European Film Remakes

1999

Nation, tast Hollywood rema of Europe American film a sio are often een as strong forces in the Ameri anization of European culture. William Uricchio investigates an interesting aspect of the American film industry: the remaking of European film.

Communications. The European Journal of Communication Research 44(3), 2019

This article analyzes the industrial and cultural dynamics of transna-tional film remakes, focusing on the recent rise of remake rights representatives and the production of comedy remakes for local-language markets. Through the use of in-depth interviews with remake rights representatives and the analysis of primary and secondary sources, we scrutinize the strategies of these players in mediating the production processes of remaking foreign popular films into local-language hits. The article takes on two tasks: First, it dissects the work of the different agents at play in buying and selling remake rights and examines their business models and tactics; second, it looks at the generic contents that these agents are circulating through selected catalogs. In this context, comedy becomes a privileged interface to link diverse national markets and manufacture an ideal of proximity, whereby foreign popular comedies-unknown to local audiences-are remade with a local flavor and presented as 'new' national hits.

The essay begins by giving an economic and critical context to the frequency of American remakes of French films in what is termed ‘classical period’, 1930-1960 – particular attention shall be paid to the ‘ideology of the auteur’. The main body of this chapter then comprises analysis of key Franco-American remakes of the period, and discussion of practices shared amongst them. It looks at narrative organisation, ‘generic familiarisation’ and characterisation and then examines issues of class and the social in relation to war discourses (World War II separating many of the remakes from their French models), then issues of sexuality. It concludes by questioning the relative merits of approaches to examining remakes that take ‘circles of intertextuality’ or the opposition of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ as central. This study has drawn directly on seven ‘original’ French films and their ‘Améremakes’: 'La Chienne' (Jean Renoir, 1931) into 'Scarlet Street' (Fritz Lang, 1945), 'L’Equipage' (Anatole Litvak, 1935) into 'The Woman I Love' (Anatole Litvak, 1937) , 'Pépé le Moko' (Julien Duvivier, 1937) into 'Algiers' (John Cromwell, 1938) and 'Casbah' (John Berry, 1948), 'La Bête humaine' (Jean Renoir, 1938) into 'Human Desire' (Fritz Lang, 1954), 'Pièges' (Robert Siodmak, 1939) into 'Lured' (Douglas Sirk, 1947), 'Le Corbeau' (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) into 'The 13th Letter' (Otto Preminger, 1951) and, finally, 'Le Jour se lève' (Marcel Carné, 1939) into 'The Long Night' (Anatole Litvak, 1947). I discuss films like 'La Chienne'-'Scarlet Street', 'Pépé le Moko' and its remakes far less than 'Le Jour se lève'-'The Long Nigh't and 'Pièges'-'Lured' because the former have had major studies devoted to them, while the latter are little discussed .

Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake | Remodel, Edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, 2012

This book provides a dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction – remaking and remodelling – in film, television and new media. Drawing on a wide variety of Hollywood and other examples, this impressive group of contributors considers a wide range of film adaptations, remakes and fan productions from various industrial, textual and critical perspectives. Their case studies discuss new versions of popular texts such as The Manchurian Candidate, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. They provide new perspectives on the unlimited cultural production of classics like The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and they analyze the groundbreaking work of fan appropriations, including Batman and Spiderman fanvids, and fanfic trailer revisions for The Shining and television's The Adventures of Merlin.

Cinej Cinema Journal, 2018

The purpose of this study is to analyze American remake versions of the original British films taking narrative as a basis. It claims that the American remakes put America forward as a cultural product for sale, and makes the British narrative Americanized. For the study, two sets of film remakes have been chosen for analysis: Alfie (1966, dir. Lewis Gilbert), Alfie (2004, dir. Charles Shyer), Bedazzled (1967, dir. Stanley Donen), Bedazzled (2000, dir. Harold Ramis). This study explores the narrative elements of the American remakes by comparing the remakes with their originals. These narrative elements are setting, intertextuality and Americanization.

Film International 20. 3, 2022

Across the six chapters-and 65 stimulating case studies-of How the World Remade Hollywood, Glaser demonstrates that, while ideas for movies may be adapted from elsewhere, cinematic remaking should not be understood in terms of (good) originality and (bad) repetition, but rather as an active process of cross-cultural borrowing and translation ...

Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication official conference proceedings, 2023

Scholars usually consider such “repetitions” through the scope of institutional and industrial practices for commercial benefits through previously established and tested titles. Some scholars approached remakes from the contextual perspective, revealing their novelties, thematic value, and how remakes attempt to “translate” them. However, with the development of streaming services and further sophistication of the source and remaking titles into more extensive franchises, the borderline between well-defined film “repetition” practices may be elusive. This paper will argue whether the remake of Andrew Lau’s and Alan Mak’s 無間道 / 无间道 [Infernal Affairs] (Lau & Mak, 2002), TV film Daburu Feisu [Double Face], consisting of Daburu Feisu: Gisou Keisatsu-hen [Double Face Disguise Police Edition] and Daburu Feisu: Sennyuu Sosa-hen [Double Face Undercover Investigation Edition] (Nakazawa & Sasaki, 2012), affect the contemporary definition of film remakes as a critical and practical category. Together with Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (Scorsese, 2006), Double Face is not a part of the broader franchise but may be part of another form of “supersystem” (Kinder, 1991). The paper will test whether the Japanese remake contributes to creating such a system as a “repetition network” and identify what kind of film “repetition” qualities it encapsulates. Furthermore, its minor contextual adjustment compared to the source material significantly reshapes to deliver the themes of higher cultural appropriation and relevance. Thus, the paper will explore these contextual qualities and evaluate whether they are enough to build a context-based remaking taxonomy.

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Comunicazioni Sociali, 2018

While more than a thousand films are made in Europe each year, only around 20 actually circulate in any meaningful way outside their own national market but within Europe. Despite the processes of globalisation and digitisation, we are clearly still some way from a film industry that knows no borders. This paper analyses the sorts of European productions that do travel successfully within Europe, and why. It draws on research undertaken for the MeCETES project (Mediating Cultural Encounters Through European Screens, 2013-2016), and especially the extensive database of films released in Europe between 2005 and 2015 put together by Huw D. Jones. The key factors affecting the ability of European films to travel successfully in nonnational European markets include the size of the budget, whether one of the major American studios was involved as producer or distributor, whether the lead producing nation was one of the Western European big five, the language in which the film was shot, critical acclaim, and the way in which the film tells its story. Five categories of European films, their production circumstances and their market performance, emerge from this analysis. First there are large-scale, big-budget blockbusters, many of them inward investment films backed by the Hollywood majors, which tend to travel well within Europe and enjoy equivalent success online. Secondly, there are small-scale, director-led, art-house films that command significant critical attention and travel to cosmopolitan audiences across Europe. Thirdly, there are feel-good, middlebrow films that occupy the middle-ground between these two extremes: modestly budgeted films that occasionally achieve crossover success and travel well within Europe. The other two categories describe films that travel very little, if at all, outside their domestic market. The fourth category is modest to low budget films with a strong national appeal, which may be successful in their own domestic market but rarely travel well beyond that market, whether theatrically or online. Fifthly, there are a great many European productions that fail to secure significant national admissions, let alone admissions in non-national markets. In many cases, this is indeed about failure. The dominance of the European film market by a small number of powerful American, British and French companies, and to a lesser extent, German, Spanish and Italian companies, indicates a lack of diversity within the films that circulate. And while some European films do circulate successfully outside their main producing nation, the vast majority do not. National film cultures within Europe are also surprisingly resilient in this era of globalised, digital storytelling and a surprising amount of national film-making is still enjoyed by national audiences. The challenge to policy-makers thus remains to find more effective ways of enabling a greater degree of cultural exchange, openness and inclusivity, within and beyond Europe.