ENGL 381, Film Remakes, Fall 2013

Abstract

Remakes have always been popular in Hollywood; they are usually safe commercial bets, repeating successful formulas and emphasizing cinema's ability to shape and reshape the cultural imagination. They might even be seen, as Leo Braudy does, as metaphorically reflecting "the history and culture of this self-made and self-remade country." But remakes are never exact copies, and this course will consider the aesthetic and ideological dynamics of cinematic repetition with a difference. We will begin the semester with theoretical and critical perspectives on the remake as a formative genre in filmmaking. Then we will turn to remakes that cross cultural and national boundaries. Cross-cultural remakes recast, adapt, and make over popular culture, and such cinematic border crossings have significant implications for our understanding of how cultures embrace and resist, borrow from and interact with each other, particularly in the era of globalization. Finally, we will focus on Bollywood remakes of Hollywood films. Rather than regarding these remakes as uncritical homage or derivative plagiarism, we will examine them within wider debates about the transnational flows of media, the intertextual nature of cinematic productions, and the hybridizing character of cultural exchange. Prerequisite: Any 200-level film class, preferably ENGL 202, or permission from instructor.