From music sampling and file sharing, to 3D printing and DNA patents, to pop stars, like Taylor Swift, who seek to copyright memorable lines from their songs – today’s world is dominated by issues around authorship and ownership. Of course, people have been borrowing, stealing, remaking, adapting, and reimagining the ideas of others as long as there has been something like ‘culture.’
Early producers of moving images borrowed copiously from each other, reshooting, restaging, recasting, and flat-out copying the short subjects circulating in an emerging film industry. The eventual regulation of property and copyright in the new medium did not put a stop to the practice of remaking, but rather defined how remaking would continue in a legal and institutional framework.
If the remake is as old as cinema itself, the process of
remaking – as a form of adaptation, appropriation, and recycling – seems tightly bound up with the very nature of film. In many ways film is remaking – the reworking of stories from the literary tradition and other films. Films are structured by repetitions in the form of intertextual associations, visual and aural quotes, homages, etc. Films embody remaking in the form of series and serials, and different cuts or versions resulting from censorship, synchronization, and restoration. In fact
the very first film by the Lumière brothers, "La sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon" ("Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory", 1895), exists simultaneously in three variations, causing us to question the very notion of the ‘original’ and authenticity as they relate to cultural artifacts.
It has often be said that the remake is defined by a paradox – namely the tension between repetition on the one hand (a familiar story) and difference on the other (the impetus to bring in something new).
A remake presents itself as wanting to be the same, but different. Part of the attraction of viewing a remake of a previous film is the anticipation of seeing how the new film will reimaging the original in a new context. For every remake transports an interpretation of the source film into a new historical and cultural context. Of course there are many kinds of remakes. Those that seem to want to obliterate the original by changing the setting, time period, character names, and other details. Other remakes pay tribute to their precursors as homages, often legitimizing their existence by claiming to bring out new dimensions or repressed themes that the original could not fully express (for reasons of censorship or cultural norms, for instance).
The
media debates around Gus Van Sant’s much maligned 1998 shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock classic "Psycho" (1960) and Michael Haneke’s 2007 reprise of his own "Funny Games" (1997) suggest that the remake phenomenon continues to fascinate.
Why are we drawn to this form of cultural recycling? What does it offer as an artistic strategy? Are remakes becoming passé as the classical notion of authorship fades? These are some of the questions that will be raised in the GOETHE FILMS series Copy & Paste.
by Prof. Stefan Soldovieri, University of Toronto, who advised on this GOETHE FILMS series, which is presented by the Goethe-Institutes Boston, San Francisco and Toronto and was curated jointly by Jutta Brendemühl, Karin Öhlenschläger and Jale Yoldas
Email me until March 1 and tell me how you heard about our Copy & Paste series for your chance to win 2 tickets to our Petzold & Farocki double bill on March 5. Even better, come & watch all films over 3 nights in our series, March 3 + 5 + 10, for your chance to win the new BluRay of Murnau's restored NOSFERATU.
GOETHE FILMS screen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St W, Toronto
with English subtitles
Tickets $10, day-of sales only at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, open at 10am
Open to audiences 18+.
Mar 5, 6.30pm: “Yella” (2007) by Christian Petzold & “Nothing Ventured” (2004) by Harun Farocki
Eminent essayist Farocki’s documentary “Nothing Ventured”, an examination of venture capital, documents the tough negotiations that take place when entrepreneurs and bankers meet.
"A classic of the political documentary. It uses the method of ‘direct cinema' and focus on observing through the camera." – Monopol Magazine
Berlin director Christian Petzold (“Phoenix”) took the inspiration for his film “Yella”, featuring collaborator actor Nina Hoss, from his mentor and co-writer Farocki. “Yella” is a mystery thriller about a young woman who narrowly escapes her volatile ex-husband and flees her small hometown in former East Germany for a new life in the West.
”An utterly involving thriller which is exquisitely frigid, menacing, disquieting, with a storyline that keeps you off-balance.” - The Guardian
