A Tale of Two Balloons: Intercultural Cinema and Transnational Nostalgia in Le voyage du ballon rouge

Millions of movie lovers around the world have experienced a range of emotions upon viewing Albert Lamorrise’s 1956 French classic Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon). Many adulatory responses have been triggered but perhaps none other more clearly than Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon, France-Taiwan, 2007). Although lacking the fantastical interludes of the earlier film and filled with fewer flaneurial excursions through the alleyways of Paris, Hou’s feature-length work is no less compelling as a series of quotidian scenes concerning the interwoven themes of companionship, loneliness, memory, nostalgia, and the restorative power of art. Drawing upon phenomenological and memory-based studies of intercultural cinema, this chapter explores the relationship between recollections, references, and transnational film remakes, ultimately aiming to transnationalise (or “uproot”) nostalgia and show how twenty-first century cinephilia performs a similar cultural function to the remaking process.

Transformation and Glamour in the Cross-Cultural Makeover: Return to Eden, Khoon Bhari Maang and the Avenging Woman in Popular Hindi Cinema

Rakesh Roshan’s Khoon Bhari Maang (Blood-Smeared Forehead, India, 1988) is closely modelled on the iconic Australian television 3-part, mini-series Return to Eden (Karen Arthur, Kevin James Dobson, 1983), itself a self-conscious appropriation and strategic indigenisation of the melodramatic conventions and “feminised address” of the prime time American soap opera. In Return to Eden, a treacherous tennis champ marries a meek and dowdy heiress, Stephanie Harper, and throws her into alligator-infested waters; she survives, has plastic surgery, becomes a supermodel, and returns to exact revenge on her husband. In the transnational film remake, Khoon Bhari Maang, the heroine’s transformation is more extreme – in accordance with her revenge, which is more violent – and also more complex, in terms of cultural identity, since her journey, from frumpy Aarti to the sultry Jyoti, necessitates a negotiation of traditional/modern and Indian/non-Indian modes of womanhood (and this also resonates with the ‘reinvention’ of its star, Rekha, in the late 1970s). Drawing on recent discussions of the anxious “assemblage” of femininity in popular Hindi cinema this chapter focuses on issues raised by Khoon Bhari Maang’s presentation of the make-over conceit.

The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.

The Cultural Politics of Remaking Spanish Horror Films in the Twenty-first Century: Quarantine and Come Out and Play

The 21st century revival in Spanish horror film production has seen both a resurgence of interest in the genre’s Iberian past and an interest in transnational film remakes for North American audiences. This chapter will consider the cultural politics of remaking Spanish horror through two case studies - Quarantine (2008), the US remake of [REC] (2007), and Come Out and Play (2012), the Mexican remake of Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). The chapter argues that Who Can Kill a Child? might profitably be read as an engagement with the legacy of Francoist Spain, and that [REC] could be productively understood in relation to Spain’s recent tensions surrounding immigration. Through a discussion of the potential political readings of these films, the chapter argues that the North American remakes are divested of the most urgent political aspects of their Spanish counterparts in an endeavour to create globally marketable horror films.

Introduction: Transnational Film Remakes

Film remakes are often dismissed within critical discourse as unoriginal, derivative and inferior to their source texts, yet this mode of critique takes on additional layers of meaning when films are remade transnationally as this process raises further issues surrounding national and/or ethnic identity and questions of cultural power. In order to investigate these kinds of complexities, this chapter focuses its attention on the phenomenon of transnational film remakes and the wider social and cultural issues that they raise. What happens when a film is remade in another national context? To what extent can a film embedded within one cultural context be adapted for another? How might a transnational perspective offer us a deeper understanding of a specific socio-political context, and of the politics underpinning film remaking more generally? Given the increasing emphasis on reworking existing material within global film (and screen) culture, there is a pressing need for scholarship to address this phenomenon in a rigorous and systematic way.

Trading Places: Das doppelte Lottchen and The Parent Trap

In 1961, Walt Disney Productions released The Parent Trap. A huge popular and commercial success for the Disney studio, it was theatrically re-issued in 1968; extended through three television sequels (1986, 1989, 1989); and remade in 1998. Perhaps less well known is that Disney’s 1961 version of The Parent Trap was itself already a remake of German, Japanese and British versions – Das doppelte Lottchen (1950), Hibari no komoriuta (1951), and Twice Upon a Time (1953) – each in turn derived from Erich Kästner’s 1949 novel Das doppelte Lottchen. While the cultural production does not end here – with subsequent versions reported in India, Iran and Korea, and animated and live action remakes in Japan and Germany – this chapter inquires into the transnational connections between Kästner’s novel and the US and German versions (originals and remakes). This chapter extends its analysis beyond Kästner’s twin figures of Lisa (from Vienna) and Lotte (from Munich) to chart not only a cartography of transnational flows – a political economy of textual production and reception – but also indicate the way in which the films’ exchange of twins is symptomatic of that between original and transnational film remake.

The Transnational Film Remake in the American Press

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.

‘Crazed Heat’: Nakahira Ko and the Transnational Self-remake

Transnational film remakes present a variety of complicating issues – of geography, culture, translation, and temporality, among others. Directors have remade their own films, sometimes quite directly, other times by shifting genre, but the case of a director moving from one national situation to another and remaking an earlier film is rare. What makes such an auto-remake particularly interesting is that it calls into question issues of authorship. This chapter will look at the case of Nakahira Ko who made the influential Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit,1956) and later in his career remade the film (under the Chinese pseudonym Yang Shu-hsi) as Kuang lian shi (Summer Heat, 1968). The case of Crazed Fruit and its transformation into Summer Heat is interesting, partly due to the stature of the Japanese original and also due to some of the more obvious transformations, such as from Ishihara Yujiro in the original to a more generic male star in the remake. More significantly, while Crazed Fruit was part of a cycle of Japanese films examining post-war disaffected youth, the Hong Kong remake is far less implicated in a cultural moment.

‘For the Dead Travel Fast’: The Transnational Afterlives of Dracula

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1897, the character of Count Dracula has proven to be eminently adaptable, appearing in various guises in over 300 feature films – from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) through to Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012). As with other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Dracula has been freed from his roots in a source text and entered what Will Brooker describes as ‘the realm of the icon’. Yet, while there has been a considerable amount of scholarship on the canonical adaptations of Dracula produced in Hollywood, the UK and Germany, very little has been written on the numerous adaptations of the Count Dracula character that have appeared in other film industries. This chapter considers examples of transnational film remakes, including the 1953 Turkish film Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in Istanbul), the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro (The Vampire), and the 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). Paying close attention to the variety of ways in which the character is utilised across different cultural contexts, this chapter interrogates the complex issues that this raises in relation to the dynamic interplay of global and local within international popular cinema.

Disrupting the Remake: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Recent years have witnessed a cycle of high profile Hollywood remakes of Scandinavian cinema, including such titles as David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, (USA, 2011), based upon the Swedish-Danish co-production, Män som hatar kvinnor/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009). This chapter argues that these remakes should be located within a much broader cultural phenomenon: namely, the huge international success of so-called “Nordic noir” or “Nordicana.” The location of these particular Hollywood remakes within a broader Scandinavian success story has enabled the production of films which do not entirely display the process of “Americanisation” so often meted out to other foreign remake sources. These remakes arguably reveal a type of “foreignising” atypical in the Hollywood remake. This chapter argues that in many ways this is a positive thing, blurring definitions of and distinctions between “national” cinemas. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes that the bottom line of box office returns suggests that even these transnational film remakes have very little impact on the continuing global predominance of Hollywood.