back. In the English-language
174

version, the film cuts to a reaction shot of an audience member for the duration that her underwear would
have been revealed, completely omitting this image.

93
Vincendeau, 30.

94
Danan, 237; Garncarz, 267; Vincendeau, 30-32.

95
"Supplementary Statement to Comparison of Negative Costs and Gross Income on Productions Released
from Sept. 4, 1931 to August 26, 1939: Foreign Versions – Made in U.S.A. (re-shots),” Warner Bros.
Pictures, Inc., typed May 28, 1943, 14. Part of the William Schaefer Collection at the Warner Bros.
Archive at the University of Southern California.

96
"Supplementary Statement to Comparison of Negative Costs and Gross Income on Productions Released
from Sept. 4, 1931 to August 26, 1939: Foreign Versions – Made in U.S.A. (re-shots),” 14.

97
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: The Bad Man (Spanish Version).” Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

98
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: The Bad Man.” Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

99
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Those Who Dance,” 18 Dec. 1929. Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

100
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Those Who Dance (French Version),” 18 Aug. 1930. Held in the
Warner Bros. Archive.

101
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Those Who Dance (Spanish Version),” 19 Aug. 1930. Held in the
Warner Bros. Archive.

102
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: The Devils Playground.” Held in the Warner Bros. Archive. Note:
The Devil’s Playground was the production title for The Lady Who Dared.

103
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: The Devils Playground (Spanish Version).” Held in the Warner Bros.
Archive.

104
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: Sacred Flame (Spanish Version),” 17 Sept. 1930. Held in the Warner
Bros. Archive.

105
“Estimated Negative Cost Report: The Aviator (French Version),” 31 Oct. 1930. Held in the Warner
Bros. Archive.

106
Thompson, 163.

107
Ďurovičová, 149.

108
Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey, “‘Temporary American Citizens’: Cultural Anxieties and Industrial
Strategies in the Americanisation of European Cinema,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”, 47.

109
Vincendeau, 32; Garncarz, 266-267.

110
Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 19.

111
Garncarz, 267.

175

112
As indicated by a Warner Bros. inter-office communication letter from J.J. Glynn to Stuart Aarons. 3
Sept. 1940. Held in the Warner Bros. Archive.

113
Letter from Morris Ebenstein to T.J. Martin, 11 Nov. 1940; Warner Bros. inter-office communication;
“Agreement between Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. and Loew’s Incorporated,” 7 Nov. 1940. Held in the
Warner Bros. Archive.

114
“Story Digest” report for Local Boy Makes Good, 16 Nov. 1936. This document lists the chain of title
for the film.

115
Vincendeau, 27.

116
Brian Hu, “Closed Borders and Open Secrets: Regional Lockout, the Film Industry, and Code-Free
DVD Players,” Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 2, (2006).
http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/archive/volume01/number02/reviews/hu.htm

117
Hu.

118
For a definition of “versionality,” see my essay, “Horrors Derived: The Thing as Adaptation, Remake,
and Version.” Cinemascope: Independent Film Journal 2 (May-August 2005). www.cinemascope.it.

119
Andrew Rodgers, “’Phantom Edit’ Deletes Jar-Jar Binks,” Zap2it, 4 June 2001,
http://zaptoit.com/movies/news/story/0,1259,---6903,00.html; Daniel Kraus, “The Phantom Edit,”
Salon.com, 5 Nov. 2001, http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/11/05/phantom_edit/index.html.

120
Youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCw6rkuZUk.

121
Youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY.
176
CHAPTER 5 – TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKES AS A HISTORICAL
DISCURSIVE CATEGORY
Just as the institutional history of transnational film remakes demonstrates their
heterogeneity, their alterity derived from technical multiplicities and conceptual
conflations, so too has the very term “remake” been subject to splittings and duplicities.
The Oxford English Dictionary signals that the term “remake” functions as both a verb
and as a noun. In the first instance, which is historically older than the second, the
remake is further split. On the one hand, to remake is “to make over again, reconstruct.”
Thus to remake is to reproduce with likeness and similarity as the aim. On the other
hand, to remake is also “to make again into something” (emphasis in the original). Thus
to remake is also to transform. As a process, remaking is linguistically torm between
repetition and transformation. The OED also defines remake as a noun, as “a remaking
of a film or of a script, usually with the rôles played by different actors; an adaptation of
the theme of a film.”
1
Thus the duplicitous action of remaking gets assigned to a certain
category of films, gets objectified in their form. And indeed, these films come to embody
the tension between repetition and transformation even in the examples cited by the OED,
which quotes Variety from 1936 as stating, “James Melton assigned the lead in Warners'
remake of ‘Desert Song’,” and then quotes Time magazine from 1940 as saying “the
result is not just another remake, for Director Hawks's weird idea was also to remake the
sex of his leading character.” These examples reveal early attempts at codifying a set of
films according to this particular term, and how in the process certain technical,
conceptual, and even ideological tensions became embedded in the category.
177
Such tensions have been exacerbated and compounded in the case of transnational
film remakes, which in film reviews and other popular print discourses in the United
States have been consistently maligned along a number of different axes. Indeed, the title
of a review of a transnational remake appearing in the Los Angeles Times in 2001 began:
“Open to Interpretation: Hollywood Versions of Foreign Films Rarely Live Up to the
Originals.”
2
Upon first consideration, this appears to address a contemporary
phenomenon and appears to do so according to contemporary standards; notice the use of
the more impartial term “version” sitting alongside the word “original,” or the
recognition of the interpretive capabilities of discerning audiences. This headline also
features certain typical judgments, such as the clear association of the writer (and reader)
with Hollywood, which is clearly contrasted with “foreign” films.
Yet compare this headline, and the many like it that recur consistently in
contemporary popular film criticism in the US, with the following headline from the Los
Angeles Times from 1936: “Many Films from Europe Remade Here: Hollywood Versions
Usually Inferior, Declare Critics.”
3
Although this headline somewhat defers its own
judgment to that of anonymous “critics,” it reads strikingly similar to the one written 65
years later. It implicitly refers to a cycle of transnational remakes of which audiences and
readers would be aware. It refers to Hollywood as the “local” or indigenous cinema.
And it indicates, in a general way, a valorization of European or “foreign” cinema at
Hollywood’s expense and likewise denigrates Hollywood in opposition to “foreign”
cinema. Indeed, both headlines dismiss or malign transnational film remakes in general
because Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films are so suspect and poor.
178
Although this comparison could lead one to think that nothing has changed in
popular discussions of transnational remakes, it is more true that the criteria for
evaluation seen in the 2001 example are already in place in the 1936 example. This is
historically important, especially for those audiences, readers, critics, and scholars who
assume that transnational film remakes are a contemporary phenomenon and even more
vitally for those who would dismiss or malign such films anew. But even this historical
point threatens to obscure the genuine changes that did occur in discussions of film
remakes within the US over the course of the twentieth century, a historical trajectory
that reveals complex issues and important ideological shifts. This chapter examines these
historical periods and the criteria of evaluation of transnational film remakes. Although
many of these issues are historically durable, some are quite novel and fleeting. By
observing the dominant criteria by which remakes have been understood, we are able to
discern four relatively distinct historical phases.
1. Emergent Period
2. Industrial Period
3. Neo-Romantic Modernist Period
4. Culturalist Period
These periods more or less coincide with the four periods demarcated by the historical
industrial conditions wherein the transnational film remake gained resolution. Although
it is tempting to assert a correlation between the industrial and discursive periodizations
of the transnational film remake, asserting a directly causal would be misguided. Rather,
the historical coincidence of the institutional contexts of transnational remakes and the
179
dominant critical criteria by which they have been defined more likely speaks to general
social and cultural changes that impacted how cinema has been made and conceived. It
is just as likely that the changing conceptions of what film “ought to do” impacted the
technological and industrial conditions of the cinema as much as industrial conditions
altered evaluative criteria for the cinema in general and remakes in particular.
In broad historical strokes, this discursive history reveals an ongoing tension
between Romantic and Post-Romantic conceptions of film as art, particularly as the film
remake raises general issues about originality as well as of textual repetition and
transformation. In his analysis of film genres, Leo Braudy states, “the modern prejudice
against genre in art can be traced to the aesthetic theories of the Romantic period,”
4

which generally privilege uniqueness, originality, poetic inspiration, and artistic
expression. As will be shown below, film remakes have encountered similar prejudices.
Alternatively, Umberto Eco has proposed that the contemporary period is defined by its
opposition to artistic novelty typical of Romanticism. Instead, our moment is one, he
asserts, “when iteration and repetition seem to dominate the whole world of artistic
creativity, and in which it is difficult to distinguish between repetition of the media and
the repetition of the so-called major arts.”
5
He posits that ours is a world defined by
repetition and only the most minute variation.
6
Thus when Braudy asserts, “absolute
creativity in finally a fraud because all art must exist in some relation to the forms of the
past, whether in contrast or continuation,”
7
he identifies precisely the tension between
repetition and transformation that the film remake necessarily embodies. On the one
hand, the remake has encountered the residual effects of Romantic aesthetic theories. On
180
the other hand, the plethora of criteria by which transnational remakes have been
evaluated also speaks to tensions within these Romantic conceptions, and indeed reveals
the emergence of Post-Romantic conceptions of film.
I am not asserting that the discourses around transnational film remakes
coherently demonstrate a historical shift from Romantic to Post-Romantic paradigms.
Instead, this history reveals, among other things, the competition between these residual
and emergent structures of feeling, which in a broad way does show a waning of the
Romantic sensibility toward art. Thus, the following analysis will survey the diversity of
particular ideas within each period in addition to the overall general trends, as a way of
pointing out both the historical sweep of the discourse but also the range of possibilities
available in a given moment. This history of a category, or more accurately the history of
ideas about a cinematic category, reveals numerous repetitions, transformations,
overlaps, and ruptures. The aim is to show how transnational film remakes have been
made and remade in various moments and how the current moment relates to this history.

EMERGENT PERIOD
Just as there was little practical difference between duping and remaking during
cinema’s emergence, so too was there a discursive ambivalence between the two
practices. In her account of the emergence of the film remake, Jennifer Forrest describes
how cinema trade magazines conflated remakes and dupes in 1907 and denigrated both
forms of “imitation” as “theft.”
8
In these professional discourses, remakes were
disparagingly associated with stealing, despite the fact that both remakes and dupes were
181
common practice by many film production companies. In fact, as the term “remake”
does not occur as a noun in trade discourses until later, in these early discourses the
remake is referred to as a “‘pirated’ film.”
9
This popular discourse thus follows and
compounds the practical allegiance between piracy and remaking.
Of course, the early discourse about cinema was disparate and fragmentary, and
popular discussions of film remakes in US print sources reflect this. Indeed, there is very
little discussion of film remakes as a particular cinematic form for quite some time. For
example, the Lubin Company’s remake (1904) of Edison/Porter’s The Great Train
Robbery (1903) did not gain attention as a remake, as indicated by a review of the film in
the Philadelphia Inquirer, which made no mention of the previous film.
10
However,
what is important is that when they were discussed, remakes were characterized
negatively. Moreover, as the early discursive conflation of duping and remaking aligned
remaking with mechanical reproduction, this negative tone was associated with the
mechanics of cinema. Remaking was characterized largely as an easy, automatic process
of cinematic reproduction, in opposition to any innovation or creative transformation.
Indeed, from its very early emergence, remaking was characterized as a decidedly
uncreative process of repetition, a pseudo-mechanical process of theft.

INDUSTRIAL PERIOD
As the Hollywood system of production came into place and the film remake
became a standardized cinematic form, popular discourses also stabilized their
characterizations of film remakes. This stabilization can be seen particularly as
182
newspapers shifted toward using the term “remake” as a noun rather than merely as a
verb. This transition coincided with the first real explosion of discussions of remakes,
when the Hollywood studios attempted to systematically and prolifically remake silent
pictures as sync-sound movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thus a story in the Los
Angeles Times from 1929 stated: “Remaking of pictures as talkies is the great indoor
sport of the studios these days. Now it is ‘Laska,’ based on Frank Desprez’s noted poem
of the same name, which is to be remade in this same way by Universal.”
11
Likewise, a
1930 story read: “Either Warner Brothers of First National will remake ‘The Patent
Leather Kid,’ this time as a talker.”
12
Yet a story in the Washington Post from 1930
reveals the remake’s transition from noun to verb, from process to object, stating, “the
pleasant memories the public retains of the greater stars’ silent pictures is one reason so
few are being remade…Although a new, up-to-date remake would outclass in almost
every way its subtitled predecessor, there is respected tradition to be considered.”
13
This
story reveals the double use of “remake,” which eventually led to the stabilized
objectification of the category in the 1930s. As the studios became coherent and a
common ground for public understanding of cinematic production, the remake was also
made coherent.
Yet these stories also indicate important points of consideration that are
historically specific and which further characterize this industrial phase. In addition to
the passing reference to the studios, which demonstrates their status as de facto cinema
producers, there is reference to the non-cinematic sources of remakes (and films in
general), reference to stars as important cinematic figures, reference to the rapidly
183
changing styles of film in the face of changing social attitudes, and finally reference to
tradition and respect. In more conceptual terms, these stories draw upon discourses of
adaptation, the star system, film style, and historical change. Together, these categories
pervade discussions of film remakes within the industrial period. Each in its own way
helps to sustain a general conception of Hollywood studio filmmaking practice and of
cinematic remaking in particular, no matter whether a remake was neutrally or negatively
characterized.
In general, the attempt to remake silent pictures as sync-sound pictures was a
critical failure, one story stating, “remakes of ancient pictures, reproduced as talkers, in
short, are found unpopular,”
14
and this appears to have caused a larger debate about the
merits and flaws of film remakes. Indeed, one story in the Los Angeles Times from 1932
sought to survey the apparent cycle of remakes and evaluate their importance, with the
headline: “Tradition Trampled Upon as Films Revive Classics.”
15
There the author
characterizes film remakes as a challenge to tradition itself, and he singles out actors and
actresses, that is, stars, as the primary culprits. Stars appear as the human agents in the
Hollywood studio system, which draws voraciously upon established works and thereby
disrespects history.
This consciousness of historical change was also regularly articulated during the
1930s in relation to changing film styles and technologies, following the precedent set by
the cycle of remakes prompted by the transition to sound and the discussion of this cycle.
For instance, one story that discussed the end of the cycle of sound remakes of silent
films stated: “The styles in storytelling change, say First National officials.”
16
Another
184
noted with some interest that RKO planned to remake Seven Keys (…to Baldplate, 1929),
which the paper claimed had the “distinction of being the first talking picture to be
remake”
17
and another stressed the Hollywood studios’ responses to changing production
conditions when it stated: “Warners, who have become acutely conscious of the great
outdoors, are to remake ‘Burning Daylight,’ by Jack London. Shooting will start in the
Spring when color cameras can invade the Northwest…Paramount made the first version
of the London Yarn in 1914, Metro followed in 1920 and First National, which has since
been absorbed by Warners, made it in 1928.”
18

These stories were part of a greater awareness of film remakes during the period,
which were generally treated as a questionable product of an un-creative studio
production system. One story from 1937 asked: “Are re-makes of old films successful?
This is today’s most bitterly disputed question…To date, it’s a draw.”
19
Another stated:
“Noel Cowards ‘Private Lives’ is to join the industry’s parade of remakes.”
20
Treated
ambivalently at best, the film remake in general was positioned as an industrial product
of the studios. Notably, one survey written in 1941 that sought to address possible causes
of the tendency for remaking, including issues of changing censorship and increased
production costs, addressed international industrial and cultural concerns. It stated:
One of the more familiar wisecracks regularly tossed off at Hollywood’s
expense is that movies are not made, they’re remade…Today, with the
motion picture business admittedly upset because of the loss of foreign
markets and the uncertainty of domestic patronage, the temptation to
remake is probably greater than ever before.
21

Here, remakes are not just a product of industrial insecurity, but further they are the
results of an insecurity about a transnational cultural arena.
185
And indeed, the questions and issues about film remakes in general also pervaded
popular discourses about transnational film remakes at the time, and yet transnational
remakes also garnered points of discussion all their own. In some cases, transnational
remakes were mentioned in passing or even benevolently, such as in one story that
reported: “The Metropolitan’s incoming ‘The Lady in Question’ is a West Coast remake
of that charming Raimu film, ‘Heart of Paris,” [Gribouille, 1937]…If it’s anything like
the original, it will be worth seeing.”
22
Other times, they were treated as questionable
industrial and cultural products. One story reads:
Remakes of European successes are proving attractive to Hollywood. Not
only do the studios buy the stories, they acquire the ideas and talents of the
best continental craftsmen and are privileged to use them in the local
product. In addition, comedies ever provide insecure footing, for the most
hilarious original ideas frequently go sour on the screen. When the
foreign films are copied, they provide little risk. It is only when
Hollywood seeks to ‘improve’ them that the trouble starts.
23

This story reveals a number of important issues and evaluative criteria: Hollywood is
once again positioned as the local, American cultural industry with whom readers are to
identify; there are distinct cultural differences between the filmmaking industries of
different parts of the world, as can be seen in particular generic trappings and textual
details; film remakes in general are torn between repeating earlier films and transforming
them; finally, that Hollywood, although American, is generally not to be trusted to be
creative or thoughtful enough to transform foreign films. In this respect Hollywood
becomes denigrated in the face of the creative ingenuity of European film producers.
These negative sentiments occur also in the previously mentioned story, “Many
Films from Europe Remade Here, Hollywood Versions Usually Inferior…” from the Los
186
Angeles Times. There, the loss of creativity or ingenuity is seen as ephemeral, as the
story states: “Consensus is that nine times out of ten, the adapted version is inferior.
Something – charm, lightness, power, what not – is generally lost in transit.”
24
And in
another piece in the New York Times from 1937, which has the aim of criticizing remakes
in general, takes particular aim at transnational remakes.
25
This article even states:
“Forsaking Hollywood temporarily for a quick hop across the ocean, we find that
European directors have been no less industrious in remaking old films.”
26
The article
goes on to cite the French film Le Golem (1936) as an intra-European example and
mentions that a French production of Crime and Punishment (1935) appeared in US
theaters at the same time as the 1935 Hollywood version, directed by Joseph von
Sternberg.
27
In this case, the generally negative attitude toward film remakes inflects the
discussion about any transnational adaptations, re-adaptations, or remakes. As all
imitation is suspect, this cultural exchange is likewise denigrated.
The reviews of individual transnational film remakes from this period also
demonstrate a complex intersection of ideas, and in the overwhelming number of cases
these reviews sustain a conception of the remake as a product of the studio system. Most
coherently, they do so by focusing upon the stars of the films, drawing upon a conception
of the studio-based star system of the time and by deflecting the issue of cinematic
remaking. For instance, many of the reviews of Mad Love (1935) discussed the film’s
literary source rather than detail its previous filmic counterpart, the German film The
Hands of Orlac (1924).
28
Neither Motion Picture Daily of the Hollywood Reporter made
any mention of a previous source for the film, rather they discuss the importance of Peter
187
Lorre’s first role in an “American” film.
29
Variety discussed the film’s lack of
originality, mentioning the novel in particular and eventually noting the previous film as
well.
30
In all of these cases, it appears as though the positive reviews coincided with the
general lack of acknowledgement of the film’s previous filmic incarnation. Notably,
these articles maintain explicit interest in discussing “transnational exchange,” but only
of the actor Lorre.
Likewise, the reviews of First a Girl (1935), a remake of the German musical
Viktor und Viktoria (1933), were primarily about the film’s female lead, Jessie
Matthews.
31
Even when the original film had been reviewed in US publications, it gained
positive acknowledgement mainly due to the quality of actress Renate Müller.
32
These
reviews of First a Girl consistently mentioned that it was a “British film,” and thereby
conflated issues of the star system with cultural exchange. Similarly to the case of Mad
Love, the film star became the locus of a discussion about transnational cultural
exchange.
This same conceptual program guided the reception of the Swedish film
Intermezzo (1936) and its Hollywood remake (1939), specifically in relation to the star of
both films, Ingrid Bergman. One story said of the Swedish production, “Director Gustaf
Molander added nothing to the story…But Goesta Ekman and Ingrid Bergman put so
much sincerity into their acting and enjoy such excellent support that even persons
depending on the English titles are likely to be impressed.”
33
This review reveals the
emergence of a nascent auteurist discourse, but more importantly, it positions the star as a
cultural bridge. Numerous stories about this film focused solely on Ingrid Bergman, and
188
all positioned her as a newly discovered star soon to come to Hollywood,
34
and indeed, it
was newsworthy when she was signed to appear in the Hollywood remake.
35
One review
of the remake referred to Bergman as “imported especially from Scandinavia for this
production, previously made as a foreign subject against that background.”
36
This
sentiment is typical of the film’s reviews, which consistently cited Bergman as the main –
foreign and now imported – attraction. The reviews gloss over entirely, however, the
film’s status as a remake.
Thus, throughout this “industrial period,” the transnational film remake was
mainly characterized ambivalently. Remakes were also negatively discussed, for a
number of reasons. Hollywood was seen as increasingly creatively bankrupt and the
remake was a symptom of this problem. When discussed at all, the transnational film
remake was typically caught in this rhetoric. Viewed with slightly more nuance, these
reviews all demonstrate a construction of Hollywood as a studio-based industrial affair;
within this system, the individual performer or star was the active human agent, and in
the case of transnational film remakes, this meant they were agents of cultural exchange
through their mobility. Issues of cultural difference were generally viewed as
insurmountable, and the remake demonstrated this.
Perhaps the clearest example from this period is that of Pepe le Moko (1937) and
Algiers (1938). Whereas Pepe le Moko was seen as distinctly “French” and un-
American, for example with its depictions of crime and mistresses,
37
the Hollywood
remake was a lavish and picturesque rendering of an exotic locale and people.
38
And if
the reception of this remake effaced its cultural relation to its source, then the eventual
189
popularity of Algiers and pressing real-world politics prompted the return of the repressed
original in US theaters. After being held from US theaters for censorship issues, Pepe le
Moko eventually premiered in New York City in 1941, and the funds from this run were
used to aid in the war effort in Europe.
39
Here, genuine conflict prompted a cultural
response, an opening. In turn, this generated a wave of consciousness and discussion
about transnational film remakes as a mode of exchange.
40
Whereas once the differences
between the United States and France had barred cultural exchange, the new ideological
imperatives of WWII made these differences benign and productive.

NEO-ROMANTIC MODERNIST PERIOD
Following this “industrial period” in the discourse of transnational film remakes
came a period that was dominated by a neo-Romantic, anti-commercial discourse. This
was most regularly and overtly manifested in auteurist discourses, which revealed a
number of new problematics in relation to film remakes and contradictions in their
evaluation. Indeed, the neo-Romantic belief in the auteur as a heroic, visionary, and
idiosyncratic artist prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s, and exerting “residual”
influence through at least the 1980s, would appear to conflict with the apparent lack of
“originality” in remakes. Yet in cases when the director of the remake was already an
auteur of some stature, this reversed the remake binary and made critics deride the
“original” film.
190
The impetus for this shift was transnational in its own right, beginning in France
with the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma. Indeed, in his universally acknowledged and
influential essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” Francois Truffaut attacked
not only the tendency for literary adaptation among the French “Tradition of Quality,”
but also disparaged contemporaneous French cinema for its imitation – its remaking – of
Hollywood in general. In one early and vital moment in the essay, Truffaut criticizes
Pepe le Moko for being too strongly influenced by Scarface (1931) as a pointed example
of how French cinema has plagiarized American cinema.
41
Here, the American remake
Algiers takes a back seat within Truffaut’s overall effort to denigrate the psychological
realism of the “Tradition of Quality” and to call for “auteurs” who write as well as direct
their films, thereby inscribing an authentic artistic vision within them.
As Jennifer Forrest and Leonard Koos detail, André Bazin took even more direct
aim at film remakes in Cahiers du Cinéma, lamenting particularly American remakes of
French films.
42
In his essay from 1952, “Remade in USA,” Bazin criticizes American
remakes of French films for being greedy, ruthless, and indicative of an uncreative
corporate mentality.
43
Related to this, Bazin examines the historical and cultural fixity of
film and the resultant need for revision and updating in “A propos des reprises.”
44
Bazin
notes that the impulse to revise and to remake derives in large part from the technological
basis of cinema; remakes appeal to contemporary audiences by re-presenting films with
contemporary technologies. But, as Forrest and Koos note, there is a contradiction
between Bazin’s romantic vision of the artist and the art object and the technological and
economic realities of film production in the 1950s.
45
Because of his valorization of the
191
visionary and expressive artist, the remake gets positioned as a poor substitute for
visionary artistry. Similarly, any duplication of a genuine artwork somehow impedes
upon the sanctity of the original. Thus, in the 1950s with Truffaut and Bazin, one finds
an intellectual discourse about remakes that raised issues of transnational cultural
exchange (with implicit hierarchical binaries), the relationship between technology and
cultural timeliness, and the valorization of the visionary artist and the sanctity of the art
object.
These sentiments inflected American film reviews of transnational film remakes
of the time as well. In the case of Scarlet Street (1945), Fritz Lang’s remake of Jean
Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), for instance, the issue of artistic merit created quite a
controversy, as the film was subject to a sensational censorship battle.
46
US reviewers of
La Chienne had characterized it as a scandalous film and yet also situated it as typically
European in its “sophistication” and treatment of sexuality.
47
The remake’s subsequent
“sophistication” created ideological conflicts, as Scarlet Street was seen as promoting
immoral sexuality and crime. Notably, most articles about Scarlet Street cited or
emphasized the film’s source as being the French theatrical play La Chienne rather than
Renoir’s earlier film, perhaps in an effort to lend artistic legitimacy to the remake.
48

But if Fritz Lang’s directorial prowess was not lauded in the reviews of Scarlet
Street, his name mentioned only in passing amidst the discussion of the film’s scandalous
content, then his status as an auteur was central to discussions of the Hollywood remake
of M, originally made in 1931 and remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey. Indeed, both Lang
and Losey were treated as admirable creative talents. One review stated:
192
Since producers generally and sometimes justifiably have an antipathy
toward “remakes,” Seymour Nebenzal should be accorded a kudo or two
at the outset for turning again to “M,” that study in crime and abnormal
psychology which director Fritz Lang first fashioned in Germany back in
1932. For Mr. Nebenzal, Joseph Losey, the director, and their cast and
scenarists again have done justice to a forbidding theme.
49

Here, the producer is positioned as the industrial agent who may or may not impede upon
the creative expression of a director, whereas the director in each case is the creative
agent behind the “theme” of the film. This dichotomy, in fact, conforms fully to auteurist
notions that individual creative directors worked in contrast with the industrial
imperatives of Hollywood. Another review of the remake went so far as to mention that
it was not directed by Lang, that is, it brought him up as a noteworthy absence from the
film. But it did state that Losey and the remake’s writers, “have devised individual
scenes and effects with the camera and sound that are enormously graphic,” thereby
implicating Losey’s creative vision upon the film.
50
Yet this review also lamented:
As a remake this shocker suffers its severest dislocation by having its
setting, its milieu, uprooted from the decadent German city of the original
and planted in an American one…For the story, complete with gimmick,
while provocative and stirring, is somehow not indigenous to this time and
place, or at least not yet…The “moral climate” is different.
51

Despite the creative vision of the director, and despite the synthesis of the
producer’s commercial interest with the director’s artistic vision, the film gets caught up
in and is ultimately maligned for cultural dissonance. In this respect, this case reveals
how mid-century auteurist discourses did not and perhaps could not overcome the strict
cultural binaries at work in the discourse of transnational film remakes. One might say
that the auteur of transnational remakes was caught up in this division. This contrasts
with the assimilationist way in which film stars had been discussed in the earlier era of
193
transnational remakes. That is to say, during the “industrial period,” film stars were seen
as benignly “imported” alongside the importation and remaking of European films at the
time. In this period, when the auteur becomes the locus of critical evaluation of
transnational remakes, these figures stood in relation to the overall discrepancy between
American culture, as produced by Hollywood, and the “foreign” culture of foreign films.
Lucy Mazdon has noted that, for a variety of reasons, there was a sharp decline in
the number of Hollywood remakes of French films during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
52

coinciding for the most part with what I have called a the “neo-romantic” period of
transnational film remake discourse. Indeed, it is interesting that this period wherein the
“auteur” dominated discussions of the transnational remake, there were fewer trans-
Atlantic remakes being made, the cultural conduit through which auteurist discourses
became coherent. However, this was the same period that witnessed the first cycle of
trans-Pacific remakes, particularly with the various remakes of films directed by Akira
Kurosawa. Indeed, international positive reception of Kurosawa’s films not only
preceded the transnational remakes of these films, this reception anticipated and in many
respects generated these remakes. Auteurism was central to this process, intermixed as it
was with an assimilationist discourse about film genre, which overcame the ongoing
discussion of cultural differences between “original” films and their remakes.
The case of the Seven Samurai (1954) provides a prominent example, as the film
was shown in a number of theaters in the United States and garnered much critical
acclaim. Kurosawa was consistently mentioned prominently in these reviews,
particularly as he had gained artistic prestige by directing the Oscar-winning film
194
Rashomon (1950).
53
In numerous reviews, the film was cited for its exotic and culturally
authentic portrait of historical Japan, such as in one review that stated: “But what is
culturally arresting and fascinating about the thing Mr. Kurosawa has chosen to do is it
[the film] succeeds in conveying a notion that this is an authentic picture of the life and
spirit of sixteenth-century Japan.”
54
But more importantly, these reviews almost
universally discussed the film within generic terms that ameliorated these issues of
cultural specificity or difference. Specifically, they all characterized the film as a
Japanese version of a Hollywood Western genre film. Thus one review stated, “‘Seven
Samurai’ is basically a horse opera in Oriental garb,”
55
and another compared the film to
the Hollywood Western High Noon (1952).
56
Yet another went so far as to say that
“although the occurrence of the crisis is set in the sixteenth century in a village in Japan,
it could be transposed without surrendering a basic element to the nineteenth century and
a town on our own frontier,”
57
predicting the textual and generic transformations that
would actually occur in the remake. As these generic comparisons were intermixed with
high praise for Kurosawa’s directorial abilities, particularly his use of the camera,
58
his
staging of action, and his characterization,
59
one sees the admixture of auteurism and
genre as the means by which the “foreign” film was received in the US.
Precisely this conceptualization guided the production and reception of the
Hollywood remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960). Indeed, in many markets in the US,
Seven Samurai had been called Magnificent Seven,
60
so even the title of the remake was
lifted directly from the earlier film along with the film’s narrative. Several reviews
overtly and negatively compared the remake to the “original” film,
61
while other, more
195
positive reviews neglected to mention the earlier film at all.
62
Interestingly, these reviews
generally effaced the auteurist discourse that punctuated the discussion of the earlier film.
Nevertheless, reviews that discussed the original film did raise issues of cultural
difference and geo-cultural “dislocation.” In a strange cultural conversion, one review
called Magnificent Seven a “westernization” of Seven Samurai, which is particularly odd
given that Seven Samurai was seen as an “oriental” Western.
63

Yet the prevalence of auteurist discourse surrounding Kurosawa and the remakes
of his films increased as the cycle continued. This can be seen in the discussions of
Fistful of Dollars (1964) which remade Yojimbo (1961). In the review in Saturday
Review, the film was said to be “lifted bodily from Kurosawa’s samurai Western,
Yojimbo”
64
In this case the film was an “illegitimate remake,” meaning that the
producers had not paid the original producers for the remake rights, and the original
producers sued the makers of Fistful and won.
65
Because of its “illicit” nature, it initially
did not designate an author for the screenplay. In turn, many reviews of Fistful did not
mention that it was a remake.
66
In these discussions, the status of the auteur took
prominence, and the issue of genre was paramount. Previously, reviews of Yojimbo had
discussed genre as well. The New Republic said that Kurosawa’s films were comparable
to Western movies,
67
Playboy called it an “eastern western,”
68
and Box Office magazine
called the film an “Oriental western, having many of the ingredients of out own frontier
films.”
69
In the case of Fistful of Dollars, the discussion of genre actually focused on its
novelty rather than its repetitiveness, as many reviews said that the film took the Western
film in a new, more simplistic, action-driven direction akin to a James Bond film.
70
In
196
these respects, one can see that whereas generic repetition ameliorated the “foreignness”
of Yojimbo, discourses of generic innovation ameliorated the negative connotations of the
“remake” in reviews of Fistful of Dollars.
Discussions of The Outrage (1964), a remake of Rashomon, similarly reflected an
ambivalence toward remakes informed by discourses of the “visionary auteur,” genre,
and quality. This film had the particular circumstance of remaking a foreign film that
received immense publicity in the US upon its initial release, as Rashomon had gained
theatrical release in the US after winning the Academy Award in 1952. Thus the review
in Variety situated the critical success of the earlier film as an asset for the remake, and
not as a reason that the film should not get remade at all.
71

Notably, all the discussions of The Outrage discussed its status as a remake.
Some articles tried to spin this positively, and others blasted the film because of this fact
alone. The Variety review first mentioned that the film was “adapted” from a Broadway
play, thus giving the film the legitimacy of the theater and being American, before it
mentioned the Japanese film, and the review in the New York Times, titled “Respectful
Remake,” said that the film did not “disservice the source material.”
72
The article noted
that the primary change of the remake was the change from an “exotic” location to the
American Southwest. These examples reveal a romantic discourse about the sanctity of
the artist and of the art object, using specific textual features of the films as evidence of
artistic merit.
On the other hand, the review in Cue magazine also noted the change of location,
yet stated that this change did not work.
73
Derogatorily calling The Outrage an
197
“imitation” of Rashomon, Cue dismissed the remake entirely. Similarly, an earlier story
in the New York Times blasted The Outrage, stating that remakes have the “implication of
intellectual poverty” and that the very word “remake” is a “word that movie makers
hun.”
74
This story compared the differences between the remake and the original, and
although it designated the original as the superior film, it did so in nationalist tones,
referring to the “Japanese impressionism” of the original film. It also implicated that the
larger budget of the Hollywood film would help it gain a bigger audience. In this
example, as with many popular discussions from the middle of the twentieth century, the
remake is discussed in relation to artistic originality and integrity, authorial merit, as well
as textual specificities (usually bound up with cultural connotations). The anxieties
around the remake, pushing toward polarities between “good remake” and “bad,”
highlight the belief in artistic “expressiveness” characteristic of the mid-twentieth
century.
This tenor remains in popular discussions of film remakes until the late 1970s.
For instance, all of the discussions of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the
Soul (1974), a remake of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955), in US papers
discussed Fassbinder’s skills and thematic particularities as a director, but did not
mention that his film remade the Hollywood melodrama.
75
Similarly, auteurism
dominated discussions of Werner Herzog’s remake Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
(1979), which perhaps should be expected given Herzog’s self-conscious mobilization of
auteurist discourses. The majority of reviews of the 1979 film called it a “remake of
Murnau’s classic film,”
76
thus conflating the artistic merit achieved by the original film
198
with an auteurist sentiment that allowed for Herzog’s “expression” in such a degraded
commercial form. In the review in Variety, not only is Herzog seen as the agent of
change and expression, but moreover, there is some equivocation whether the film is a
remake at all, or “an entirely new version.”
77
Similarly, the review in the Los Angeles
Times described the films as a “remake” and yet also “more than a remake,” thus
indicating the lingering sense of the remake as a debased form yet also not clearly
designating the criteria which separates the remake from being “more than a remake.”
78

Although the dominant criteria in this period remain based on the expressivity of the
author, an overtly “culturalist” strain begins at this point as well. Thus the article in the
New York Times not only discusses how Herzog expresses himself in the film, but more
importantly, how he expresses greater cultural tendencies, and specifically how the
auteur seeks to connect contemporaneous German film to that of the 1920s via this
remake.

CULTURALIST PERIOD
Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, several discourses exploded and
changed the landscape for remakes. Namely, the dominance of theories of
“postmodernism” situated the remake as a privileged cultural articulation and
simultaneously deconstructed the former cultural hierarchies by which they were
degraded. Within popular film criticism, one finds a “cultural turn” whereby films, and
specifically remakes, no longer reflect the intentions of a hero-artist-director, but rather
represent the cultural attitudes and identity for entire national cultures. Indeed, the issues
199
of cultural specificity, authenticity, and exchange that had repeatedly been articulated in
various ways throughout the history of the discourse of transnational film remakes
became dominant at this time; culture was the primary axis in which transnational
remakes were conceived and discussed. Notably, this “cultural turn” coincided with the
boom in Hollywood remakes of French films during the period. In this respect, the
overall explosion in discussions of remakes results directly from the transnational remake
in particular.
Reviews of the Hollywood remake Three Men and a Baby (1987) provide a clear
example of this shift. First, one sees an absolute explosion of remake discourse in regard
to this film. Almost every single review was compelled to not only mention that the film
was a remake,
79
but moreover to account in detail for the similarities and differences
between the two films. The review in the Village Voice compared the two films point-by-
point and described the Hollywood as “faithful” to the original even while it said it aims
at a “broader audience.”
80
However, the reviews in Variety and the Los Angeles Times
did not even call the film a remake, but rather referred to it as an “Americanization”
81
and
as an “Americanized version of the French sleeper hit.”
82
Likewise, a review of the
remake Cousins (1989) interchanged these two terms unquestioningly, stating: “‘Cousins’
is a remake, or Americanization, as Paramount Pictures likes to put it, of the 1975 hit
French film.”
83
In this regard, national culture takes on a profound importance in the
discussion of the intertextual relationship between films.
Just as critics demonstrate a need to contend with national culture because of the
tensions about originality and authenticity raised by remakes, one can argue equally that
200
the discourse of remakes, especially in the contemporary period, gains real force because
of greater tensions regarding national culture. Thus the review in the L.A. Herald
Examiner situated Three Men and a Baby in relation to an entire wave of Hollywood
remakes of French films made during the 1980s.
84
By positing that this film succeeded
where the others failed, this review used the occasion to lay out a heuristic of cultural
comparison derived from a discussion of film remakes. Janet Maslin’s review of Three
Men and a Baby in the New York Times provides the most salient indication of this, as the
title of the review is “Baby Talk About Two Cultures.”
85
Maslin reviews not just the
Hollywood film, but in comparing the two films point-by-point, actually reviews two
films at once. Using the term “version,” Maslin describes how the Hollywood film
closely resembles the French film, but emphasizes the differences between the two films,
specifically as these differences indicate cultural differences.
This culturalist discourse, prompted by the cycle of Hollywood remakes of French
films, itself prompted a cycle of surveys and overviews of the phenomenon in popular
print sources; nearly all of these were negative. Although such stories had occurred in
the past, particularly in the 1930s and then again in the 1970s,
86
the equivalent stories
from the 1980s were distinguished by taking aim at the entire phenomenon in cultural
terms. A 1985 story in the New York Times that discussed the many remakes, or
attempted remakes, of the films of Francis Veber situated the director within and
attributed the entire cycle to “economic an cultural conditions,” and at one point
compared these remakes to the American adoption of the croissant.
87

201
But this discourse was not simplistically one of cultural domination or
assimilation, but rather showed strange tensions and bizarre contradictions. For instance,
in 1989 Vincent Canby wrote a story about transnational remakes that is particularly
poignant. His article is exceptional only by synthesizing so many of the issues and
contradictions that permeated the typical, similar stories on the topic. It deserves to be
quoted at length:
Mr. [Stan] Dragoti reproduced the French screenplay [of The Tall Blond
with One Black Shoe (1972)] (by Francis Veber and Yves Robert) almost
scene by scene. Yet the American film [The Man with One Red Shoe
(1985)] wasn’t funny, partially because Mr. [Tom] Hanks was miscast, but
mostly because French films are French. They reflect a different reality.
In a French movie, a man who moves easily between his wife and his
mistress can be taken for granted. The French accept the situation without
surprise. An American movie would insist on analyzing the guy. These
cultural differences are not incomprehensible to American audiences.
Indeed, they are the reason that French films have been the most popular
foreign language films in this country for so long. French films become
incomprehensible only when they’re reproduced here, virtually intact, as
expressions of a way of life to which they have no connection.
88

This story takes up a number of different ideological positions and proposals: the remake
should aim at greater forms of transformation rather than repetition; films automatically
and inherently reflect the culture of the nation in which they were made; truer still, this
reflectionist model of cinema is in fact, for Canby, a poetics of cinema, as he asserts that
films should reflect the national culture in which they were made; rather remarkably, the
passage mobilizes “culture” in a very culturalist manner, referring as it does to “a way of
life,” inadvertently evoking Raymond Williams;
89
in the arena of reception, the story
posits that viewers in the United States generally identify Hollywood films as culturally,
nationally indigenous; viewers in the United States enjoy foreign films precisely for their
202
foreign-ness; when cultural exchange has not occurred well, it induces either “surprise”
or incomprehensibility.
Even accounting for the various conceptual contradictions embedded in this
passage, Canby and the many other critics like him,
90
clearly constructed and reinforced a
strict dichotomy among nations, national cultures, and national cinemas, and positioned
the film remake centrally within this discursive formation. Within this formation, films
are firmly attached to national cultures in their production. Even when such films are
exhibited outside of their “indigenous” country, they merely attest to the differences
among peoples in different parts of the world. Most vitally, these stories, Canby’s
perhaps most explicitly, position the transnational as a sphere of incomprehensible
unknowingness. When films lose their inherent or innate attachment to their culture of
production they simply become meaningless.
91

Although generally not as negatively discussed as Hollywood remakes of French
films, the culturalist discourse continued to dominate reviews of other transnational
remakes in US publications. Variety, for instance, said of War of the Buttons (1994):
“this remake of the 1962 Gallic kidpic about warring tykes is a light, often charming
transplant to Irish soil.”
92
Similarly, reviews of the film Last Man Standing (1996), a
remake of Yojimbo, was blatantly yet non-judgmentally called a remake,
93
and in fact the
reviews sought to connect this film to the Japanese picture. Notably, the reviews
occasionally mentioned Fistful of Dollars as an example of an earlier remake of Yojimbo,
stating that Last Man Standing was dissimilar from both.
94
In these cases, the film’s
status as a remake was actually highlighted so as to connect the film to a tradition of
203
quality entertainment films. Amy Taubin’s review reveals how the culturalist approach
remained active through the 1990s, as she called the film an “American-foreign hybrid,”
even though she disliked the film on aesthetic grounds.
95

The Vanishing (1993), a remake of the Danish film Spoorloos (1988) by the same
director, was characterized as “not simply Hollywood vulgarizing European art,” but
rather seen as a failing of the director who changed too much of the earlier film.
96
A
review of City of Angels (1998), a remake of Wings of Desire (1987), called the film “less
of a remake than a despairingly imbecilic perversion of Wenders’ 1987 film,”
97
resorting
to auteurism once again as a way to critique artistic failings. Another review of this film
stated that it “does not attempt to directly remake ‘Wings of Desire,’ a wise choice given
how poetic, ethereal and determinedly nonnarrative that film was.”
98
In these post-1980s
reviews, one begins to see that the term remake itself appears used up, as critics seek out
new terms or refuse it altogether.
At the turn of the millennium, two tracks were generally taken by film critics
regarding transnational film remakes. First, there were those who, like many of their
predecessors, surveyed a large number of remakes and claimed that these films were
either a sign of creative vacancy and/or of extremely problematic cultural dislocation.
One story from 2005 said that although a large number of upcoming, big-budget
Hollywood films were derived from earlier films, that the word “remake” was generally
shunned by the industry, and further, that remakes were signs of uncertainty and
economic weakness in Hollywood.
99

204
Second, there were critics for whom the remake, transnational or otherwise, was
an accepted and uninteresting fact of contemporary Hollywood production. This
nonchalance was particularly true in stories about the cycle of Hollywood remakes of
East Asian films beginning with The Ring (2002) and intensified by The Grudge (2004).
Indeed, one story that lamented remakes generally for being commercially conservative
merely said that it was “no surprise” that Sony planned to make a sequel to The Grudge
or that Martin Scorsese was remaking Infernal Affairs (2002) as The Departed (2006).
100

Typically, the East Asian cinematic source material for these films was only mentioned in
passing, in stories that were otherwise about the box-office potential or performance of
these films.
101
More than anything, these stories took the remaking of “foreign” films as
unremarkable facts of life for the contemporary cultural industries.
102

CONCLUSION TO PART II
The institutional and discursive history of transnational film remakes presented
here should not appear unremarkable at all, however. The regulatory confusions and
industrial crises that eventually produced the transnational film remake as a coherent
cultural practice were continually fraught with intense struggles and ideological
presumptions. The discursive history of the remake and of the transnational remake in
US popular print sources appears similarly varied and contentious. Emerging from an
initially disparate stage, wherein remakes were demeaned for mechanistically and
uncreatively repeating earlier films, the discourse about film remakes first really gains
coherence during the transition to sound. Whereas at this same moment there was an
205
industrial conflation of multiple language versions and transnational remakes, the
discourse at the time appears increasingly pointed; indeed, this initial discourse
reaffirmed the studio system and the remake’s place within this. Typically, transnational
remakes were either effaced as such in lieu of a discourse about transnational stars, or
such films were maligned for creative vacuity.
As transnational remakes became more firmly defined institutionally, they were
characterized discursively in a variety of ways. Auteurism was a consistent conceptual
tool used to evaluate the merits and flaws of such films; most regularly, the artistic
reputation of whomever was directing the remake determined whether or not it was to be
maligned or not. Further, the status of the auteur either amplified or ameliorated the
denigration of transnational remakes along cultural lines. During this same period,
discussions of genre were used to create bridges across cultures, as constructed or
reflected in transnational remakes. Here, issues of creativity were assigned to directors,
even in the case of remakes, whereas issues of similarity were associated with genre.
Although the production process of transnational film remakes has not changed in
the recent period (even if patterns of circulation have), the overall conditions of cinematic
remaking have been greatly altered by shifts in the transnational mediascape. Indeed, the
commodification, domestication, digitalization, and increased “versionality” of cinema in
general renders the transnational film remake an archaic form of transnational
intertextuality in many respects. Nevertheless, as discussed in Part I, the contemporary
examples of transnational remakes articulate contemporary globalization in particular
ways. In the context of the history presented in this Part, however, it is remarkable that
206
the industrial shift toward a commodity-based domestic cinema coincides more or less
with the dominance of culture as an evaluative criterion in popular critical discourse.
Although it is tempting to think that this is a sign of an increased awareness of remakes
brought about by home video technologies and new transnational cultural exchanges, I
have shown that such awareness was just as intense during the late 1920s and early
1930s. Rather, we might interpret this as an increasing anxiety about cultural
globalization in general matched with an emergent post-Romantic conception of film art.
As such, it is extremely remarkable to note how the transnational film remake becomes a
central to larger cultural anxieties about authenticity and exchange.
Indeed, the history described here intends to broaden conceptualizations of
transnational film remakes by locating the various moments in which they became more
rigorously defined. In all these cases, one finds tensions between repetition and
transformation, tensions around artistic originality and cultural authenticity, tensions
around cinematic technologies and patterns of human thought and behavior – culture.
Given the totality of the category of “transnational culture,” this history cannot help but
reveal moments of reductive constraint and simplistic ideological assumptions. But
history should also reveal alternatives and possibilities for change; in this case, a chance
to remake the transnational film remake.

207
CHAPTER 5 NOTES

1
The first definition of remake as a noun reads: “A second formation of a gold-bearing reef.”

2
Marshall Fine, “Open to Interpretation: Hollywood Versions of Foreign Films Rarely Live Up to the
Originals. Cameron Crowe’s ‘Vanilla Sky’ is the Latest to Try to Make the Cultural Leap,” Los Angeles
Times, 11 Nov. 2001

3
Philip K. Scheuer, “Many Films from Europe Remade Here: Hollywood Versions Usually Inferior,
Declare Critics,” Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1936, C1.

4
Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films, 25
th
Anniversary Edition, (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1976 and 2002), 105.

5
Umberto Eco, “Interpreting Serials,” in The Limits of Interpretation, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 84.

6
Eco, 91, 98.

7
Braudy, 107.

8
Jennifer Forrest, “The ‘Personal’ Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema,” in
Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002), 99-101.

9
Forrest, 115 n8.

10
Film review, “The Great Train Robbery,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 June 1904.

11
Grace Kingsley, “Lasky to Film ‘Follow Thru’,” Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 1929, A16.

12
Grace Kingsley, “M.-G.-M. Signs Stage Player,” Los Angeles Times, 19 Aug. 1930, A6.

13
Hubbard Keavy, “Screen Life in Hollywood,” Washington Post, 31 Aug. 1930, A3.

14
Grace Kingsley, “Film Remakes Found Unwise,” Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 1931, A11.

15
Philip K. Scheuer, “Tradition Trampled Upon as Films Revive Classics,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Sept.
1932, B7.

16
Grace Kingsley, “First National Policy Changed,” Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 1930, 10.

17
Douglas W. Churchill, “Hollywood on the Wire,” New York Times, 1 Sept. 1935, X3.

18
“Changes of Staff Completed by RKO,” New York Times, 11 Nov. 1937, 31.

19
Barbara Miller, “New Editions of Old Films Stir Debate,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Apr. 1937, C1.

20
“Metro to Remake Noel Coward Film,” New York Times, 24 Feb. 1938, 23.

21
Bosley Crowther, “It’s a Far, Far Cry,” New York Times, 22 June 1941, SM6.

208

22
Richard L. Coe, “Second Thoughts on Monday’s First Night,” The Washington Post, 25 Sept. 1940, 18.

23
Douglas Churchill, “How Much Wrath?” New York Times, 10 Dec. 1939, 171.

24
Philip K. Scheuer, “Many Films from Europe Remade Here: Hollywood Versions Usually Inferior,
Declare Critics,” Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1936, C1.

25
Ezra Goodman, “Stop Us If You’ve Seen This One,” New York Times, 14 Nov. 1937.

26
Goodman.

27
Goodman, 184.

28
Motion Picture Herald, 25 May 1935.

29
Motion Picture Daily, 29 June 1935; “Personal Triumph for Peter Lorre,” Hollywood Reporter, 27 June
1935.

30
Variety, 7 Aug. 1935.

31
Ex-Comedienne Turns to Dramatic Roles,” Los Angeles Times, 7 Jan 1936, 11; Philip K. Scheuer, “Jessie
Matthews Shines as Star of ‘First a Girl’,” Los Angeles Times, 11 Jan 1936, 7.

32
Claire Trask, “The Screen in Berlin,” New York Times, 4 Mar. 1934, X4; H.T.S., “Three New Foreign-
Language Films, Two in German and One in Spanish, Reach New York Screens,” New York Times, 28 Jan.
1935, 10.

33
Frank Nugent, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, 25 Dec. 1937, 10.

34
“Swedish Drama Screening at the Grand Theater,” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1938, C2.

35
“Screen News Here and in Hollywood,” New York Times, 25 Feb. 1939, 19.

36
“Ingrid Bergman Hailed as New Film Personality,” Los Angeles Times, 27 Sept. 1939, A14.

37
Douglas W. Churchill, “Re-Made in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1938, 153.

38
“Stolen Jewels in Old Algiers,” New York Times, 10 July 1938, 124; Edwin Schallert, “‘Algiers,’
Picturesque and Exotic Play, Given Gala Premier,” Los Angeles Times, 14 July 1938, 11.

39
“Film Will Furnish Free French Aid,” New York Times, 16 Feb. 1941, D1.

40
“Saga of ‘Pepe le Moko’,” New York Times, 2 Mar. 1941, X4; Bosley Crowther, “‘Pepe le Moko,’ or the
Original French Version of ‘Algiers,” at the World – New Film at Rialto,” New York Times, 4 Mar. 1941,
20.

41
Francois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods Vol. I., ed. Bill
Nichols, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 225.

42
Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, “Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction,” in Dead Ringers, 8-9,
11-12, 18-19.

209

43
André Bazin, “Remade in USA,” Cahiers du Cinéma 2, no. 11 (April 1952): 54-59, as discussed by
Forrest and Koos remakes in Dead Ringers, 18-21.

44
André Bazin “A propos des reprises,” Cahiers du Cinéma 1, no. 5 (September 1951): 52-56, as cited in
Forrest and Koos.

45
Forrest and Koos, 21.

46
“Film Censors Ban ‘Scarlet Street,” New York Times, 5 Jan 1946, 16; “Film Cuts will Lift ‘Scarlet Street’
Ban,” New York Times, 11 Jan 1946, 17; “‘Scarlet Street’ Gets Censor’s O.K.,” New York Times, 25 Jan.
1946.

47
Herbert L. Matthews, “Pictures in Paris,” New York Times, 31 Jan. 1932, X6.

48
Douglas W. Churchill, “Famous Productions Acquires English Screen Rights to ‘La Chienne’ – Several
New Films Here This Week,” New York Times, 28 Aug. 1939, 22; “Stars of ‘Woman in the Window’
Teamed Again,” New York Times, 24 March 1945, 23.

49
“Remake of ‘M’ Opens at the Globe,” New York Times, 11 June 1951.

50
Philip K. Scheuer, “‘M’ Sordid, Powerful Story of Child Killer,” Los Angeles Times, 26 Oct. 1951, B8.

51
Scheuer, “‘M’ Sordid.”

52
Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 17.

53
“First Japanese Film Spectacle Previewed,” Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1956; Bosley Crowther,
“Screen: Japanese Import,” New York Times, 20 Nov. 1956.

54
Bosley Crowther, “Eastern Western: Kurosawa’s ‘The Magnificent Seven’ Follows Format of Cowboy
Films,” New York Times, 25 Nov. 1956.

55
“First Japanese Film Spectacle Previewed,” Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1956.

56
Richard Griffith, “New Japanese Picture Like American Western,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 1956,
A10.

57
Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Japanese Import,” New York Times, 20 Nov. 1956.

58
G.M.W., “Artistry Reaches Peak in ‘Magnificent Seven’,” Los Angeles Times, 24 June 1957.

59
Richard Griffith, “New Japanese Picture Like American Western,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 1956,
A10.

60
Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Japanese Import;” Richard Griffith, “New Japanese Picture Like American
Western,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 1956, A10; G.M.W., “Artistry Reaches Peak in ‘Magnificent
Seven’,” Los Angeles Times, 24 June 1957.

61
Howard Thompson, “Screen On Japanese Idea,” New York Times, 24 Nov. 1960, 48.

62
R.L.C., “‘Magnificent 7’ Tough, Funny,” Washington Post, 14 Oct. 1960, B14.

210

63
Philip K. Scheuer, “Swords of Bushido Become Guns in ‘Magnificent Seven’,” Los Angeles Times, 30
Oct. 1960, B3.

64
Hollis Alpert, “Death and Consequences,” Saturday Review, 18 Feb. 1967.

65
“UA Cautious on Link to Italo ‘Fistful,’ Faces Slap from Akira Kurosawa,” Variety, 13 July 1966.

66
Film review, Variety, Feb. 8, 1967; Motion Picture Herald, 4 Jan. 1967.

67
Stanley Kaufman, “An Unemployed Samurai,” New Republic, 17 Sept. 1962.

68
Playboy, Nov. 1962.

69
“Yojimbo,” Box Office, 29 Oct. 1962.

70
“Daring to Be Different,” Time, 10 Feb. 1967; Variety, 8 Feb. 1967; Motion Picture Herald, 1 Jan. 1967.

71
“The Outrage,” Variety, 30 Sept. 1964.

72
A.H. Weiler, “Respectful Remake,” New York Times, 11 Oct. 1964.

73
Cue, 10 Oct. 1964.

74
Larry Glen, “‘Rashomon’ Altered in Time, Title, Cast, Site, Retains Basic Ideas,” New York Times, 19
Jan. 1964.

75
Vincent Canby, “At the Film Festival: ‘Ali’,” New York Times, 7 Oct. 1974, 55; Kevin Thomas, “German
Essay on Bigotry and Love,” Los Angeles Times, 3 Nov. 1976, F1.

76
“Dracula is Bourgeois Nightmare, Says Herzog,” New York Times, 30 July 1978.

77
Variety, 2 Jan. 1979.

78
Mary Blume, “Shadow Boxing with Werner Herzog,” Los Angeles Times, 24 Feb. 1979.

79
Although it does not really go in depth in regard to the remake angle, the Hollywood Reporter mentioned
in passing the French source early in its review. Duane Byrge, “Three Men and a Baby,” The Hollywood
Reporter, 23 Nov. 1987.

80
Jan Hoffman, “Baby Bust,” Village Voice, 7 Dec. 1987.

81
Michael Wilmington, “‘Three Men and a Baby’ Pampers the Senses,” Los Angeles Times, 25 Nov. 1987.

82
Film review “Three Men and a Baby,” Variety, 25 Nov. 1987.

83
Moira Farrow, “Making ‘Cousins’: An Excursion Into Relativity,” New York Times, 5 Feb 1989, H20.

84
Deborah J. Kunk, “‘Three Men’s’ [sic] Bigger but Not Wiser than Original,” L.A. Herald-Examiner, 25
Nov. 1987.

85
Janet Maslin, “Baby Talk About Two Cultures,” New York Times, 6 Dec. 1987.

211

86
For example, Vincent Canby, “What Are We to Make of Remakes?” New York Times, 16 Jan. 1977, 55.

87
Annette Insdorf, “French Films, American Style,” New York Times, 28 July 1985, A16.

88
Vincent Canby, “Movies Lost in Translation,” New York Times, 12 Feb. 1989, H1+.

89
Raymond Williams defines culture as “a whole way of life” in several places. Among them: Raymond
Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), xviii.

90
Lawrence Van Gelder, “At the Movies: French Wave Rolls On as Two More Films Undergo
Americanization,” New York Times, 1 July 1988, C8; “French Films, American Accents,” The Economist,
27 Feb 1993, 89.

91
Remarkably, Canby resorts to history in his extended criticism of 1980s Hollywood remakes. He claims
that the Hollywood studios once “knew what they were doing,” and cites Algiers as an example of a remake
more “effectively reconceived” than Cousins or Three Fugitives (1989). Vincent Canby, “Movies Lost in
Translation,” New York Times, 12 Feb. 1989, H13.

92
Derek Elley, “War of the Buttons,” Variety, 17 Oct. 1994.

93
Michael Tunison, “Latest Reviews,” Entertainment Today, 20 Sept. 1996.

94
Tunison; David Stratton, “Last Man Standing,” Variety.com, 10 Sept. 1996.

95
Amy Taubin, “Repast and Present,” Village Voice, 24 Sept. 1996.

96
“Film Makers’ Flip-Flops,” The Economist, 17 July 1993, 83.

97
Dennis Lim, “Heaven Help Us,” The Village Voice, 21 Apr. 1998, 72.

98
Kenneth Turan, “Angel Fantasy vs. Hollywood Reality,” Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 1998, 1.

99
John Lippman, “Hollywood Report: The ‘R’ Word,” Wall Street Journal, 6 May 2005, W1.

100
T.L. Stanley, “Seen That Movie Before? Hollywood Likes it that Way,” Advertising Age 76, no. 30, (25
July 2005): 10.

101
“‘Ring’ Brings Chills From Abroad,” Variety, 21-27 Oct. 2002, 26; Elaine Dutka, “The Scary ‘Ring’ is a
Pleasant Surprise,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Nov. 2002, E10; Elaine Dutka, “‘Grudge’ Stays No. 1, But ‘Ray’
Opens Well,” Los Angeles Times, 1 Nov. 2004, E2.

102
As just one example, Kevin Thomas notes the lineage of the film The Grudge merely to state that
perhaps something new should be attempted, but not necessarily to critique the film for being derivative.
Kevin Thomas, “Time to Get Over ‘The Grudge’,” Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2004, E6.
212
PART III – REMAKING EUROPE: TRANSNATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Historically, the most prolific exchange of transnational remakes has been
between cultural producers in Europe and in the United States. As noted previously, this
exchange begins with the very beginnings of cinema as a cultural institution. Following
the dissolution of the production of multi-language versions, transnational remakes
became a prominent form of cinematic exchange with the aim of cultural accommodation
and commercial exploitation. This exchange has been conditioned by various crises and
tensions; not only have these transnational remakes been defined by existing cultural
tensions between Europe and the United States, but the production of transnational
remakes provoked tensions of their own. Indeed, the exchange of remakes between
Europe and the United States has helped articulate the strains between them, at once
creating cultural bridges and rifts.
In many ways, these overlapping and divided spaces between Europe and
America, formed through the simultaneous action of rending and suture occurring
through and around transnational film remakes, outlines characteristics of both;
historically and conceptually, transnational remakes evoke, sustain, compound, and
complicate the practices and notions that organize “Hollywood” and “European cinema.”
The flows between these vast cultural spheres necessarily disturb these categories’
internal coherence, tidy separation, and isomorphism.
This Part examines some of the most salient, important, and provocative
transnational film remakes occurring between Europe and Hollywood. Following an
overview of some of the most prominent definitional criteria that have characterized
213
“Hollywood” and “European cinema” in general, I will engage in a survey of specific
cases that clarify or trouble these assertions in various ways. Although this survey moves
more or less chronologically, my aim is not to provide a comprehensive history of
remakes flowing between the US and Europe. (For an extensive list of films viewed and
considered for this dissertation, see Appendix A). Rather, I wish to highlight privileged
cases that raise larger historical and theoretical issues – themes and ideas that permeate
the larger transactions or which diverge from bigger trends in critical ways. Thus, the
aim is to provide an overview that is as conceptual as it is historical.
Following this, I will engage in two intensive case studies of transnational film
remakes between Hollywood and Europe in the contemporary period. First, I will
examine the films Abre los Ojos (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), particularly as these
films raise issues regarding fluctuating identities across a transnational cultural sphere,
seen in their textual features as well as in the circumstances of their production,
circulation, and reception. Then, I will examine select films by two experimental
filmmakers, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky. Like the troublesome films of these
exceptional artists, this chapter seeks to trouble some of the common assumptions
regarding the conceptualization of remakes. Although their films are not without their
faults and limitations, they provide an alternative model of transnational film remakes to
conventional Hollywood/European transnational remakes. In total, the Part will provide
an extensive view of the history of transnational remakes between Europe and Hollywood
as well as pointed insights into some of the issues that punctuate the contemporary scene.

214
CHAPTER 6 – HISTORICAL FLOWS
The cinemas of Europe and Hollywood have been intertwined since the inception
of the medium. Nevertheless, these two centers of cinematic production have had
substantially different historical trajectories and, perhaps more overtly, the two have been
separated by substantially different conceptions of cultural production and reception.
Among these, perhaps one of the most durable and encompassing has been a practical
and rhetorical division between art and commerce, where European cinema is construed
as more artistically invested and Hollywood as almost entirely driven by profit
motivations. With the advent of the various European avant-gardes of the 1920s and
1930s, which sought to differentiate themselves from the commercial cinema of narrative
clarity produced by Hollywood at the same moment that Hollywood first came to
dominate the global cinema market, there appeared an aesthetic and practical division
between these cinemas. This division was compounded following World War II,
particularly as European film critics and practitioners valorized the unique cinematic
visions of auteur directors in a neo-Romantic discourse articulated by Francois Truffaut’s
call for a “politiques des auteurs.”
1
Especially during the 1950s, when European art
films gained distribution in United States art-house theaters and critical attention at the
annual Academy Awards, the differences between European and Hollywood cinema
appeared to fall into a simplistic artistic/commercial dichotomy. As Elizabeth Ezra has
put it, “films in Europe, so it is said, are created by artists, while in Hollywood they are
manufactured by corporations…[this] distinction between Europe and Hollywood, while
in many ways heuristic, has nonetheless played an important role in film history.”
2

215
This division obtained through the 1990s, a moment of critical structural change
in Europe, European cinema, and global social and economic relations. Specifically, it
manifested itself through a crisis in the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, where lobbyists from the United States positioned the
cinema as just any other industry, making it therefore subject to GATT jurisdiction, while
those from Europe, particularly France, argued for a “cultural exception” to the cinema
and other audiovisual goods. Once again, a conceptual divide manifested itself
continentally. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has observed this obstinate division as well,
stating:
There is a purely economic rhetoric, mainly on the American side, which
presents the issue as solely one of free markets and consumer choice. And
there is a culturalist rhetoric, mainly on the European side, which talks of
cultural identities, of language as the soul of a nation, of the right to
national self-expression, of resistance to alien cultural hegemony, and so
on.
3

Here, we find a rhetorical, conceptual, and practical division of space, between Europe
and the United States, which of course effaces divisions within Europe as well as spaces
of overlap between the US and Europe. This construction of space is fully intertwined
with issues of identity and culture, particularly through a rhetoric of domination and
resistance, strategies that indeed have inflected much of European-American, or Eur-Am,
cinematic cross-traffic.
This issue regarding the “cultural geography” of European cinema has been
particularly pressured in the contemporary period, as can be seen particularly though the
formation of the various MEDIA programs and the Eurimages program, both of which
provide economic support to European cinema and have explicitly pan-European cultural
216
objectives. In these programs, one sees the cinematic/cultural articulation of greater pan-
European political and social reconfigurations following the collapse of the Berlin Wall
and the formation of the European Union. Although these programs aim to curtail the
dominance of Hollywood films on European theatrical and home-video screens, the
writers of Global Hollywood have indicated that these efforts been unsuccessful so far
and appear unlikely to improve.
4
The attempt to formulate a unified Europe and
European cinematic culture in the contemporary period is strongly inflected by an
enduring interpenetration by and imbalanced competition with Hollywood, which is
manifested in economics, culture, space, and identity.
Although many discussions of Eur-Am transnational remakes simplify their
relation as one of geo-cultural “Americanization,” as seen in the previous Part, such a
conflation has occurred also in the general flow of Hollywood films throughout Europe.
Richard Maltby has characterized this dynamic in the following way:
‘Hollywood’, the utopian place in which all ‘American’ movies were set,
was a geographically free-floating signifier of American-ness…Through
Hollywood, ‘Americanisation’ became both a material reality and a
discursive practice…the act of Americanisation took place in the space
between the audience and the screen, in the transient act of consumption
of the shadow images of cinema’s Great Dark Room.
5

Maltby goes further and asserts how this dynamic has been rhetorically positioned as a
threat to European cultural identities, stating, “to a significant extent, ‘Americanisation’
was defined by European cultural nationalists through their encounter with Hollywood.”
6

In this broad discourse, Hollywood as such threatens the coherence and integrity of
European spaces and identities, which have also, elsewhere been construed as art-
oriented and derived largely from idiosyncratic artistic visionaries. This has contributed
217
to an ongoing defensiveness on the part of both national-cinematic institutions within
Europe as well as particular artistic strategies taken up by European filmmakers. In the
latter case, this can oscillate between parody and homage, between reference and
departure. But just like the division between art and commerce, these polarities indicate
only some parts of the larger Eur-Am cinematic flow, especially in the instance of
transnational remakes.

CYCLES AND ODDBALLS, EXCHANGES AND ISSUES
The history of transnational remake exchanges between Europe and Hollywood,
as well as among the cinema industries within Europe, largely falls into a pattern of
cycles, flurries of activity that generate films and remakes that bear similar
characteristics. Often, these cycles adopt and/or reinscribe a genre, narrative form, or
cinematic style as they cross national lines. In this respect, historically speaking, the
flows of transnational remakes within Europe and between Europe and Hollywood
frequently have conformed to much greater patterns of cultural and cinematic exchange.
In other instances, a cycle of transnational remakes has stood with relative independence
with regard to larger trends in transnational cinematic traffic, or else has prompted their
own, larger patterns of exchange among the global cinema industries.
Despite this tendency of cycling, there are numerous “oddball” transnational film
remakes. These often occur as anomalous, seemingly singular remakes, which defy
trends or common patterns of exchange. At other times, oddballs occur as apparently
incongruous or surprising singularities within a larger existing pattern or cycle. In both
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instances, oddball transnational remakes frequently beg the question: “What were they
thinking?” These oddballs are often singled out this way in popular criticism. In cases
where the remake is seen as artistically successful, critics laud the filmmakers for seeing
something not apparent in the original. In the more consistent cases when the remake is
viewed as artistically deficient, the sentiment of “What were they thinking?” is even more
pronounced.
But the greater point is that both the cycles and the oddballs reveal a larger pattern
of exchange, most simplistically viewed as a system of “trial and error” that, in some
accounts, resembles the means by which genres develop over time.
7
Transnational
remakes between Europe and Hollywood behave similarly to a genre.
8
This is perhaps
more true industrially than it is culturally, however, as the interaction between producers
and film viewers of transnational remakes is significantly less reciprocal than with film
genres more generally. Often, a cycle will occur due to the “freak” success of a single
transnational remake; for instance, as we shall see in Part IV, the millennial cycle of
Hollywood remakes of East Asian horror films largely resulted from the overwhelming
box office success of The Ring (2002). What could have been “oddballs” in these cases
initiate a greater cycle, driven by the relatively conservative artistic/industrial logic of the
global cultural industries, which seek to ease the financial risks of a “hit business” with
variations on tried-and-true formulae. Conversely, one or two economic losers within a
cycle consistency bring this cycle to an end, or even more consistently, prompt a shift in
strategy that can lead to a different sort of cycle or a more disparate pattern of production,
exchange, and reproduction.
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Of course, all of this makes sense within the broader logic of Hollywood and the
larger cultural industries of the world. In this scenario, transnational film remakes
conform to larger tendencies and trends. However, the cultural motivations and
resonances of transnational remakes cannot be easily or simply reduced to economic
factors alone. Whether they occur as cycles or oddballs, transnational remakes
correspond with significant exchanges and barriers between and among peoples and their
senses of cultural identity. As transnational remakes within Europe and between Europe
and the United States have been so prolific, such films implicate important points of
contact and resistance between these cultural zones. Tracing the cycles and oddballs
among European transnational film remakes reveals many of these issues.

EARLY TRAJECTORIES OF HOME AND AWAY
Two of the most prominent early transnational film remake pairs occurring
between Europe and Hollywood are Pepe le Moko (1937) and its Hollywood remake
Algiers (1938) and the Swedish-produced Intermezzo (1936) and its Hollywood remake
of the same title (1939). These pairs not only signal the rise of transnational remakes,
they also raise conceptual and thematic issues that are representative of anxieties and
tensions within Euro-American transnational remakes more generally. Specifically, we
see in these two early remake pairs discourses regarding “home” and “away,” between
“Europe” and its “outside,” which articulate larger issues and tensions regarding cultural
mobility in the days preceding World War II. Each film creates a “structure of attitude
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and reference,”
9
which articulates culturally distinctive issues within and across Europe
and the US.
Pepe le Moko has become a classic of 1930s French cinema. The film tells the
story of a suave Parisian gangster, Pepe, played by Jean Gabin, exiled in the casbah area
of Algiers. Sought by the local police as well as by colonial French authorities, Pepe
evades capture with help from a network of local compatriots. This gangster film takes a
melodramatic turn as it details Pepe’s affair with a visiting Parisian bourgeois woman,
Gaby, played by Mireille Balin, which leads to his failed escape out of the casbah and
home to Paris, and ultimately to his demise. The Hollywood film Algiers, which was
subsequently followed by the musical remake Casbah (1948), is a remarkably faithful
remake, replicating most portions of the narrative of the original and changing only a few
important details.
This narrative, occurring more or less similarly in both films, dramatizes anxieties
and troubles regarding space, travel, and identity. In both films, much of the dramatic
tension embodied by the character Pepe derives from his status as a figure in exile, a
figure of exile. Both films treat him as “trapped” within the casbah, where, although he
relaxes in relative freedom, he is unable to return to his native Paris, his home. The
inverse of this dramatic tension lies in the setting of the films themselves, the city of
Algiers, and more particularly the casbah. In this setting, we see a cinematic
representation of the contradictory, Manichean construction of a national/colonial
dichotomy, where the national apparatus requires the exploitation of resources outside its
territory and yet over which it holds dominion, and where the colony is both subject and
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subjugated within this “external” force. As an exile in a colony, Pepe is outside and yet
this outside is itself held within.
Such a narrative and its depiction(s) hold substantially different significance in its
different realms of production and reception. Pepe le Moko was made in France while it
still held Algeria as a colony, in opposition to Algiers, which was made in the US largely
for American audiences. Lucy Mazdon has argued that various differences between the
two films indicate culturally distinct attitudes toward the issue of colonialism. For
instance, she states that the colonial setting of the films would have registered concretely
with French audiences, particularly in response to the large number of other colonial
films made at the time as well as the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, and that “such
specificities would be less accessible to an American audience unfamiliar with this
colony and its relationship with France.”
10
Further, she shows how Pepe le Moko
associated its various spaces with issues of class and gender, which the remake rearranges
or displaces. She describes how Pepe could not take the woman Inès with him to Paris if
or when he escapes, as she would bring the casbah with her, whereas his affection grows
deep for Gaby, a female tourist from Paris. Yet, whereas in Pepe le Moko Gaby and Pepe
exchanges reminiscences about favorite Paris neighborhoods that indicate their different
classes, the Hollywood remake eschews this trajectory, which in Mazdon’s view creates a
situation where the majority of the American audience would find in these geographic
references “almost no cultural resonance. They would represent a homogenous Paris and
little else.”
11

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This geo-cultural “loss,” this victim to the vagaries of translation, results from the
cultural imaginary operating within and around the remake. Whereas Pepe le Moko
situates its narrative within the exoticized locale of colonial Algeria, and more
specifically within the highly exoticized casbah, the remake resituates these imagined
spaces of otherness through the larger filter of an imagination of France and of
Frenchness. The remake is at least doubly exoticized in its representation of geography
and the cultural associations of its locales and characters. In this transformative action,
according to Mazdon, certain details get lost. This is neither surprising nor unique.
Indeed, within the generally abstracting logic of transnational remakes, specific geo-
cultural references typically give way to generalized, exoticized otherness and
inassimilable difference.
Two instances of repetition and transformation between Pepe le Moko and Algiers
illuminate these issues with particular clarity and force. The first is the oft-noted
introduction of the casbah in both films. In the case of Pepe, the camera closes in on a
map of the city inside the police station as the local police inform the Parisian detective
about Pepe’s hideout. This sequence begins with a top-down map of the city, a
rationalized demarcation of lived, social space. Yet the film dissolves into a montage of
images of life in the streets of the casbah as a male voice describes its qualities and its
inhabitants. The footage itself seems to have been made for documentary purposes, and
within the film it appears as an interjected ethnographic study in an otherwise fictional
narrative feature. As the camera glosses over the particular architectural styling of the
casbah and people bustling through the streets, the narrator describes the place as a
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labyrinth of unknowable corridors and alleys, as if in its very design the casbah defied
rational conceptions of space. Further, the narrator describes the ethnically diverse
population of the casbah in decidedly negative terms, highlighting both their exotic (non-
Anglo) ethnicities and emphasizing in particular the plurality of these cultures. In these
ways, Pepe le Moko situates the casbah as both a spatial deviation from Europe and a
cultural Babel, in both respects constructing the place as exotic and impenetrably
unknowable.
This effect is a particular manifestation of the colony/nation dialectic functioning
in France’s conception of Algeria at the time. What is perhaps surprising, then, is the
way the remake treats its equivalent scene. As noted, the remake is faithful to the
original with only marginal revisions, and those adaptations that occur serve to make the
film less “French” and more “American.” Thus it is remarkable that this sequence
required no revision whatsoever in the remake; the exact same ethnographic documentary
footage plays in Algiers to portray the casbah as in Pepe le Moko. The same images play
of the rooftops and corridor-like streets of the casbah. The same women populate these
streets. Although the narration changes a few points of emphasis, it generally carries the
same message, that the casbah is spatially confusing, polyglot, multicultural, and in these
ways “other.” Apparently requiring no revision, then, this vision of foreign otherness is
transferred completely from one film to its remake. This already raises the issue of the
repetition-and-variation structure that guides film remakes in general. Here, nothing
seems remade at all but rather replayed, reproduced verbatim. Although Pepe le Moko
has certain investments in portraying Algiers and the casbah as an exotic colonial exterior
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to the normalized interior of France’s national unit, it is remarkable that the Hollywood
remake keeps these boundaries firmly intact while having very different investments in
the nation/colony dichotomy.
These depictions resonate with Priya Jaikumar’s analysis of late-imperial British
films about India, despite the significantly different histories of imperialism between
France and Algeria and Britain and India as well as those among the cinemas in those
areas. Jaikumar delineates among “realist,” “romance,” and “modernist” treatments of
imperialism in a cycle of films produced between 1927 and 1947.
12
Of these, she states
that in the imperial realist films, “hierarchies between imperializer and the imperialized
are naturalized and reified.”
13
Jaikumar situates this “imperial realism” in relation to the
multiple kinds of realism that have been theorized within cinema studies, between, for
instance, the apparatic realism of the film camera and classical Hollywood realism of
narrative clarity, between revelatory realism of formal invisibility and between the false-
consciousness of ideologically-read realism.
14
Thus, “combining both insights,”
Jaikumar asserts that imperial realist texts:
deploy realist techniques at the behest of imperialism…[and] traditionally
functions through documentary realism as well as narrative realism.
Frequently, cinematic representations of imperialism presume to present
colonial subjects naturalistically, as is well illustrated in the abundant use
of documentary footage from the colonies….[This mode portrays] colonial
subjects in a state of savagery or infancy and in need of
assistance…[whereas] the British themselves are represented through
another form of realism, one that was closer to classical Hollywood
realism, with carefully constructed sets and continuity editing normalizing
their social and racial hierarchies.
15

In this context, both Pepe le Moko and Algiers are linked in their adherence to an
“imperial realist” imaginative mode. Transposing “the British” in Jaikumar’s analysis for
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“the French in Algeria” in Pepe le Moko and Algiers, we see that both films present the
colonizer (and exile) in classical Hollywood realist fashion. However, although it is
important that Algiers transforms slight narrative details of the French film, it is perhaps
more remarkable in those instances where the remake recycles images from Pepe le
Moko entirely and exactly, along with the vision of colonialism and exoticism they
support.
This moment contrasts with another use of recycled, documentary-style landscape
footage in this remake pair. Toward the end of Algiers, Pepe runs to the ship carrying his
Parisian lover away from him, stumbling and love drunk. In this sequence, the camera
closes in tight on Pepe’s face, and then cuts to a reverse shot from his vantage showing
the streets of the casbah before him. But these dissolve away into a brief montage of
locations in Paris, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. Nothing like this
montage occurs in Pepe le Moko. This brief travelogue of postcard images would have a
greater effect of connoting “France” to an American audience, for whom France was
nearly as exotic or foreign as Algeria. Here, we see the remake situate “home” as “away”
for the intended audience through an addition of recycled footage, contrasting with the
shared “away” of the ethnographic travelogue of the heterogeneous casbah seen at the
beginning of both films.
This structure of attitude and reference, between the “home” of the nation and the
“away” of the colony, takes on a different inflection in another set of remakes from the
early sound period, namely, the two Intermezzo films. Both star Ingrid Bergman as a
young violinist, Anita, who becomes involved with an older, married, world-famous
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violin virtuoso, Holger. The earlier, Swedish film begins as Holger returns to his home
and family in Sweden after an extended music tour in cities around the world. As he
returns, his older friend Thomas says he is tired of life on tour and discusses how nice it
will be to return to his home in his native land and enjoy a quiet life of rest and stability.
Holger’s life is presented as the epitome of domestic comfort and stability. His home is
large and stately. His wife, son, and daughter cherish him. Holger’s wife laments that he
has been gone so long while he says that touring the world provides him with great
inspiration for his music. It is at this point that he and Anita begin their affair, however,
and as a result the two steal away and go on tour. Pictured in an extended music-
propelled montage, the couple travels the world and plays their music to enthralled
crowds. After some time, the couple settles in a quaint flat in Germany, where they
become friendly with the local people and enjoy themselves in leisure. However,
eventually an old friend from Sweden catches up with Holger and encourages him to
return home and to his family. This friend also convinces Anita to leave the scene
amicably, for the sake of Holger who he feels should return home. Holger does return,
and after some melodrama involving his daughter, settles back in his home. In the final
line of dialogue in the film, his wife says, “welcome home, Holger.”
The Hollywood remake of this film, also starring Ingrid Berman in her
Hollywood debut and made a scant three years following the earlier film, maintains much
of this narrative and thematic emphasis. As in the original, Ingrid Bergman plays Anita,
a young Swedish musician who becomes involved with and goes on a musical tour with
an older, married violin virtuoso. As in the original, the film portrays their spatial and
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emotional journey away from the Sweden, around the world, through a montage of
various locales interspersed with images of trains in motion. However, the film differs in
two striking respects, particularly related to space and cultural geography. First, when
the adulterous couple takes a respite from their tour and settle somewhat, they do so not
in Germany but rather in the south of France. This is perhaps not so surprising in a
number of ways, as it reflects, rather simplistically, the cultural allegiances of the nations
that produced these films on the eve of World War II. Specifically, Sweden held a
conflicted but connected relationship with Nazi Germany at the time, making the
depiction of Germany as a safe haven acceptable, whereas the United States held a
likewise conflicted but increasingly antagonistic relationship with Nazi Germany, and
this was particular strong by 1938-1939. Germany simply could not have appeared as a
vacation spot or lovers’ hideaway to American film viewers, even for fictional Swedish
characters.
The second and more nuanced shift in space between these films relates to the
depiction of the domestic and the national. In the earlier film, Holger’s wanderlust
eventually succumbs to his longing for home and family, yet this longing for home bears
a notably nationalist sentiment. Earlier in the film, when Holger’s older friend laments a
life on the road, he specifically lauds the comforts and pleasures of Sweden, and this is
compounded by the sumptuous portrayal of the Swedish landscape early in the film. For
Holger, returning to his family is also to return to his nation. In the remake, Holger’s
compulsion to return home is more overtly a return to his house and to his wife and
children, rather than a need to return to Sweden. In other words, associations between the
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national and domestic units become abstracted, in this case into a pseudo-universal
category of the domestic home. The differences between the last scenes in each
respective film demonstrate this somewhat subtle point. Whereas the earlier film ends
with Holger reuniting with his family at a hospital, where his daughter is being cared for,
the remake markedly ends at the home, with Holger’s wife coming down the stairway to
meet him. In this scene, as throughout the film, the stately grandeur of the home
establishes it firmly as a space of desired comfort and familial security. This should not
suggest that this abstraction from nationalism to a pseudo-universal “domestic” space
does not reflect certain nationalist imaginings particular to the United States; the home in
this film clearly draws upon the dreams of large, suburban homes that would characterize
the United States’ spatial organization in the post-War period. Yet in deferring from a
directly “Swedish” home(land) to a generalized domestic home, the Hollywood remake
demonstrates a logic of transnational abstraction.
In these ways these two pairs of remakes, Pepe le Moko and Algiers, as well as
the two Intermezzo films, reveal a complex structure of attitude and reference, between
“home” and “away,” between the nation and the colony, and between the national home
and the domestic home. These tendencies for abstraction result from the act of remaking
itself, from the literal mechanical reproduction of the colonial ethnographic interlude in
Pepe le Moko and Algiers, to the subtle narrative alterations between the Intermezzo
films. As will be seen, the geo-cultural concerns and tendencies seen in these early
transnational remakes will inflect later examples and yet will also change in historically
instructive ways.
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CHILLS AND THRILLS
The artistically adventurous expressionist cinema of Weimar Germany,
productive from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, not only produced some of the great
classics of world cinema but disseminated beyond Germany to have, in myriad and
complex ways, arguably one of the biggest and historically longest effects on cinematic
form, style, narratives, and themes. This dissemination was both aesthetic and industrial,
as the narratives, themes, and styles of German expressionist cinema were adopted by
filmmakers in other parts of the world, and many of the filmmakers within this cinema
fled Germany in the face of Nazi power and brought their expressionistic tactics to other
cinema industries.
Most concretely, the transnational dissemination of German expressionism
produced two enduring cinematic genres or modes, horror films and film noir. The
tendency for supernatural or uncanny stories, combined with the high-contrast, moody,
chiaroscuro lighting in many of these films, such as in Nosferatu (1922), helped to codify
a modular style and vocabulary for the cinematic horror genre. The deeply anxious and
consistently pessimistic view of urban modernity, again combined with high-contrast,
moody chiaroscuro lighting, seen in other German expressionist films, seen for example
in The Street (1923) or M (1931), helped provide aesthetic and thematic tropes to be
adopted by the crime films and melodramas that constitute film noir.
Within this dispersal of cinematic tropes, narratives, and themes, there appear a
few instances of transnational film remakes, which do not merely signal concrete
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instances of the general trend but whose particularities also reveal salient issues related to
transnational cultural exchange and delimitations in the early-to-mid twentieth century.
The first pair examined here are two sets of remakes of German expressionist films that
would become transformed into horror films in other national contexts: The Golem
(1920), which was remade in France in 1937 as Le Golem/The Golem: A Legend of
Prague, and The Hands of Orlac/Orlac’s Hande (1924), which was remade in 1935 as
Mad Love. Together, these two sets of intra-European transnational film remakes reveal
important anxieties about and contentions over identity, configured both
individualistically and culturally.
The silent film Orlac’s Hande is an extremely moody Robert Weine film, made
following his masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Like the earlier film,
Orlac’s Hande presents a protagonist, Orlac, played by Conrad Veidt who had previously
played the somnambulist in Caligari, who undergoes extreme psychological trauma and
romantic distress in a world of dark shadows and a ubiquitous sense of unease. Conrad is
a virtuoso pianist who loses his hands in a terrible train crash. The train wreck is detailed
with amazing dramatic weight in a nighttime, on-location scene, thus differing from the
more regular use of soundstages in expressionist films, yet is aesthetically brilliant for its
high contrast lighting scheme, the scale of the scene, and the number of extras. Orlac’s
wife rushes him to a doctor and begs to have her husband’s hands saved, which the
doctor does with a hand transplant. The rest of the film details how Orlac comes to
believe that his hands were taken from a deranged criminal who is an expert knife
thrower. Orlac comes to fear that not only can he no longer use his hands for playing
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piano, but that he may himself take on the criminal mentality and abilities of this
criminal. Tensions arise between him and his wife, and he is harassed and blackmailed
by the “criminal” whose hands he supposedly has. Ultimately, however, the film reveals
that the criminal was in fact just a schemer whose hands are intact. Although Orlac still
has the hands of another, the threat to his identity is assuaged.
The 1935 remake of this film, Mad Love starring Peter Lorre and directed by
German expressionist cinematographer and director Karl Freund, transforms this tale.
The film generally upholds a similarly individualistic, abstracted concern with the
integrity and coherence of physical/psychic identity, yet its transformations of the
narrative reveal important points of contrast. Produced by MGM, the film’s production
already attests to a migration of cinematic identities in the face of European fascism – as
it was Lorre’s first Hollywood film, and Freund had already made several films in
Hollywood, including the horror classic The Mummy (1932). At first, it may appear that
the most significant changes between this film and Orlac’s Hande involve technology
and style. This is a synch-sound film, whereas the earlier had been silent. The remake
maintains the staid and coherent cinematic style of the “classical Hollywood cinema,”
whereas the first had been overtly expressionist in look and gestural in its performances.
The narrative appears quite similar; the protagonist Stephen Orlac (played with great
intensity by Dr. Frankenstein himself, Colin Clive) is a famous pianist who loses his
hands in a train accident and has new hands transplanted. Yet in this story, emphasis is
placed squarely on the doctor who performs the transplant, Dr. Gogol, played by Lorre as
a mad scientist whose lust for knowledge overtly recalls the Frankenstein story and
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presages the mad scientists that would populate the cycle of sci-fi/horror films of the
1950s and 1960s. Gogol lusts after Mrs. Orlac, and he schemes to take her from Stephen.
Perhaps most importantly, in this film, the mad doctor actually does transplant the hands
of an expert knife-throwing criminal onto Orlac, who indeed trades his abilities with the
piano for knife tossing.
Both the first film and the remake, then, generate dramatic tension by questioning
the relation between the body and the psyche in the formation of identity. This narrative
device should be coordinated with broader insecurities about cultural identities in the
societies in which the films were made and distributed, while acknowledging that both
films abstract such insecurities into the “universal” category of the body and mind. To
this extent the differences between the films are telling. Whereas Orlac’s Hande
ultimately negates the threat to the protagonist’s identity, suggesting that such anxieties
simply had to be eradicated in the cultural milieu of Weimar Germany, Mad Love depicts
a man whose identity is genuinely transformed by physical transformation. The remake
also ends “happily,” as Stephen Orlac uses his knife-throwing ability to kill Gogol and
save his wife. Here, transformations of identity become opportunities rather than solely
aberrations, resonating with the productive influence the German émigré film-workers
had in Hollywood at the time.
But if these two films abstract identity crises into general categories of the
physical and the psychic, between the sane and the deranged, then The Golem and Le
Golem depict cultural identity crises more overtly, even if these representations have
relative autonomy from their actual cultural contexts. The 1920 film, directed by and
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starring Paul Wegener, is in fact the third film in a series of films made about the golem
automaton, but the earlier films appear to be lost. The film takes place in sixteenth
century Prague, where the mad baron persecutes the local Jewish community. Rabbi
Leow, in an effort to make life better for himself and of his family, molds a humanoid
figure out of clay and draws upon ancient magic to animate it. Numerous sequences
show Leow putting the golem to various tasks, depicting the golem as a mindless and
somewhat bafoonish servant to Leow. In a very direct way, the golem embodies the
spirit and wishes of Leow, and by extension the Jews of Prague, as it is not only animated
by arcane spiritual forces, but literally serves the desires of Leow. Although the golem
protects the Jews from the mad baron, he ultimately slips out of Leow’s control.
Averting disaster just in time, a little village girl removes the animating star from the
golem’s chest, suspending his animation. Obviously inspiring the Frankenstein story and
its theme of controlling unchecked power over nature, the film resolves with the golem
frozen as the will of the Jewish community is realized.
The film Le Golem is an interesting intra-European transnational remake. Major,
immediate differences between this film and the earlier film include film style and
narrative interrelations. Whereas The Golem upheld the gestural acting and cinematic
frontality typical of German expressionism, Le Golem attends to the rich, baroque
costumes and sets typical of French quality productions of the 1930s. More interesting,
then, is the narrative relations between the films. Le Golem does not merely pose as a
remake of The Golem, but in fact intertextually operates as an unofficial sequel to the
earlier film. An opening title tells us that in medieval Prague, the mad baron persecuted
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the Jews, but that they had been defended by a golem, which had later been hidden away.
The film picks up some years after this initial incident, which reads like the plot of the
earlier German film. The main rabbi in the film is not Leow, but rather his protégé,
Jacob. The film primarily deals with the increasing madness of the baron and a
complicated love-triangle plot involving the baron and a local countess. In one scene,
which resonates uncomfortably with the actual persecution of the Jews in German and
Polish ghettos, the baron’s soldiers attack the ghetto, and the film details in grand, large-
scale shots the physical confrontation between the Jews and the soldiers in the streets and
alleyways. Later in the film, the baron discovers the location of the golem and brings it
back to his palace. However, Jacob’s wife, who is also imprisoned, manages to access
the golem and awakens it. The last ten minutes of the film are devoted to an extended
sequence of cataclysmic destruction rendered by the golem. He crashes through doors
and walls, tearing down the palace and wreaking havoc.
In both films, the golem embodies the will and spirit of the local Jewish people. It
is subject to the desires and wishes of Leow and Jacob, respectively, and does their
bidding. In this respect, it can be read as a certain figuration of a cultural identity. This
contrasts strongly with the dislocations and confusions of identity seen in Orlac’s Hande
and Mad Love, which reduce identity to the level of the individual and immediate
romantic relations. Here, identity is constructed out of broad social relations, based on
religious and cultural legacies and posed in strong opposition to a villainous and
repressive social force. If the golem embodies the sense of a collective social will of the
oppressed Jews, then the transfiguration of the golem from one film to another is all the
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more paramount. In this light, the semi-comical and multi-functional depiction of the
golem in the earlier film suggests the intense but diffused social antagonism toward Jews
in 1920s Germany. By 1937, in France, such a depiction became simply untenable. The
golem is solely a machine of destruction, a black humanoid monolith rendering justice in
violence.
In addition to horror films, many early European films generated the cycle of film
noir, and the cases of their remakes reveal an interesting aesthetic, thematic, and
ideological matrix through which American and European cultures were articulated.
Some of the more remarkable titles in this grouping include the British film Gaslight
(1940) and its remake (1944), Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet
Street (1945), the Vichy-French thriller Le Corbeau (1943) and The Thirteenth Letter
(1951), and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Joseph Losey’s remake (1951). Thus we find that
the dominant cycle of Eur-Am transnational remakes in mid-twentieth century was
grounded in thrillers that generally drew upon broad social anxieties and tensions,
flowing in concert with the transnational exchange that constitutes film noir and also
revealing some of the genre’s traits and limits.
Both Gaslight films dramatize a husband’s deliberate undermining of his wife’s
psychological stability. In both, a villainous man marries a young woman and moves into
a splendid city townhouse. Yet the husband consistently tells the wife that she is
imagining or forgetting important things, making her doubt her own sanity and at times
purposefully causing her to lose emotional control in social situations, particularly seen
when the couple attends a musical performance. Each night, the gas-fueled lights of the
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house dim, and the wife thinks this is part of her increasing insanity, but in reality it is
because the man is searching the neighboring house for the jewels of a woman he had
killed years earlier. In both films, a police detective helps to figure out the mystery and
the woman is liberated from her tormentor, who is imprisoned. In terms of transnational
cultural issues, what is striking is that the villain is a “foreigner” in both films, although
differently so. Whereas in the British film, the husband is described merely as “foreign”
and he displays a German accent, the Hollywood film features Charles Boyer as the
husband, and his heavily French-accented language attests to his European background.
Thus both films vilify the “foreign” as a psychologically corruptive force on the sanctity
and coherence of the national-feminine figure. But whereas in the 1940 English film this
was an intra-European figure, specifically German, Hollywood displaced the British
source of the film and refracted its European-ness in the figure of the villainous
Frenchman. (This is further complicated by the casting of Ingrid Bergman as the wife in
the Hollywood remake).
La Chienne and Scarlet Street similarly present social anxieties through
dramatizing a highly charged romantic relationship. La Chienne begins with the stamp of
its director, showing a small puppet theater performance, which signals Renoir’s interest
in puppets and theater as the models for a cinema of moral questioning, and which
contrasts with the relatively realist aesthetic of the rest of the film. Leo Braudy asserts,
“the possibility of relation with others in a society is expressed through the image of
theater” in this and other films by Renoir,
16
a claim that augments Christopher Faulkner’s
sociological and ideological reading of the film. Following the introduction, the film
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depicts an older, inexpressive man played by Michael Simon who becomes involved with
a young prostitute, who works with her pimp to deceive the old man and swindle him out
of his money and his paintings, which he does as a hobby. Ultimately, the husband finds
the woman in bed with her pimp and kills her. Due to coincidence and “fortunate”
timing, the pimp is charged and found guilty of her murder, leaving the protagonist free.
However, at the end of the film we find him destitute, wandering the streets.
For Christopher Faulkner, La Chienne is a social study with formal characteristics
that politically radicalize its subject matter.
17
For instance, the film reveals how the
whole of society is ensnarled by a capitalist, commodity logic, as the protagonist’s only
“escapes” from his otherwise alienated existence, painting and romance, are subject to
commodification, as the paintings get swept up in a market and his lover is a prostitute.
18

Similarly, Faulkner argues that the film consistently defers toward social rather than
psychological understandings of individual agency, such as when the film cuts to the
crowd on the street while the prostitute is murdered.
19
Not only does this socially-
conscious mode of filmmaking contrast with the majority of French films made in the
early sound period, it resonates with the increasingly tense social milieu in France and
Europe at the time, which in 1931 was facing the growth of the Nazi party in Germany.
More directly, however, the impact on France in 1930 of the worldwide Great Depression
makes the film’s representation of alienation, urban criminality, and class conflict
particularly forceful. Within the context of Renoir’s career, the social responsiveness of
this film, among others of his from the early 1930s, anticipates the director’s involvement
238
with the anti-fascist October Group and his subsequent films that reflect the Popular
Front political views.
20

Scarlet Street presents a story similar to La Chienne, with Edward G. Robinson
playing the cuckolded older man/amateur painter. This film is the stylistic epitome of
mid-century Hollywood noir. In it, high contrast black and white cinematography creates
dramatic and dynamic pictorial spaces in the urban environment and expresses the
interior rot of its characters’ souls. Here we find an extension of the German
expressionist film style combined with the dour, anti-female pessimism of pre-war
French cinema. Of course, the content of this film had to be refracted through the
Hollywood Production Code, so the film makes no mention of the woman being a
prostitute, and generally the film handles the sexual relations with timidness compared to
the relative graphicness of La Chienne. In both cases, the deceitful female lover serves as
a foil for anxieties around male heterosexuality, one in pre-war France and the other in
post-war USA. Importantly, this trope also signals La Chienne’s privileged position
within the transnational construction of film noir more generally. As Raymond Durgnat
discusses, the treatment of urbanity and of gender in La Chienne closely resembles that
seen in a cycle of German films made during the 1920s and early 1930s, such as The
Street and The Blue Angel (1933).
21
In any case, La Chienne and Scarlet Street obey a
certain stereotype of “liberated” sexuality in Europe and of constrained sexual
representations in post-war America.
In turn, these generically connected constructions of gender implicates the larger
role played by remakes of French films in the Hollywood cycle of film noir. Such
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contestations around issues of sexual/social relations become even more evident in the
remake set Le Corbeau and The Thirteenth Letter. The earlier film was made in Vichy
France by Henri-Georges Clouzot, telling the story of a rural French village where a local
doctor is blackmailed for performing abortions and publicly persecuted through poison-
pen letters. Soon, all the village is implicated in a web of lies and deceit. As generalized
paranoia diffuses throughout the village as everyone suspects everyone of spying and of
spreading ill will. Eventually, the letter-writer is killed by the mother of a boy who’d
committed suicide as a result of the reign of suspicion. Order may not be restored, but
justice is enacted – beyond the law, which itself may be corrupt given the corruption of
the society. The remake is about as thematically and culturally confused as any
transnational remake made. Produced by Hollywood on location in a village in Quebec,
the film maintains something of a “French” cultural valence. Notably, setting the film in
Quebec allows it to maintain the Catholicism of the society it portrays, which is
important in creating a specific moral universe in which hypocrisy and sin are tangible
and dramatically resonant. Most importantly, however, the 1951 film entirely eradicates
any mention of the young doctor performing abortions. Instead, the remake takes the
general sexual frankness and liberalness of the earlier film and condemns it thoroughly,
making the poison-pen letters about the doctor’s possible affair with a married woman
rather than performing abortions. The film thus becomes a tepid morality tale that
resembles any suburban melodrama of the period. Although it maintains the sense of a
corrupt and suspicious society that is characteristic of post-war Hollywood noir, the
film’s compliance to censorship protocol undermines its dramatic charge.
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The remake of M, on the other hand, demonstrates a logic of dislocation and
relocation that seems characteristic of transnational remakes in general and demonstrates
important socio-political recontextualizations. Although the remake was initially offered
to German émigré Fritz Lang himself,
22
instead the film went to the left-leaning, former
theater director Joseph Losey during his brief stint working in Hollywood. Whereas the
earlier film by had the pace and tone of a weighty mediation on the moral complexities of
contemporaneous urban life in Germany, evocative of the widespread, dispersed paranoia
rendered by the rise of the Nazi Party, the remake has the feeling of a banal police
procedural. The remake maintains much of the plot of the original, but its style and mode
of performance render it distinct. The remake supplants Peter Lorre’s astounding
performance with a more internalized and opaque performance by David Wayne. Indeed,
in this film the murderer hardly appears at all in the first third of the film, creating a
narrative hole. As the film proceeds, it only engages with the murderer superficially.
Although in several moments the film implies that the protagonist is a closeted
homosexual and has unhealthy ties to his mother, a motivation Losey later confirmed in
interviews,
23
the film largely leaves the protagonist’s personality impenetrable until his
tormented “trial” by local criminals in an underground parking structure at the end of the
film. There, he begs for punishment, complicating his already vague sense of motivation
for murdering the girls, and desperately asserts that he could not help his actions, could
not control himself. Whereas the original film implicated the viewer as complicit in M’s
murders, raising questions about morality and justice in both society and in cinematic
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representation, the remake feels centerless, moving through a structure with no
underlying support.
This sense of absence and loss coordinates interestingly with the graphic changes
between the films. Whereas the original demonstrates the heights of German
expressionist representations of urban, nighttime dangers, the remake situates itself firmly
in the sunny and weathered streets of downtown Los Angeles, around Bunker Hill. Here,
urbanity is shabby, but not ominously so. Run down, used up, and empty, like the soul of
the killer in the film. Indeed, the remake consistently mobilizes the nascent pseudo-
documentary aesthetic that would be utilized in some noir films and, in many ways,
become characteristic of post-war cinema. In this, the diffused paranoia of the narrative
inflects a very real Los Angeles, seen in its open drabness rather than its manicured
glamour.
This relocation of social paranoia, from early-1930s Germany to Los Angeles,
speaks also to the increasing anti-Communist paranoia during the early days of the cold
war in the United States, which had direct effects on Joseph Losey and many of his
associates in Hollywood in the period. Although Losey was not summoned in the first
round of House Un-American Activities inquiries in 1947, this process rendered
widespread fear and mistrust throughout the Hollywood community. Losey was a
member of the Communist Party,
24
was investigated thoroughly by the FBI for having
communist ties or sympathies,
25
and in fact helped organize Hollywood personnel to
resist the HUAC hearings.
26
Further, Losey consistently tried to invest leftist or pacifist
sentiments into his theater and film work, such as with the anti-war allegory The Boy with
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Green Hair (1948). His close associate at RKO Adrian Scott, in fact, became one of the
famous “Hollywood Ten” who were punished for refusing to testify to HUAC. Given
Losey’s close proximity to these events, and the general air of political suspicion they
created in Hollywood at the time, it is difficult to not see the remake of M as echoing the
anti-fascist fear of its predecessor, relocated in a very different time and circumstance.
This notion is augmented by the inclusion of writer Waldo Salt in the production of this
film, as he was one of the “Hollywood Nineteen” people initially subpoenaed by HUAC.
Moreover, as a cultural figure, Losey himself reflects a transnational mobility. As HUAC
returned to Hollywood in 1951 for a second round of hearings, they prepared to serve
Losey with subpoena to appear.
27
Refusing, he fled the United States, reversing the flow
of émigré directors out of Europe during the 1930s who had fled fascism and political
persecution.

TRANSITION INTO THE BOOM TIME
In her thorough and insightful analysis of Hollywood remakes of French films,
Lucy Mazdon notes a serious decline in such films between 1950 and 1980, following a
cycle of inter-French-Hollywood remake production between 1930 and 1950.
28
She
argues that the vertical integration and high demand for film product necessitated by
theatrical double bills generated the initial cycle, and that following the decline in public
demand for cinema as well as the growth of independent production in the US following
the Paramount Decision led to the general decline in transnational remakes.
29
Indeed,
there is an observable numerical decline in not only French-Hollywood remakes during
243
this time, but in European-Hollywood remake exchanges as well – France being the
greatest cinematic producer in Europe and similarly providing the sources for the greatest
number of Hollywood remakes of European films.
Nevertheless, one numerically small but culturally significant cycle of
transnational remakes occurred during this same period, which implicates the changing
conditions of cinema in the US and Europe at the time. Specifically, and perhaps
counter-intuitively, Hollywood transformed various types of European films into big-
budget, blockbuster musicals. The most noteworthy examples include My Fair Lady
(1964), a musical version of the film Pygmalion (1938), itself derived from the play by
George Bernard Shaw inspired by the Greek myth, The Sound of Music (1965), a musical
taken from the same literary source material as the German Heimat film Die Trapp-
Familie (The Trapp Family, 1956), and, most strangely, Sweet Charity (1969), a musical
remake of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). To call these films remakes, of
course, challenges certain assumptions of the category, as all three musical films derived
from successful musical stage productions. Nevertheless, all three stage productions,
which were successful enough to prompt film adaptations, were taken from European
cinematic sources to a significant degree.
This mini-cycle implicates the changing conditions of cinema in Europe and
Hollywood during the “post-classical,” pre-New Hollywood period. Specifically, the late
1950s and 1960s were the heyday of the European art cinema and its successful
penetration of US markets, particularly in the then-substantial art-house and college
campus theatrical circuit. At the same time, this was the moment of lavish, big-budget
244
spectacle films as a business/aesthetic strategy aimed at contending with the greatly
diminishing general audiences for Hollywood films, particularly in lieu of the saturation
of television throughout the US. The remaking of European art films into blockbuster
musicals may still appear somewhat surprising or idiosyncratic, “oddball,” but it
conforms to the dominant forms of cinema at the time and it stands as the most coherent
form of remake exchange before the 1980s “boom.”
In terms of transformations and intertextual relations, the films reveal interesting
cultural issues and themes. Pygmalion, in particular, had a circuitous transnational
trajectory before becoming a film. As detailed by Peter Conolly-Smith, Shaw originally
wrote the play in England and in English in 1912. He then commissioned a translation
into German in 1913, and decided to have it premiere in Vienna, in German, in October
1913. The play was a success in Vienna and was subsequently in Berlin and, eventually,
on the New York German immigrant stage, making the play’s premier in German. After
much publicity, the play opened in London in April 1914, its first-ever English-language
performance, to great success, and later that year premiered in the USA, in English now,
to equal acclaim.
30
The 1938 film version, on the other hand, has been linked
thematically to the distinctively “American” genre of “Remarriage Comedies” theorized
by Stanley Cavell.
31
With its theme of the construction of “the woman,” by a man,
through language, the film lends itself to a musical adaptation, as the characters construct
themselves so singularly through the voice. As a transnational and inter-generic dialogic
shift, then, the transformation of Pygmalion into My Fair Lady bears a certain continuity.
245
Sweet Charity, on the other hand, appears quite strange within this matrix. A
picaresque tale of a down-and-out prostitute living in a shack on the outskirts of Rome,
the film demonstrates the wayward narrative of social outsiders typical of Fellini and of
European auteur cinema of the time; seemingly not the material of escapist Hollywood in
the 1960s. But, Bob Fosse turned this into the 1966 stage production, emphasizing the
young woman’s search for true love and exploiting the sexual charge of the earlier film
by placing her within a dance hall where female bodies could be displayed in detail. The
subsequent film version was Fosse’s film directorial debut, and intersperses song-and-
dance routines shot on-location in New York City with numbers on highly stylized
soundstages. Exchanging an auteur-inflected realism for a Broadway/Hollywood auteur
formalism, the transformation of Nights of Cabiria into Sweet Charity reflects dominant
stylistic trends in both cultural zones. More interestingly, perhaps, both these remakes as
well as Pygmalion and My Fair Lady reveal a transatlantic treatment of gender relations
that center upon the status of “the woman” as a possible male construction and as a social
subject. The transformations within and across these films thus suggests that femininity
operated as a vital site of the constructions of larger cultural identities in both Europe and
the USA during this period, and that in fact the transforming relations among these
cultural zones found its most precise articulation through transforming and/or wandering
female figures. This set a certain precedent, and punctuates a number of transnational
remakes in the more recent period as well.

BOOM TIME (BOOM/TIME)
246
As a critical category, transnational film remakes have been overwhelmingly
defined by the rapid and prolific cycle of Hollywood remake of French films beginning in
the late 1970s and lasting until the early 1990s – although similar remakes occur up until
the present moment. Indeed, the scholarly discourse about transnational remakes,
including the work of Lucy Mazdon, Carolyn Durham, and others, predominantly
conforms to the statistically observable boom in Hollywood remakes of French films.
Following a thorough analysis of the relations between Wages of Fear (1955) and
Sorcerer (1977), Mazdon states, “the release of Sorcerer in 1977 signals the remake
boom of the 1980s.”
32
This is interesting, given how badly Sorcerer did at the US box
office, suggesting that this amazingly productive and lucrative remake cycle began with a
mistake, a missed chance, and a failure rather than success. In any case, Mazdon,
Durham, and others have discussed this cycle in extensive detail, and until recently,
Hollywood remakes of French films have been the primary form of the category.
In fact, this is true to the extent that such films have come to stand in for the
category of transnational remakes in general, inaccurately skewing the category in three
discernable ways. First, this cycle and the attention paid to it has made transnational film
remakes appear as a contemporary phenomenon. Second, this cycle has privileged inter-
European-Hollywood over intra-European transnational remakes, inter-Asian-Hollywood
transnational remakes, intra-Asian transnational remakes, as well as Eurasian
transnational remakes. Third, it has privileged France above all other European nations
in the Eur-Am transnational film remake circuit. Without intending to provide a
comprehensive corrective to these issues, several broad trends deserve discussion and
247
several specific films help complicate the picture that has been presented. The most
immediate adjustment relates to the historical trajectory of French-Hollywood remake
exchanges, and tracing a particular historical legacy will implicate the malleability of the
historiography of this exchange.
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) occurred squarely within the larger trend of
Hollywood-French remakes of the 1980s, one of the many French comedies remade by
Hollywood during this period, which along with high-concept action films and neo-noir
thrillers make up much of the French-Hollywood remake exchange. The film derives
from a film from 1932, Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. Although many
Hollywood remakes occurring during this period derived from films made only a short
time before, a good number came from older sources; in terms of historical reach, Down
and Out in Beverly Hills has the longest interval between source and remake of any film
in this cycle, and one of the greatest in all of transnational remakes.
Somewhat resembling the social concerns of La Chienne, Boudu presents an overt
if compromised critique of inter-war, Depression-era, Parisian class stratifications.
Unlike La Chienne, this film operates through the generic guise of a sex farce. As with
La Chienne, the social conditions surrounding the film make its interest in class
differences resonant, particularly as the Great Depression had hit France with particular
force by the time of the film’s production and release in 1932. Alternatively, Down and
Out in Beverly Hills attempts to reconcile the postmodern pastel gloss of 1980s Los
Angeles with genuine social tensions. Specifically, the film strains to intersect with the
contemporaneous, hot-topic discourse about “homelessness” in the US during the mid-
248
1980s, which for instance reached its highly ambivalent and contradictory height of
public awareness (and complaisance) with the failed “Hands Across America” event in
May 1986. (Down and Out in Beverly Hills was released in theaters earlier that year).
Both Boudu and Down and Out use a vagrant character as an interloper within the
relatively stable domestic existence of an upper-class family. However, whereas in the
earlier film he is merely a disruptive force that temporarily unsettles the household, in the
remake he is a seemingly magical creature who brings spiritual, emotional, and even
sexual fulfillment to all those in the household. In this way these remake reflects the
ongoing attempt within cinema to contend with class differences, but in ways that are not
only transnationally inflected but also historically generated. In 1930s France, that is,
class differences could be ameliorated, however inadequately,
33
through sex farce, while
in 1980s Hollywood, class differences are so outside of the conception of daily life that
they become magical.
However, the French-Hollywood remake pair that most directly complicates
issues of history, historiography, and the ability for the cinema to measure its own history
is La Jetée (1962) and 12 Monkeys (1995). Although this paring indicates one possibility
within the French-Hollywood remake exchange, from a formally experimental art film to
a big-budget, high-concept, sci-fi action spectacle, this same pairing neglects the more
complicated intertextual histories of these texts. First, this pairing overlooks an earlier
remake of La Jetée, James Cameron’s high-concept, sci-fi action spectacle The
Terminator, from 1984. Although this film does not acknowledge Chris Marker’s film as
a source, and although it transforms the narrative so sufficiently that one might be hard
249
pressed to call it a remake, the film draws upon the plot and themes of Le Jetée in direct
ways and occurs amidst the rising boom of Hollywood remakes of French films. In fact,
it seems that only because the film does depart from the original that The Terminator is
generally overlooked as an important film in this cycle. Moreover, the entire paradigm
for transforming La Jetée into a Twelve Monkeys is present in The Terminator, as a high-
tech, visceral, and psychologically daring blockbuster.
But if the remaking of La Jetée as Twelve Monkeys has inaccurately skewed
understandings of the film’s textual dissemination into the future and into Hollywood,
then the earlier film’s historical sources are been equally obscure. What is a film remake
if not the attempt to bring the past of cinema into the present, transformed in the process,
by the process, and more often than not, as the process? Remakes challenge simplistic
historiographies of cinema and the practice of writing history through cinematic images.
As a meditation on time, images, film, death, history, and the future, La Jetée elucidates
these issues in a privileged way. The film is quite overtly about the cinema itself, about
its confusing temporalities, about the relations between photographic images and death,
about cinematic animation as a simulation of life, and about desire as the propellant force
behind life, death, narrative, and cinema spectatorship. Told entirely in still frames, save
an image of woman opening her eyes, the film reflects upon the relations between
photographic stillness and death, cinematic animation and life. Such analogies have been
persistent in analyses of both media; a recent and notable example is Laura Mulvey’s
book Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.
34
La Jetée is not just a work
that raises these issues, in many ways it functions as a theoretical meditation in its own
250
right. Indeed, the use of still frames, cut pointedly with a very specific image of
movement, contemplates the historical relations of photography, death, cinema, and life.
One of the works that La Jetée “remakes” is a photograph from the very
beginnings of that cultural form. As has been well noted, photography was “invented,”
independently and nearly simultaneously, by a number of different individuals, in a
number of different countries, using a number of different techniques.
35
Hippolyte
Bayard was one of these individuals. In 1839, he began exhibiting images he had
produced by exposing chemically treated paper to light via a camera obscura.
36
The
results were a kind of direct-positive photography that resembled drawing in their
gradations of light values and textural consistency. Unfortunately for Bayard, Louis
Daguerre had already revealed the results of his photographic process to the Institut de
France, and had received official widespread institutional support.
In protest to the lack of support for his invention, Bayard made the set of
photographs. The photographs are all titled Le Noyé, translated literally as “the
drowned,” or Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man. They are of the same subject and are of
nearly identical formal compositions. Le Noyé shows Hippolyte Bayard slumped on a
bench in the center of the frame, turned slightly to the viewer’s left. He is bare-chested,
with a large cloth draped at his waist. His eyes are closed. To the left, there is a large
straw hat hung on the wall, facing the lens top-forward. To the right there is a small
porcelain vase. Below that, there is a small plaster statue of a female figure.
Any reading of the image is guided by the hand-written text that Bayard included
on the back of the photograph. It reads as follows:
251
The corpse you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that
you have just seen, or the marvelous results of which you are soon going
to see. To my knowledge this ingenious indefatigable researcher has been
working for about three years to perfect his invention.

The Academy, the King and all those who have seen his pictures, that he
himself found imperfect, have admired them as you do at this moment.
This has brought him much honour but has not yielded him a single
farthing. The government, having given too much to M. Daguerre, said it
could do nothing for M. Bayard and the unhappy man drowned himself.
Oh! The fickleness of human affairs! Artists, scholars, journalists were
occupied with him for a long time, but here he has been at the morgue for
several days and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and
Gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of
smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are
beginning to decay.

H.B. 18 October 1840

The viewer is instructed to read the subject of the photograph as dead, not
sleeping nor merely caught in a moment with eyes shut. The photograph explicitly
designates death as its primary subject; it is truly the eidos of the image.
37
However, the
importance of this reading requires its consideration in relation to several other
determinants. Uniquely prolific and aesthetically adventurous among his peers, Bayard
participated in multiple photographic genres, including portraits, landscapes, journalism,
still-lives, etc.
38
In this way Bayard can be viewed as participating not just in the
invention of the technical process of photography, but equally in investigating
photography’s means of constructing meaning through various specific uses and
practices.
In his reading of Le Noyé, Geoffrey Batchen follows Michal Sapir by comparing
Bayard’s physical position within the photograph to the composition of Jacques-Louis
David’s painting Death of Marat.
39
Batchen claims this reveals Bayard’s desire to
252
partake, via photography, in a greater artistic tradition of martyrdom and death. Batchen
also provides readings of the objects that share the space with Bayard’s “corpse.” He
connects the small statuette to Bayard’s other photographs that regularly used such
figurines. Batchen first says these were used to recall previous artistic traditions in the
hopes of legitimizing the artistic use of photography. In one photo, Batchen claims that
Bayard incorporates the statuettes with his own presence in order to register his physical
form as “a thing among things.”
40
One of the figurines in this photo is of Antonius, a boy
from Roman legend who drowned himself to magically extend the life of his lover.
Batchen reads the hat as metaphor for the camera lens. Frontally positioned, graphically
echoing the concentric circles of the aperture, the hat signals that this image stands at the
center of the photographic practice.
Similarly, Le Noyé can be read as an argument as to the foundation of the medium
of photography as a result of the text included on its reverse side. It is an overt plea for
legitimization. In this way, the text and the image position Le Noyé as the exemplary
model by which all viewers might judge the importance of Bayard’s work. However, this
appeal is inextricably conflated with the issue of the photographer/subject’s death.
Bayard equates photography with death, as in his text he uses one to explicate the other.
Of course, Le Noyé articulates this equation in ambiguous terms. As has been noted by
Michal Sapir, the relationship between the photograph and its accompanying test is
paradoxical in nature.
41
It presents an impossible set of relationships between
photographer, subject, time, and space. The physical impossibility of the photograph, of
taking one’s photograph after one’s death, bears not only on the kind of transformation in
253
conceptions of time aroused by photography, but also on the possibility to create fictions
out of photography’s displacements of time, space, and identity.
La Jetée overtly contends with these issues and themes. The narrative begins with
a boy, who is never named, at the jetty of the airport at Orly. The boy is transfixed by the
face of a particular woman there. Suddenly, there is a commotion and he sees a man die.
Following a nuclear holocaust, the boy and all the survivors live underground. Much
later, when the protagonist is a man, he is recruited by scientists to be sent back in time.
He is chosen for this job because of his unique ability to fixate upon images from the
past. During the course of many experiments, the traveler is sent many times into the
past, nearly always interacting with the woman he had seen as a child on the jetty. They
fall in love. Then, upon the regular success of their experiments, the scientists send the
traveler into the future in order to secure the help of those who live there. The traveler
receives an inexhaustible energy supply with which mankind might rebuild itself. Once
this is completed, the traveler realizes that he is now expendable, and that the scientists
intend to eliminate him. However, those of the future return to tell him that they too can
travel in time, and offer to let him live in the future with them. He refuses this, asking
instead to be sent back into the past so that he may be with the woman. They send him,
and he is back at the jetty at Orly. He sees the woman and rushes toward her. But one of
the scientists is there to kill him. As he is shot dead, the traveler realizes that his boyhood
self must be also there, witnessing his death. He is the man he had seen killed as a child.
La Jetée represents a self-conscious meditation on the powers of both
photography and film. The film’s most notable formal feature is its nearly exclusive use
254
of still images. As it cuts and dissolves from one immobile image to another, the film
openly declares its technical basis in photography. Similarly, the non-diegetic narration
regularly calls attention to the medium, however indirectly or by way of analogy. In his
first attempts to travel into the past, the traveler has difficulty existing fully within past
moments. As the narration informs us that the traveler sometimes receives only indistinct
impressions of the past, the film depicts a foggy landscape that appears to not have been
fully chemically developed. Later, when describing the ephemeral relationship of the
traveler and the woman, the narration says, “time builds itself painlessly around them.
Their only landmarks are the flavors of the moment they are living and the markings on
the wall.” This signals the characters’ momentary existence as projected photographs on
the movie screen.
Further, the narrative of the film can be read as a metaphor for the act of
regarding photographs. The entire motivation behind the film, stated at the start, is to
follow a man who is obsessed with “images of the past,” a rough but accurate description
of photographs in general. As the traveler journeys through time, into the past, he lives
(and dies) within the images thereof. He is able to do this because of his unique ability to
fixate upon them, that is to say, to immobilize and inhabit them. To travel back in time,
in La Jetée, is to view the past presently, as one would in a photograph. In this way, one
can see that the traveler’s voyage is not only through time, but also through photography.
As a self-conscious examination of film and photography, La Jetée also shows
signs of consciously examining the historical development of photography as well as
previous works that have engaged in similar examinations, including Le Noyé.
255
Graphically, La Jetée adjoins itself to Le Noyé through the incorporation of statues and
plaster figurines. In the film, several shots of statues are inter-cut with images of men
who had previously gone mad because of the time-travel experiments. The men’s
immobility, combined with the high-contrast lighting, makes them appear as statue-like
as any stone or plaster. Later, as the traveler first approaches the lab where the time-
travel experiments are to take place, he looks down and to the left. In the reverse shot,
there is a small plaster figurine of a boy carrying a musical instrument, clearly
reminiscent in composition and lighting to Bayard’s various depictions of similar plaster
figurines. Later still, just after the traveler has encountered the woman for the first time,
the film plays out a montage of several images of broken statues. La Jetée’s comparison
of photographic images of the human with lifeless statues, so similar to Bayard’s
comparison one hundred years earlier, is fully realized as the traveler returns from his
first voyage into the past. At the end of the statue-montage, a close-up image of the head
of a statue of a man slowly dissolved into a close-up of the traveler, exactly filling the
space vacated by the statue in a graphic match. Here too is the photographically rendered
human merely a “thing among things.”
Le Noyé and La Jetée may also be considered to be working within the same
thematic universe. Both works equate the immobility of still photography with death, as
they both articulate the possibility that still photography cannot distinguish the real from
the living. In La Jetée, during one of his journeys back in time, the traveler encounters
the woman lying against a gate at a park. Her eyes are closed and her face is titled up
toward the sun. The narration tells us that the traveler is confused as to whether she is
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alive or dead. As the view of the audience is aligned with that of the traveler, we see that
her immobility permits the possibility that she is in fact dead. Similarly, when later the
couple tours “the museum of timeless animals,” their still physical forms are compared
with the dead and stuffed animals around them. One can see that, in stillness, the life of
both the dead animals as well as the living couple has to be implied through poses of
halted movement.
Both works also use a combination of language and still images to create
moebius-strip narratives of time travel. In this endeavor, they compare the displacement
of time, space, and identity that occurs in photography with the annihilation of the
subject. That is to say, in their respective narratives, Le Noyé and La Jetée position the
photographic apparatus as the means by which one may regard his own demise. Death is
their common subject, as death is their conclusion. However, if Le Noyé posits that
through still photography we are bound in death to our misfortunes, then La Jetée make
the beautiful promise that in cinema we may relive our mistakes endlessly.
Such themes and issues become ensnarled by the somewhat disparate commercial
and ideological imperatives of Hollywood in the era of postmodernity, through the
transformation of these texts into The Terminator and Twelve Monkeys. If Le Noyé
presents an implicit time travel narrative in which a man may view his own demise
through photography, and if La Jetée compounds this narrative by placing a lost female at
its center, then The Terminator corrals this myth into an unavoidable future of nuclear
destruction and of eternal war between man and machine. More psychoanalytically, The
Terminator does not tell the story of a man lured into the past to retrieve a lost object of
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desire, but rather presents a fantasy of someone who is able to choose his own parents
and simultaneously fulfills his Oedipal wish to destroy one’s father. By the time La Jetée
was formally remade as Twelve Monkeys, with a purchase of remake rights and the
consent of director Chris Marker, the labyrinthine intertextual/intermedial web of
inspiration and resonance was almost entirely elided. Instead, the film demonstrates the
directorial flair of Terry Gilliam and his obsessive emphasis on quirky characters and
steampunk aesthetics.
These alternative trajectories within the Hollywood-French remake cycle of the
1980s and 1990s do not refute the histories of the cycle that exist. It is true that a many
of the films from this period were farcical comedies, propelled by the immense
commercial success of Three Men and a Baby (1987). Many others were sexual thrillers,
such as Diabolique (1996) or Unfaithful (2002), films that took their dramatic tensions
from the comparatively more liberal treatments of sexuality and infidelity seen in the
French national cinematic context. Action films, such as Point of No Return (1992) or
True Lies (1993), or prestige, auteur-based pictures such as The Good Thief (2003, a
remake of Bob Le Flambeur from 1955), are also prevalent in this cycle. Instead of
refuting or entirely rewriting this cycle, or its immense importance to transnational
remakes between Hollywood and Europe in general, the case of Le Noyé, La Jetée, The
Terminator, and Twelve Monkeys rather demonstrates the complex intertextual web that
underpins the category of transnational film remakes. These set of texts do not just occur
within this cycle, but overtly dramatize and configure the apparent issues, tensions, and
paradoxes of the category of Eur-Am transnational remakes. They demonstrate the rise
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and demise of the heroic artist at the center of an aesthetic practice with technologies of
photographic reproduction. Individually and in their intertextual relations, these texts
configure non-linear, erratic, seemingly contradictory temporalities of the image and its
modes of reproduction and recycling. To me, these artistic renderings more adequately
demonstrate the immensely problematic history of French-Hollywood transnational film
remakes, which reach into the depths of time to at least a moment of confused yet
inspired multiple origination. The commonplace hierarchical divisions between French
films, supplanting in many respects European films more generally, and their Hollywood
remakes, around issues of artistic originality, aesthetic brilliance, auteurial signature,
cultural significance, and commercial competition, are embedded in these deep origins,
and manifested in even the seemingly least likely of examples.

NEW GERMAN HOLLYWOOD
Although not as numerous or as commercially impactful, the remake exchange
between Germany and Hollywood in the post-WWII period provides one interesting
example of Eur-Am transnational remakes that differs in several important respects from
the French-Hollywood exchange. Some of the most notable titles include Ali: Fear Eats
the Soul (1974), Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s unofficial but overt remake of Douglas
Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955), Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu (1979), City
of Angels (1997) which relocates the narrative of Wings of Desire (1988) from a cold-war
divided Berlin to a contemporary Los Angeles, and Jakob the Liar (1999), a remake of
Jacob the Liar (1975). Each of these cases demonstrates some issues particular to
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German-Hollywood exchanges, as well as demonstrating larger issues around Eur-Am
film remakes. Specifically, these films resonate strongly with three issues that punctuate
film remakes in the contemporary period more generally. First, they raise the issue of
“postmodernism” and, in certain accounts, its attendant predilection for recycling and
copying. In addition, as an extension of postmodernism, the New German-Hollywood
remakes demonstrate the tensions between parody, pastiche, and homage. Further still,
some of these films raise the issue of cosmopolitanism as a certain mode of urban or
transnational experience, which can have both alienating and liberating valences, and
although not new to the contemporary period, nevertheless characterizes certain dominant
forms of experience of postmodernity.
For better or worse, Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism has become the
most recognized of all theorizations of the “condition.” He was not the first or last to
propose the term or define its characteristics, nor has his writing gone uncontested.
Central to his characterization of the aesthetic possibilities and tendencies of the
contemporary moment, defined by global interconnection and “late capitalism,” is the
tendency for recycling, remaking, and copying that, although occurring in the past, is
definitive of the present and which has lost its critical edge or philosophical weight. For
Jameson, the cinema is a privileged site or this shift, and the film remake – or some
version of the film remake – is even more pressured. Describing something like the
“nostalgia film,” Jameson cites Brian De Palma, among others, as recycling films and
film styles in the “dead language” of pastiche.
42
There is a certain totalization in this
formulation, which not only elides historical precedents but the range of possibilities in
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the present. Indeed, in her refutation of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, Anne
Friedberg similarly uses the film remake as a highly pressured object of analysis. She
looks back to the very beginnings and early practices of cinema, and cinematic remaking,
to show that, first, the film remake is not historically new and thus does not signify
anything particular to the postmodern period and, second, that the very logic of copying
and recycling that Jameson proposes is distinct to postmodern aesthetics is in fact
ingrained in the very machinery of cinema.
43
Similar deductions could be drawn from
Part II of this dissertation.
So, if the remake is not a unique artistic tendency within postmodernism, then
perhaps a more particular form of recycling is, such as with Jameson’s claim that pastiche
has displaced parody in the contemporary period.
44
He mentions the film Body Heat
(1981) as an important case. However, Marsha Kinder has shown that, particularly in the
case of the New German Cinema, parody is alive and well, when considered as a
historically durable rhetorical stance in German cultural production. Specifically, she
cites Linda Hutcheon’s definition, “a repetition with a difference…whose pragmatic
ethos can range from scornful ridicule to reverential homage.”
45
Kinder details in
particular how Wim Wenders’ film The State of Things (1982) ideologically parodies The
Searchers (1956), how Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Desire of Veronika Voss (1982)
parodies Sunset Boulevard (1950), and how Helma Sanders-Brahms’ film Germany Pale
Mother (1980) parodies multiple texts in multiple media from both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet Kinder acknowledges that she is “foregrounding the classical Hollywood texts [these
films] rewrite, making them far more visible than they would otherwise appear in another
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kind of reading.”
46
In this way, Kinder situates the German films not so much as
“remakes,” yet her analysis reveals clear and deep intertextual relations among the films
that undermine the ideological suppositions of the Hollywood “originals.” These films
demonstrate that Hollywood texts “can be rewritten and revitalized to show how the
inscription of patriarchal capitalism constructs subjectivity in individual characters,
filmmakers, and spectators.”
47

This kind of parodic engagement with classical Hollywood also occurs in
important New German transnational remakes, specifically in Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats
the Soul and Herzog’s Nosferatu. With Ali, Fassbinder engages in one of his most direct
engagements with Hollywood and more specifically with the Hollywood melodramas of
German émigré Douglas Sirk. As Kinder has pointed out in another context, Sirk first
mobilized melodramatic structures in Nazi Germany,
48
and would go on to develop this
mode in 1950s Hollywood. For his part, Fassbinder came to realize the ideological and
aesthetic power of melodrama and Sirk’s films in particular after viewing six Sirk films at
a festival, an experience that prompted him to write a glowing piece of criticism about
Sirk. Thus, Ali is an overt remake of Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955), and in this
remaking parodies the earlier film toward a critique of contemporaneous German culture
and its fascist legacy. Whereas All that Heaven Allows details the troubled romance of an
older, bourgeois widow with a young, working-class man, played by Rock Hudson, Ali
details the romance between a significantly older working-class German woman and a
lumpenproletariat Moroccan immigrant. The tensions between age and class in the
original film here become at once exaggerated, coinciding with an interest in outsider
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characters typical of the New German Cinema, and are compounded by the
representation of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in a post-War Germany that is
increasingly subject to transnational flows of peoples and capital. The intensity of the
love between this couple contrasts starkly with the drab surroundings in which they live;
in one scene of material pleasure, the couple goes to a fine restaurant, but the pleasure of
this is ruptured when the woman says that this was a place frequented by Nazi officials.
As the earlier film provides an excess of visual splendor in the mise-en-scène as an
expressionistic reflection of the surging feminine desire in the film, Fassbinder depicts a
love of and for the downtrodden, one that crosses ethnic divides and undermines the
supposed homogeneity seen in Nazi ideology and in All that Heaven Allows.
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s
expressionist vampire classic, works ambivalently between parody and homage. Further,
the film complicates the notion of the transnational film remake, especially as it functions
in the contemporaneous period. On the one hand, this film pays slavish detail to much of
the imagery and iconography of the earlier film; the make-up of Klaus Kinski is
particularly striking in relation to that of Max Schreck. Herzog also exaggerates certain
elements in keeping with his own auteurial imperatives, such as with the obsessive
detailing of “creatures of the night,” including small animals, rodents, and insects, that he
depicts with pseudo-documentary detail. Yet the deliberate and nearly translucent
performances seen in the film implicitly comment on the mystification of the German
population under the Nazi regime, Herzog drawing a parallel between the hypnotic power
of the vampire with the hypnotic power of the German cultural industry on the eve of the
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rise of Nazism. The end of the remake even more directly creates an ambivalent relation
with the original, as the Jonathan Harker character turns into a vampire and rides off,
implying that he carries the pestilence of vampirism with him and that, in fact, it will be
eternally durable.
As a production, the film may appear at first to be a purely “national” remake
rather than transnational, as it is a “German” remake of a German film. In fact, Herzog’s
film is at least two films; it was produced simultaneously in English-language and
German-language versions, replicating the MLV method of production developed in the
late 1920s and early 1930s. Herzog’s film is thus not only a remake of Murnau’s, but
also a multiplicity of texts in its production. As with MLVs in general, the simultaneous
production in different languages aims at securing audiences in divergent lingual and
cultural markets. In this case, Herzog’s English-language version of the film aimed
squarely at the art-house circuit in the US and UK, where the director had already
garnered a secure audience and widespread critical acclaim. Indeed, his reputation was
so good during the late 1970s that he was able to secure distribution rights for the film(s)
in advance through 20
th
Century Fox. As an aesthetic and industrial hybrid, then, this
remake does not just intend to draw upon and possibly transform the history of German
cinema, but it also remakes the potential for transnational cinematic traffic between
Germany, Europe, and Hollywood in the late 1970s.
Of course, these cases occur in the context of Hollywood remakes of German
films that obey a more stereotypical logic of transnational remaking, that is, of cynical
commercial exploitation and artistic degradation. A somewhat ambivalent but ultimately
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“heart warming” story set in a concentration camp starring Robin Williams, Jakob the
Liar, for instance, clearly intended to cash in on the critical and commercial success of
Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), which had won the Oscar for best Foreign-
Language Picture. More recent is No Reservations (2007), a tepid romantic comedy that
remade the tender German film Mostly Martha (2001).
However, perhaps the most notable Hollywood remake of a German film is City
of Angels, which remade Wim Wender’s art-house masterpiece Wings of Desire. In this
case, what had been a profound philosophical meditation on love, eternity, and
contemporary urban existence in a Berlin divided by the lingering cold war became an
emotionally overwrought and stylistically exaggerated Hollywood melodrama. Beyond
the remake’s artistic failure, however, a comparison between the two films reveals
divergent contentions with transnational cosmopolitanism, one of the salient and
distinguishing features of transnational film remakes in the contemporary period,
particularly as they differ from those in earlier periods.
This issue relates strongly to the issue of postmodernism and postmodernity
mentioned earlier as well. In fact, Wings of Desire holds a privileged place in David
Harvey’s characterization of postmodernity, which for him is primarily an historical era
predicated upon economic structures, yet which has experiential and cultural
manifestations. For Harvey, Wings of Desire conveys a compelling representation of the
kind of disembodied, liberated, but dislocated experience typical of the contemporary
period of transnational economic flows, virtual economies, and the confusions of “time
space compression.”
49
The remake, on the other hand, takes the apparent duality of the
265
localism and cosmopolitanism of the original and relocates this issue to Los Angeles in
the late 1990s. Numerous scenes detail Nicolas Cage, playing the love-struck angel, in
various Los Angeles locales, including from the top of skyscrapers under construction, or
later, on the beach in Malibu. On the one hand, these scenes try to secure the film in a
Los Angeles that is more fixed and local than the anonymous Los Angeles mobilized in
most Hollywood films. On the other hand, this film’s use of the locality bears none of
the social and cultural import that Wings of Desire derived from its space of production, a
city caught in the last moments of the cold war and contending with historical US cultural
presence. That is, the cosmopolitanism of City of Angels effaces the more pressured
forms of disconnection seen in the original film. Its disconnections have no connection at
all, other than as a Hollywood remake of a German film. This variation in modes of
alienation and transnational dislocation at once have certain precedents in Eur-Am
transnational remakes, such as with Pepe le Moko and Algiers, and will be seen in even
greater detail in the films Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky.

BRITISH INCURSIONS
The cultural and cinematic interconnections between England and the US are
extremely complex, but several things appear particularly striking. First, unlike other
Eur-Am transnational remakes, those between the US and the UK are distinct for sharing
a common language, thereby emphasizing even more precisely any possible cultural
differences. Second, this cycle appears slightly delayed but nearly as extensive as the
French-Hollywood cycle of the 1980s, yet they receive much less attention. Thus, this
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cycle coordinates with particular generic patterns, commercial cycles, and aesthetic
conventions. Finally, and most culturally significant perhaps, these films tend to
highlight issues of masculinity, particularly as in a state of tension or crisis, and also tend
to transform issues of class difference in the British context for issues of ethnic diversity
in the American context.
Looking beyond issues of genre or cultural differences for the moment, it is
striking that a significant number of Hollywood remakes of British films are taken from
originals that star Michael Caine, from his very productive period from the mid-1960s to
the early 1970s. These films are generally mod melodramas or crime films, including
Aflie (1966), remade as Alfie (2004), The Italian Job (1969), remade as The Italian Job
(2003), and Get Carter (1971), remade as Get Carter (2000). It is worth noting the role
of the star in this cycle of remakes, which indicates how cycles of production can focalize
around a particular figure and that these cycles become coherent sites for reproduction,
and perhaps are made even more coherent in this process of remaking. (An inversion of
this would be the career of Richard Gere, who has starred in an astounding number of
Hollywood transnational remakes.
The original Alfie details the melancholy and ultimately aimless ennui of a
bachelor as he moves from one romantic exploit to another. The film draws upon
stereotypes of “swinging London” of the 1960s, but also privileges the single, sexually
adventurous man as its entry point into a world of class differences and social constraints.
The point being that Alfie needs to grow up and face the “real world” in order to find real
happiness. As a male melodrama, the film aims to bring the protagonist to some level of
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self-conscious reflection, or perhaps even shame or regret, and it achieves this when Alfie
sees the aborted fetus of a woman he had impregnated on her kitchen floor. Caine’s tears
in this scene conform to the generic convention of melodrama of compelling tears in the
protagonist, as an aria of emotion. The surprisingly similar remake, starring Jude Law,
handles this critical juncture quite differently. Here, Alfie has impregnated the African-
American girlfriend of his African-American best friend. However, his moment of
emotional awareness and crisis arrives when he realizes that he has done this; the woman
had kept her pregnancy a secret form him, and rather than aborting the baby, she chooses
to keep it. Thus, Alfie’s moment of self-realization is when he understands that he has
fathered a child, and that he has ruined his relationship with his best friend in the process.
Thus, his coming into awareness is recognizing his paternity, which vitally is interracial.
Whereas in the original film, Alfie’s sexuality allows him to transect class divisions, here,
sexuality crosses lines of race and ethnicity.
The remakes of Get Carter and the Italian Job present anxieties over masculinity
in two different registers within the idiom of the action/crime film. As Constantine
Verevis has noted, the remake of The Italian Job functions as a “non-remake,” or a
remake that significantly transforms the style, content, and plot, of the source film, taking
only the original title and perhaps the premise.
50
Indeed, the remake relocates the story
of a group of criminals from Europe to Los Angeles, maintaining the chase scenario at
the end, which involves shutting down the traffic lights in a strategic way. Beyond this,
however, the remake is notable for posing the protagonist, played by Mark Wahlberg,
against a fraternal adversary, played by Edward Norton, who had earlier in the film
268
caused the death of their shared mentor, played by Donald Sutherland. Here, the rivalry
among men derives its dramatic force over the revenge over symbolic patricide, and as
the hero wins out through wits and skill, confirms his inheritance of the patron’s power.
Both the original and the remake of Get Carter, on the other hand, present cynical
and rather depraved masculine revenge plots that revolve around the sexual exploitation
of a young woman. In both, Carter is a thug who has been away from his hometown for
some time, but returns for his brother’s funeral. Not leaving well enough alone, Carter
investigates the circumstances of his brother’s death, finding that he’d been killed as a
result of tensions arising from his daughter (Carter’s niece) being used in a pornographic
picture. Whereas the original features a commanding Michael Caine and emphatically
locates itself in the north England industrial town of Newcastle, the remake stars an aging
Sylvester Stallone and is diegetically located in Seattle (although partially filmed in
Vancouver). Interestingly, the original film’s plot of cheap porno films coincided with
the rise in sexploitation cinema, whereas the remake overlaps with the fears about
internet pornography at the turn of the millennium. As for the issue of masculinity in
crisis and redeemed, the original film is remarkable for depicting Caine as a ruthless and
nearly charmless thug who uses violence at every turn, with increasing brutality, on his
search for revenge. The remake, on the other hand, depicts Carter as an emotionally
overwrought but ultimately inexpressive meathead, apparently due to the differential
between Stallone’s acting ambitions and his achievements. Moving from the disaffected
and pessimistic tone that would become endemic of 1970s cinema to a neo-noir of the
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late 1990s, the Get Carter films present masculine crises in their respective national
contexts.
The substitution of class issues for those of race and ethnicity is also clearly
evident in two Hollywood remakes of Alec Guinness comedies, The Ladykillers (1955),
remade in 2004 by the Coen brothers, and Last Holiday (1950), remade in 2006. With
The Ladykillers, what had been a charming, if extremely dark, ensemble comedy became
a quirky and multi-cultural farce. In both films, the ensemble is comprised of a group of
crooks who steal a bunch of money and hide out in an older lady’s house, pretending to
be musicians. In an interesting example of re-regionalization, the earlier film is set in
London, while the remake is set in the Mississippi. Not only does this relocation
coincide with the Coen brothers’ use of the American south in their successful film O
Brother Where Art Thou? (2001), but moreover works within their overall interest in
exploring regional cultural stereotypes in the United States, seen in such films as Raising
Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Fargo (1996), and No Country for Old Men
(2007). Whereas in the original, the team of criminals is comprised of men of a number
of social classes, seen in their taste and knowledge of music as well as their regional
accents, the team in the remake is multi-ethnic but primarily African-American. Tom
Hanks plays the ringleader, figured as an anachronistic southern gentleman, who affects a
strong southern accent of dubious authenticity. There is also a Vietnamese man on the
team, who is used for his specialized ability to dig tunnels, which according to the film,
he developed during the Vietnam War. Similarly, the emphasis on music differs notably
in the two films. Whereas the original had the men posing as a chamber music-type
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ensemble of musicians, the music in the remake fuses gospel and hip-hop. In fact, this
provides one of the most salient moments of tension around the multi-cultural ambitions
of the remake. In the original, the owner of the house is an upper class older Anglo
woman, whereas in the remake it is a middle-aged African-American woman, who at one
point laments the use of the word “nigger” in contemporary hip-hop music. This
protestation, however, reads a bit problematically, considering the way her performance
coincides so neatly with a “sassy Black woman” character, seen recently in the lowbrow
comedies of Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy.
Last Holiday, on the other hand, transposes Alec Guinness’ working-class
character, who upon hearing that he is imminently dying spends all his savings on an
extravagant vacation normally exclusive to the upper classes, for an African-American
salesperson played by Queen Latifah. The original is almost entirely about the
protagonist learning to enjoy the pleasures of high-class leisure, and while the remake
dramatizes the same, the complication of the altered gender and ethnicity of the
protagonist here is notable. For instance, Queen Latifah’s character is almost entirely
surrounded by Caucasian, upper-class hotel patrons on her vacation, with the exception of
a suave African-American senator from her home in New Orleans. Yet this issue is never
directly addressed in the film; it strives to efface ethnic diversity in lieu of class
difference, especially through dramatic tensions around personal honesty, integrity, and
interpersonal romance. Not only does the remake end with Latifah’s character not dying
of any disease, whereas in the original Guinness’ character does, but she also finds
romance with a man, played by fellow hip-hop star LL Cool J. Vitally, whereas Latifah’s
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character educates the elite society about their prejudice, prompting them to morally
redeem themselves in the end, the conclusion of the original film implies that although
Guinness’ character managed to momentarily cross class divisions, the upper classes
eventually return to a self-justifying ideology and insular cultural sphere.
Two other notable possibilities are at work in British-Hollywood transnational
remake exchanges. First, there is a correspondence between the remaking of Fever Pitch
(1997) into Fever Pitch (2005), and that of The Longest Yard (1974) into Mean Machine
(2001). In both cases, organized sports play a central role in, on the one hand, posing an
obstacle to heterosexual romance, and in the other example, in allowing for homosocial
bonding among men. Yet both cases transpose the particular sport to accommodate for
the cultural norms of their respective national contexts; in the original Fever Pitch, the
young man is obsessed with soccer, whereas in the remake he is obsessed with baseball.
The Longest Yard, on the other hand, features an incarcerated football star training his
fellow prisoners in the game, whereas the British remake of this Hollywood film features
an incarcerated soccer player forming intra-penitentiary soccer teams. Although the
particular sport changes in the films’ respective national/regional contexts, both cases
demonstrate that sports provide the means for male bonding, apparently at the expense of
male-female relations.
Lastly, although this dissertation does not contend with television-film remaking
practices, two examples of this bear mentioning. As opposed to the numerous American
network remakes of BBC TV series, such as All in the Family and The Office, two
notable Hollywood features have been adapted from British television miniseries. This is
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an important distinction, as the typical British miniseries generally features complex,
multiple plotted narratives with a high degree of moral questioning. Thus, we find that
The Singing Detective (2003), which was a critical and commercial failure, derived from
the mini-series of the same title from the late 1980s. More successful, however, was the
Steven Soderbergh-directed Traffic (2000), taken from the British mini-series Traffik,
also from the late 1980s. In this latter case, the complex but ultimately conclusive
narrative structure allowed for in the British TV context provided the material for a
feature film with a high degree of narrative complexity. Notably, both the series and the
film remake contend with complex, transnational networks of finance and illicit drug
traffic. Through this conceit, the series and the remake attempt to address local
manifestations of globalization. In both cases, family melodrama serves as the
organizing principle for contending with immense, global social and economic structures,
which combined provide the grist for “quality” television in the UK and prestige pictures
in the US.
Revolving around issues of art, authorship, authenticity, originality, commercial
crassness, and unfair competition, the flow of transnational remakes through Europe has
been a complex affair from the start. More recent examples are not only “privileged
articulations of globalization,” but are even more particularly privileged in their
representation of issues and tensions related to contemporary globalization. First, the
Spanish/European film Abre los Ojos in relation to its Hollywood remake Vanilla Sky
strikingly raises issues of contemporary transnational identities – cinematically,
industrially, and culturally. Second, the works of two Austrian experimental filmmakers,
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Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold both conform to and seriously complicate more
commonplace ideas regarding European transnational film remakes.

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CHAPTER 6 NOTES

1
Francois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, ed. Bill
Nichols, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224-236.

2
Elizabeth Ezra, “Introduction: A Brief History of Cinema in Europe,” in European Cinema, ed. Elizabeth
Ezra, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-2.

3
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Introduction,” in Hollywood & Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity
1945-95, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci, (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 2.

4
Toby Miller, et. al., Global Hollywood, (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 93, 163.

5
Richard Maltby, “Introduction; ‘The Americanisation of the World’,” in Hollywood Abroad: Audiences
and Cultural Exchange, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), 16.

6
Maltby, 5.

7
Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” in Film/Genre, (London: BFI Publishing),
216-226.

8
It is worth mentioning again here that Constantine Verevis provides a model of film remakes based
largely on Rick Altman’s model of film genres. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 84-85.

9
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 74-75.

10
Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 33.

11
Mazdon, 35.

12
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25.

13
Jaikumar, 25.

14
Jaikumar, 107-109.

15
Jaikumar, 109.

16
Leo Braudy, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1972), 85.

17
Christopher Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1986), 18-28.

18
Faulkner, 22.

19
Faulkner, 24-25.

20
Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 106-109.

275

21
Durgnat, 72.

22
Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 370.

23
Joseph Losey, quoted in David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 93.

24
Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey, (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), 56.

25
Caute, 99; de Rham, 58.

26
Caute, 101.

27
Caute, 105-107.

28
Mazdon, 13.

29
Mazdon, 17.

30
Peter Conolly-Smith, “On Adaptations, Translations and Extreme Makeovers: Pygmalion, from Stage to
Screen to My Fair Lady and Beyond,” in Adaptation Theories, ed. Jillian St. Jacques, (Maastricht,
Netherlands: Jan van Eyck Press), forthcoming. My information derives also from Conolly-Smith’s
presentation of this material at the 2006 Literature/Film Association conference in Towson, Maryland, as
well as generous emails from the author.

31
Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, (Harvard University
Press, 1981).

32
Mazdon, 49.

33
Christopher Faulkner follows Raymond Durgnat in asserting that although Boudu addresses class
differences, it does so in ways that are fully acceptable to bourgeois ideological codes of the time, and so
does not offer a sufficient critique of society. Faulkner, 33-41.

34
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

35
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997), 50.

36
Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography, (Milan, Italy: Könemann, 1998), 29.

37
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1981), 15.

38
Batchen, 157.

39
Batchen, 166-167.

40
Batchen, 162.

41
Michal Sapir, “The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man,”
Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 3, (1994): 623-624.
276

42
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 17-18.

43
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 175-176.

44
Jameson, 17.

45
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, (New York and
London: Methuen, 1985), 37; cited in Marsha Kinder, “Ideological Parody in the New German Cinema:
Reading The State of Things, The Desire of Veronika Voss, and Germany Pale Mother as Postmodernist
Rewritings of The Searchers, Sunset Boulevard, and Blonde Venus,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 12,
nos. 1-2 (1990): 73.

46
Marsha Kinder, “Ideological Parody in the New German Cinema,” 74.

47
Kinder, 73.

48
Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 72.

49
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 240, 284.

50
Verevis, 85.
277
CHAPTER 7 – SKY’S THE LIMIT: TRANSNATIONALITY AND IDENTITY IN
ABRE LOS OJOS AND VANILLA SKY

Begin with a nightmare. The opening sequence of the 1997 Spanish film Abre los
Ojos presents a powerful allegory of alienation within the contemporary city. The film’s
protagonist, César, wakes up to the phrase “Abre los ojos” playing on his alarm clock,
examines his handsome face in a mirror,
1
gets dressed, and exits his posh apartment. He
drives through the streets of Madrid and notices that the city is devoid of all other
inhabitants. He exits his car, and in an operatically grand crane shot, runs through the
vacant city. When he wakes again, distressed and breathing quickly, the sequence is
revealed as a nightmare. But what sort of nightmare? The terror of this moment appears
to be of an individual cut off from the culture that produced the material conditions in
which he roams. The film explores the individual, as a psychic subject, in relation to the
material world. As the film jarringly repeats his action of waking up, it affirms how
repetition, variation, conscious, unconscious, and culture work in tandem to inform
subjectivity and constitute identity. In this way, Abre los Ojos declares from the start that
it will investigate the ideological functions of identity, construed as a nightmare that must
be rationalized.
Now, make this a recurrent nightmare. In 2001, Abre los Ojos was faithfully
remade by Hollywood as Vanilla Sky.
2
The opening sequence of this film largely
replicates the opening of Abre and restates many of its questions; it too dramatizes the
ideological construction of the individual in relation to the unconscious and urban
material culture. However, the film relocates the narrative to New York City,
278
dynamically foregrounded as the film’s protagonist, David Aames, steps out of his Ferrari
and runs through a depopulated Times Square. Here, the city is a distinctly commercial
space, seen as the film rapidly inter-cuts images of advertisement billboards and video
screens with images of the agonized protagonist in a techno-music driven, MTV-style
montage. Vanilla Sky thus designates commercial culture as mediating the relation
between the individual and the social world, thereby adding significant semiotic and
ideological layers to the allegory of alienation carried over from Abre los Ojos.
Despite these analogous interrogations of material culture within the construction
of identity, the mere fact of this repetition raises issues regarding the transnational
movement of texts, meanings, and ideological positions in the remake process.
3
Just as
the individual films raise questions of identity, whether physical, psychological, national,
or gendered, their migration from one spatial-temporal context to another similarly
problematizes any singular identity that they might construct. In fact, the economic and
intertextual relationships between Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky reveal a transnational
negotiation of Spanish cinema and national identity, as well as Hollywood and American
national identity, in the contemporary context of increasing globalization. Together they
demonstrate the difficulty of conceiving Spanish identity outside of transnational
capitalism and point to the unstable yet powerful forces of American national identity
within the global culture industry.
This case study deviates from the most common studies of transnational film
remakes, that is, studies of Hollywood remakes of French films.
4
In this respect, I argue
that the example provided by Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky is both eminently
279
representative of contemporary Eur-Am transnational film remakes, and that, at least in
part because of this, these films provide an alternative view of more common tendencies,
that might be overlooked by merely looking at French-Hollywood examples. As
throughout this dissertation, my approach here is multifaceted and interdisciplinary;
aiming in particular to provide an alternative to much of the discussion of transnational
Hollywood remakes within popular criticism, which often relies on a simplistic binary
between national and transnational forces. Many critics who compared Vanilla Sky to
Abre los Ojos lamented the recent proliferation of Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films
and relied upon nationalist discourses of quality, artistry, originality, and cultural
specificity.
5
For instance, the title of Kenneth Turan’s review in the Los Angeles Times
read: “From Paella to Pot Roast: ‘Vanilla Sky,’ the remake by Cameron Crowe of a 1997
Spanish Film, is Smooth and Professional, But Something is Off in His Translation’s
Recipe.”
6
Like many similar reviews, Turan’s essay assumes a static hierarchy of critical
taste that threatens to nationalize and thereby simplify the transnational relations of these
texts by conflating artistic evaluations with fixed cultural identities.
7
In fact, the
transnational relations between these two films are more mobile and complex.
Although the context for the two films is distinctly transnational, their
interrelation coincides with changes in national economic, political, and cinematic
conditions; specifically within Spain in regard to Abre los Ojos and the United States in
regard to Vanilla Sky. As Santos Juliá argues, the political context in Spain leading up to
the production and distribution of Abre los Ojos can be largely defined by the
stabilization of democracy and democratic values.
8
During this period, Spain “opened its
280
market to the international world and had become fully integrated, culturally and
politically, into the European Union,”
9
indicating a new macro-regional economic and
cultural existence for the nation.
10
The modernization of infrastructure, urbanization, and
liberalization of capital market worked in unison with Spain’s increasing international
significance, as seen in the 1992 World Expo in Sevilla and the 1992 Summer Olympics
in Barcelona. By promoting Barcelona as the new cultural capital of Europe, Spain’s
national identity was repositioned within a transnational frame. As would be expected,
Spanish cinema played a significant role in configuring the international perception of the
nation, seen most prominently in the popularity of the films of Pedro Almodóvar.
However, Spain witnessed the influx of a new wave of young, “post-Almodóvar”
directors during the 1990s, among whom Abre los Ojos director Alejandro Amenábar
was an important figure.
11
His presence on the international film market has continued to
increase and his film Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside) won the 2004 Oscar for best foreign-
language film. Prompted in part by changes in Spanish state funding for film production,
which replaced a system of advance subsidies with “subsidies geared to the commercial
results of films,”
12
these young directors made diverse genre-driven films geared toward
popular and commercial appeal.
13
In these respects, the political and economic contexts
in contemporary Spain indicate the nation’s increasing interconnectedness to the global
forces that drive the rest of the world.
As noted in Part I, the forces of globalization have also conditioned the economic
situation for the United States and cinematic context for Hollywood, although very
differently than in Spain. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the United States held a
281
privileged role in the world economy and nearly-unchecked political hegemony as a
result of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Facilitated by
new international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the US gained a
stronghold on the expansion and consolidation of select multinational corporations during
this period. As the cultural embodiment of the United States’ role in the transnational
management of capital and division of labor, Hollywood benefited from and responded to
globalization in distinct ways. Specifically, Hollywood expanded horizontally to secure
international markets and gained unprecedented amounts of international financing, most
notably in the form of multinational corporate mergers, in order to maintain its
managerial dominance in the global culture industry.
14
This has led some scholars to view
Hollywood as a fundamentally global phenomenon, and particularly note that its
“hegemony is built upon and sustained by the…exploitation of a global division of
labor”
15
through numerous economic and legal apparatuses.
16
This argument undermines
claims by Hollywood marketers and apologists that its films maintain global appeal
through universal narratives and the expression of American populist values.
17
The
transformation of Abre los Ojos into Vanilla Sky demonstrates that Hollywood’s
transnational dominance relies on strategic exercises in power and not necessarily
narrative transparency. In these respects, the United States and Hollywood developed
new forms of transnational interconnectedness under globalization, specifically, a
strategically secured and maintained dominance over the means of cultural production.
By examining the economic contexts in which Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky
were produced and circulated, we begin to perceive their modes of cultural
282
interpenetration. Abre los Ojos was produced by Sogetel (later re-dubbed Sogecine), the
film co-financing and production division of the media conglomerate Sogecable and the
biggest film production company in Spain at the time.
18
Sogetel was instrumental in
promoting the careers of the “post-Almodóvar” directors in Spain, and specifically
focused on making thrillers and horror films during the mid-1990s.
19
In addition,
Sogecable consistently secured deals with production and distribution companies in the
United States and Europe. This was the case for Abre los Ojos, which was co-produced
with the Italian company Lucky Red and the French company Les Films Alain Sarde, as
well as the Spanish outfit Producciones del Escorpion. In fact, Abre los Ojos was the first
in a concerted effort on the part of Sogetel to engage in a number of multi-lateral co-
productions.
20
In this respect, Abre los Ojos conforms to a significant trend of pan-
European media co-productions, whose economic pairings work to make European films
viable despite the hegemony of Hollywood in this region. This type of maneuvering
seemed quite effective in the Spanish market during the late 1990s, where the Hollywood
market share dropped by 11%, Spanish films gained a 14% share, and other European
films held a 19% share.
21
Abre los Ojos played a key role in Spain’s economic
recuperation of its domestic market, where the film earned over seven million US
dollars,
22
and become the second-biggest domestic box office hit at the time.
In this way, pan-European co-production partnerships facilitated Spain’s ability to
support a commercially viable “indigenous” film industry. However, these same
economic pairings speak to the transnational flow of capital in the cultural sector, which
highlights the precariousness of defining a contemporary “indigenous” Spanish industry,
283
especially in relation to Abre los Ojos. As a result of its multinational economic base,
which effaces the national specificity of the production from the start, the film draws
attention to the transnational forces currently mobilized to support the “national cinema.”
By creating international partnerships to protect the Spanish domestic market from
Hollywood, Spain’s national apparatus has worked in a definitively transnational and
transnationally marginal mode. If viewed as a representative of contemporary Spanish
national cinema, Abre los Ojos indicates the strong connection between Spanish cinema
and a pan-European cinema, which in turn struggles for transnational hegemony with
Global Hollywood.
This pan-European funding of Abre los Ojos is further complicated by the
political economy of its international distribution and eventual purchase by Cruise-
Wagner. In addition to winning economic success within Spain, the film played and won
awards at numerous international film festivals, including Berlin and Tokyo.
23
While
playing at Sundance, the film was purchased by Summit Entertainment for international
release and Artisan Entertainment for release within the United States. Most importantly,
perhaps, is the purchase by Summit of the English-language remake rights for
$600,000.
24
Cruise-Wagner purchased these remake rights several months later, while
Artisan planned a limited theatrical run for the film and Summit sold off its international
distribution rights territory-by territory.
25
Here, one can see how the institutional
framework of film festivals enables the international dissemination of “national” cultural
products through the multinational distribution deals attained there. Additionally, these
institutions provide the venues by which film texts may be bought and sold for cultural
284
re-inscription in the form of their remake rights. The trade of remake rights functions in
a parallel fashion to territorial distribution rights, and may be seen as another mode of
transnational cultural migration in the economic sphere.
Yet this form of migration has distinctly different motivations and consequences
than territorial distribution. As the writers of Global Hollywood argue, much of
Hollywood’s power derives from the legislation and enforcement of international
copyright laws, at times even benefiting from nationally-specific imbalances among these
laws.
26
As a conceptual, legal, and economic expression of authorship and ownership,
copyright regulates how, by whom, when, and where a text may be copied. Remake
rights make this act of copying literal; they regulate and sanction the production of
derivative film texts in different contexts by different authors (read: corporate owners).
In this way, the remake results from a legal and economic transaction whereby the
copyright of a film changes hands for the purpose of that film’s revised re-production.
27

Further, the sale of Abre los Ojos demonstrates how Hollywood uses the international
trade in remake rights to stabilize its own global hegemony.
Thus, the economic and legal transformation of Abre los Ojos into Vanilla Sky is
not a simple matter of a Spanish film becoming an American film. At the time, Cruise-
Wagner, which produced Vanilla Sky, had a “first-look deal” with Paramount Pictures,
and was housed on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles.
28
This mutually beneficial
relationship allowed Cruise-Wagner to develop projects independently from Paramount
on the condition that the studio gets first choice at developing, buying, and/or distributing
these pictures. This allowed the studio to reduce the financial risks of development and
285
enabled Cruise-Wagner to operate with the regular financial backing of the studio. In
fact, Paramount put forth the money to purchase the rights to Abre los Ojos for Cruise-
Wagner to develop and produce.
29
In addition, Paramount is part of the Viacom
corporation, a transnational media conglomerate with operations in radio, television,
publishing, film production, and film distribution. Cruise-Wagner thus held an important
position within the content development area of the transnational culture industry, as it
was backed by the capital holdings of Paramount and available for synergistic
opportunities with the rest of the Viacom infrastructure. So, when Vanilla Sky began
shooting in New York City in late 2000, in English and with a production budget of
approximately seventy-five million dollars,
30
it was not a simple matter of a geographic
or lingual transposition of Abre los Ojos. Instead, the text migrated from one
transnational arena to another, from the Spanish/pan-European macro-region to the
transnationally operational and dominant Hollywood.
The transnational relations between these two films find expression and
complication within their respective textual and intertextual configurations. As noted,
both films pose questions of identity from the start. Both films also work to unveil the
mysteries of masculine identity in contemporary, transnational worlds. Following its
opening, Abre los Ojos continues to examine, disrupt, and eventually reconfigure the
identity of its protagonist, specifically through his body, subjectivity, and relation to
transnational corporations. Early in the film, César jilts his casual lover Nuria when he
takes up with Sofia, played by Penélope Cruz. In revenge, Nuria takes César into her car,
drives rapidly through the streets of Madrid, and intentionally crashes the car off the road.
286
As a result, César’s face is demolished and the film displays this in numerous, harshly-lit
close-ups.
The graphic detailing of hideous make-up effects, combined with César’s terrified
reactions to his monstrous appearance, firmly places the film within the horror genre.
The monster as such is the protagonist, who seeks to repair or escape the disfigured
confines of his body. In this respect, the film alludes to the horror classic Phantom of the
Opera (1925) and the ingenious make-up effects of actor Lon Cheney. This reference is
made explicitly in Abre los Ojos when César describes his disfigurement to Sofia and
mentions the title by name. Later, doctors present him with a featureless facial prosthetic
to cover his ruined face.
31
Yet, even after César wears this uncanny mask, the horror of
the body is merely displaced once over. Instead of covering the horror of his bodily
damage, this mask emphasizes César’s inability to secure his idealized physical form.
His face loses all meaning as a social signifier, as the mask, his persona per se, is
declaratively anonymous. Further, this mask once again situates Abre los Ojos within a
field of transnational horror films, as it quite astoundingly recalls the mask in George
Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960). In Abre los Ojos, physical identity appears
doomed to irrevocable deterioration, and through allusion the film entrenches this
position within a generic structure of horror.
The inescapable horror of César’s deformed body works in collaboration with the
mutability of his subjectivity. The film renders the horrors of his subjectivity most
clearly through ambiguous ellipses in chronology and elisions between conscious and
dreaming experiences. Early in the narrative, the film inter-cuts between the main action
287
and scenes of César in a prison cell narrating the story to a therapist. Although it is clear
that these prison scenes take place at some point in César’s future, one cannot be certain
of exactly when. The therapist refers to events that César does not remember and that the
film has not shown. As he struggles to remember his past and tell this story to the
therapist, who consistently challenges him on the facts, César works to assemble his
psychic identity in a unified fashion. Yet the film’s leaps in time and space dramatize the
difficulty of this process, and in fact reveal the horror of a psyche cut off from linear
time.
Further, many of the film’s jarring leaps in time, space, and reality status revolve
around César’s desire to retain his unmarred face. In a dream sequence directly after the
car crash, an unmarred César walks through a park with Sofia, only to suddenly wake up
in his apartment to find his face demolished. Later, once it seems César’s face has been
repaired and he can live happily with Sofia, he wakes in the middle of the night to find
his face in shambles once again. Yet, this too is reversed as he wakes from this
nightmare to find his face intact. These slippages between psychic states successfully
blur the reality status of the images, as even the condition of his face cannot serve as a
clear marker of authentic experience. By revolving these slippages around the condition
of César’s face, only to undermine the importance of his physical state in a blurring of
dream and reality, Abre los Ojos subordinates physicality to the psychological
determinations of identity. Yet, given the fluid movement between false and true
memories as well as between dreaming and waking states, the mind proves to be as
horrifically unstable as the body.
32

288
Having undermined the construction of identity as a physical or psychic
condition, Abre los Ojos reconfigures these realms through intertextual alignment and
overt explication; the film suggests that transnational corporations are the final
determinants of the protagonist’s identity. Several times in the film César watches
television commercials and programs detailing a cryogenics company. A French man
named Duvernois owns the company and discusses the process of cryonization, whereby
people’s bodies are frozen and held for later resurrection. Walt Disney comes up as an
example of the process in every one of these discussions. These references to Disney
situate the company in the realm of Global Hollywood, and would have likely held
implications of American cultural imperialism given European debates around Euro
Disney in the 1990s. Further, by presenting this narrative development graphically
through television, the film draws a strong comparison between cryogenics and screen
media. In this way, the cryogenics company is indirectly aligned with the transnational
culture industry.
As César proceeds through the narrative in his search for the basis of his identity,
he moves ever-closer to dealing directly with Duvernois and the cryogenics company.
Finally, César confronts Duvernois at the Spanish offices of the company, housed in the
Picasso Tower in Madrid. The last section of the film curiously spends tremendous effort
to rationalize all the narrative ambiguities that had come before. César discovers that he
is currently being held in a cryogenic chamber in Arizona, owned by the multinational
company Life Extension. Standing atop the tower, Duvernois explains that all César has
experienced is a virtual simulation implanted into his dreaming psyche by the company.
289
This answer to the mysteries of identity aligns César’s experience, and the film itself,
with ideological determination by transnational corporations. Through overtly rational
discourse, the film attempts to explain the otherwise invisible forces that construct the
world, his identity, and their interrelation. In this way, this explanation projects a certain
imagination of a transnational identity. Explicitly, César’s body, mind, and experience
have all been conditioned by transnational forces that re-present or simulate the Spanish
capital Madrid, as seen in the beginning sequence or from the tower at the conclusion.
In Abre los Ojos, transnational forces reproduce with frightening exactitude the
conditions of locality, and the relation between the two may only be understood through
rationalization. Those places where the individual breaks from the wholeness of this
picture, where fissures occur between experience and reality, are sites of horror and
trauma. Abre los Ojos thus situates transnational corporate economics as the active agent
in the construction of identity as it is experienced in the body and the mind; the
individual’s only hope is to discover this underlying structure if not counter it.
By reproducing this narrative, Vanilla Sky also imagines a transnational identity
for its protagonist. Yet this transnational existence differs considerably from that
imagined in Abre los Ojos. As in the earlier film, Vanilla Sky uses make-up effects and
narrative ellipses to destabilize the physical and psychological components of identity.
However, its protagonist has a dramatically different relationship to the transnational
culture industry and its ideological determinations. The character David Aames owns
and operates a multinational publishing company that specializes in beauty magazines.
In this respect, the character is actually part of the transnational culture industry from the
290
start, as opposed to being solely its dupe as in Abre los Ojos. One of the primary
struggles within the film is Aames’ attempt to retain control over his company as the
other members of its board of directors try to wrest it away. Not coincidentally, these
men are humorously referred to as the “Seven Dwarfs” in the narrative, maintaining the
allusion to the Disney Corporation and cultural imperialism from Abre los Ojos. Yet,
here the protagonist struggles within the internal makeup of this transnationally operative
ideological force.
Although Vanilla Sky similarly seeks to rationalize its questioning of identity
through drawn-out exposition at its conclusion, this explanation reveals important
contradictions. Throughout its narrative, the film makes numerous references to popular
culture,
33
from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) playing on the television in the prison cell,
to posters of Jules and Jim (1962) in Aames’ apartment, to the innumerable pop-songs
which pervade the soundtrack. These references indicate Vanilla Sky’s dramatically
different position within the global culture industry, as seen in the large number of paid
licenses for its references in the credits.
34
Moreover, the film at once aligns Aames’
cryonic experience in the film with popular culture as well as separates the two. On the
one hand, when Aames jumps from the top of the building and his life flashes before his
eyes, the film presents a montage of images from other texts to show how he modeled his
entire existence on pop culture. On the other hand, by placing him among the cultural
producers within the diegesis, the film provides the protagonist with a semblance of
agency over his own ideological construction. In this respect, Vanilla Sky makes an
291
indirect but strong argument about the interpenetration of production and reception of
popular culture in the construction of identity.
This characterization speaks directly to a different mode of transnational identity
from that of Abre los Ojos. Whereas the “Spanish” film slowly reveals that the
transnational culture industry wholly determines the experience of its protagonist, Vanilla
Sky maintains the privileged role of the protagonist within his own self-construction, no
matter how inauthentic that may be. This ideological asymmetry between the films
articulates differing relations of power under globalization and commercial culture.
Although neither film imagines an outside to the virtual existence under transnational
corporate control, their different characterizations of the means of production speak to
American managerial dominance within this structure.
In addition to this reconfiguration of masculine identity under globalization, the
films’ constructions of feminine identities reveal another mode of limited transnational
mobility. Both Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky initially create a polarity between a “bad
girl,” Nuria and Julia respectively, and a “good girl,” Sofia in both instances. This
feminine duality propels the protagonists’ desire and movement through the plot. In both
films, the bad girl is noted for her sexual appetite, which is reciprocated by the male
protagonist yet appears to disqualify her from any emotional investment on his part. The
good girl, on the other hand, elicits genuine emotions from the protagonist, who then
reduces his sexual assertiveness to indicate the seriousness of his feelings. As these
narratives play out, the bad girls destroy themselves for having been sexually used by the
protagonists and the good girl comes to the rescue by helping the protagonist through his
292
physical recuperation. This would seem to replicate longstanding and ill-thought binaries
between virgin and whore as the possibilities for feminine identity. That these positions
are reproduced in the two films indicates a greater, transnational, and patriarchal
construction of gendered identities. Specifically, these extremely limited possibilities for
feminine identity appear neatly transferable across vast transnational spheres, indicating
how the films’ imaginations of transnational identities remain constrained by masculinist
discourse.
As the psychology of the protagonist comes unglued, the polar opposition
between virgin and whore likewise collapses. In Abre los Ojos, the Nuria begins
appearing where the Sofia had existed; the body of actress Najwa Nimri displaces that of
Penélope Cruz in various series of inter-cut shots. Similar displacements occur between
Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz in Vanilla Sky. These fluctuations between female
bodies work alongside the changes in the protagonist’s face to establish the instability of
his subjectivity. The protagonist seems unable to sustain the binary of possibilities of
femininity, and in this way the strict duality of feminine identities prove to be the
undoing of the male protagonist. Eventually, the bodies of the bad girls Nuria/Julia
entirely replace that of Sofia/Sofia, and the confusion this causes leads him to murder the
woman. Among the issues this raises is the structural and psychodynamic similarity
between Abre los Ojos and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), as they similarly use
feminine duality to reveal fractures in male subjectivity. Many English-language critical
responses to Abre los Ojos compared it to Vertigo, illuminating yet another instance of
transnational intertextuality and patriarchal discourse within the film.
35
Just as
293
importantly, the fluctuation of female bodies in Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky creates a
vision of femininity as fundamentally unstable, however contradictory that may sound.
This fluctuation could also be read as consolidating the already limited possibilities for
femininity into a single female body. In either case, the malleability of feminine identity
is constrained by limits that neither film transcends, however much they indicate the
insubstantiality of these limits.
Even so, the transnational frame of these films intersects with their construction
of gender in interesting ways. It is notable that Penélope Cruz plays the Sofia role in both
Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky. Her repeated presence connects the films in a
transnational dialogue and indicates their individual positions toward gender
construction. Her role in Abre los Ojos occurred after she had already appeared in
several Spanish films that received international recognition, including Belle Epoque
(1992) and Live Flesh (1997). In this respect, her position in Abre los Ojos as the “good
object” signals her importance as a representative of Spanish femininity. By the time she
reprised her role in Vanilla Sky, Cruz had acted in a number of English-language films,
where she variously played Mexican (Hi-Lo Country, 1998), Brazilian (Woman on Top,
2000), and Greek characters (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, 2001). As her nationality in
Vanilla Sky is never even addressed, the film draws upon her Americanized role as a pan-
Hispanic, pan-Mediterranean romantic female lead. In this respect, the unfixing of
feminine identity within the diegesis of Vanilla Sky mirrors an unfixing of national
identity within the American context. The relationship between both films reveals how
294
the fluctuation and repetition of physical bodies, specifically female in this context,
conflates and exposes the transnational ideological framings of gender and nationality.
This trajectory of displaced female bodies and nationalities accrues even greater
meaning in the star discourse around the films, as seen in numerous gossip and
entertainment magazines. Specifically, these magazines lay out a narrative of
transnational bodily movement that they subsequently corral into a melodramatic, sexist
discourse of marital fracture. During production of Vanilla Sky in February 2001, star
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman split up, and this was widely reported as a surprising
development for what was thought to be a stable marriage.
36
Three days later, Cruise
filed for a divorce, an action that was largely viewed as coldly rapid.
37
The majority of
articles following the divorce situated Kidman as the jilted lover and sympathetic victim,
a sentiment augmented by reports of her miscarriage.
38

In July and August 2001, a real-life romance between Tom Cruise and Vanilla Sky
co-star Penélope Cruz began getting major press, which worked in tandem with the
publicity for the film’s upcoming release and their on-screen romance. Penélope Cruz
stood to significantly enhance her position within the Hollywood star system as a result
of this association, just as Nicole Kidman’s own earlier rise to stardom and re-negotiation
of Australian national identity had been facilitated by her romantic and cinematic
attachment to Tom Cruise, beginning with Days of Thunder in 1990.
39
However, the
reports about Cruise and Cruz noted how the open displays of affection between the new
couple seemed out of place, and set up the cynical view that the romance was a publicity
stunt.
40
This angle keyed into ongoing reports about Cruise’s lawsuits against people
295
claiming he was gay.
41
His attachment to Cruz at this cultural moment served to augment
the actor’s position as a heterosexual, romantic leading man as he strove to halt any
lingering doubts. Other articles also posited that the romance between Cruz and Cruise
had begun during the production of Vanilla Sky, strongly positioning the Spanish actress
as a home-wrecker.
42
This followed reports that she had similarly disrupted romances
between Matt Damon and Winona Ryder as well as between Nicolas Cage and Patricia
Arquette.
43
In this respect, a reactionary, sexist, and derogatory discourse attended the
transnational migration of actress Penélope Cruz, which contrasted strongly with her role
as the “good girl” in Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky.
The tension among these positions reached a pinnacle at the premiere of The
Others in August 2001, a film that starred Nicole Kidman, was executive produced by
Tom Cruise, and was directed by Alejandro Amenábar.
44
Numerous articles and reviews
of The Others and Vanilla Sky discussed the divorce, the new romance, and the female
rivalry, and so conditioned the readings of these films.
45
Cruise and Kidman’s divorce
was finalized on the same day as the Los Angeles premiere of The Others, further
blurring the lines between the film and real-life events.
46
Here, the production of The
Others and the reviews of these films reveal an important transnational exchange of
cultural workers. Indeed, whereas Penélope Cruz moved into the Hollywood system with
Vanilla Sky, Nicole Kidman moved into the Spanish/European cultural system with The
Others. On the one hand, this reveals the mobility of these figures across cultural spaces.
Yet just as importantly, this transnational movement was constrained by a narrative of
broken romances, jilted wives, and a highly sexualized Spanish temptress.
296
This exchange of female bodies by and for male cultural producers openly
converses with the narratives of Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky. While in the films female
bodies are continually displaced as a symptom of the male protagonist’s unstable
psychology, the physical exchange in the surrounding discourse also highlights the
privileged role of male cultural producers.
47
In both cases, that is within the arch-
narrative of all these films and the gossip around them, there existed a conflation of
gender relations and national identities within the context of the transnational culture
industries. Viewed in this way, the possibilities for transnational identity seen in Abre los
Ojos, Vanilla Sky, and the discourses around them appear asymmetrical and very limited
indeed.
The concluding images of Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky confront the problems of
transnationalism by visually transcending their local settings. As César stands atop the
Picasso tower, the vastness of Madrid looms behind him under a brilliantly blue and
cloud-speckled sky. As he is told of his transnational existence, he stands centrally
amidst this locality. Given the difficulty of representing the transnational as a space of
vast interconnectivity, Abre los Ojos depicts the local at its most expansive. The city
backdrop falls away as the scene continues, and César is framed in low-angle shots
against the sky. Abstracted from his surroundings, he floats within a virtual space among
the clouds. Vanilla Sky concludes similarly and thus evokes its title. David Aames
stands high above New York, tinted rose and orange from the computer-generated sunset.
The transnational context once again displaces the individual from his immediate
surroundings yet finds representation only through such localized, embodied experience.
297
When the characters leap from the buildings, they reject the apparent duality of
this situation. Graphically, these refusals take the duplicitous form of bodies liberated in
space and yet violently bound for the pavement. In both cases, the untenable dichotomy
between the local and the global, between immanent experience and transcendent
interconnection, compels a drastic reconsideration of how these spheres interpenetrate.
At the center is the individual, whose identity is as virtual, pliant, yet determined as the
world he inhabits. Identity is literally suspended, caught in the middle of a shifting
matrix of limited possibilities.
As allegories of transnational identity, these films reveal the difficulty of
reconciling the individual with the global. In both, identity fluctuates between beauty
and disfigurement, between two entirely different female bodies, as well as between
dream and “reality.” Through the metaphors of cryogenic technology and virtual reality,
the films depict transnationalism as a comprehensive structure that sets these bounds and
attempts to unify these multiple and conflicting conditions. On the one hand, this renders
the opening nightmares of alienation as real as any other moment in the films, as the
characters genuinely are disconnected from their physical and social realities throughout.
On the other hand, the characters are simultaneously interconnected with a transnational
corporation that thoroughly “re-makes” these realities. In this respect, transnationalism
disembodies and dislocates the individual, abstracting both identity and reality, yet
simultaneously casts these abstractions in embodied and localized forms.
A fuller consideration of the economic, intertextual, and extra-discursive
relationships between Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky presents a clearer, if more complex,
298
picture of the limited mobility of transnational identities. Specifically, these relations
produce certain contrasting and collaborative ideological limits in relation to bodies,
minds, gender relations, and nationality itself. This indicates an asymmetrical
articulation of globalization within two overlapping transnational spheres, the
Spanish/pan-European macro-region and Global Hollywood. On the one hand, Abre los
Ojos and Vanilla Sky indicate that Spanish cinema and identity, as well as Hollywood and
United States’ nationalism, cannot easily be understood outside transnational corporate
culture. On the other hand, these examples reveal the contestation among multiple axes
of power that reconfigures identity alongside economic determinations. Most
importantly, perhaps, the relations between and around these films indicate how
transnationalism itself is characterized by a struggle for hegemony within multiple
cultural discourses.
However, these forces are not merely discursive; they have real effects on bodies,
minds, and the ideological parameters of identity. This can be seen most clearly at the
end of Vanilla Sky, which features one of the last-recorded Hollywood images of the
World Trade Center twin towers. As the film had been shot in early 2001, yet was
released two months after September 11, Vanilla Sky entered a wider debate within the
United States regarding the virtual representation of the World Trade after its genuine
destruction.
48
Few things indicated better the United States’ dominant role in the world
economy before September 11 than the World Trade Center, a symbolic and practical
function not lost on the individuals who crashed airplanes into the towers. The sudden
change of physical, cultural, and ideological landscape rendered in their destruction had
299
various effects on contemporaneous films which featured the towers; a trailer for Spider
Man (2002) was not released, Zoolander (2001) erased the towers altogether, while
Sidewalks of New York (2001) and Vanilla Sky kept the towers intact.
49
Discussions of
Vanilla Sky’s representation of the twin towers were thus imbricated with larger
discussions of the United States’ role within global politics, economics, and military
operations. As these debates quickly moved to reify a newly exceptional and vehemently
nationalist identity for the US, Vanilla Sky can be seen to have been strongly re-
nationalized by reactions to September 11. Similarly to the way the World Trade moved
from symbolizing the United States’ transnational dominance to being a strictly national
icon, so too were Vanilla Sky’s transnational relations effaced by messages spoken in
violence. This should indicate how constantly shifting political, economic, cultural, and
ideological factors negotiate the conditions of nationalism and transnationalism, and the
stakes at risk in these fluctuations. Further, the genuine effects of transnational
hegemony and national exclusivity illuminated on September 11 should caution cultural
critics to mobilize these notions with great care. End with a nightmare.

300
CHAPTER 7 NOTES

1
This action has obvious psychoanalytic implications regarding the formulation of the subject in the
“mirror stage,” as theorized by Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1977), 1-7. Just as importantly in this context, the moment draws attention to the good looks of actor
Eduardo Noriega.

2
Paul Julian Smith provides a persuasive and engaging comparative analysis of Abre los Ojos and Vanilla
Sky in “High Anxiety: Abre los ojos/Vanilla Sky,” Journal of Romance Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 91-
102. There, he situates Alejandro Amenábar as representative of the contemporary Spanish film industry,
discusses the themes of “urban alienation and the danger of the image” in the films, and contrasts the
stylistic excess of Vanilla Sky with the coherence of Abre los Ojos. Although Smith also demonstrates how
these two films disturb certain cultural binaries, he doesn't address the issues of transnational spaces and
identities.

3
Although this essay refers to “ideology” in ways that imply the Althuserrian sense of the term, I prefer to
think of ideology in light of the modifications made by Raymond Williams upon that concept via his use of
Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony.” In this respect, ideology should indicate the application of pressure and
the setting of limits within a social field comprised of heterogeneous forces. Raymond Williams, Marxism
and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 84, 87, 110, 112-113.

4
Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, (London: BFI Publishing, 2000); Carolyn
A. Durham, Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes, (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1998).

5
Marshall Fine, “Open to Interpretation: Hollywood Versions of Foreign Films Rarely Live Up to the
Originals. Cameron Crowe’s ‘Vanilla Sky’ is the Latest to Try to Make the Cultural Leap,” Los Angeles
Times, 11 Nov. 2001; David Edelstein, “‘Remade in America’: A Label to Avoid,” New York Times, 4 Nov.
2001; Emmanuel Levy, “Spanish Gold Tarnished by Hollywood Handling,” Screen International, 14 Dec.
2001-Jan. 3, 2002. It should be noted that Edelstein also situates the recent remakes within a greater
historical trend.

6
14 Dec. 2001.

7
This is in keeping with observations made by Lucy Mazdon regarding discourses around Hollywood
remakes of French films. Mazdon, 12, 149.

8
Santos Juliá, “History, Politics, and Culture, 1975-1996,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern
Spanish Culture, ed. David T. Gies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119.

9
Juliá, 119.

10
I am using the term “macro-regional” in the sense indicated by Marsha Kinder, who states that regions
function ideologically like nations, yet which are geographically larger (macro-region) or smaller (micro-
region) than nations. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 389.

11
Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema, (London: Routledge, 2003), 144.

12
Peter Besas, “Financial Structure of Spanish Cinema,” in Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/
Representation, ed. Marsha Kinder, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 257.
301

13
Triana-Toribio, 143-163.

14
Tino Balio, “‘A Major Presence in All of the World’s Important Markets’: The Globalization of
Hollywood in the 1990s,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith,
(London: Routledge, 1998), 58, 61.

15
Toby Miller, et. al., Global Hollywood, (London, BFI Publishing, 2001), 51.

16
Miller, et. al., 18, 42, 51.

17
Miller, et. al., 51.

18
“Sogetel Plans to Push Newcomers,” Variety.com, 8 Jan. 1998,
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117434564?categoryid=13&cs=1 (accessed October 17, 2004).

19
“Sogetel Plans to Push Newcomers.”

20
David Puente, “Sogetel Expands Co-prod Line-up,” Screen International, 28 Feb. 1997.

21
Adam Dawtrey, et. al., “Old World Charms B.O.,” Variety.com, 24 Dec. 1997,
http://www.variety.com/vstory/VR1117343321?categoryid=38&cs=1.

22
“Box Office Film Search Results: Open Your Eyes,” Variety.com,
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=filmsearch_exact&dept=Film&movieID=10229.

23
Jon Herskovitz, “Amenabar’s ‘Eyes’ Wins Top Prize at Tokyo,” Variety.com, 9 Nov. 1998.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117488258?categoryid=13&cs=1.

24
“News in Brief,” Screen International, 30 Jan. 1998.

25
Dana Harris, “Cruise Reopens Spanish ‘Eyes’,” Hollywood Reporter, 6 April 1998.

26
Miller, et. al., 111, 129. To be clear, these scholars do not efface the role of the nation within these
transactions, as when they state “…the internationalism of new communications technologies and patterns
of ownership and control…extend the significance of the state as regulatory and stimulatory entity.”
Miller, et. al., 42.

27
Thomas M. Leitch notes that remakes almost inevitably require a transfer of property rights and assumes
that remakes involve the adaptation of non-cinematic sources at some point in their intertextual chain.
Although I agree that the consideration of remakes demands an understanding of property ownership, the
case of Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky shows how the ownership of “original” films must also be
transferred, in some way, in order to produce remakes. Thomas M. Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal
and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer
Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 38-39.

28
Nick Roe, Production Executive at Cruise-Wagner, email to author, 25 Sept. 2004. This type of
relationship is quite common within the contemporary Hollywood system. For example, Section 8, which
is owned by director Steven Soderbergh and actor George Clooney and produced such remakes as
Insomnia, Ocean’s Eleven, and Criminal, has a first-look deal with Warner Brothers.

29
Roe, email to author, 25 September 2004.
302

30
“Project: Vanilla Sky,” Variety.com, 14 Dec. 2001,
http://www.variety.com/studiosystems/index.asp?layout=studiosystems&ss_view=s_s_project&mode=allcr
edits&project_id=130700.

31
The facial prosthetic, and its particularly expressionless look, also connects this film to the contemporary
musical production of Phantom of the Opera, as that stage production featured a similar mask.

32
Andrew Willis notes that although the horror genre has a long history in Spain, it is currently
proliferating and is characterized by a division between ironic hybrids and “sincere” horror films. With its
particular blending of hideous make-up effects and narrative ambiguities, it appears as though Abre los
Ojos operates within the latter mode. Andrew Willis, “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Trends in
Spanish Horror Cinema,” in Spanish Popular Cinema, ed. Antonio Lázro-Reboll and Andrew Willis,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 237, 239-240.

33
Director Cameron Crowe claimed to have put over 468 pop culture references into Vanilla Sky. Quoted
in Barbara Ellen, “Blood on the Tracks,” The Times (London), 24 Jan. 2002.

34
Many of these were from Paramount productions and other Viacom-owned companies.

35
See for example, Paul Julian Smith, “Abre los Ojos,” Sight and Sound 10, no. 3 (March 2000): 50; Chris
Perriam, “Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos,” in Spanish Popular Cinema, ed. Antonio Lázro-Reboll
and Andrew Willis, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 217-218.

36
“Cruise and Kidman Splitsville,” National Enquirer, 5 February 2001,
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/feature.cfm?instanceid=9465; Josh Wolk, Ty Burr, “Days of
Asunder,” Entertainment Weekly, 16 Feb. 2001, 14.

37
Russell Scott Smith, “Divorce Hollywood Style,” Us Weekly, 27 Aug. 2001, 34; Anne-Marie O’Neill, et.
al., “Cruising for Control,” People Weekly 26 Feb. 2001, 74.

38
Ann Oldenburg, “Miscarriage Confirmed Kidman Was Nearly Three Months Along,” USA Today, 2 Apr.
2001.

39
In his review of To Die For (1995), Kenneth Turan strongly aligns Kidman’s ascent to stardom with her
association with Tom Cruise and notes that she shows no signs of an Australian accent in the film.
Kenneth Turan, “When a Spouse Intrudes: Nicole Kidman Pursues Celebrity, at All Costs, in To Die For,”
Los Angeles Times, 27 Sept. 1995.

40
Sean Daly, “A Very Public Affair,” Us Weekly, 6 Aug. 2001, 36.

41
Josh Tyrangiel, “Messing with Tom is Risky Business,” Time, 14 May 2001, 81; Liza Hamm, et. al.,
“Cruise Controls Rumors Again,” People Weekly, 18 June 2001, 17.

42
“Curse of Homewrecker Cruz,” New York Post, 18 March 2002; Daly, 36.

43
Daly, 36.

44
According to Cruise-Wagner Production Executive Nick Roe, there was no comprehensive deal with
Amenábar, Cruise-Wagner, and Nicole Kidman, despite the appearance of such a deal. Email to author, 25
Sept. 2004.

303

45
Nancy Ayala, “Amenabar Steps Out of the Shadows,” USA Today, 10 Aug. 2001; Jen Jensen, “The Mind
of an Unmarried Man,” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Dec. 2001.

46
Ann O’Neill, “Keeping Their Distance at Premiere,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Aug. 2001.

47
Notably, the “Wagner” half of Cruise-Wagner is Paula Wagner, making her a significantly powerful
Hollywood producer, female or otherwise. On the one hand this would seem to indicate gender equality
within the power structure of the production company. However, much of the reportage about The Others
focused on Tom Cruise’s dominant role in the company and relationship with Nicole Kidman. For
example, see Jeannie Williams, “Kidman Stars in Cruise-controlled Film,” USA Today, 26 July 2001.

48
Jensen, 39.

49
Martin Miller, “A Skyline that Won’t Go Away: Much of the Public Wants the Twin Towers’ Image to
Endure,” Los Angeles Times, 18 Dec. 2001.
304
CHAPTER 8 – RIVALS AND DEPARTURES: THE AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE
AS COUNTER-REMAKE
The film remake always, at least implicitly, raises the specter of cinematic
intertextuality more generally, which as a perpetual process cannot really come to an end
in any definitive way. Although Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky indicate broader patterns
among contemporary Eur-Am transnational remakes, these films also threaten to
privilege Hollywood as the industrial and cultural dominant to such an extent that
resistance, opposition, or alternatives may appear difficult to fathom. This chapter
intends to provide a very specific case of an alternative trajectory among transnational
film remakes, specifically in the works, aesthetic strategies, filmmaking processes, and
institutional situations of filmmakers Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold.
Together, these filmmakers trouble the category of transnational film remakes, as
both make “experimental” or “avant-garde” films. This lies outside the dominant
practice of cinematic remaking of feature-length, narrative films, typically produced to
garner economic profit in the mainstream theatrical and home video markets. In her
study of French national cinema, Susan Hayward proposes that cinema, in general,
divides into two main categories. First, there is the commercial, popular cinema.
Second, there is the art cinema, the avant-garde cinema, or the “non-mainstream or
oppositional” cinema.
1
This cinema aims to aesthetically distinguish itself from the
popular cinema through richness and complexity, and aims at elite and distinguishing
audiences domestically and internationally. It is typically produced independently,
through state subvention, or in an artisinal manner by a small number of individuals with
305
minimal or loose institutional interconnection. In the French context, Hayward focuses
primarily upon the first category, positioning the second in difference to the
“mainstream.” Indeed, many conventional studies of “national cinemas” consistently
neglect or omit experimental, non-commercial cinemas, making her observations about
the French avant-gardes relatively exceptional.
In the context of transnational film remakes, especially those between Europe and
the United States, this tendency has helped to create a limited view of the practice of
transnational cinematic intertextuality. It has reinforced the notion that film remakes
exclusively entail one feature-length narrative film derived from another feature-length
narrative film. Of course, the previous discussion regarding the film La Jetée and its
various Hollywood remakes slightly nuance this general claim, as the source-film is
relatively short and formally experimental. Yet further, this limited view has upheld
commonplace notions regarding Hollywood’s theft and commercial bastardization of
higher quality European art films. This tendency has indeed supported the idea that art is
made in Europe and commercial films in Hollywood, thus making these remakes crass
and aesthetically inferior. On the one hand, this neglects the Hollywood remakes of
popular European films with little artistic pretension, such as Taxi (1998, remade in
Hollywood in 2004). On the other hand, it fully disregards the transnational remaking
occurring within the formally experimental, non-commercial cinemas. In the case of the
contemporary Austrian cinema, the avant-garde plays an exceptional role in defining the
“national cinema” within a transnational arena. Within the contemporary art cinema,
Michael Haneke is exceptional, who has made films in Germany, France, and in fact
306
remade his own German film Funny Games (1997) in English (2007).
2
For their part as
well, Tscherkassky and Arnold help to formulate a transnational remake cinema
circulated through a particular Austrian cinematic context.

REMAKING FILM (AND) HISTORY: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL CINEMA OF
PETER TSCHERKASSKY
Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky has made some of the most aesthetically
thrilling and intellectually provocative films to emerge from the international avant-
garde. His work is incredibly diverse, but he has gained the most attention for his series
of highly dynamic found-footage films made in CinemaScope. Like his friend and fellow
Austrian Martin Arnold, Tscherkassky takes existing films and subjects them to extreme
formal alterations. Yet through this process of repetition and transformation, he engages
in more than just a formal practice, but also a critical institutional practice, a cinematic
practice – making a transformational cinema.
As discussed, transnational remakes primarily occur as Hollywood remakes of
“foreign” films, demonstrating Hollywood’s structural advantage in remaking “foreign”
films rather than allowing these films to enter the United States through distribution. It is
in this light that Peter Tscherkassky’s films constitute transnational remakes of a
particular kind, and further, clarify and trouble the foundations of this broader category.
Tscherkassky presents a critical alternative to dominant forms of trans-Atlantic cinematic
and cultural exchange. Throughout his career, he has engaged with issues of filmic
medium specificity, intertextuality, and intermediality. With his films L’Arrivée from
307
1998 and Outer Space from 1999, Tscherkassky critically reconfigures the histories of
European cinema, Hollywood, and the exchanges between them.
Tscherkassky first encountered experimental film in the late 1970s, when he
attended a series of screenings and lectures by P. Adams Sitney. He began making films
of his own soon thereafter. He is considered part of the “third generation” of Austrian
avant-garde filmmakers, following the first generation of people like Peter Kubelka and
Kurt Kren and the second generation of “Actionist” filmmakers like Valie Export.
3
In
1982, Tscherkassky and several other young filmmakers re-formed the Austria
Filmmakers Cooperative in order to build an infrastructure for the production,
distribution, and exhibition of non-commercial films.
4
In his early works, Tscherkassky
demonstrates a concern with film as a material object as well as with issues of
representation.
5
Along with the others in this group, Tscherkassky made his films in
super-8mm. In his study of Tscherkassky’s films, Alexander Horwath argues that the
filmmaker’s use of super-8 served to circumvent the established conventions of the
Austrian avant-garde as well as the logic of technological progress implied by
contemporary video art.
6
With its small frame size, grainy texture, and blurry images,
Super-8 provided an intimate connection with the materiality of film and rejected other
technologies of commercial and experimental cinemas; Super-8 was a medium of refusal.
Through the mid-1980s, Tscherkassky worked regularly with cinematic recycling.
He shot the film Urlaubsfilm (1983) on super-8 and then re-shot this footage from a
screen,
7
thereby adding another layer of technical mediation between reality and its
representation as well as compounding the distortions of the super-8 image. With his
308
films Motion Picture (1984), Manufraktur (1985), and Shot Countershot (1987),
Tscherkassky worked with found-footage proper, in each case taking existing film
materials and transforming them through a variety of processes.
8
In these works,
Tscherkassky’s interest in the materiality of film became self-reflexive, making
mechanical reproductions not of the world but of previously produced images.
During this time, he continued his work as a film critic and promoter. He curated
exhibitions of Austrian films throughout Europe, helping to give a culturally distinct
shape and historical trajectory to a broad range of work.
9
He studied film at the Institute
of Philosophy in Vienna, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. This formal education in
film theory weighed heavily upon his work from this period, such as Tabula Rasa (1987),
which contends with issues of subjectivity and gender formation in relation to Lacanian
psychoanalysis. His 1992 film Parallel Space: Interview is a semiotic exploration of film
as a discursive medium. At several points, the film depicts words flashing across a
computer screen, marking an incursion of new non-filmic technologies upon his work. In
this case, Tscherkassky’s exploration of cinematic materiality confronts the supposedly
medium-less context of digital technologies through the trope of verbal language. By
depicting the computer as a material object as well as a medium of expression,
Tscherkassky further asserts his cultural resistance through the particular material of film.
During the 1990s, the Austrian avant-garde gained new productivity and cultural
coherence, due in large part to the popularity of Martin Arnold’s found-footage film
Pièce Touchée in 1989.
10
Tscherkassky, Arnold, and several other filmmakers formed
Sixpack Film in 1991 to help promote and distribute their films at festivals, and this
309
organizational structure continues to function to this day. This regional grouping of
experimental filmmakers gained new international prominence and historical coherence
in 1995, when Steve Anker programmed an extensive retrospective of Austrian films at
the MOMA. This program, along with a number of glowing essays and reviews, helped
to situate the contemporary work by Tscherkassky and Arnold alongside Kubelka, Kren,
and many others.
11
Since that time, tours and screenings of Austrian avant-garde films
have played extensively throughout Europe and North America. Notably, Tscherkassky
wrote the historical survey for the program that accompanied the MOMA exhibition. He
also published several essays about Austrian avant-garde filmmakers in various
catalogues and journals, including an essay about Kurt Kren that appeared in Millennium
Film Journal in 2000.
12

Thus since at least the mid-1990s, the Austrian avant-garde has been one of the
most coherent and relatively popular non-commercial cinemas in the world, and
Tscherkassky serves as one of its vital figures. As a filmmaker, he helped resituate film
as the medium of choice through which to resist technological change, doing so through a
set of intermedial refusals and negations. As the high-modernist aspirations of earlier
“structural” filmmakers, such as Hollis Frampton, George Landow, and Michael Snow
had ultimately rejected filmic representation, Tscherkassky’s return to film and “return to
the image” demanded that it be used not only as a material but also intertextually and
culturally. Indeed, along with Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky’s films synthesize the
rigorous formalism of structural film with practices of found-footage filmmaking and the
attendant issues of representation and cinema history. In this respect, his films are both
310
meta-filmic and meta-cinematic, both about the medium as well as about the institutions
and cultures through which they are produced and circulated. These concerns are further
reflected in Tscherkassky’s work as a film promoter, curator, and critic, as in these ways
he engaged the cinema as a cultural rather than merely as an aesthetic practice. Not only
should his films be understood within the larger context of the Austrian avant-garde, but
further, the contemporary Austrian avant-garde must be seen in light of Tscherkassky’s
critical and promotional activities, as they articulate a larger collective project. It is in
this light that Tscherkassky’s “CinemaScope trilogy” from the latter-half of the 1990s
constitutes a vital part of a transformational cinema.
The film L’Arrivée, made from 1997 through 1998, is the first of Tscherkassky’s
CinemaScope trilogy. It demonstrates a number of tactics that he uses throughout this
group of films. In its brief running time, this film confounds a number of distinctions
embedded in the category of “transnational film remakes.” Perhaps the most apparent is
that it is a “found-footage” film, consisting of a short segment of the 1968 film
Mayerling, directed by Terrance Young. L’Arrivée raises issues about cinematic
intertextuality by duplicating another film in a material way. As a formal category, film
remakes always negotiate tensions between repetition and transformation occurring along
a number of different registers. A number of discussions of remakes define them as films
derived from previously produced screenplays. This relies on an assumption that
remakes necessarily require some level of intermedial change from words to film. Every
remake must be an adaptation of sorts, because if remakes only required the mechanical
reproduction of existing films, this would be the same process as film distribution.
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But as discussed previously, Jennifer Forrest has described how at the beginnings
of cinema there was a conflation of cinematic distribution and remaking, between
mechanical and textual reproduction, between the “dupe” and the “remake.”
13
Forrest
shows that these two processes were not distinguished legally until 1905,
14
and US
copyright law eventually associated film narratives with copyrighted, written sources.
15

In this distinction, the remake becomes a particular kind of cinematic adaptation, a film
based on a previously produced written source, and mechanical reproduction becomes a
matter of distribution. Legally, this is the difference between plagiarism and piracy.
Thus L’Arivée, like all found-footage films, confounds traditional definitions of
the remake as an object. In duplicating the frames of the earlier film, Tscherkassky
draws awareness to the apparatical properties of cinematic technology. Yet in his
selective quotation and alteration of these images, he makes something new – a remake.
In L’Arrivée, Tscherkassky returns to the beginnings of cinema inasmuch as he conflates
the processes of mechanical and textual duplication.
Yet if this film returns to the beginnings of cinema in its objective material
conditions, then it also investigates these beginnings within a greater history of trans-
Atlantic cinematic exchange. The film begins with an image of a train pulling into a
station, making clear reference to the Lumière’s film L'arrivée d'un train en gare de la
Ciotat (1895), and indeed, Tscherkassky has called his film “a remake” of this earliest of
films.
16
In this regard, he transforms the 1968 film Mayerling into a reference to the very
beginnings of cinema, understood here as both an apparatus of mechanical reproduction
as well as a cultural institution.
312
As L’Arrivée continues, Tscherkassky splits, inverts, and scrambles the image,
revealing the sprocket holes of the film strip and creating a collision of the image of the
train with images of the celluloid itself. Yet an even more important collision
immediately follows, when Catherine Deneuve emerges from the train and lovingly
kisses a man. In this movement from train to loving embrace, Tscherkassky suggests the
mutual substantiation machine and libido through the cinema. Further, these images
recall Thomas Edison’s film from 1896, The Kiss, invoking a different origin of the
cinema from the other side of the Atlantic. In bringing these references together,
machine and libido, the Lumières and Edison, Tscherkassky situates the beginnings of
cinema within a technology of mechanical reproduction, but more importantly, within a
history of trans-Atlantic cinematic competition. As a remake, his film repeats and
transforms these sources, connecting them and revealing the cinema as a transnational
institution.
Of course, this is a fairly positive and pleasurable depiction of the divergent
technological and cultural beginnings of cinema, with the European and American sides
ultimately conjoined with a kiss. In this respect, Tscherkassky’s film evokes and
abstracts the genuine competition that occurred in the early trans-Atlantic exchange of
film technologies and texts. As is well established, film producers in the United States
regularly reproduced European films and distributed them as their own without paying
licenses or royalties.
17
Further, the Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) limited
the circulation of European films in the American market through their hold on film
technology patents.
18
In this context, Tscherkassky’s film marks a contemporary
313
intervention into a historical structure of power articulated through the cinema, across the
Atlantic. Conflating machine and text and European and American cinemas, the film
L’Arrivée positions the contemporary Austrian avant-garde as a transnational cinema of
synthesis and change.
Tscherkassky’s next film in the CinemaScope trilogy, Outer Space, levels a
transnational cultural critique in different historical and institutional terms. Made in
1999, this film excerpts and transforms sections of the 1981 film The Entity, starring
Barbara Hershey. The original film tells the story of a woman who is repeatedly
brutalized by an invisible attacker. Like many ghost films, The Entity plays upon a
confusion between the psychological and the metaphysical, as it tries to resolve whether
the ghost is real or a figment of the protagonist’s disturbed imagination. Tscherkassky
takes this film and radically alters it through his unique process of contact printing. The
result is a highly dynamic film of extreme beauty and force.
Outer Space reworks the footage of the earlier film so as to reject Hollywood
cinema through tactics of structural filmmaking and apparatus film theory. It begins with
a woman arriving at her home, where she is attacked by an unseen force; to this extent
Outer Space follows the logic of The Entity. However, in his film, Tscherkassky
associates the unseen attacker with the camera itself, as during the assault the film quite
literally falls apart. The celluloid slides off its hinges to the left and right, sprocket holes
move to the center of the frame, and un-synched film frames flicker and strobe. It is the
machine that attacks the woman. In this respect, Outer Space aligns with a tradition of
film theory that asserts that the cinematic apparatus interpellates subjects into very
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specific, regressive social roles. More specifically, the film accords with the apparatical
feminist theory typified by Laura Mulvey. Tscherkassky indicts The Entity for reveling
in images of a woman in despair, and moreover, uses The Entity to indict Hollywood for
its consistent use of film technology to this end. To evade derogatory representations of
women requires a total disintegration of the camera and projector.
Tscherkassky achieves this association by drawing on aesthetic conventions of
structural filmmaking, and particularly the metric films of Peter Kubelka.
19
Kubelka’s
films engaged in complex editing patterns of small pieces of footage, culminating in the
1958 film Arnulf Rainer, which had the intention of illustrating the essential properties of
the film medium. In this regard, Tscherkassky draws upon an Austrian filmmaking
practice in order to critique Hollywood, bringing the two cinemas together in a
transnational dialogue.
But if Tscherkassky critiques Hollywood, then he reveals some of the limits of
metric and structural filmmaking as well. Outer Space does not end with the exposure or
failure of the apparatus, but rather returns to images from The Entity that depict the
female protagonist violently attacking the camera. The last images show her looking
directly into the camera, opposing its powerful gaze with her own. In this return to the
image, twisted into acts of opposition rather than subjugation, Tscherkassky refutes the
anti-representational imperatives of metric filmmaking. Drawing on Hollywood to
oppose both Hollywood and metric film, asserting that resistance can occur within
representation, Tscherkassky re-situates the Austrian tradition within a larger cultural
sphere of cinematic practices. The film goes beyond a condemnation of film as a
315
technology, revealing that media are caught up in larger social and cultural relations
where both domination and resistance occur. In this respect, Tscherkassky does not just
critique Hollywood and metric filmmaking, but moreover dramatizes a shift from high-
modernist to culturalist conceptions of film and medium specificity.
It is in this respect that Tscherkassky’s work represents a cinema of
transformation, a transformational cinema, or what James Leo Cahill refers to as “an
anacinema – that …in asserting an essence, finds itself radically transformed.”
20

Tscherkassky not only transforms the material of existing films or alters their meanings
by putting them into transnational dialogue, at his best and most provocative he
transforms how we can conceive of film and the cinema within transnational culture.
This intervention is all the more relevant in the context of transnational film remakes, as
evidenced by the following: a big-budget Hollywood remake of The Entity is currently in
the works. The film’s producer is Roy Lee, who produced The Ring (2002), The Grudge
(2004), and The Departed (2006), among many more transnational film remakes.
Further, Hideo Nakata has been reported as signed to direct this remake, having been
brought into the Hollywood system after the successful remaking of his Japanese film
Ringu (1998).
21
Working within the same transnational cultural flows as Hollywood,
Peter Tscherkassky nevertheless offers an alternative and critical practice of cinematic
remaking.

TO MOCK A KILLINGBIRD: MARTIN ARNOLD’S PASSAGE À L’ACTE AND THE
DISSYMMETRIES OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE
316
Like that of Peter Tscherkassky, recent work by Martin Arnold presents insightful
and provocative interventions into the area of cinematic adaptation. Specifically, his
1992 film Passage à l’Acte illuminates a mode of cultural exchange that reverses the
Hollywood practice of cultural domination. Simultaneously, his films call attention to
contemporary concerns with filmic representational strategies and legacies. By
reworking footage from the Hollywood film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Arnold
clarifies notions of intertextuality even while he renders particular insights into the
specific film that he transforms. Additionally, his film partakes of critical strategies
found throughout the avant-garde, yet Passage à l’Acte should also be situated within a
culturally specific tradition. In this light, his work indicates the extent to which texts can
migrate and function differently within different cultural contexts.
Martin Arnold began making experimental films in the mid-1980s, having studied
the international avant-garde as well as Hollywood films under legendary Austrian
experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka. Arnold began gaining serious attention for his
1989 film Pièce Touchée, winning numerous awards at international film festivals, such
as at the Ann Arbor Film Festival,
22
and garnering the acclaim of film scholars.
23
The
film takes a small section of the 1954 film, The Human Jungle, and subjects it to extreme
rhythmic manipulations. In optical printing, Arnold duplicates frames of the original film
and plays them backward and forward in tiny increments, creating a continuous rocking
motion on and of the screen and frequent explosions in composition. As Akira Mizuta
Lippit writes of Arnold’s films in general, this results in “a hypertension between the
impulses of the original material and the reinscriptive force of the new edits.”
24

317
Arnold’s second film, Passage à l’Acte, made in 1992, works similarly. The film
takes as its source material a brief moment from the 1962 Hollywood film To Kill a
Mockingbird. As is well known, To Kill a Mockingbird was an adaptation of the novel
by Harper Lee, published a mere two years earlier in 1960. In many ways, To Kill a
Mockingbird serves as a prominent touchstone for book-to-film adaptations. For
example, it is a traditional assignment in high-school English classes to compare and
contrast the book and the film. It will suffice to say here that the film is a fairly
straightforward and faithful rendering of the written text. It obeys all the conventional
Hollywood narrative strategies of the era. Evenly balanced compositions run together
according to traditional rules of continuity editing. Character motivation provides the
causal drive to the succession of images, dialogue, scenes, and sequences. It also bears
mention that the film, as well as the novel, worked within a specific cultural and
historical context. At that time, racial politics remained a prominent and contentious
issue within the American social scene. Although advances had been made in civil rights
laws, such as the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960,
25
racial bigotry and
institutionalized prejudice against African Americans remained a pressing issue. Thus,
the racial consciousness and liberalism of the novel, and the film, resonated with the
optimistic aspirations of the nation. The novel was immensely popular, winning the 1960
Pulitzer Prize, which helped lead to the speedy adaptation by Hollywood. The film also
enjoyed massive popularity and critical acclaim, earning three Oscars at the 1962
Academy Awards, and it remains a cherished film from that era.
26

318
Martin Arnold’s Passage à l’Acte does something quite different. It is comprised
entirely of a short segment from To Kill a Mockingbird, and extends what was originally
mere seconds into a short film over ten minutes in length. The excerpted scene depicts
the Finch family gathered around the breakfast table as the children prepare for the first
school day of the year. Within its original context in To Kill a Mockingbird, this scene is
hardly notable and does not bear a significant relationship to the primary drive of that
film’s plot. Martin Arnold takes this scene and, similarly to his work Pièce Touchée,
subjects it to extreme duplications and rhythmic manipulations via procedures of optical
printing. The precisely sequenced duplication of frames creates numerous repetitions and
reversals in movement, which provides a jarring visual excitement. Additionally, Arnold
subjects the soundtrack to similar repetitions, creating beats and rhythms that explode off
the screen. However, even within this realm of formal experimentation, it is difficult, if
not impossible, to escape the fact that one is watching some transformed version of To
Kill a Mockingbird, as this film is literally comprised of the other.
In this direct referentiality, Passage à l’Acte appears to clarify notions of
intertextuality, defined by Gérard Genette as, “a relationship of copresence between two
texts,” or “the actual presence of one text within another.”
27
This seems an apt
description of Passage à l’Acte, as with this film one is asked to read the original film,
the film currently playing, and the relationship between the two. As theories of
transtextuality/intertextuality have contributed to the study of cinematic remakes and
other adaptations, such overtly intertextual works as Arnold’s help foreground the
material foundation of these theories. Genette describes five different modes of
319
transtextuality, of which the notions of “hypertextuality” and “metatextuality” seem the
most applicable in this instance. The hypertextual model describes how certain texts, or
hypertexts, refer to previous works, or hypotexts, in such a way that the latter are
transformed to some degree.
28
Within these terms, To Kill a Mockingbird provides the
dominant hypotext for Passage à l’Acte, which functions overtly as a hypertext.
Arnold’s formal process of minute repetition serves to separate his film from the former,
and provides the means for the viewer to negotiate their relationship. This transformative
process also illuminates the metatextual function of Passage à l’Acte, where
metatextuality refers to those functions by which the hypertext engages in a critical
commentary on the hypotext.
29

In terms of its critical stance, Passage à l’Acte treats To Kill a Mockingbird in
both general and specific terms. First, Passage à l’Acte functions as a kind of filmic
synecdoche of the prior film by excising a select moment within it and turning this into
an internally complete unit. Arnold’s particular method of optical printing compounds
this shift toward generalization. By manipulating To Kill a Mockingbird at the level of its
progression of frames and sounds, Arnold indicates the degree to which this particular
film stands in for an entire formal and institutional practice of a particular era and culture.
That is, Arnold transforms To Kill a Mockingbird into a representative of post-classical
narrative film strategies, which become the object of his analysis. The repetitions and
reversals in the flow of images emphasize certain actions and gestures in such a way as to
implicate and disrupt otherwise invisible formal strategies, products of the Hollywood
cultural apparatus. Suspending the metonymic chain established in To Kill a
320
Mockingbird, these repetitions reveal the alterity within the frames and defer their
sequentially constructed meanings.
Additionally, the disruption of the soundtrack radically alters the functions of the
original film. Similar to a hip-hop DJ, Arnold samples the original audio and creates a
new orchestration through minute segmentation and repetition. Beats, such as a door
slamming or the dropping of a fork, take on a new aesthetic prominence. At times, the
audio composition takes precedence over the images altogether, as the film plays upon
syllables and incidental noises as independent elements.
30
The segmentation and
repetition at the audio level transforms the dialogue into largely unintelligible barks and
yelps, sounds of no greater meaning than any other. Arnold thus eliminates the power of
language to direct the narrative and lend the images causal motivation. This places even
greater emphasis on the image as a site of meaning and contributes to the generalized
register of the film’s metatextual critique.
Within this generalized register, Passage à l’Acte appears to analyze the implicit
sexual politics of To Kill a Mockingbird, and suggests that these are embedded within the
very mise-en-scène of the film. The framing strategically circumscribes a portrait of a
nuclear family eating a morning meal. The woman on the right of the screen, a neighbor
in the original film, is now easily viewed as the wife and mother in this familial unit. Her
immobility and silence testifies to the passivity of female characters within traditional
Hollywood narratives. Gregory Peck becomes a demonic father, whose verbal and
gestural commands speak to a greater masculine authority. In this register, the scenario
describes the indoctrination of the young male and female into the traditional gender
321
roles assumed by the parents. Peck commands the young boy to obey, the young boy in
turn commands the young girl, who in turn supplicates to the masculine authority and
inherits her mother’s passivity. In this way, the film delineates a chain of command
within the nuclear family, as an otherwise unremarkable product of the post-classical
Hollywood representational paradigm.
Moving in from this generalized register to examine the specific relationship
between the two films reveals a complex and ironic textual confluence. Passage à l’Acte
strategically excises all the racial issues that had presumably been at the heart of To Kill a
Mockingbird. Arnold’s film relegates Calpurnia, the Finch family’s African American
nanny, to a mere half-shape on the right hand side of the screen. Indeed, her role as
moral authority in the original novel, already diminished in the film adaptation, is now
fully negated. The moment from To Kill a Mockingbird which comprises Passage à
l’Acte has no bearing on the previous film’s major narrative crisis, the accusation and
trial of Tom Robinson, which had functioned to singularly articulate that film’s liberal
ideology of tolerance. Although the film analyzes and critiques the politics of
representation within To Kill a Mockingbird, this critique is entirely manifested in gender
and generational constructions within an Anglo social frame. In this way, Passage à
l’Acte may implicate the racial hierarchy within the liberal ideology of the former film,
by construing the racial issues as a “backdrop” to its real motivation, the indoctrination of
the young female into a strict gender hierarchy. Passage à l’Acte reveals the extent to
which the young girl, Scout, finds herself at the mercy of the male figures in her life. Just
as Scout learns from her father invaluable lessons about the injustices of racial bigotry, so
322
too must she conform to sexist social norms. This seems a far cry from readings of To
Kill a Mockingbird that emphasize the representation of Scout as an empowered and
thoughtful female character. Further, this indicates how the earlier film mobilized gender
stereotypes and hierarchies within its greater, racially liberal representational strategy.
31

In doing so, Passage à l’Acte threatens to reify the notion that race and gender hierarchies
are constructed in isolation of one another, or at least plays ambivalently with these
divisions through its elision of the racial component. Nevertheless, this significant
retroactive revision of the previous text indicates some of the critical powers and risks of
overt intertextuality.
The intertextual copresence and metatextual commentary one finds in Passage à
l’Acte seems inherent to found footage films more generally, as this practice overtly
addresses issues of referentiality by situating previous film footage in new contexts. In
his extensive study of the genre, Recycled Images, William C. Wees distinguishes three
categories of found footage films. The compilation film reworks old images in such a
way as to comment on the subject of the images, but not on the “representational nature
of the images themselves.”
32
The collage film, on the other hand, actively interrogates
the nature of representation itself through sophisticated use of montage.
33
Such classics
as Bruce Connor’s A Movie (1958) and more recent work by Craig Baldwin typify this
approach. Wees defines appropriation works as those that reference previous films in the
postmodern idiom of pastiche, where references do not demand any recognition of the
source nor do they engage in deconstructive strategies.
34
Passage à l’Acte thus appears
most aligned with the collage film in its critical examination of representational practices.
323
However, it substantially extends the deconstructive grammar available to found footage
films. Arnold reveals how substantive and critical difference can be asserted without
resorting to juxtapositions made in editing. His film maintains the exact same set of
images as existed in the original film. Additionally, each frame of the original maintains
its relation with the frames around it, however much their rate and directional flow have
changed. It is precisely at the level of the frame that Arnold’s film articulates its critique
of To Kill a Mockingbird, and by extension, post-classical Hollywood.
Arnold’s evasion of intellectual montage and use of frame-level disruptions can
be traced to the metric films of Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka. In both
theory and practice, Kubelka worked to move beyond Eisenstein and declare that
meaning in cinema occurred not between shots, but between frames.
35
To this end,
Kubelka’s metric films engaged in amazingly complex editing patterns of minutely
segmented pieces of footage, culminating in the 1958 film Arnulf Rainer, comprised
entirely of juxtaposed white and black leader, white noise and silence. His films meant to
illustrate the essential properties of the film medium, as projections of light and dark
operating at a certain speed, where movement itself is an illusion of the apparatus.
Kubelka, along with several other contemporaries, initiated a long tradition of structural
film within Austria, as well as internationally.
Thus, the films and formal strategies of Peter Kubelka provide an additional
intertextual axis along which to read Passage à l’Acte. In this way, Martin Arnold’s film
should not be understood merely as another example of the deconstruction of Hollywood
by the international avant-garde, but as a culturally specific resistant reading of a popular
324
text and international institution. The use of Kubelkan metric structures speaks to a
regionally and historically specific filmmaking tradition, which Arnold inherits and
deploys to new ends. For, while Peter Kubelka sought to illustrate fundamental
principles of the film medium, an endeavor within the ahistoric and apolitical objectives
of high modernism, Arnold uses these tactics toward the aggressive analysis of a
historically and internationally dominant cultural practice. In this way, Arnold
invigorates the strategies of Peter Kubelka with the power of ideological and cultural
critique, similar if not equal to the critical powers of Eisenstein’s dialectical montage.
Additionally, one must note that Peter Kubelka’s films were made in roughly the same
period as To Kill a Mockingbird. Thus, Arnold’s combination of the Kubelka’s technical
strategies with the actual material of To Kill a Mockingbird can be viewed as an attempt
to synthesize two seemingly opposed, though historically synchronous, filmmaking
traditions. Arnold’s is an attempt to re-envision the course of international film, as it
were, combining the popular and the unusual, the mainstream and the marginal. In this
light, the constant repetition in Arnold’s film calls attention to the very act of reviewing
old films. In their obsessive reviewing of classic footage, they are in some ways about
the very act of negotiating film history and the incommensurate practices found therein.
Looking at Arnold’s films with regard to their cultural specificity also provides an
insight into the limits of their critical powers, specifically his effacement of the racial
issues in To Kill a Mockingbird. In an interview, Arnold said of this elision “I wouldn’t
want to play around with that material.”
36
This statement at once indicates his playful
attitude toward the filmmaking process as well as acknowledges of the possibility of
325
improperly configuring culturally delicate material. It is a matter of inappropriate
appropriation. In this light, the racial issues and the specific form of their treatment in To
Kill a Mockingbird can be seen as nationally specific to the United States, however much
Hollywood functions as an international cinematic institution and representational
paradigm. Thus, Arnold’s evasion of the racial issues in the previous text indicate his
own specific cultural frame, inasmuch as he is unable or unwilling to address that which
is genuinely foreign. Yet, it would be untrue to say that there is nothing left of African
American culture in Passage à l’Acte. Although the visual track of the film does not
acknowledge racial difference, the soundtrack mobilizes tropes of hip-hop music, which
at the time the film was made was largely associated with African American culture.
37

By 1992, hip-hop had gained widespread popular appeal within the United States as well
as internationally, and so began transversing traditional racially constructed cultural
boundaries.
38
Thus, one might say that the racial issues of To Kill a Mockingbird are
modified and displaced from the image track to the audio. Further, this displacement
speaks to a move toward an internationalized idiom of African American popular culture,
thus providing Arnold with a highly mitigated point of access to nationally specific racial
politics. In this way, Arnold’s film breaches divisions between the nationally specific
and the internationally comprehensible, even where these fissure indicate the cultural
specificity of his work.
Arnold’s mode of production, distribution, and exhibition contributes to the idea
that his films represent culturally specific re-workings of popular texts. By his own
account, Arnold works in a strictly artisinal manner.
39
However, Arnold regularly
326
receives economic and institutional support from the Austrian Ministry of Science,
Research and the Arts, as part of their general support for non-commercial films of
“innovative quality.”
40
Additionally, Arnold co-founded Sixpack Film in 1991 with
several other Austrian filmmakers.
41
This group serves as a coherent mechanism aimed
at promoting, distributing, and exhibiting Austrian avant-garde films, and works in
concert with governmental institutions.
42
This should not imply that Arnold’s films are
purely the products of the Austrian state and their cultural agenda, but instead, should
indicate how his personal artistic vision serves to represent a greater cultural imperative.
In this way, Sixpack Film has been instrumental in formulating an “Austrian avant-
garde,” through organizing retrospectives and touring exhibitions of films by a number of
Austrian filmmakers from a range of time periods. What seems striking in Arnold’s case
is that this cultural mode of production, within the tradition it formulates, functions in
direct and critical appraisal of Hollywood, specifically through a disruption of the formal
tendencies instituted by that institution. Additionally, as Arnold’s films proliferate
through culture via international experimental film festivals, venues that have long been
sites of formal and cultural opposition to Hollywood, they continue to be defined by their
marginality. In this case, Arnold’s work is re-internationalized, though in a substantially
different circuit than the international market of commercial theaters. To Kill a
Mockingbird, in some fashion, continues to circulate through international film culture
and win awards, albeit in such a way as to speak to a complex process of cultural
revision, displacement, and exchange.
327
Passage à l’Acte thus has critical appeal and relevance beyond the confines of the
select audience of experimental films, traceable in several ways. One should view the
overt intertextuality in Arnold’s films not just as a practice neatly aligned with theory, but
as indicating new and compelling explorations of the suspension of the photographic
signifier, of the relative weight and historical power of images. Notably, Passage à
l’Acte was made amidst the advent of digital photography, the circulation of the George
Holliday tape of the Rodney King beating, and the first Gulf War; in other words, a
period defined by new questions as to the meaning and political weight of images. As the
crisis of representation that these events invoke has been in no way resolved, films such
as Arnold’s mark prescient investigations into the genealogy of image-making practices.
Additionally, Arnold’s film illuminates processes of cinematic adaptation, specifically in
regard to those formal and institutional procedures by which texts migrate through and
across cultural spaces. As Hollywood remakes of so-called “foreign” films appear to
occur regularly, rapidly, and with great formal similarity, films such as Arnold’s help to
chart alternative textual movements. Although Hollywood ceaselessly transforms the
works of other, marginal cinemas into globally popular texts, one should not neglect
resistant and culturally specific practices, such as Arnold’s, as we analyze the greater
processes of adaptation. In this way, Passage à l’Acte usefully indicates some of the
dissymmetries of cultural exchange.

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CHAPTER 8 NOTES

1
Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1993), xi.

2
Ian Mohr, “Warner into ‘Funny’ Business with Helmer,” Variety.com, 16 Oct. 2006.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117952048.html?categoryid=1

3
Mark Webber, “Counting the Waves: A Summary of Activities,” Senses of Cinema, 2003.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/counting_the_waves.html.

4
Lisl Ponger, Dietmar Brehm and Ernst Schmidt Jr. Peter Tscherkassky’s website.
http://www.tscherkassky.at/content/biography/Biography.html.

5
His film Aderlass (1981) resonates with the Actionist cinema by capturing a sense of improvised
performance that emphasizes the physicality of the human body.

6
Alexander Horwath, “Singing in the Rain: Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky,” in Peter
Tscherkassky, ed. Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein, (Vienna: Filmmuseum SYNEMA, 2005),
16, 22.

7
Horwath, 20.

8
In the case of Shot Countershot, Tscherkassky excerpted a small 22-second snippet of a Western film and
turned it into a film in its own right.

9
Peter Tscherkassky’s website. http://www.tscherkassky.at/content/biography/Biography.html.

10
Scott MacDonald, “Sp…Sp…Spaces of Inscription: An Interview With Martin Arnold,” Film Quarterly
48, no. 1 (Fall 1994), 2-11.

11
Program available at http://www.hi-beam.net/org/moma/austria.html.

12
This helped raise awareness about this filmmaker, who’d perhaps been overshadowed by the historical
prominence of Peter Kubelka.

13
Jennifer Forrest, “The ‘Personal’ Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema,” in
Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002),

14
Forrest, 93.

15
Forrest, 110.

16
During a screening of this film at Filmforum Los Angeles in spring 2006, Tscherkassky called L’Arrivée
“a remake” of the Lumière brothers’ film.

17
See Forrest; as a specific example, Robert Sklar discusses how early American film producers copied the
films of Georges Méliès and distributed them as their own. Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Cultural
History of American Movies, Revised and Updated, (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 22-23.

329

18
Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914, Updated and Expanded Edition,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 44-45; David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction,
Second Edition, (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 39.

19
Peter Kubelka, “The Theory of Metric Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney. (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 141.

20
James Leo Cahill, “Anacinema: Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinematic Breakdowns (Towards the Unspeakable
Film),” Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism 28, no. 2
(Fall 2008): 91.

21
Claude Brodesser, “Nakata Will Run Rings around ‘Entity’ Redo,” Variety.com, 29 July 2004.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117908458.html?categoryid=13&.

22
“Exhibitions,” Martin Arnold, 2003. http://www.r12.at/arnold/pages/exhibit/exhibit.html.

23
Scott MacDonald, “Martin Arnold,” in A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 347-362; Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Martin Arnold's Memory
Machine,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 24, no. 6 (1997): 8-10. Since this
initial wave of interest in Arnold, James Cahill has provided the most thoughtful and illuminating
consideration of his films. James Leo Cahill, “The Cineseizure,” distributed with the DVD, Martin
Arnold: The Cineseizure, (Vienna: Index and Paris: Re:Voir, 2006), 2-10.

24
Lippit, 8.

25
This was taken as a largely insufficient piece of legislation. This was revised and passed in a new form
in 1964, becoming what is now understood as the Civil Rights Act.

26
Mark Holcomb, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 35. Holcomb notes
that To Kill a Mockingbird was ranked 34
th
among the “100 best American films of all time” by the
American Film Institute in 1998.

27
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude
Dubinsky, (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 1997), 1-3.

28
Genette, 5-7.

29
Genette, 4.

30
In Arnold’s next film, Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1993), the audio component takes on an even
greater organizational and aesthetic importance. This film constructs an Oedipal narrative out of footage
from three films within the Mickey Rooney Andy Hardy series. Arnold reworks musical numbers
performed by Judy Garland, changing her words and creating a new musical composition through sonic
repetitions and reversals. For an analysis of this film, see Michael Zryd, “Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy,”
Senses of Cinema, October 2000. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/cteq/alone.html.

31
Even so, Mark Holcomb states that To Kill a Mockingbird allows for very few possibilities for its African
American characters, and in fact relegates them to familiar stereotypes. Holcomb, 38-39.

32
William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, (New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993), 36.

330

33
Wees, 39-40.

34
Wees, 40.

35
Kubelka, 141.

36
Martin Arnold, quoted in MacDonald, 357.

37
Arnold states, “I think I have been influenced not so much by American film as by contemporary
American music. Hip-hop, for example, is full of sampled phrases that are being repeated for longer or
shorter durations.” MacDonald, 358.

38
According to André Prévos, rap and hip-hop permeated French culture throughout the 1980s and early
1990s, and Mark Pennay notes a similar infusion in Germany during the same period. André J. M. Prévos,
“Postcolonial Popular Music in France: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the 1980s and 1990s,” in
Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA, ed. Tony Mitchell, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2001), 40-45; Mark Pennay, “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre,” in Global Noise,
114-119.

39
Interview with author, 6 April 2003.

40
Interview with author, 6 April 2003; The Council of Europe, 8 April 2003.
http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operation/Culture/Cinema/Short_film/Reports/austria.asp.

41
“Biographies & Filmographies,” in Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema: 1955-1993, ed. Martin Arnold and
Peter Tscherkassky, (Sixpack Film, 1994), 78.

42
Sixpack Film, 2003. http://www.sixpackfilm.com/info/index_infoE.html.
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PART IV – PAC-RIM TRANSATIONAL REMAKES

CHAPTER 9 – AS THE WORLD TURNS (TOWARD ASIA)
Although remakes between European cultural producers and Hollywood have
historically been the most significant form of transnational remake exchange, this flow
appears significantly displaced by the recent cycle of Hollywood remakes of films from
East Asia. The most notable examples include The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and
The Departed (2006), but the cycle is also evidenced by such films as Shall We Dance
(2004), Eight Below (2006), and Pulse (2006). This recent trend has historical
precedents, of course, and it evokes the history of cultural exchange between East Asia
and “the West” through the cinema.
As opposed to the system of mutual cinematic invention and competition between
European and American powers described in Part II, of which Eur-Am transnational
remakes constituted an important facet, East Asian cinemas have, more often than not,
been described as adopting, importing, or being dominated by the cinema, seen as
inherently Western due to historical priority. Some have claimed that, in fact, the
utilization of cinema technologies in East Asia was itself a kind of copying or remaking,
a domestication and transformation of a foreign technology. Marie Thorsten Morimoto
describes how the importation of cinema technologies into Japan worked within a process
of both modernization and, in some ways, Westernization. She states, “Japan’s film
industry got started nearly one hundred years ago, with the importation of several Edison
Kinetascopes...[marking] the entry of the Japanese archipelago into the world of modern
332
states.”
1
Yet as Wimal Dissanayake asserts, “cinema is not an indigenous form of
entertainment to Asia; however, before long, this imported Western art form was able to
sink roots in the national soil and the consciousness of the people to assume the status of
a national art.”
2

These formulations, as well as the numerous similar others, make a number of
critical alignments among the cinema, economics, culture, technology, and historical
change that inflect much of the interaction between East Asian, European, and American
powers. In this, there exists a conflation of industrialization, modernization, cinefication,
and “Westernization,” as these forces come about in East Asia. Spatially, some have
argued that the experience of modernity itself has a geographic component in addition to
a historical one. Eungjun Min, Jinsook Joo, and Han Ju Kwak have argued, “recent
history had demonstrated that modernization in essence means Westernization,”
particularly as modernization results from industrialization and Enlightenment
rationalization.
3
David Morley similarly asserts, “onto the geography of East and West is
directly mapped the distinction between the pre-modern and the modern. The category of
‘West’ has long signified the positional superiority of Europe, and later the United States,
in relation to the rest of the world.”
4

As a component of modernity, the cinema has been entwined in this complex
process, in which East Asian societies have adopted models originating elsewhere.
Looking specifically at Japan, Wimal Dissanayake writes:
Thirty years after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which opened Japan’s
door to Western influence, the film industry began in Japan. Cinema in
Japan, as indeed in most other countries, was originally conceived as a
form of mass entertainment with very little claim to artistic value, and was
333
primarily designed to offer pleasure of a special kind to the movie-going
public. From the beginning there was seen an interesting interplay
between the authority of the past and the imperatives of the present.
5

This aligns the cinema with the modernization and Westernization of Japan, and
moreover, suggests the discordant temporalities engendered by the uneven geographic
spread of modernity are themselves reflected in the Japanese cinema. This also
demonstrates three issues that will obtain throughout any discussion of transnational film
remakes of East Asian films. First, the complex conflation of modernization,
Westernization, and cinefication prevails as a lingering issue throughout East Asian
cinemas. Second, although the cinema may have originated outside Japan, its adoption
there remade this technology to suit particular cultural needs, especially as this culture
was in massive transition. Third, this conflation exhibits a potentially confusing
temporality, an experience of time and historical change in which the past and the present
come into immediate contact.
The idea that Japanese cinema remade Hollywood and European cinemas has
pervaded, or at least inflected much of Japanese film history. For instance, the once-lost-
but-now-found Japanese film Page of Madness (1927) has prompted numerous
discussions about the innovations and experiments within silent-era Japanese film and
about the influence of European avant-garde cinemas on Japanese film practice. Jasper
Sharp delineates many of the possible European influences on the film. He says, “though
Japan had not been deeply involved in the conflict [of WWI], its aftermath saw the
country opening itself up considerably to new Western ideas, be they political, economic,
or artistic. Newly-born movements such as Constructivism, Expressionism, and Futurism
334
were already being enthusiastically embraced and re-interpreted to fit the ideals of a
burgeoning avant-garde in Japan.”
6
In the case of Page of Madness, which depicts
characters in a mental institution in formally experimental ways, Sharp states “[Robert]
Weine’s landmark of expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, is the most obvious
[point of] comparison.”
7
Nevertheless, he also notes that, “according to Swiss film
historian Mariann Lewinsky, one particularly divisive influence was F.W. Murnau’s” The
Last Laugh (1925), “which had been released a month before [director] Kinugasa started
filming A Page of Madness.”
8
At the very least, the deep influence of European
experimentalism is evident in this film, inflecting a filmmaker in Japan with modernist
idioms from the West.
Indeed, the advent of modernity in Japan was frequently recognized in the West
through recognition of cinematic modernism. A prominent example of this is Akira
Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film
Festival and the 1952 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. As evidenced by these
awards, this film has been largely understood as the sign of the West’s acknowledgement
of Japanese culture following World War II. Further, this film serves as a prominent
example of narrative “remaking” though its multiple and multivalent retellings of the
same events, a rape and murder. This fractured narrative and modernist treatment of a
lack of a singular “truth,” combined with its generally humanist depiction of characters,
has been understood as making the film agreeable to Western critical values.
9

Similarly in Korea, some have asserted that, “modernization can be seen as the
major constituent core of Korean collective experience during the twentieth century.”
10

335
However, this issue is complicated by the influx of the cinema not just from the West but
also through the colonial Japanese infrastructure. Indeed, the Korean film industry was
largely defined by the incursion of outside forces, specifically the Western technology of
cinema and the Japanese colonial apparatus. Generally, under Japanese rule, there was a
very minimal cinema that was Korean, due to heavy censorship, which only intensified as
the occupation went on.
11
As a result, there remains debate about what film constitutes
“the first Korean film” as such, because of the large number of films made under the
occupation by colonial forces. The Korean example, then, reveals the complex,
palimpsestic form of cultural layering going on in East Asia with regard to the
development of the cinema there. Not only was the advent and spread of cinema in this
region associated with industrialization and modernization, but it held an ambivalent
relationship to so-called Westernization. Accepting even some degree of “cultural
imperialism” by Hollywood there, Eungjun Min, Jinsook Joo, and Han Ju Kwak
nevertheless assert that in Korea, “Hollywood cinema has provided attractive and
liberating democratic ideologies.”
12
Multiple lines of political and cultural force existed
within East Asia, disrupting any clear East/West binary division of this historical change.
In fact, numerous scholars have correctly pointed out that, in fact, much of what
counts as components of European modernity followed social and technological
developments first occurring in Asia.
13
What is most important, then, is that these forces
came into a particular cohesion in Europe and spread, often violently, outward. Although
the components of European modernity may have originated in Asia, the European claim
to historical priority has been a means of articulating European power over East Asia.
336
The claims to originality, from technological development to the very formulation of the
nation-state as a dominant social formation,
14
aim at superiority. This process of mutual
definition, this Orientalism, has sought to position East Asian cultures as second-rate
copycats.
In the particular context of film remakes, East Asian cinemas have been seen as
remake cinemas. Many of the issues around authenticity, originality, and historical
precedence that structure understandings of film remakes similarly inflect “East-West”
cinematic flows. The general denigration of remakes is immensely complicated by
Orientalist denigration of Asian cultures. One might presume that the senses of Eur-Am
precedence and superiority over East Asia would simply compound the denigration of
remakes in or from these areas. In fact, things are much more complex.
The film remake occurs throughout the diverse histories of East Asian cinema.
As Keiko McDonald notes, one “specialty” of Japanese cinema is the “classic remake,”
of which “the record [number of remakes] is held by the epic Chushingura, thanks to
Japanese cinema known round the world as The Forty-Seven Loyal Ronin. Eighty-four
versions have been made since the first.”
15
Eric Cazdyn expands this discussion, saying,
“the Japanese term eiga-ka (meaning ‘to make into film’ or ‘to cinematize’) refers to the
process generally called film adaptation in English. Of course, the most famous example
of eiga-ka is the more than one hundred films made from the story of Chushingura (The
loyal forty-seven ronin)…Almost every work in the canon of modern Japanese prose
fiction has been made into film, usually more than once.”
16
In Korea, on the other hand,
many different versions of the traditional folk tale Chunghyang have been made, for
337
example. In fact, the first officially “Korean” sync-sound film, that is, independent of the
Japanese colonial force at the time, was a version of this story made in 1935, which was
in fact a remake of a silent version from 1923.
17
As Hyangjin Lee discusses, versions of
this film were made in both North Korea and South Korea following the division of the
nations after the Korean War. Lee shows that although these film versions derive from
the same source, they “divulge the disparate interest of contemporary Koreans living in
the divided nation.”
18
These differences fall between capitalism and communism and yet
all are connected by their shared Confucian values regarding women and family. In the
southern films, a range of depictions of women, from ideal mother, sister, and wife
combines to constitute an idealized woman through the lead figure in the films. In the
North, the stress is on the contradictions created by class divisions. Thus within the
single-but-divided “nation,” important social issues find articulation through these
remakes and readaptations.
As seen in Parts II and III, the issue of originality, artistic expression, and the
“poetic inspiration” of the genius Euro-auteur inflected the exchange of Eur-Am
transnational remakes. This might lead to an assumption that similar considerations
would have no bearing on the discussion of Pac-Rim remakes. Nevertheless, not only
does David Desser acknowledge the development of auteurs in Japan, but further links
them to the practice of remakes. He asserts that, as numerous European auteurs have
remade their own films, the practice is “even more common in Japan,” citing auto-
remakes done by Yasujiro Ozu, Kon Ichikawa, and Hiroshi Inagaki.
19
Desser uses this
trait to connect these Japanese directors to European counterparts in their shared,
338
artistically valuable endeavor to rework and improve material they had produced earlier.
Like a number of European and Hollywood directors, Japanese cinema featured directors
remaking their own previous films. This occurred, for instance, with Ozu’s Floating
Weeds (1959), a remake of The Story of Drifting Wood (1934). Moreover, this director,
according to Tadao Sato, was greatly influenced by Western cinema. Sato states,
“Ozu…set eyes on Thomas H. Ince’s Civilization (1916), [and] became so absorbed in
American movies that he failed to enter college and got a job with a studio.”
20
Since that
event, the director’s “first films in 1927 as well as some later works were based on ideas
from American movies.”
21
This demonstrates the general influence of Western cinema
on prominent Japanese auteurs, and more importantly, the eminent place of the film
remake within their oeuvres, and most importantly, exactly this process serving as the
comparative validation in relation to European auteurs.
This should not suggest that there have not been cultural specificities to
adaptations, readaptations, and remakes within East Asian cultures. For instance, Eric
Cazdyn historically details specific adaptations in his book about Japanese cinema, The
Flash of Capital. He shows how the very idea of adaptation adapted over time, looking
particularly at the 1930s, the late 1960s, and the 1990s. In the 1930s, he finds that eiga-
ka aimed largely at fidelity to the narrative of the source.
22
The films using the approach
developed in the late 1960s “commonly exceed the original text either by focusing on a
particular section or adding content to the narrative.”
23
He connects these tendencies to
the broad social conditions of the Japanese nation at the time, moving from an imperial
sense of superiority in the 1930s to a critical stance toward the nation itself in the 1960s.
339
Finally, Cazdyn asserts that eiga-ka of the contemporary period, which he calls
“transformative eiga-ka” much in the way I call Peter Tscherkassky’s oeuvre
“transformative,” “seeks to delink and deterritorialize the adaptation from the
original…[implying] that the original is not only what it is, but also that it exceeds
itself.”
24
In this respect, Cazdyn aligns transformative eiga-ka with the contemporary
vacillations between the Japanese nation and globalization.
This Part of my study looks pointedly at Pac-Rim transnational remakes produced
in the contemporary period, the same era that Cazdyn examines in relation to
transformative eiga-ka in Japan. Similarly as well, I will coordinate these films with the
transnationalization of East Asian cinemas in the contemporary period. However, my
research reveals that, generally, Pac-Rim transnational film remakes are rather
conservative, and although transformations occur in the remaking process, these remakes
do not imply that “the original is not only what it is, but also that it exceeds itself” of their
own internal textual properties. Rather, it is in the process of critical and contextual
examination that the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of these cinematic texts
becomes apparent. Indeed, it becomes apparent the recent cycle of East Asian
transnational film remakes conforms with a significant rearrangement of existing
economic and cultural flows at the macro-regional level, a shift that appears to conform
to the spatialization of postmodernity.
In the last several decades, Asian cinemas have become increasingly important
within their regional contexts and throughout the world. The cinema of Hong Kong,
from the action spectaculars of Tsui Hark to the cosmopolitan art films of Wong Kar-wai,
340
has had a particularly strong impact on world cinema. The kung-fu films of Bruce Lee,
of instance, were popular in the United States, as well as throughout East Asia. In South
Korea, Hong Kong action films were incredibly popular among general audiences, as
detailed in depth by Daiwon Hyun.
25
Hong Kong films first entered Korea in the late
1960s with the swordfight films of King Hu, which gained widespread popularity.
During the 1970s the kung fu films of Bruce Lee gained monumental popularity. Also
during the 1970s, there were a number of Korean-Hong Kong co-productions that
imitated the kung fu style of Hong Kong. Through the mid-to-late 1980s, the Zen warrior
films and the gangster films of John Woo gained huge popularity, nearly matching the
import levels of Hollywood films. The art cinema of Wong Kar-wai was also quite
popular. Hyun goes on to describe how the levels of Hong Kong imports went up
drastically with the changes in import laws in 1985 that also facilitated Hollywood’s
entry into the market. The high point in Hong Kong films in Korea was between 1986
and 1992. More recently Hong Kong films have faded in popularity due to changing
popular tastes, yet it remains remarkable that Hong Kong films rank as the second highest
film import after Hollywood and still hold a profound influence on the Korean scene.
Numerous directors and actors moved from Hong Kong to work in Hollywood
during the 1990s, including John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jackie Chan. Likewise,
Hollywood has incorporated certain aesthetic conventions of Hong Kong action cinema,
notably exemplified by the combination of wire-work acrobatics and martial arts seen in
The Matrix (1999). Notably, Hollywood’s self-conscious contention with Hong Kong
action cinema corresponded with the “handover” of the former British colony to the
341
People’s Republic of China in 1997. Many directors and other above-the-line talent
emigrated from Hong Kong before this shift in political control. Without suggestion a
causal relation, it is vital to note that the Hong Kong film industry has, since the
handover, severely declined within Hong Kong and within the greater East Asian
region.
26
Alongside the dissipation of Hong Kong action cinema dissipated is the growth
in a globally-recognized action cinema of the PRC. The recent cycle of martial arts epics
directed by Zhang Yimou, such as Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004),
exemplify this trend.
Alongside the transmutation and decline of Hong Kong action films, the popular
cinema of South Korea has found unprecedented domestic and international success with
numerous melodramas and action thrillers. Although the South Korean cinema had
undergone incredible flux during the 1980s and 1990s, as of the late 1990s, South Korean
cinema was transformed by the enormous domestic success of two action thrillers, Shiri
(1999) and JSA: Joint Security Area (2000). Based on the wild popularity of these two
films, the entire industry was largely reoriented toward large(r)-budget action spectacle
films geared toward a large, popular, domestic audience.
On the one hand, this change came in the wake of drastic political and cultural
changes in South Korea. Eungjun Min, Jinsook Joo, and Han Ju Kwak put it succinctly:
Beginning in 1988, Korea entered a new phase in its political and social
development. There were constitutional safeguards against despotism,
relaxation of censorship, and, following the success of the Seoul
Olympics, a new sense of Korea’s Statues in the world. Former President
Taewoo Roh’s ability to extend the political center by discussion rather
than force created a hope for new democratically elected civilian
president. Rho made a peace treaty with various left-wing radical groups
and released several key political prisoners. This political change,
342
continuous student demonstrations, anti-Americanism, and economic
growth and decline had brought economic, political, and cultural forces
into new kinds of relation, into a new equilibrium.
27

On the other hand, the transformation of Korean cinema into a “blockbuster cinema” had
much to do with pan-Asian economic transformations. Doobo Shim describes the effect
that the Asian financial crisis of 1997 had, which itself had resulted from the inflated debt
economy of Korea and other places collapsing.
28
In Korea, this crisis destroyed smaller
film production firms, and yet the chaebol managed to survive. This weeding out left the
chaebol in a singular position of power in the film industry. Indeed, the chaebol invested
heavily in film production in the wake of the economic crisis, making films of generally
increased budgets and glossier production values.
Japanese cinema, however, has been somewhat different. Following the severe
decline in the domestic industry during the 1970s, Japanese cinema has gained only
marginal success abroad, mainly through a continued presence at international film
festivals, with such films as The Eel (1997) and Fireworks (1997). More prolific and
significant, however, has been the Japanese animation industry, which Susan Napier
observes held “an inverse relationship with the decline of the Japanese film industry.”
29

Yet beyond animated films, Japanese cinema has not gained the same transnational
impact as other East Asian cinemas. Nevertheless, Japanese cinema recently became
culturally dialogized in particular ways with Hollywood, as part of an overall response by
Hollywood to the increasing global popularity of East Asian cinemas. The most
remarkable contemporary interaction between Hollywood and Japanese cinema has been
through film remakes, an exchange that has facilitated a broader series of remakes
343
between Hollywood and other East Asian cinemas. In the wake of this Japanese-
Hollywood remake dialogic exchange, Hollywood has sought out films from numerous a
much larger East Asian cultural sphere, including Hong Kong and South Korea. The
Departed (2006), a remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), and The Lake
House (2006), a remake of the South Korean film Il Mare (2000), present two examples
of this larger trend.
Considered geo-culturally, this represents a dramatic change in Hollywood’s
transnational remakes, which have predominantly taken European films as their sources.
Of course, there was an earlier cycle of Hollywood remakes of Japanese films, concurrent
with the (re)integration of Japan into the world political community following WWII, and
the integration of Japan’s economy within the world economy. Perhaps the most initially
striking of these post-war remakes is the case of Gojira (1954), which was remade, in a
way, as Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1956) for audiences in the United States.
Produced by Toho studios and directed by Toshiro Honda, Gojira made a huge impact on
Japanese cinema, evidenced through nearly innumerable monster movies that it inspired
on both sides of the Pacific. It is vital to note that this film was itself heavily inspired by
the Hollywood monster movie, King Kong (1933). William Tsutsui, among others,
details how King Kong was re-released in the United States and around the world in
1952. This re-release inspired the production of the giant-monster film The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms (1953), which along with King Kong directly inspired Gojira director
Toshiro Honda.
30

344
But if Gojira was a Japanese remaking of these two Hollywood monster movies,
the film was also a direct response to larger, immediate social issues that also spoke to
tensions between the United States and Japan. Honda sought to integrate
contemporaneous Japanese concerns regarding atomic testing in the Pacific by the United
States. This issue took on particular significance following the accidental fallout
exposure to the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon No. 5. Honda
incorporated this event into the film through the mysterious destruction of a fishing boat
early in the film, as part of his overall objective to connect the eponymous monster with
anxieties about nuclear power and weaponry.
Samara Lee Allsop, among others, interrogates the differences between Gojira
and its Hollywood “remake,” Godzilla: King of the Monsters. She describes in detail
how the original film contends with these nuclear issues, while the remake excises
them.
31
In 1954, Gojira was released on a limited scale in the USA, and generally did not
do booming business. However, a young entrepreneur saw the film and bought the
international rights, selling the film to a small production company thought that they
could revise it and release it in American theaters. This company recut the film,
drastically reducing it in length. Moreover, they had a number of new scenes shot with
American actor Raymond Burr and integrated them within the new edit of the original
footage, constructing a new narrative element about an American newspaper reporter
visiting Tokyo during the attacks by the monster. So, the film was remade in a number of
respects. First, it was remade according to a traditional definition inasmuch as new
footage was shot for a film based on an existing film. However, a good portion of the
345
original film was duped and simply replayed within the new narrative context constructed
by the added new footage and editing. In this respect, Godzilla: King of the Monsters
conflates the division between dupe and remake, between distribution and remaking,
although much less radically than the films of Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky.
Thus, second, Godzilla remakes even the original footage by resituating it amidst new
footage, as the new footage transforms that which is repeated. Third, the film was
culturally remade, as it conformed to American ideological parameters, by both situating
the narrative from the perspective of an American “outsider” looking into Japan, as well
as through the eradication of overt references to atomic energy.
The most significant transnational remake exchange between Japan and
Hollywood before the recent cycle occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, when
Hollywood remade a number of samurai films directed by Akira Kurosawa. The most
prominent of these is The Magnificent Seven (1960), a remake of Seven Samurai (1954),
yet Hollywood also remade Rashomon as The Outrage (1964). Through a process of
generic, geographic, and historical transformation, these films were made into Western
genre films set in the North American frontier of the late 1800s. On the one hand, these
remakes could be seen as “Westernizing” Japanese films in both senses of the word.
However, in his classic study of Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai films, David Desser details
how, “Kurosawa utilizes Western motifs and makes them his own.”
32
In this respect, this
“most Western” of Japanese directors provided a set of texts, already hybridized between
“East” and “West,” which were subsequently recognized as legible yet positioned as
“foreign” through their remaking.
346
Whereas Seven Samurai provides an elegiac treatment of a dying way of life in
sixteenth century Japan, reflecting the sense of deep historical change in Japan following
the end of World War II, The Magnificent Seven alters this narrative for an American
national imagination of the early 1960s. This remake changed many things from the
original, two of which speak to cinematic and ideological shifts. First, although it may
seem simplistic, the remake depicts the bandits outside the experience of the seven
heroes. Eli Wallach plays the head of the bandit gang, and the film depicts him planning
the attack on the small town, for instance. This transition reveals an interest in
humanizing even villainous characters in Hollywood cinema, an interest in providing
psychologically motivated characters throughout the narrative. Second, the remake
contends, however indirectly, with issues of race and ethnicity particular to the North
American context. The film interacts with a civil rights discourse as the characters
played by Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen escort the corpse of a dead native American
into a “Whites Only” graveyard – every man is equal, under the protection of the Anglos.
The case of The Outrage is slightly different. Although it similarly relocates the
narrative from medieval Japan to the American West of the late 1800s, it retains the
complex, ambivalent narrative in such a way as to create a script-and-performance-based
film. This reworking as a Hollywood prestige picture in part derives from its earlier
incorporation into American culture as a theatrical play that showed on Broadway. In
this respect, the cultural confluence is mediated by a transmedial exchange, resonating
with the taste for more character-based texts on the American stage.
347
A Fistful of Dollars (1964), although not a Hollywood film, closes out this cycle,
and reveals the fully transnational rather than international scope of this exchange. As an
initially illegal remake of Yojimbo (1961), this “Western” was directed by Italian Sergio
Leone, was shot in Spain, and featured an international cast including American Clint
Eastwood. Although the film mobilizes tropes and conventions of the Western genre, it
eradicates any sense of cultural specificity from the narrative and milieu. Indeed, this is
truly a transnational remake, as it abstracts cinematic signifiers from any specific or
coherent national cultural context. Even in light of the international popularity of Fistful
of Dollars, however, this cycle of samurai-Western transnational remakes came to a close
along with the decline in the Western genre through the late 1960s and 1970s. One can
chart the closure of this wave with the film Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), which drew
much of its inspiration and narrative from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958).
Indeed, this film incorporates both the samurai and Western genres, in terms of narrative
structures, within the epic sci-fi genre, which would soon dominate Hollywood big-
budget production in the wake of its enormous economic and cultural success. It was
precisely out of this moment, from the late 1970s through the 1990s, that Hollywood
ravenously remade films from Europe.
Now, the world appears to turn toward Asia. At least Hollywood has. Following
the enormous success of The Ring at the US box office ($129 million) and across the
globe ($120 million), Hollywood apprehended a steady stream of Japanese films and
remade them.
33
Similarly, Hollywood reacted to the recent boom of South Korean
blockbusters by initiating remakes of a number of hits, such as Il Mare, My Wife is a
348
Gangster (2001), and Oldboy (2003). Since 2001, more than twenty Hollywood remakes
of East Asian-produced films have been made or are currently in some stage of pre-
production or production, including the following films: Addicted (2003), Antarctica
(1983), Dark Water (2001), The Eye (2002), Hi Dharma (2001), Ju-on (2003), My Sassy
Girl (2001), One Missed Call (2003), Pulse (2001), Shall We Dance (1996), and A Tale
of Two Sisters (2003). The shift toward remaking films from East Asia thus coincides
with a larger cycle of activity and transnational significance of those cinemas; in this
respect, Hollywood’s remakes of East Asian films should be seen as part of a larger
reaction to the competition posed by them. This represents a strategic respatialization of
Hollywood toward Asia, a redirection of the economic and cultural flows through which
Hollywood operates and which the industry seeks to command.
This “Asian turn” in Hollywood resonates with the growth in importance of many
East Asian nations within the world economy, or more accurately, the increased
economic interdependence of European and North American powers with East Asian
powers. Manuel Castells describes the interaction among businesses in East Asia and the
rest of the world, as well as the Eur-Am adoption of business models occurring in East
Asia, particularly in their adoption of network logics.
34
At one point, Castells notes the
increasing interconnection of business networks in China with the Chinese state, saying
that if a stable integration is achieved, “the world’s economic landscape will be
transformed.”
35
According to the CIA World Factbook, “the restructuring of the
[Chinese] economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold
increase in GDP [from 1978 until the present].”
36
Similarly, of South Korea they state,
349
“Since the 1960s, South Korea has achieved an incredible record of growth and
integration into the high-tech modern world economy. Four decades ago, GDP per capita
was comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia. In 2004, South
Korea joined the trillion dollar club of world economies.”
37
Finally, of Japan they write,
“government-industry cooperation, a strong work ethic, mastery of high technology, and
a comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with
extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically powerful economy in
the world after the US and the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China,
measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis.”
38
Writing in 1996, but based on his
observations of Japan’s global economic power in the 1980s, David Morley was
prompted to say, “modernity (or perhaps postmodernity) may perhaps be located more in
the Pacific than the Atlantic.”
39
If it is true that, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the
Eastern bloc, we now live in a world of a globally interconnected, real-time economy
operating according to capitalist logics, if it is true that money makes the world go round,
then the world now turns toward East Asia.
In this respect, the contemporary cultural dialogue between Hollywood and East
Asian cinemas is one cultural manifestation of new social and economic relations. Yet
like any cultural process, this dialogue does not simply reflect social or economic
realities, but rather operates with “relative autonomy” and indeed exerts real force upon
the construction of these realities. Just as these remakes delineate a transnational space
of flows between “East” and “West,” between Hollywood and select East Asian cultural
350
industries, so too do these remakes redirect these flows, reshape the space of them,
remake them.

351
CHAPTER 9 NOTES

1
Marie Thorsten Morimoto, “The ‘Peace Dividend’ in Japanese Cinema: Metaphors of a Demilitarized
Nation,” in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake, (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 12.

2
Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction: Nationhood, History, and Cinema: Reflections on the Asian Scene,”
in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, xiv.

3
Eungjun Min, Jinsook Joo, and Han Ju Kwak, Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic
Imagination, (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), 116.

4
David Morley, “EurAm, Modernity, Reason, and Alterity: Or, Postmodernism, the Highest Stage of
Cultural Imperialism?” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-
Hsing Chen, (London: Routledge, 1996), 328.

5
Dissanayake, xiv-xv.

6
Jasper Sharp, “A Page of Madness,” in Cinema of Japan and Korea, ed. Justin Bower, (London:
Wallflower Press, 2004), 15.

7
Sharp, 17.

8
Sharp, 17.

9
Notably, this film was an adaptation of the short stories “In a Grove” and “Rashomon,” by Ryunosuke
Akutagawa, who himself had been “influenced” by Western modernism.

10
Min, Joo, and Kwak, 115.

11
Min, Joo, and Kwak, 26

12
Min, Joo, and Kwak, 151.

13
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Second Edition, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), 7-9.

14
Partha Chatterjee, among a number of post-colonial scholars, is particularly insightful in his criticism of
this phenomenon. The following analogy paraphrases his characterization of the problem: As nations are
imagined and nationalism is Western, postcolonial powers have their imaginations colonized. Partha
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.

15
Keiko McDonald, Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2006), 67.

16
Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002), 88.

17
Min, Joo, and Kwak, 31.

18
Hyangjin Lee, Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics, (Manchester: Manchester
University, 2000), 67.
352

19
David Desser, “Ikiru; Narration as a Moral Act,” in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre,
History, ed. Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 57.

20
Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, trans. Gregory Barrett, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982),
33.

21
Sato, 33.

22
Cazdyn, 90.

23
Cazdyn, 91.

24
Cazdyn, 117.

25
Daiwon Hyun, “Hong Kong Cinema in Korea: Its Prosperity and Decay,” Asian Cinema 9, no. 2 (Spring
1998): 38-45.

26
Film piracy constitutes a major factor in this equation as well. Reports show that piracy runs rampant
within Hong Kong’s internet. For instance, in Hong Kong, internet piracy via BitTorrent has had a
tremendous impact on video retailers and the small-to medium budget films. According to one estimate,
the number of video retailers has fallen from 800 to 100 while the number of BitTorrent sites is above
2000. Gordon Chan, quoted in Winnie Chung, “Task Force Mulls H.K. Film Crisis,” Hollywood Reporter
386, Nov. 30-Dec. 6, 2004, 67.

27
Min, Joo, and Kwak, 74.

28
Doobo Shim, “South Korean Media Industry in the 1990s and the Economic Crisis,” Prometheus 20,
no.4, (2002): 337-350.

29
Susan Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke, (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 16.

30
William Tsutsui, Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 19-20.

31
Samara Lee Allsop, “Gojira,” in Cinema of Japan and Korea, 63-70.

32
David Desser, The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 4.

33
For instance, Hollywood “mini-major” Pandemonium secured the rights to Nakata’s horror film Dark
Water (2002) before its release in Japanese theaters. Claude Brodesser and Charles Lyons, “Pandemonium
bathes in 'Water' horror fantasy,” Variety.com, 16 Jan. 2002.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117858694?categoryid=13&cs=1. Similarly, Universal Pictures
optioned a remake of Nakata’s neo-noir thriller Kaosu (1999) in 2002. Michael Fleming, “Tribeca,
Bickford ready 'Kaosu' for U,” Variety.com, 28 April 2002.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117866147?categoryid=13&cs=1&query.

34
Castells, 189. He necessarily differentiates between the relation between the Japanese state and economy
and the relation between the Chinese state and economy, stating that whereas Japan formed the national
economy as well as that of Korea and Taiwan under authoritarian, colonial rule, the relation between China
and the economy is much looser, allowing for more spontaneous forms of entrepreneurialism.
Castells.196-197.
353

35
Castells, 205.

36
CIA World Factbook: China, last updated 20 March 2008. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/ch.html#Econ.

37
CIA World Factbook: South Korea, last updated 20 March 2008.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ks.html#Econ.

38
CIA World Factbook: Japan, last updated 20 March 2008. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/ja.html.

39
Morley, 349.
354
CHAPTER 10 - CIRCULATIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND DISCOURSE IN THE
RING INTERTEXT
The Ring. These words evoke a number of metaphors. The Ring as a circle, as a
system of circularity, of cycling and of recycling. Hence the Japanese film Ringu (1998)
is derived from a novel written in 1991 by Koji Suzuki.
1
A series of film sequels and
prequels followed Ringu, including Rasen (1999), Ringu 2 (1999) and Ringu 0: Birthday
(2000). In 1999, Ringu was remade in South Korea under the title Ring and known in
English as Ring Virus. Hollywood also remade Ringu, in English and with a
multinational cast in 2002 as The Ring. Further still along the circle, a sequel to the
Hollywood version followed in 2005, directed by Ringu director Hideo Nakata, yet it
held almost no direct intertextual connection to the Japanese Ringu series.
As a system of recycling, The Ring evokes the entire wave of Hollywood remakes
of East Asian films. However, The Ring does not only indicate new levels of interaction
among Japanese and Hollywood players; it is vital to remember that the South Korean
Ring Virus followed Ringu by merely a year. After years of troubled relations between
Japan and South Korea, this remake marks an important instance of cultural exchange. In
combination, Ringu, Ring Virus, and The Ring thus constitute a circuit of economic,
semiotic, and cultural exchange, however imbalanced, among players across the Pacific.
This constellation of texts, this “Ring Intertext,” maps a transnational and macro-regional
space. This composes another metaphor, geographic as well as economic and cultural—
The Ring Intertext as the Pacific Rim.
355
Considered this broadly, The Ring Intertext literally and figuratively illuminates
forces of transnationalism and globalization, specifically through communications
technologies. As Arjun Appadurai argues, electronic media serve as a primary
component of globalization, transforming the geographies of culture and imagination.
2

Similarly, David Morley and Kevin Robins argue that new global media transcend
national borders and realign cultural identities.
3
In this respect, The Ring Intertext is
overdetermined by mammoth social forces, even as it represents these forces within
specific narrative and aesthetic parameters. Moreover, for the purposes of analysis, the
compound term “communications technologies” may be productively divided into
constitutive parts, discourse and technology. These terms signify the taut lines of
connection and contestation throughout The Ring Intertext, articulating a new Pacific Rim
cultural configuration and revealing the struggle for power within it.
This struggle for power manifests itself in two polarities that pervade The Ring
Intertext as well as its broader economic, cultural, and discursive circumstances. First,
the Intertext reveals tensions between technophilia and technophobia. The fluctuation
between these poles finds a basis in the historically circumscribed economic and political
relations among Japan, Korea, and the United States. The different modes of
technophilia and technophobia exhibited by these films demonstrate the asymmetrical
power relations that inflect this cultural formation, specifically as the texts reveal
anxieties about history and identity.
The second polarity that pervades The Ring Intertext is a dichotomy between
logophilia and logophobia, terms described by Michel Foucault in his essay “The
356
Discourse on Language.” There he posits that the apparent love for discourse in Western
culture covers over a deeper fear of discourse.
4
This logophobia is a fear of the
uncontainable proliferation of discourse; it is a fear of inarticulation. It manifests itself in
the desire to censor, to monitor, to delimit, and/or to halt discursive proliferation.
Alternatively, logophilia refers to a predilection for and a taking pleasure in the creation
of texts, textual proliferation, and textual dissemination; it is the joy of putting into
discourse. The polarity between logophilia and logophobia seen in The Ring Intertext
pervades the relations among East Asian and Hollywood players as well as the
contemporary institutional conditions of transnational remakes more generally. The
dialectic between these two polarities, between technophilia/technophobia and
logophilia/logophobia, gives shape to The Ring Intertext and significantly inflects the
contemporary transnational-transtextual space of Hollywood and East Asian cinema.

GHOST IN THE SHELL: AN ECONOMY OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE RING
INTERTEXT
Ringu begins with a horror film cliché. Two teenage girls, home alone at night,
gossip about an urban legend. Rather than a tale of ghosts or murderers escaped from
prison, however, their story is about a killer videotape. The premise is simple—anyone
who views this videotape dies seven days later. One girl admits she has seen the tape and
now fears for her life, and as the scene plays out the girl dies mysteriously. This dramatic
device—the killer videotape—derives from the novel Ringu, by Koji Suzuki, and the
premise runs throughout the filmic versions of the narrative. Here in the first film, the
357
narrative follows Reiko Asakawa, a female reporter, as she watches the tape and tracks
the video to its source in an attempt to save her own life. She discovers that the tape is
cursed and houses the malevolent soul of a dead psychic girl. Ringu thus locates terror in
technology by conflating the spiritual and the mechanical.
This method of denigrating media technologies is not new. Jeffrey Sconce has
observed the spiritualization of media since the mid-1800s, as in the case of the “spiritual
telegraph” through which the living attempted to communicate with the dead.
5

Analogously, Geoffrey Batchen notes that the invention of photography was attended by
ruminations about its close relationship with death.
6
These early sentiments of “haunted
media” resonate directly with Ringu and its remakes. As these films portray the ghostly
inhabitation of a videotape, they articulate different temporalities in relation to
technology and in the context of horror, combining “modern” rationalism and “pre-
modern” superstition.
This characterization resonates with the differential histories of technological
exchange among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Of course, these
relationships are infinitely complex and fraught by intense struggles for power that
continue to raise anxieties. For Japan and Korea, modernization and technological
progress was, and in some respects remains, associated with Westernization and the
imperial power of the USA. Further, Korean industrialization was associated not only
with Western incursion but rather Japanese colonial domination, as Japan forcefully
corralled Korea into its national/imperial economic infrastructure.
7
However, technology
also provided the means for Japan and South Korea to exert power across the globe
358
during the second half of the twentieth century, as both nations underwent economic
“miracles” based predominantly on technological development. In these respects, the
relational development of technology across the Pacific Rim is marked by the uneven
spatial deployment of modernity and evokes an intense struggle for cultural power.
These tensions are intricately connected with constructions of cultural identities,
as can be seen across a wide variety of Japanese films. Gojira (1954), for instance,
fluctuates ambivalently between technophilia and technophobia in ways that correspond
with tensions between the USA and Japan around nuclear technology. As this film
downplayed the issue of nuclear testing when it was “remade” as Godzilla: King of the
Monsters (1956) for theatrical release in the USA, it demonstrates further how
asymmetries of power inform cultural characterizations of technology across the Pacific
Rim. More recently, the processes of globalization have transformed the lines of
connection across the region and realigned the associative relationships between
technology and identity. Ian Conrich argues that Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) and its
sequel illustrate a “new wave of Japanese Horror cinema” that dramatizes “post-
industrial” fantasies.
8
The protagonist in this film obliterates traditional boundaries
between human and machine in fantastic fashion, and he ultimately forms a cybernetic
synthesis of the two categories. Further, Eric Cazdyn reads the cyborg narratives of both
Tetsuo and Ghost in the Shell (1995) as allegories for the transition from national
sovereignty to globalization.
9
He argues that the films’ representation of fluid
relationships between human and machine evokes the mobility of a transnational identity.
359
These associations, transformations, and tensions among temporalities,
technology, and identities pervade the greater cultural configuration. Morley and Robins
describe how the West distinguished itself from Japanese technological modernity
through a discourse of “techno-orientalism,” which denigrated the Japanese as overly
mechanized and inhuman.
10
They illuminate the discursive chain of associations that
posits, “if the future is technological, and if technology has become ‘Japanised’, then the
syllogism would suggest that the future is now Japanese too.”
11
Alternatively, Koichi
Iwabuchi argues that Japan’s immense global cultural impact has been largely through
culturally “odorless” consumer technologies that do not necessarily bear associations of
“Japaneseness.”
12
As examples, Iwabuchi mentions “VCRs, computer games, karaoke
machines, and the Walkman.”
13
Further, Paul du Gay, et. al., show how Sony as a
company and the Walkman as a technology fluctuated between signifying Japan and the
global.
14
These different characterizations mark important tensions between national
specificity and transnational abstraction and indicate how technology and its
representations interact within a struggle for cultural power and identity across the Pacific
Rim.
The Ring Intertext reworks this matrix of forces within its narrative and aesthetic
strategies. These texts depict the “haunting” of imaging technologies, specifically
dramatizing techno-spiritual threats to the human subject. This occurs within an apparent
polarity between pre-modernity and (post-)modernity. Just as importantly, this crisis
raises questions about the relation of the individual subject to a transnational space of
technological flows. Negotiating the split between technophilia and technophobia, the
360
characters combat threats to their identities, between differential temporalities and from
external domination, through the mastery over technology.
Early in the narrative of Ringu, the film associates imaging technology with terror
and the erasure of identity. The female reporter Reiko discovers that, a week before their
deaths, her niece and several of her classmates snuck away to a cabin. During her
investigation, Reiko finds Polaroid photographs they took during their trip. In some
photos the teenagers appear happy as they stand near the cabin. Yet other photographs
depict the teens with their faces distorted, warped out of legibility. The Korean and
Hollywood remakes of the film replicate this device and it recurs in one of the Japanese
sequels, Ringu 2. Within the logic of the narrative, this warping occurs because the
teenagers watched the videotape. As visualized in the photographs, the teens’ identities
were distorted by their experience with another imaging technology, the cursed
videotape. Later, the protagonists, Rieko in Ringu, Sun-ju in Ringu Virus, and Rachel in
The Ring, verify that they too have been cursed after watching the videotape by
photographing themselves, and indeed these images depict their smeared faces. The
characters become monstrous as a result of technology as seen through technology.
This effacement corresponds with another device in the films, the hair that covers
the female ghost’s face. Within each of the films, the ghost is rendered particularly
creepy by the long, oily black hair that drapes over her face and obscures her features,
making her unknown and perhaps unknowable. As both the photographic warping and
the draping hair remove clear markers of individuality, these devices both raise anxieties
about identity. Moreover, when contrasted with one another, these tropes mark a
361
temporal divergence between pre-modernity and modernity. As a convention, long black
hair covering the faces of female ghosts has a long history in East Asian visual culture.
More recently, the ghost-story masterpiece Kwaidan (1964), among others, features this
device prominently in one of its folkloric narratives.
15
As the ghosts throughout The Ring
Intertext feature this inky hair, they similarly evoke pre-modern East Asian culture.
16

This association is reinforced by the ghosts’ originating from a distant rural area where
cultural traditions presumably remain “untainted” by modern city life.
However, rather than immutably aligning Ringu, etc., with “tradition,” the past,
and with Asia, it is more accurate to say that The Ring Intertext negotiates divergent
historical temporalities and cultural spheres, which threaten stable conditions of identity.
The films manifest this negotiation by conflating the VCR and the vengeful female ghost,
by haunting a modern technology with a terror of the past. As the Hollywood remake of
Ringu faithfully retains the iconography of the dark-haired female ghost seen in Ringu
and Ring Virus, the Hollywood film repositions this visual trope within the context of
transnational culture. In The Ring, the girl who eventually becomes the antagonist was
adopted by unsuspecting parents before she became a malevolent spirit. It remains a
mystery where her adoptive parents got her, but the film insinuates that she came from
some distant place, from “elsewhere.” Although The Ring maintains the sense of the
ghost’s distance from contemporary culture, the film disassociates the iconography of the
dark-haired female ghost from pre-modernity and East Asia. Replicated across the
Pacific Rim and between East and West, the ghost’s lack of identity marks her
transnational legibility. She becomes a transnational figure, a figure of transnationalism.
362
A scene from Ringu 2 reinforces the connection between the hair and imaging
technologies as threats to identity. As a male reporter reviews footage of an interview
with a girl who died from the videotape curse, her head shakes back and forth. The
video-player slips out of the reporter’s control and the girl’s head shakes ever more
violently on the screen. The girl’s face disappears, covered by her black hair and
obscured by the videographic blurring, combining pre-modern and post-modern visual
conventions in one cinematic moment. As with the warped photographs, this scene
suspends the identity of the individual through their relation to technology. This presents
a picture of transnational identity inasmuch as it displaces, suspends, and abstracts the
surface markings of identity while contending with diverse historical experiences with
technological modernity.
The Ring Intertext also dramatizes media technologies penetrating the human
psyche. The Ring explains that the killer videotape resulted from the ghost exercising her
psychic will upon the technology, a concept appearing previously in Ringu 2.
17
The film
shows the child Samara as she is tested in a mental institution. Known for having
psychic abilities, doctors seek to record her extra-sensory talents, which appear as bizarre
images on sheets of plastic film that resemble X-rays. The protagonist finds that the
cursed tape was produced in the same way, as imprints made by the child’s mind upon
the imaging technology. The Ringu novel presents the inverse of this situation. When
the protagonist views the cursed videotape, the tape inserts itself directly into his mind.
The novel describes the experience as “strange—something was stimulating his five
senses, some medium besides the sounds and visions that appeared as if he were suddenly
363
recalling them.”
18
Earlier in the viewing, the male reporter watches “concepts in the
abstract, etched vividly into his brain,” as if there was no technology or medium involved
at all.
19

Such characterizations demonstrate a deep concern with the relation between
technology and subjectivity. The Ring Intertext presents the possibility for psychic
projection upon technology, making it malleable to the will of the subject, a direct
reflection of the subject. Yet, the texts also warn of technology overcoming the subject,
erasing his or her subjective individuality. This corresponds with the ambivalent split
between technophilia and technophobia, as it proposes that human and machine might
interact in some transcendent fashion, yet one that threatens to erase the human entirely.
Situated firmly within the horror genre, The Ring Intertext tends toward
technophobia. The association of technology with terror reaches its peak when the cursed
tape kills protagonists’ male companion, the Ryuji Takayama / Choi Yeol / Noah Clay
character. In the Ringu novel, Takayama dies as a result of terrible hallucinations in a
mirror.
20
In all the film versions, however, the television flickers to life on its own and
gains the man’s attention. The screen shows the top of the well where the psychic girl
died, and shockingly, the video shows her crawl from this rim. She walks with uncanny
jerks and twitches toward the screen; in fact, in Ring Virus and The Ring her movements
align with the videographic technology, as flickers on the tape displace her closer to the
screen’s edge. When she reaches the lip of the screen she crawls into the “real world.”
Inexplicably, she kills the man with her sheer frightfulness. The girl is made present
from the past, making the past present; she is ghostly and yet manifested through
364
technology into the space of reality. Unable to reconcile the apparent contradictions of
this figure, the man dies in a state horror.
However, The Ring Intertext intersperses technophobia with technophilia, and the
horror of these films is countered by the protagonists’ positive engagement with
technology. Paul Young notes that the reporter Rachel regularly and productively uses
the Internet during her investigation throughout The Ring.
21
Likewise, as part of her
examination of the cursed video, Rachel and her ex-husband Noah review it in a
professional video editing booth. As Rachel looks over the tape frame-by-frame with
Noah’s assistance, the camera languishes over the machine’s many knobs and buttons.
Noah demonstrates his technical mastery as he adjusts the controls and glides over the
images, through them, and rests upon them. Ultimately, his technological savvy allows
the characters to ponder the meaning of the video’s content. Nevertheless, he succumbs
to the curse of the videotape at the end of the film while Rachel does not; she manages
her survival through the technological tricks that he taught her. Earlier, the characters
believed they would escape the curse by recovering the girl’s bones from the well in
which she died. However, this laying to rest does not assuage the evil in the girl’s soul
and her perpetual wrath kills the man. Rachel escapes this fate through her use of
technology; she survives because she made a copy of the tape and showed it to Noah.
Moreover, at the end of the film she makes yet another copy to proliferate in order to save
her son who had also viewed the tape. In this regard, technology provides the resolution
to the film’s central crisis about technology. Here, The Ring Intertext depicts a certain
technophilia that counters the pervasive representations of technophobia. It is
365
fundamentally important that the technological solution that the films offer facilitates the
mechanical reproduction of a text.

SIGNS OF EMPIRE? DISCURSIVE PROLIFERATION AND CONSTRAINT ACROSS
THE RING INTERTEXT
As discussed in Part II, at the beginnings of cinema, there existed a conflation of
two types of filmic repetition, the dupe and the remake, a conflation of mechanical and
textual repetition. The two types were not legally distinguished until 1905, and both were
derided at the time as forms of economic and/or artistic theft.
22
The integration of film
into the copyright apparatus of the United States made the remake possible, as laws
eventually associated film narratives with copyrighted, written sources. This troubled
origin reveals the close relationship between cinematic remaking and film distribution as
related but distinct forms of filmic repetition and dissemination. This also indicates how
the remake functions textually and intertextually; torn from its basis in a technology of
mechanical reproduction, the cinematic remake exists as a mode of textual reproduction.
Issues of textual repetition and dissemination resonate with great intensity across
the Pacific Rim, as a polarity between logophilia and logophobia shapes the discursive
interactions across the region. These tensions manifest themselves overtly in negotiations
around textual commensurability and incommensurability, a division that consistently
threatens to reinforce oppositions between East and West and hierarchies of cultural
power. In fact, this inflects the very definition of logophobia, as Foucault states, “there is
undoubtedly in our society, and I would not be surprised to see it in others, though taking
366
different forms and modes, a profound logophobia” (emphasis mine).
23
Foucault invokes
the notion that discursive patterns and tendencies find a limit at civilizational boundaries.
Indeed, these boundaries might help to define one another. Situated in this way, the
lingual/civilizational other poses one of the greatest agitators of logophobia, as it arises
from the potential meaninglessness of discourse, the “violent, discontinuous, querulous,
disordered even and perilous in [discourse].”
24

Roland Barthes provides a pronounced example of this issue in Empire of Signs.
There he states:
The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand
it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being
recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or
vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the
impossibilities of our own … in a word, to descend into the
untranslatable.
25

Japan serves as the basis of this fantasy, but, as Barthes readily admits, he apprehends
Japan not in reality but rather as “an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether
detached from our own.”
26
This epitomizes a semiotic Orientalism inasmuch as the
totalized difference of the discursive other provides a better understanding of the native
language. Analogously, Noël Burch draws upon Barthes’ approach in his analysis of
Japanese cinema.
27
Deriving part of his argument from characteristics of the Japanese
language, Burch argues that the narrative and aesthetic tendencies of Japanese cinema
purposefully deconstruct those of Western cinemas.
28
For both Barthes and Burch, Japan
constitutes a coherent discursive entity, the alterity of which underpins their respective
clarifications of discourse in general. In these cases, the division between logophobia
and logophilia corresponds with the delimitation of discursive/cultural boundaries; the
367
logophobic fear of meaninglessness, embodied in the discursive other, propels the
logophilic drive for meaning and the greater resolution of discourse.
In creating such dualities, Barthes and Burch engage in what Naoki Sakai calls a
“schema of configuration.”
29
Following Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, Sakai asserts that,
as a tendency of translation, cofiguration entails the clarification of one’s native or
familiar language in the process of learning another, foreign language.
30
Such a practice
has the pitfall of constructing or augmenting problematic alignments between language
and nation as well as language and ethnicity, an issue that troubles constructions of
“Japan” in particular.
31
As a corrective, Sakai argues that understanding translation as a
heterolingual mode of address undermines constructions of supposedly homogenous
lingual/ethnic/national communities.
32
Evoking Bakhtin’s term “heteroglossia,” where
individual utterances primarily attain meanings through the context of their utterance
rather than as the product of some internal quality, Sakai states that heterolingual address,
“assumes that every utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent
in any medium, linguistic or otherwise.”
33
Sakai maintains a productive tension between
logophobia and logophilia, yet in such a way that it transcends boundaries between
languages and cultural groups. This intervention is particularly important to
understanding The Ring Intertext, as it fluctuates between logophobia and logophilia and
obscures divisions between East and West as well as among Japanese cinema, South
Korean cinema and Hollywood.
The narratives within The Ring Intertext dramatize this vacillation between
logophobia and logophilia. The Ringu novel emphasizes the textuality of the cursed tape
368
by characterizing its content as a form of writing. It describes “a frayed bundle of lights,
crawling around like worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind
of captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly written, as if scrawled
by a white brush on jet-black paper.”
34
This description evokes an experimental film that
has been hand-painted with India ink. More importantly, it situates the tape as a legible
text, yet one emerging from an undifferentiated mass of illegible non-signs.
In the films, the tape serves as the visual enigma that the narrative works to
resolve. In Ringu, the images on the tape defy immediate comprehensibility; characters
float across the screen and spell out “eruption,” a woman combs her hair in a mirror, and
the top of a well stands isolated among trees. These images bear no explicit meaning and
no logic clearly connects them. Nevertheless, in this film, as in Ring Virus and The Ring,
the protagonist deciphers the meaning of the images in order to trace the tape to its
source. Reiko and her ex-husband research newspapers to find that the woman in the
mirror died by throwing herself into a volcano. They trace her to an island where they
uncover the woman’s personal history; she had a child who was later killed and thrown
into a well. The images on the tape thus connect directly with historical reality and in
deciphering the tape’s code the characters draw these connections.
In The Ring, the tape similarly re-codifies and represents reality through
operations of condensation and displacement. The tape depicts disparate images of
situations that the characters cannot interpret yet which they encounter later in reality.
For instance, it shows a high-contrast black and white image of a ladder leaning against a
white wall.
35
Later, Rachel and Noah’s investigation leads them to a farmhouse on an
369
island. They find that the girl Samara was held in a loft at the roof of a barn and that an
extremely tall ladder provides the only means of accessing this bizarre prison. As they
climb, the images of The Ring clearly reference the image from the cursed videotape.
As seen in these cases, The Ring Intertext dramatizes acts of interpretation. The
characters’ movement through the narratives requires their making sense of visual texts.
They learn the meanings behind images; they learn to read them. Initially, these texts
appear as nonsensical non-signs and raise the specter of logophobia. This drives the
characters’ logophilic search for meaning, and thus The Ring Intertext vacillates between
these poles to propel the movement of its narratives. Just as importantly, when
considered intertextually, these narratives also resonate with Sakai’s notion of
heterolingual translation. As transcultural remakes, Ring Virus and The Ring function as
literal and figurative acts of translation. The production of these films demanded the
literal translation of Ringu’s script and dialogue. Further, Constantine Verevis argues
that the process of repetition and transformation that occurs in cinematic remaking
resembles that of translation.
36
In this light, the alterations that the South Korean and
Hollywood films made to Ringu’s narrative can also be viewed as translations. Notably,
the trope of the cursed videotape occurs within each of these films and spans across them.
Each of the films translate differing visions of the potentially meaningless and
untranslatable, and in this respect The Ring Intertext offers dramatizations of
heterolingual address across linguistic, national and cultural zones. These dramatic
renderings of logophobia and logophilia efface rather than reinforce these traditional
boundaries, realigning a transnational cultural formation across the Pacific Rim.
370
Yet in addition to dramatizing acts of interpretation, The Ring Intertext also
illustrates tensions regarding discursive control and containment. Through the trope of
the cursed videotape, the narratives map logophilia and logophobia onto divisions
between local and global, domestic and exotic. In the Ringu novel, the protagonist finds
the cursed videotape in the lobby of a resort, on a shelf alongside numerous other videos.
All the titles mentioned are Hollywood films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981),
Star Wars (1977), Back to the Future (1985) and Friday the 13
th
(1980).
37
Here, the non-
labeled cursed tape becomes associated with foreign or global media. Similarly, as noted
above, the films associate the tape with a geographic “elsewhere.” Yet Ringu, Ring Virus
and The Ring more strikingly associate the foreign with logophobia by dramatizing the
vulnerability of the domestic sphere, when, in all three films, the reporter’s child views
the cursed tape. Ringu, for example, depicts Reiko woken from her sleep by a vision of
her dead niece. The room is dark with shadows that play across the paper walls. After
the vision dissipates, Reiko rushes from her room to check on her son. She shrieks in
horror when she finds him bathed in the blue light of the television, watching the last
frames of the cursed video. She gathers him in her arms and covers his eyes, but she is
too late. He viewed the tape and now bears the curse. Ring Virus and The Ring depict
similar scenes, and in this manner all three films add intensity to their narratives.
As they dramatize a parent’s efforts to protect a child from dangerous images, a
domestic logophobia pervades all three films. The potential meaninglessness of the tape,
making it a site of heterolingualism across the films, simultaneously takes on strong
associations with the non-domestic and the exotic. The tape is not entirely meaningless,
371
then, but rather represents the danger of uncontrolled foreign images entering and
endangering the home. In this respect, The Ring Intertext presents a complex structure of
logophobia; it demonstrates radical discursive heterogeneity within and across cultural
formations and yet also maintains an abstract division between home and away. This
makes the logophilic drive of the narratives an attempt to reconcile these zones, and
indeed the protagonists journey far and wide as they search for answers. In their effort to
delimit the force of the cursed tape and resolve its enigmas, the characters interconnect
the domestic and the distant, making the exotic conform to the meanings of the local.
The polarity between logophilia and logophobia not only shapes The Ring
Intertext and its transnational flow, but also strikingly characterizes the surrounding
discursive and political-economic context. For instance, Ring Virus indicates remarkable
patterns of discourse between Japan and South Korea. Traditionally, these relations have
been fraught by the history of Japanese imperialism in the Korean peninsula. As Michael
Robinson notes, Japan’s colonial project prompted the restriction of all forms of Korean
culture, including bans on the Korean language.
38
Conversely, South Korea prohibited
the distribution or exhibition of Japanese cultural products following the Japanese defeat
in World War 2. Both these cases demonstrate the institutional deployment of
logophobia with aims of national/cultural autonomy.
This changed in the late 1990s and Ring Virus stands centrally within this
transnational discursive shift. In 1998, South Korea began incorporating Japanese films
into its market and Japanese capital into its domestic media industry.
39
This process
proceeded in stages from 1998 until 2004 and eventually South Korea eliminated the ban
372
on Japanese cultural products. This coincided with Ringu’s overwhelming success in
Japanese theaters. However, in 1998 institutional barriers remained that curtailed the
direct distribution of Ringu in South Korea. Thus, Ringu could only legitimately enter
the country as a remake, and indeed, Ring Virus appeared a year after Ringu and
succeeded in the South Korean domestic market.
40
Yet the production of Ring Virus
reveals an even more complex picture of cultural migration. The Japanese company
Omega Project, one of the firms that produced Ringu, co-financed the film’s production
along with AFDF Korea and Hanmac films, making Ring Virus an international co-
production at the level of financing.
41
However, the South Korean producers never paid
for the remake rights for the film, making the film an illegal international co-
production.
42
In these ways, Ring Virus articulates changing conditions in Japanese-
South Korean interactions. The film creates a cultural and discursive bridge between the
nations and yet simultaneously demonstrates the lingering constraints upon discursive
exchange; it originates from a tension between logophilia and logophobia that conforms
partially to national boundaries and yet also transforms and transcends them.
The Hollywood remake demonstrates a realignment of discursive flows that
threatens to reinforce certain cultural boundaries and relations of power. The imbalanced
trade in distribution rights versus remake rights makes this most apparent. Following the
domestic success of Ringu in 1998, DreamWorks SKG bought the film’s remake rights in
2001.
43
Notably, DreamWorks paid $1.3 million for these rights, which actually
exceeded Ringu’s production budget of $1.2 million.
44
This provided a valuable revenue
stream for the Japanese producers, which is particularly important given the extreme
373
difficulty “foreign” films have entering the United States’ market. However, this
contrasts dramatically with The Ring’s production budget of $48 million,
45
and the film’s
eventual global earnings of $249 million.
46
The Hollywood film quickly exceeded the
earnings of Ringu in Japan.
47
Further, when DreamWorks bought the remake rights to
Ringu they also purchased its distribution rights for the US theatrical and video markets,
as part of their deal for all world-wide rights.
48
Rather than releasing Ringu in theaters or
on video, however, DreamWorks withheld the film while they produced their remake.
49

This exclusion caused some popular consternation; upon the release of The Ring,
American audiences who attempted to view Ringu were upset to find it unavailable in any
format.
50
Ringu eventually reached the US market when DreamWorks simultaneously
released The Ring and Ringu on video in early 2003.
51

This interaction articulates the asymmetrical relations of cultural power across the
region. The remaking of Ringu as The Ring engendered a new pattern of discourse
through the subsequent proliferation of Hollywood remakes of East Asian films. The
exact expression of this transnational exchange accords with the economic imbalance
among the players; Hollywood’s economic superiority allows it to pay for remake rights
in sums that exceed the budgets of Japanese film producers so extremely that they benefit
from the influx of money. Gang Gary Xu signals the spatial component of this extreme
disparity of power when calls this phenomenon “Hollywood’s way of outsourcing.”
52

The case of The Ring demonstrates a transnationally imbalanced deployment of
logophilia and logophobia, which maintains and augments these asymmetries of power.
In some sense the transnational film remake is always overdetermined by its conflated
374
articulation of logophilia and logophobia, as it disseminates through revision. The Ring
makes this more conspicuous, however, by revealing the relative impenetrability of the
US media market to non-Hollywood films as well as Hollywood’s transnational mobility.
This represents a severe trade imbalance in cultural goods and demonstrates how
Hollywood strategically navigates national and transnational cultural arenas.
Hollywood’s selective association with the United States quite literally renders non-
Hollywood films “foreign” within the US media market and thereby exerts a cultural
logophobia along national lines. However, as it simultaneously dominates many media
markets around the globe, Hollywood attempts to render its own films transnationally
legible; in effect, Hollywood inscribes a transnational logophilia everywhere it can except
the United States. Thus, the transnational operation of logophilia and logophobia in the
political economy of The Ring Intertext diverges from the heterolingualism found in its
narrative and aesthetic strategies, marking an important point of contradiction between
text and context.

Ø: TRANSNATIONAL TECHNOLOGORRHEA
Yet The Ring is not a circle but rather forms a spiral, tracing expansive lines that
move ever-outward. The similar narrative resolutions of Ringu, Ring Virus, and The Ring
insinuate the perpetual dissemination of the cursed videotape. In order to curtail its
effects, it must be duplicated and viewed by others.
53
Here, the productive tension
between logophilia and logophobia becomes overly productive, ceaselessly so, creating
an endless flow of discourse, a logorrhea. Yet this process is only possible through the
375
powers of duplication inherent in the VCR. In this respect, the films dramatize
tendencies particular to the media technology, suggesting the indivisibility of discourse
and technology under the category of communications technologies. Thus The Ring
Intertext presents a pattern of simultaneous, synergistic, and ceaseless proliferation of
discourse—through a technology of discourse—a technologorrhea.
In their depictions of continual yet constrained proliferations of discourse, these
films appear to give allegorical expression to their own material conditions. The
logophobia of the protagonists, who try to contain the spread of the cursed video only to
later aid in its duplication and distribution, matches that of DreamWorks SKG, who
halted the spread of Ringu into the United States but later disseminated this text as The
Ring. Yet this equation has limited allegorical value. The Ring Intertext depicts the
spread of cursed images through mechanical reproduction, not through a kind of textual
repetition and revision comparable to cinematic remaking. Rather, the films evoke
tensions around the remake’s disavowed “other,” the dupe, the copy. The films thus
recall the close relationship between cinematic remaking and film distribution, categories
distinguished as much by law as by their different modes of repetition. In this regard, the
films do connect to their objective circumstances, as DreamWorks coordinated their
power over film distribution with their remaking of Ringu, deftly navigating and
exploiting conventional divisions between mechanical and textual reproduction across a
vast transnational space.
Yet the technologorrhea depicted in the films contrasts markedly with this
corporate consolidation of rights. They depict furtive, unsanctioned, even illicit acts of
376
dubbing and circulation, tainted by generic trappings of horror. An underground,
dangerous circuit of media distribution, this is a nightmare of media piracy. Shujen
Wang, for one, examines piracy in East Asia as the criminalized counterpart to legitimate
media distribution. Facilitated and sustained by such communications technologies as
VCRs, VCDs, DVDs and personal computers, piracy networks disseminate media with
speed and efficiency that largely circumvents, outperforms, and subverts Hollywood and
other legitimate distributors.
54
Wang suggests that piracy poses a resistance to legitimate
distribution, a counter-distribution;
55
it constitutes a form of counter-power within the
overall dynamic of technologorrhea. Viewed from this vantage, the allegory of piracy
seen in The Ring Intertext duplicitously inverts the films’ objective material conditions.
A hegemonic expression of resistance, The Ring Intertext in fact opposes piracy; the
transnational remake as counter-piracy.
The synergistic forces of media discourses and technologies propel these struggles
for power according to a complex transnational geography, revealing a broader pattern of
technologorrhea. Thus the Hollywood studios attempted to thwart Sony and Matsushita,
themselves competitors, from distributing VCRs in the American market.
56
Yet as
Harold Vogel notes, home-video quickly became Hollywood’s single largest source of
revenue.
57
Likewise, there have been numerous interpenetrations among media
technology manufacturers and cultural producers across the Pacific; Sony bought
Columbia Pictures in 1989 in “the largest-ever Japanese takeover of a U.S. company;”
58

Matsushita acquired MCA in 1990, only to resell it in 1995;
59
South Korean chaebol
Cheil Jedang invested $300 million in DreamWorks SKG.
60
Yet the same logic of
377
mutual/perpetual technological dissemination drives global media piracy; Sony and
Matsushita introduced and continue to distribute VCD players throughout Asia, helping
to sustain an interdependent market for VCD manufacturers and media pirates in the
region.
61
Here, technologorrhea drives a dynamic interaction between domination and
resistance across the Pacific.
The Ring Intertext is remarkable for its complex relationship with these forces.
Comprised not only of a constellation of texts but also their industrial and cultural
connections, it navigates disparate temporalities, spaces, and identities in a distinctly
transnational formation. The films reveal tensions about technology and discourse, each
of which fracture into technophilia and technophobia, logophilia and logophobia. These
divisions occur throughout the films’ narratives and aesthetic strategies and resonate with
greater cultural struggles among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Yet, these
forces do not operate in a system of static binaries, but rather dialectically, producing new
forms and conditions in a continual process of struggle and change. As a powerful
component of globalization, communications technologies help to radically transform
existing relations of geography, representation, and imagination, and The Ring Intertext is
firmly enmeshed in this process. Seen in combination, in relation, and in their
circulations, the films of The Ring Intertext draw lines of connection across apparent
cultural divides and reveal the heterogeneous forces that pull these lines in a struggle for
cultural power.

378
CHAPTER 10 NOTES

1
I refer to the English translation of the novel. Koji Suzuki, Ring, trans. Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne
Walley, (New York: Vertical, 2004); originally Ringu, (Kadokawa Shoten: Tokyo, 1991).

2
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-4.

3
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural
Boundaries, (London: Routledge, 1995), 1-2.

4
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” trans. Rupert Swyer, in The Archaeology of Knowledge
and The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 228-
229.

5
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2000), 12-13.

6
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997), 166-167.

7
Bruce Cumings describes in detail how the Japanese colonization of Korea propelled the industrialization.
Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1998), 148-154, 162-175.

8
Ian Conrich, “Metal-Morphosis: Post-Industrial Crisis and the Tormented Body in the Tetsuo Films,” in
Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 95, 100.

9
Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002), 242-243.

10
Morley and Robins, 168-173.

11
Morley and Robins, 168.

12
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27-28.

13
Iwabuchi, 24.

14
Paul du Gay, et. al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, (London: Sage
Publications, 1997), 69-74, 77-80. Marsha Kinder made the same observations regarding the Sony
Corporation earlier, in Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies
to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 153, 156.

15
Even this example evokes the cultural exchange between Japan and the West, as the film Kwaidan
adapted stories collected and translated into English for Western readers by Lafcadio Hearn.

16
Ringu appears to have given new life to this convention, as it strikingly occurs in A Tale of Two Sisters
(2003) and Ju-on (2002).

379

17
In the novel, the curse is caused by a virus; the ghost literally infects a videotape, and this pseudo-
scientific ghostly/viral explanation also occurs in Rasen and is obliquely implicated in Ring Virus.

18
Suzuki, 80.

19
Suzuki, 77.

20
Suzuki, 264-265.

21
Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 229.

22
Jennifer Forrest, “The ‘Personal’ Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema,” in
Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002), 93, 99-100.

23
Foucault, 228-229.

24
Foucault, 229.

25
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, 1st American ed., trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982), 6.

26
Barthes, 3.

27
Noël Burch, To The Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema, revised and ed. Annette
Michelson, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 13-14.

28
Burch, 37, 89, etc.

29
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 34-35, 50-59.

30
Sakai, 34-35, 51.

31
Sakai, 16, 43-44, 60-61.

32
Sakai, 3-10.

33
Sakai, 8.

34
Suzuki, 76.

35
In keeping with the videotape’s pastiche of Surrealist aesthetics, the scale of the ladder, the bareness of
the image, and the odd vanishing point recall the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

36
Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 82-84.

37
Suzuki, 64-65. Notably, all these films are serial texts with a chain of sequels that address generational
conflicts and gain dramatic tension by putting youth into danger.

380

38
Michael Robinson, “Contemporary Cultural Production in South Korea,” in New Korean Cinema, ed.
Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer, (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 19-21. Bruce Cumings
also mentions that the Japanese placed strict regulations upon the use of the Korean language. Cumings,
141.

39
This is described by Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient as well as by Darcy Paquet on his
fantastic website. Hye Seun Chung and David Scott Diffrient, “Interethnic Romance and Political
Reconciliation in Asako in Ruby Shoes,” in New Korean Cinema, 208 n. 5; Darcy Paquet, “Japanese Films
in Korea,” Koreanfilm.org. http://koreanfilm.org/japanfilm.html.

40
“1999,” Koreanfilm.org, citing the Korean Film Council. http://koreanfilm.org/kfilm99.html. Notably,
Ring Virus followed the success of such Korean horror films as Whispering Corridors (1998).

41
Producer Takashige Ichise provided much of this information about the industrial and legal status of Ring
Virus. Interview with author, trans. Chiho Asada, 4 October 2006. Darcy Paquet also generously
confirmed certain aspects of the production of Ring Virus. Email to author, 23 July 2006.

42
Ichise.

43
Claude Brodesser and Charles Lyons, “‘Ring’ Fits D’Works Digits,” Variety.com, 1 Feb. 2001,
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117793066?categoryid=13&cs=1.

44
“Project: The Ring.” Variety.com, 18 Oct. 2002,
http://www.variety.com/studiosystems/index.asp?layout=studiosystems&ss_view=s_s_project&mode=allcr
edits&project_id=129010.

45
“Project: The Ring.”

46
Claude Brodesser, “Vertigo Spins with U, Focus,” Variety.com, 19 Aug. 2004,
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117909306?categoryid=1237&cs=1 (15 March 2005).

47
Gang Gary Xu, “Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood,” Senses of Cinema, no. 34, Jan.-Mar.
2005. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/34/remaking_east_asia.html; citing Tad Friend,
“Remake Man.”

48
Brodesser and Lyons.

49
“Holdback provisions” are standard practice in deals for remaking films, which state that the original
cannot enter a media market for a certain period before the release of its remake. Roy Lee, interview with
author, 9 Sept. 2006.

50
Thomas K. Arnold, “'Ringu' calls 'Ring' fans to video stores: To their horror, Japanese version is difficult
to find,” USA Today, 25 Oct. 2002, D.16.

51
Brett Sporich, “DHE 'Ring' set to bring viewers into inner circle,” Hollywood Reporter, 23 Jan. 2003, 58;
“Corrections,” Hollywood Reporter, 13 Feb. 2003, 20.

52
Xu. I hasten to add that there are in fact many ways that Hollywood outsources beyond the United
States.

381

53
In Rasen the curse of the videotape makes its way into a written account of the videotape’s contents. The
end of the film implies that this written description will be published and curse all the customers who buy
and read this “novelization.”

54
Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China, (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 2.

55
Wang, 187-188, 191.

56
Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen, (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1995), 126-130; Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR,
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 83-85, 88-91.

57
Harold Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, 6
th
Edition,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103.

58
Janice Castro, Seiichi Kanice, and Elaine Lafferty, “From Walkman to Showman,” Time, 9 Oct. 1989,
70-71.

59
Andrew Pollack, “Matsushita Tells Why It Decided to Abandon Hollywood,” New York Times, April
1995, D.10.

60
“Dreamworks East,” Fortune, 28 October 1996, 158.

61
Wang, 50-51, 54-57.
382
CHAPTER 11 – CONTEMPORARY PAC-RIM TRANSNATIONAL REMAKES:
TRENDS AND ISSUES
Characterizing the contemporary relation between East Asian cultural producers
and Hollywood in terms of technologorrhea demands qualification, however, in two
specific ways. First, although this term appropriately describes the dominant forms of
Pac-Rim remake exchange, alternative possibilities and trajectories occur. These films
and remakes largely take part in the recent cycle and yet expand the range of possibilities
within it. Second, the term “technologorrhea” may, to some ears, present a reified,
alienated theoretical construct that obscures human agency and labor. This demands an
analysis of the real social agents involved in the traffic in Pac-Rim transnational film
remakes.
It is nevertheless worthwhile to explore how technologorrhea describes the
dominant. This most readily makes itself apparent in the generic tendencies of the
contemporary Pac-Rim cycle, which is overwhelmingly comprised of horror films
featuring the use of technology as a source of fear. For instance, the film Phone (2002) is
a contemporary ghost-story/thriller produced by the South Korean arm of the Disney
Corporation. Clearly in the vein Ringu (1998), it features a murderous ghost inside
cellular phone technology, and in the “behind the scenes” footage on the DVD, the
director of Phone states that he conceived of the film after watching Ringu.
1
Similarly,
the Japanese film One Missed Call (2004) self-consciously takes up the tropes of the
contemporary cycle, with a plot about people receiving cellular phone calls from the
future in which they hear themselves die.
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Although Phone and One Missed Call should be considered indirect remakes of
Ringu, or at least generic intertexts, One Missed Call was further remade by Hollywood
and released in 2008. Indeed, a number of East-Asian techno-horror films that take
Ringu as their inspiration have been subsequently remade by Hollywood. Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s Kairo (2001) poses as a generic “J-Horror” film, with a narrative about urban
teenagers living after death inside computers, although in actuality the film functions as
an existential contemplation of alienation in contemporary Japanese society. Hollywood
faithfully remade this meandering, ponderous film as yet another part of the Pac-Rim
techno-horror remake cycle, starring television actress Kristen Bell. Likewise, the film
Shutter (2004), from Thailand, continues the obsession with photography and death seen
in The Ring Intertext by featuring a series of haunted photographs, and the Hollywood
remake appeared in 2008.
Even when technology or discourse do not comprise the immediate thematic or
textual catalyst for the film, the generic trappings of horror curtail the Pac-Rim remake
cycle. Hideo Nakata’s film Dark Water (2002) is an adaptation of another Koji Suzuki
novel, and explores themes and imagery that strikingly recall those of Ringu. Whereas
Ringu featured a the haunting of a videotape by a girl who had drowned in a well, Dark
Water depicts an apartment haunted by the ghost of a young girl who drowns in a water-
tank on top of the apartment building. The Hollywood remake (2005), starring Jennifer
Connelly and directed by Brazilian Walter Salles following the international acclaim
garnered by his film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), relocates this narrative to New York
City. Like The Ring Intertext, both films maintain a central concern with a single mother
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protecting her child from the ghost of another child, helping to push the millennial
Hollywood horror genre further away from the teen slasher cycle of the 1990s. Similarly,
the Hong Kong film The Eye (2002) tells the story of a woman who, after getting an eye
transplant, begins seeing the immanent deaths of those around her. Although the film
was originally supposed to be remade with Renée Zelweger and a mid-range budget in
the vein of the Hollywood versions of The Ring and Dark Water,
2
The Eye (2008) was
remade on a modest budget with Jessica Alba and, like Shutter, was released in the post-
holiday dumping ground of January-March 2008.
Among intra-East Asian horror remakes, The Quiet Family (1998) and The
Happiness of the Katakuris (2002) presents a truly remarkable pair.
3
The Quiet Family is
a horror-comedy that blends gruesome imagery of murder and a genuinely macabre
narrative with moments of silliness, ridiculous emotional outbursts, and slapstick gags.
The film tells the story of a family who moves from the city to rural Korea to run an inn.
Problems ensue as, due to events beyond their control, all of their guests die. The family
hides these deaths so as to not ruin the reputation of the inn, leading to strife within the
family and increasingly outrageous efforts at keeping the secret. The Happiness of the
Katakuris, on the other hand, is a truly bizarre generic hybrid. In addition to faithfully
replicating the plot of The Quiet Family, now located in rural Japan, this remake features
several musical numbers performed by different members of the family. This
extravagant departure pushes the remake away from the original yet simultaneously
heightens the humor of the film by contrasting so strongly with the grisly storyline. If the
385
addition of musical numbers was not enough, The Happiness of the Katakuris features an
extended sequence of stop-motion claymation with increasingly bizarre imagery.
Just as this pair of remakes indicates the existence of multiple generic codes
within films, it implicates the plurality of genres among recent Pac-Rim transnational
remakes. The film Tortilla Soup (2001) is a family melodrama set in Los Angeles among
a Hispanic family, generically similar to such films as Mi Vida Loca (1993) and Star
Maps (1997), and is a remake of the Taiwanese film directed by Ang Lee, Eat Drink Man
Woman (1994). The original tells the story of a widowed family patron who is a
renowned chef and who regularly makes dinner for his three adult daughters. Yet due to
increasing internal tension and the women’s changing lives, this family unit undergoes
strain and threatens to crack. The narrative of the remake is nearly identical, similarly
emphasizing delicious-looking food as well as lush music and saturated colors within the
mise-en-scène, augmenting the film’s connection to Hollywood melodramatic
conventions. If the original film stresses the attempt to maintain a family unit within a
strictly national context, undermined by the transnationality of the film’s actual
production, then the remake overtly addresses transnational issues particular to the
contemporary United States. The patron of the Hispanic family living in Los Angeles,
and all his work in the restaurant business, aims to provide an upstanding life for his
daughters. In this respect, the central importance of maintaining the family unit defies
the possibly alienating effects of a transnational ethnic identity; the family bond strives to
overcome the displaced national bond. The film also evokes a pan-Hispanic identity, as
one of the daughters is tempted to move to Barcelona for a job while another daughter
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begins a romance with a Brazilian man. In these respects, Tortilla Soup presents a
melodrama of the transnational forces inflecting the locality of contemporary Los
Angeles, even while the source of its narrative implicates an East Asian transnational
trajectory.
Somewhat similarly, the Hollywood remake (2004) of the Japanese melodrama
Shall We Dance (1996) contends with issues of cultural diversity within the United
States. The original depicts a married “salaryman” who, finding his life unrewarding,
begins taking ballroom dance lessons after spotting an attractive female instructor at a
dance school. This film dramatizes anxieties about the recessionary Japanese economy
of the 1990s through this male figure, whose masculinity and social standing are
jeopardized by his covert participation with the dance school. Ultimately, his secret is
revealed and all potential embarrassments or infidelities are tidily resolved, as is his
apparently conflicted identity. The remake, on the other hand, features Richard Gere in
yet another one of his appearances as the protagonist in a transnational film remake. The
narrative replicates that of the original, but shifts the transnational valences toward issues
of American multi-culturalism. Jennifer Lopez stars as the beautiful dance instructor
who inspires the protagonist to transgress out of his mundane life, and who further
contributes a Latin American cultural inflection to the film. Whereas the original film
represents an exotic interest in Western culture through the form of dance, configured as
culturally transgressive, the Hollywood remake aligns this transgression with a
multicultural and multi-ethnic community in the dance school. Further, constructions of
gender and sexuality differentiate these films. Whereas the original depicted the
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protagonist as needing to hide his passion for dance because of large, diffused cultural
stigmas, the remake explicitly connects the protagonist’s embarrassment to issues of
sexual romance. One, he does not appear homosexual, and two, he does not want to
jeopardize his relationship with his wife. The remake features an extended dénouement
in which, after learning of his secret involvement with ballroom dance, the protagonist’s
wife and daughter implore him to take up dance once again. Here, the restoration of the
masculine figure within the nuclear family unit justifies his continued involvement with
dance, affirming once and for all that he has not in fact transgressed “normal” gender or
sexual lines.
In addition to these films, the Japanese film Antarctica (1983) and its Hollywood
remake Eight Below (2006), as well as the South Korean film Il Mare (2000) and its
Hollywood remake The Lake House (2006), confirm that melodrama is the second-most
significant genre among contemporary Pac-Rim remakes. Based on a true story,
Antarctica tells the story of several Japanese scientists working in Antarctica and, due to
problems, must leave their sled-dogs there when they vacate. The film then details how
the dogs struggle to survive in the incredibly harsh environment, using verité-style
camerawork as well as a “voice-of-god” narrator who describes the dogs’ actions and
feelings. Overcome with grief about the dogs, the scientists return to save any that
remain. Although a number have died, several live, and all is well. The remake
eliminates the documentary aspect of the original, conforming to a conventional
Hollywood narrative with goal-oriented protagonists and a highly-manicured approach to
mise-en-scène. Whereas the original allowed for a genuinely touching melodrama about
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men’s love for dogs, the remake introduces a heterosexual romance into the plot,
somewhat deferring from the man-animal love scenario presented in the first.
Il Mare and The Lake House, on the other hand, demonstrate not only the
emotional excesses available among Pac-Rim remakes, the films further indicate
important cultural particularities through the melodramatic form. Il Mare tells the story
of a man and a woman who live in the same house by the sea – literally on the sea, as the
house stands on stilts above the water. Although they live in the same space, however,
they occupy it at different times; the man lives there two years earlier than the woman,
although through the editing of the film, these timelines appear to the viewer as
concurrent. The two people begin exchanging letters to one another via the house’s
mailbox, which seems to exist outside of historical time. Over the course of the film, the
couple develops romantic feelings for one another, and although they try to meet, their
efforts fail. In the end, the woman warns the male protagonist not to go to a meeting
because he will be hit by a car. The concluding shots of the film reveal that, in fact, he
did not go to the meeting. Although he lives, and although the couple finally meets one
another in the same place and time, the man has no memory of the correspondence with
the woman due to the logical, temporal paradox they have caused. The future is open to
them together, but without their shared past.
The seemingly bizarre treatment of time in Il Mare is, in fact, part of a larger,
culturally specific treatment of temporality in contemporary South Korean cinema.
Although all contemporary Korean popular films maintain a “classical” narrative design,
with psychologically defined, motivated characters as well as plots that obey a cause-
389
effect chain of events, Korean cinema demonstrates a tendency to disrupt chronological
sequencing. Although this tendency takes numerous forms, it makes itself most apparent
in the near ubiquity of the flashback in contemporary popular Korean film. The horror
films Whispering Corridors (1998), its sequel Memento Mori (1999), as well as A Tale of
Two Sisters (2003) use flashbacks to explain their supernatural plots; the thriller 301/302
(1995) depicts a flashback and then a flashback in a flashback, as it sorts through the
complicated psycho-sexual identities of its two female characters; the action blockbuster
Shiri (1999) uses flashbacks to explain narrative information and to further motivate the
strains between the characters’ romantic ties, while the action blockbuster JSA: Joint
Security Area (2000) is entirely organized through Rashomon-style flashbacks as a
detective sorts through the events leading up to a violent incident at the Demilitarized
Zone between North and South Korea; the gangster-comedy My Wife is a Gangster
(2001) uses a flashback to explain how the female protagonist came to be so violent and
misanthropic. Flashbacks abound throughout Korean cinema, not as an arbitrary or
incidental narrative device, but like melodrama itself, as a constitutive element that cuts
across most if not all genres.
4

Rather than just reflecting a novel approach toward cinematic storytelling,
however, I would like to suggest that these achronological approaches toward cinematic
time reflect a deep “structure of feeling” and contend with larger political, social, and
cultural tensions. In many ways, these devices function analogously to the disjointed
temporality seen in the Japanese techno-horror films, inasmuch as they conflate historical
temporalities and thus evoke the disparate and confusing experiences of time and space
390
during the modern period. Two films in particular prompt this politicized understanding,
Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oldboy (2003). Like Memento (2001) and Irreversible
(2002), Peppermint Candy is one of a number of recent international art-cinema films to
feature a backwards narrative; the plot of the film primarily obeys a reverse-
chronological structure, leaving viewers to reassemble the story into chronological order
retroactively. Like Memento and Irreversible, Peppermint Candy asks viewers to
wonder: how did things come to be this way? Will the past explain the present, and if so,
how so? Unlike these other films, however, Peppermint Candy directly contends with an
individual’s relation to political history. One sequence depicts the protagonist as he
begins his career as a police officer and is prompted forcefully by fellow officers to
torture a left-leaning political dissident, while the next sequence, taking place
chronologically earlier, details how the protagonist took part in the violent quelling of a
student protest as part of his military service in 1980. In the end, or the beginning, the
man is overwhelmed by his past and commits suicide, the ruptures in political history
causing an irreconcilable rupture in the man’s psyche.
Oldboy, on the other hand, deals with more contemporary Korean experiences of
“time-space compression.”
5
The film begins as the protagonist, Oh Dae-su, is captured
and held for no known reason in a private prison, where he stays for fifteen years.
During this time, he ponders who might have reason to imprison him, while he gets all
his information about the social world through television. He watches, for instance, as
President Roh Moo-hyun is convicted of bribery in 1996 and as President Kim Dae Jung
and North Korean president Kim Jong Il met for the first time. In other words, Oh Dae-
391
su is imprisoned during a fifteen-year period in which South Korea underwent massive
social and political changes, and the character’s only access is through the media. When
he is released, he goes on a search for the man responsible and to discover why anyone
could hate him so much. In an extended flashback sequence, he discovers that as a
teenager he had witnessed an incestuous affair between a brother and sister, and later told
someone who spread the information as gossip around their high school. Because of the
scandal, the girl killed herself, and it turns out to be the brother who had imprisoned Oh
Dae-su. As if the fifteen-year imprisonment were not enough, this villain tricks Oh Dae-
su into becoming romantically and sexually intimate with his own daughter, the villain
displacing his own incestuous relationship onto someone else as punishment. In his
attempt to explain his removal from social history, then, Oh Dae-su journeys into his
memory, into his psychic history, which ultimately leads to his transgressing the most
basic of social/sexual taboos.
6

These films implicate the conflation of social and emotional histories through the
playing with cinematic temporality in Korean cinema. The disruptive historical events of
Korea in the twentieth century, and more particularly of the last twenty-five years, get
refracted through a number of remarkable non-chronological treatments of time in
cinema, which more often than not enmesh the psychic with the social. This
understanding intends effectively to politicize the use of non-chronological temporalities
throughout contemporary Korean popular cinema, which in fact does not uniformly use
these devices in overtly political ways. Rather, the flashback and other devices, including
392
those of Il Mare, should be seen as attempts to neutrally or invisibly treat genuine social
and political tensions.
In fact, Il Mare is part of a larger a “time travel melodrama” genre, or what
Anthony Leong has called “the ‘love across time’ genre,”
7
one seemingly distinct to
contemporary Korean cinema. Leong states that this genre mixes melodrama with
elements of science fiction to tell stories about lovers, separated by time, which are able
to unite.
8
Other examples include The Gingko Bed (1996), in which reincarnated but
time-separated lovers get together in a magical bed, as well as Ditto (2000), in which the
history-separated romantic couple contacts one another through a radio. Similarly, Il
Mare refracts all questions of time and history entirely through the heart, through the
emotions, and through the psyches of its characters, deferring almost completely any
questions of history as a social practice. Nevertheless, this film, like this genre,
demonstrates the force of the human will in attempting to overcome seemingly disparate
moments in time in a larger effort to satisfy desire. In Il Mare, the protagonist must
sacrifice his memory in order to collapse two different temporalities into one timeline,
suggesting that the internal clock of the heart and that of the external world cannot be
synthesized.
Perhaps surprisingly, The Lake House replicates the conceit of Il Mare, presenting
characters played by Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as living in the same house at
different times, yet who begin a romantic correspondence through a magic mailbox. Set
in the Chicago area, this remake somewhat elaborates the plot of the original. For
instance, the conclusion of the film not only allows the couple to get together in the end,
393
but it also allows the male protagonist to keep his memory. More interestingly, the male
protagonist is an architect, as in the original, but in this remake, he strives to overcome
the architectural achievements attained by his father, who designed the eponymous house
on the lake. One could read the father as the “architect” of the story and of his son’s
romance, as he literally built the magical space that brings the couple together. In this
respect, The Lake House injects an Oedipal resonance into a tale about timeless love.
But what does it mean that the remake maintains the non-chronological plotting of
the original, which in the Korean cinematic context holds implicit political weight? One
answer is that the Hollywood remake depoliticizes this cinematic device,
deterritorializing a magical house as well as time and history itself. Yet if we understand
the transnational film remake as a cinematic form that obscures stable conceptions of
time, space, and identity, then it does something intertextually that resembles the intra-
textual achronologies of Il Mare and other Korean films. The simultaneous experience of
alternative temporalities and experiences is not unlike the intertextual copresence
achieved by the remake. Just as Il Mare asks viewers to believe in a world where
historical time and emotional time do not line up, a world where internal experience and
external events do not congeal, the relation between Il Mare and The Lake House asks
something analogous of critics.
Il Mare and The Lake House confirm the existence of melodrama within the
contemporary Pac-Rim transnational remake exchange, which in their deviations from
the techno-horror cycle present a fuller range of expressive forms. Admittedly, the
techno-horror films comprise the dominant form of this exchange, generally garnering the
394
most critical and popular reaction as well as box office earnings. Although films like
Shall We Dance? and The Lake House do not demonstrate the same kind of ecstatic
proliferation of technology and discourse seen in The Ring Intertext, they do demonstrate
a desire for emotional interconnection that, in its ambition, seeks to transcend boundaries
of time and space, history and geography.

395
CHAPTER 11 NOTES

1
Byeong-Ki Ahn, quoted in the interview included as an extra feature on the region-1 DVD release of
Phone by Tartan Video.

2
“Zellweger to Star in ‘The Eye’,” Variety.com, 29 Sept. 2005.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117929986.html?cs=1.

3
Tom Mes discusses Takashi Miike’s Happiness of the Katakuris, a remake of the South Korean film The
Quiet Family, but does not related the two films. Rather, he connects the film to Miike’s other works.
Tom Mes, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, (Surrey, UK: FAB Press, 2003), 249-255

4
Han Ju Kwak notes that Korean romantic comedies do not use flashbacks, as they are set strictly in the
present. Han Ju Kwak, “Mass Culture in the Age of the Private/Public Split: In South Korean Popular
Cinema Since 1992,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Southern California, 2005, 167.

5
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 240, 284

6
The Indian remake, Zinda (2006), totally eradicates the incestuous aspects of this narrative.

7
Anthony C. Y. Leong, Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong (Oxford: Tafford Publishing, 2003), 117.

8
Leong, 117.
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CHAPTER 12 – AGENTS OF CHANGE? THE BUSINESS(MEN) OF
TRANSNATIONAL FILM REMAKES
What of the human? What of human agency? Throughout, this study has drawn
upon information gained through conversations between the author and people who have
worked in the global cultural industries. It therefore seems vital to examine in detail a
select grouping of such agents and analyze their particular functions and contributions to
the practice of transnational remaking. Given the recent shift of Hollywood transnational
remakes toward East Asia, the people involved in this particular process take on great
significance. Someone somewhere made decisions that altered the “landscape” of
transnational film remakes. This chapter examines four individuals who have been
instrumental within this cultural and industrial shift: Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment,
director Hideo Nakata, screenwriter Stephen Susco, and Takashige Ichise of OZ
productions. Unless otherwise noted, all the information provided here derives from
personal interviews with these subjects.
1

These social agents simultaneously shaped and navigated a complex cultural flow
between Japan and Hollywood through the precise form of the cinematic remake.
Whereas Lee created a business model based almost exclusively on remaking East Asian
films, Ichise produced many of the original Japanese films that were remade and he now
produces many Hollywood remakes himself. Hideo Nakata has directed films in both the
Japanese film industry as well as Hollywood, turning out a cycle of horror films, sequels,
and sequels of remakes, while Stephen Susco has taken originally “Japanese” texts and
transformed them, to some degree, into Hollywood scripts; in turn, both Nakata and
397
Susco entered a Pac-Rim cultural-industrial formation. All these men demonstrate
strategic forms of cultural agency, specifically in their transnational mobility, commercial
savvy, and intertextual awareness. They exerted power through cultural hybridity and
created a transnational dialogue that exceeds their individual efforts. In building and
sustaining this market in cross-cultural remakes, they capitalized on this asymmetrical
cultural flow. As “middlemen” in many senses of the term, Roy Lee, Hideo Nakata,
Stephen Susco, and Taka Ichise illuminate the intertwined relations among the global
media industries, cinematic intertextuality, and individual social agents.
How to discuss “the industry,” or the particular agents who comprise this
necessary abstraction? Historically, individuals who have exerted agency within the
cinema have been examined within auteurist discourses, which typically privilege the
creative sensibilities of film directors in opposition to the homogenizing, factory-like
industrial processes of the Hollywood system. Of course, there has been a significant and
increasing number of scholarly “industrial analyses,” which complicate tidy divisions
between creativity and commerce in the film and media industries. A classic example is
Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System, which describes the creativity of studio
moguls, producers, and other industry decision makers in the classical Hollywood studio
system.
2
Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time also provides an impressive model for analysis
of the cultural industries, as it interrogates the creative, financial, and institutional forces
at work in the television industry of the time based largely on the author’s first-hand
interviews with industry professionals.
3
Most recently, John Caldwell has synthesized a
vast amount of first-hand research about the film and television industries into a robust,
398
theoretically and practically situated analysis.
4
Drawing loosely from Bruno Latour’s
“actor network theory,” Caldwell draws upon a vast number of interviews with above-
and below-the-line industry workers, archival research, trade publications, and reflexive
industrial texts such as DVD “behind the scenes” documentaries, among other sources.
He is thus able to show the various ideologies that guide labor practices in the cultural
industries of Los Angeles as well as demonstrate how each agent within the system
makes critical decisions based on limited information that nevertheless contribute to the
shape of the system at large.
In the context of such work, my analysis here at once has modest aims and grand
ambitions. I am only looking at four individuals, which necessarily limits the scope of
my assertions. Nevertheless, these industry practitioners can and should be seen as
symptomatic of the institutional structures of the new post-Fordist and globalized
composition of Hollywood, especially as these structures facilitate the production of
transnational film remakes. For a number of years Hollywood has reduced financial risks
by leaving the actual production of films to companies with variable and contingent
relationships with the studios, which function primarily as financiers and distributors.
Further, Hollywood has become increasingly transnational at its economic base. A
number of Hollywood studios are or have been owned by non-US companies, and
individual film projects are regularly financed by firms in multiple nations. At the same
time, Hollywood has strengthened its hold on the global film market and almost entirely
dominates the film market in the United States. As a form of globalization, this creates
and reinforces serious imbalances in cultural and economic flows. The combination of
399
Hollywood’s post-Fordist production structure with its financial transnationalization has
created new forms of commercial and cultural exchange across the globe. As the
industry has become increasingly flexible and transnational, so too must successful
industry professionals exhibit these same characteristics.
The work of globalization scholars Manuel Castells and Aihwa Ong proves
particularly useful in understanding the functions and contributions of Lee, Ichise,
Nakata, and Susco. Although Castells’ model of globalization, the “Network Society,”
has a taint of technological determinism, his description of the operation of flows and
power within networks significantly helps in the conceptualization of these
transnationally-networked cultural workers. For one, each of these men helped to create
and sustain a transnational cultural and economic flow between Hollywood and Japan
that had not existed before. Castells defines flows as, “purposeful, repetitive,
programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed
positions held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of
society.”
5
Secondly, in the process of which they took part, these men demonstrate the
operation of power within a network that similarly accords with Castells’ description
thereof, as he states, “switches connecting the networks…are the privileged instruments
of power. Thus, the switchers are the power holders.”
6

Lest this sound like too mechanistic a description of the social agents who created
and sustain the contemporary Pac-Rim flow of transnational remakes, it is vital to
incorporate a directly cultural understanding to their functions as “switchers.” In her
analysis of how individuals creatively respond to and shape globalization, anthropologist
400
Aihwa Ong describes “flexible citizenship” as “the cultural logics of capitalist
accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and
opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions.”
7
Ong thus provides a
helpful corrective to analyses of globalization that emphasize the institutional,
technological, and economic forces of transnationalism at the expense of individual
human agency. Her notion of cultural flexibility allows for a more dynamic
understanding of how individuals exert power within vast political, cultural, and
economic structures. This is particularly relevant, then, to understanding individuals
working in contemporary Hollywood, where flexibility and cultural transnationalism are
increasingly vital to economic success.
Enter Roy Lee. Lee was born New York in 1969 and raised in Maryland. His
parents had emigrated from South Korea in 1962 following the military coup there led by
General Park Chung-hee. After graduating from high school, Lee attended college and
went to law school at American University. He practiced transactional law for a short
time before moving to Los Angeles and getting a job in the film industry. Notably, this
job was at the film tracking company Alphaville, where Lee created a computerized
network system whereby film projects were evaluated for commercial viability.
8
Two of
the projects he was involved with were remakes, The Mummy (1999) and The Jackal
(1997). This experience established Lee within the Hollywood system and provided a
sense of the kinds of films that get made, specifically remakes, and how to produce them.
He learned not just the power of social networks within Hollywood, but of textual
networks as well.
401
While working at the production company BenderSpink, Lee became aware of the
1998 Japanese film Ringu, which had earned more than six million dollars in Japanese
theaters. Although there is dispute about who initially “discovered” Ringu, ultimately
Lee was responsible for acquiring the film’s remake rights and selling them to
DreamWorks SKG for a million dollars. Further, Lee became executive producer of this
Hollywood remake. When The Ring (2002) became a financial success in American
theaters, Lee gained significant power, allowing him to form his own production
company, Vertigo Entertainment. Based on the connections Lee had already developed
with the Japanese producers of Ringu, Lee proceeded to buy the rights for several more
Japanese films and sell them to Hollywood studios. Following the success of The
Grudge in 2004, which was a remake of the Japanese film Ju-On (2003), Roy Lee and
Vertigo Entertainment were not only positioned as Hollywood successes, they were
strongly associated with remaking East Asian films.
Concurrent with the success of The Ring and The Grudge, Lee expanded from
Japan to buy the rights for films from South Korea, Hong Kong, and the Philippines,
among other areas. Although horror films comprised a primary genre for Vertigo, the
company also bought rights for such East Asian melodramas as Antarctica (1983), Il
Mare (2000), and others, helping to broaden the generic purview of his company’s
production slate, but also augmenting its association with remakes of East Asian films.
Lee occasionally attended regional film festivals to negotiate these purchases, such as the
Pusan Film Festival in South Korea. However, and most remarkably, once The Ring and
The Grudge demonstrated the economic feasibility of Hollywood remakes of Asian films,
402
producers in Japan and South Korea began soliciting Lee to buy the remake rights for
their films. In some cases, these producers actually approached Lee before they even
made their films, hoping to sell the remake rights in order to fund the production of the
“originals.” In these instances, the boundaries between original films and remakes as
well as between Hollywood and Asian cinemas were significantly blurred.
In these respects, Lee created a complex economic and cultural flow between
Hollywood and East Asia, one that not only relies upon asymmetries of power but also
further reinforces and restructures them. Lee’s business is overtly built within a
networked logic of cultural flows, where power is exerted through inclusion in or
exclusion from the network. At a macro-economic level, this flow depends upon and
reinforces Hollywood’s hold upon the American film market; as “foreign” films
increasingly do not gain theatrical distribution in the US, the only way they might enter is
through their re-production as Hollywood remakes. At the heart of this structural
asymmetry lies Roy Lee, who negotiates and shapes this flow. Lee makes creative and
productive use of the barriers between the cultural markets in the United States and East
Asia, quite literally inventing a business that brings them together for his commercial
gain. He demonstrates “cultural flexibility” by maintaining his awareness of East Asian
media markets and selecting those films that have potential for revision in Hollywood.
His production of remakes should thus be seen as a perceptive cultural negotiation, as it
reveals an understanding and exploitation of disparate cultural systems. Lee
demonstrates a creative “adaptation” to the conditions of “Global Hollywood” by
403
remaking rather than distributing films. His business operates as a nodal point, a
“switcher,” that connects texts as well as cultures in a larger global network.
In addition to money and texts, Lee’s business also facilitates the flow of cultural
labor across the Pacific. For instance, he was significantly helpful in assisting the
transnational flexibility of Ringu director Hideo Nakata, although Nakata certainly played
an important role himself. In looking at Nakata as a “culturally flexible” social agent in
the contemporary film industry, however, it is important to note that the flow of above-
the-line talent from all over the world into Hollywood has been historically large. Thus,
Nakata’s transnational flexibility is not necessarily new to the industry in the same way
as is Lee’s or Taka Ichise’s. On the one hand, Nakata’s case should be seen as part of a
general tendency on the part of Hollywood producers to hire foreign-born directors to
work on transnational remakes. Such was the case with Insomnia (2002) director Chris
Nolan, Dark Water (2006) director Walter Salles, and with Takashi Shimizu, who remade
his film Ju-On as The Grudge. On the other hand, Nakata is remarkable to the extent that
he has been so fully intertwined in the larger Pac-Rim remake cycle.
Given all available accounts, Hideo Nakata is a very private person who appears
to do interviews only when they are related directly to an upcoming film project. He
keeps a very small social circle and does not socialize regularly when in the United
States. He was born in 1961 and attended Tokyo University's department of education,
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although in most interviews he states he studied science as a student.
10
After graduating,
he quickly began working in Japan’s film and television industry, although he also took a
year away from this and live in Europe.
11
After directing several low-budget horror
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thrillers, he met Ringu author Koji Suzuki, who asked him to direct the feature film
adaptation,
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which he did and which gained a popular response. Following the flurry of
production activity this success garnered, Nakata subsequently directed one of the film’s
sequels, Ringu 2 (1999), although he also showed signs of trying to break out of the “J-
Horror” cycle by directing the neo-noir thriller Kaosu (1999). The success of Ringu also
helped him begin to make inroads into the Hollywood film industry, where he had a
number of meetings about directing Hollywood films, yet with no results. Indeed, in
2002 he strengthened his association with “J-Horror” by directing the adaptation of
Suzuki’s novel Dark Water.
Nakata’s eventual move toward Hollywood coincided with the success and
proliferation of Pac-Rim transnational remakes in the wake of The Ring’s success.
Nakata was in extended talks with MGM to direct the project True Believers. Nothing
came of this, as the project shifted to Dimension films, but it did bring Nakata into
contact with Jennifer Fukasawa, who eventually became his producing partner. At the
time, she became his personal assistant as he was hired to direct the sequel to The Ring,
The Ring 2 (2005), a job that Roy Lee helped secure for Nakata. Nakata professed
excitement for this project because it differed significantly from his film Ringu 2, and
because he was interested in working in the Hollywood system, with its attendant bigger
budgets and better special effects.
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Fukasawa asserts that, “[Nakata] is equally
comfortable in both [LA and Japan]…he’s adapted very well to shooting [in] the
Hollywood style ever since The Ring 2). He’s well capable of doing Hollywood
movies….He’s very familiar with how the Hollywood system works.” However,
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working within the Hollywood system appears to have been difficult for Nakata. In a
press release for another project, Nakata himself writes that while he was working in Los
Angeles, he was “frustrated with the differences between making films in Japan and in
the US.”
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Following The Ring Two, Nakata returned to Japan to produce his next film,
the period drama Kaidan (2007), pairing him with producer Taka Ichise once again.
Moreover, his next project after that, L (2008), was another Japanese production, and it
appears as though his upcoming film will be set in Japan and features an Anglo actress in
the lead role.
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Given this shift back toward making films in Japan, it seems most likely that
Nakata found Hollywood foreign, and that he was not sufficiently “culturally flexible” to
engender a sustained career in Hollywood, or one that consistently bridges Japan and
Hollywood. Fukasawa maintains that Nakata’s production company, Hideon
Productions, is currently developing projects for production in the United States as well
as in Japan. Nakata does in fact have an agent and a manager in Hollywood, and
Fukasawa works consistently to develop projects for him in Los Angeles. Nevertheless,
Nakata does not have a residence in the United States and only comes to Los Angeles for
work. He maintains almost no social connections with anyone in Los Angeles, as he
spends all his time working when he is there.
If Nakata appears not to have the same level of cultural flexibility as Lee or
Ichise, then part of this may result from his being too strongly defined as a horror film
director by Hollywood executives. Fukasawa asserts that one of the primary objectives
of Hideon Productions is to get Nakata away from making horror films. She states,
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“[Nakata is] an artist and he’s done so many horror films that he wants to do other genres.
He’d like to explore other stories, other characters.” And indeed, his film L is an action
thriller, while his proposed upcoming film Gensanken sounds to be an ensemble
melodrama. This suggests that Nakata finds the Hollywood system too constricting for
his tastes as well as his preferred way of working on a set. His apparently limited cultural
flexibility, then, reflects Hollywood’s generic inflexibility.
Also on the production side of the equation is screenwriter Stephen Susco. Susco
grew up in rural Pennsylvania and eventually went to college at Notre Dame, where he
majored in philosophy. While there, he began screenwriting and making short films, one
of which was submitted to the Student Academy Awards, where it did well. &nbs