This project details the ways in which the classic slasher films of the 1970s, and their post-9/11 remakes, are representative of the individual and complex world views out of which each set of films were borne. The remakes manipulate gender roles including those of the Final Girl and the mother; genre conventions, including increases in domestic melodrama and pathos; production models, including the use of star actors, directors, and producers; sexuality and presentation of the sexualized female body; and race, especially in fine differences between white and non-white characters. In doing so, the post-9/11 films reveal a conservative cultural climate that strives to show recovery of the nuclear family unit after trauma, unlike the originals which are more nihilistic in tone and portray families as either absent or deeply flawed and unrecoverable.

Documentary and docudrama practices have expanded with increasingly convergent media. Cinema, television, and the web conspire to create new vehicles of information and entertainment. Footage is manipulated, reenacted, and narratively altered for viewers who must negotiate flexible and porous parameters of fact and fiction. Bill Nichols began a conversation about documentary’s “blurred boundaries” that has continued and intensified with scholars such as John Corner, Steven Lipkin, Alan Rosenthal, Vivian Sobchack, Derek Paget, and Jonathan Kahana. Documentary and docudrama techniques must be more closely scrutinized and categorized, with particular focus on the importance of reenactment and reflexivity. A phenomenon that illustrates explicit interaction between documentary footage and fictional affect has remained undefined. My project proposes a new term, “documentary adaptation,” to explain the use of documentary films or television programs as source material for a fictional retelling. Films such as Rescue Dawn (2006), Grey Gardens (2009), Devil’s Knot (2013), or Loving (2016) have an uncanny and indeed literary relationship to previous documentary films conveying the same story. My research reads, theorizes, and contextualizes these adaptations. I note industrial and audience demand for narrative that engages with familiar facts. These unique dramas are sites of affective engagement with history as well as contemporary journalism. The project employs cinema and media studies terms and techniques to analyze documentary adaptation, to interpret a distinct merger of cinema and television aesthetics. This dissertation revises the dilemmas of documentary and reveals an invention to confront a new era of flexible media.

This thesis takes up the genre of the “Asian horror film remake” as a nexus for the illustration of the intersection between two significant theoretical perspectives that inform contemporary film theory: Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian transcendental empiricism. It employs concepts such as Lacan’s registers of the Real and Symbolic alongside Deleuze (and Guattari’s) theories on the actual present and the virtual past to interrogate terms such as ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘repetition’, and ‘difference’ in an attempt to account for the role of genre in the production of meaningful reality, both within the bounds of the text and in cultural life more generally. It first deconstructs the term genre as it has been employed throughout classical, structuralist and post-structuralist genre theory, in order to reveal its ephemeral nature, and to show it to be worthy of investigation in its own right as a central component of language, more than simply a critical tool. It goes on to elaborate the contingency of discourse that constructs verisimilitudinous reality, and explicates these ideas through analysis of the Asian horror remake films. It then turns to Lacan’s division between the registers of the Symbolic and the Real in order to explore the function of the repetition that is visible in generic film in relation to the subject’s experience of a coherent and authentic reality. Finally, it proceeds to engage with Deleuze’s ideas regarding virtuality and asignification and argues, with reference to the Asian horror remake, that it is the perpetual tension between sameness and difference that sustains meaningful life. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermartizburg, 2013.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-142). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Hollywood remakes of East Asian films clearly change more than just the language of a film, and the choices that producers and directors make in order to tailor a foreign film so that it better appeals to American audiences creates an entry point that allows for a more direct comparison of aesthetic styles, cultural tastes, and narrative conventions. An analysis of two case studies, South Korean hit film My Sassy GIrl (2001) and Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002, 2003, 2003) remade into My Sassy Girl (2008) and The Departed (2006), explores the principles of Korean and Hong Kong commercial film industries and how they differ and interact with those of Hollywood.

In the eyes of Hollywood producers, film remakes are popular endeavors to undertake. Part of the logic behind remakes is that they will likely perform successfully in the domestic box office because of the tried-and-tested formula that was the remake’s source material as well as the pre-existing fanbase. In addition, over the past two decades the international box office, particularly countries like China and Russia, are overtaking the United States in generating box office revenue. Hence, with the increasing popularity of producing remakes, as well as the growing significance of foreign markets for the entertainment industry, I test whether the international share of the box office is higher for remakes compared to other types of films. I control for several standard variables including type of film, genre, production budget, critical review score, recency of film, and number of installments in the film franchise. In conclusion, I find that although film remakes do not achieve significantly higher foreign box office shares, factors like sequel films, the horror genre, production budget and critical review scores play a significantly positive role in determining foreign box office share, thus indicating the preferences of foreign film audiences.

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This dissertation examines Hollywood remakes of US films in order to discern how the narrative and formal modifications between originals and remakes are analogous across sets of films. Performing a discourse analysis that utilizes theories of popular culture and social memory, I argue that the patterns of changes confirm that remakes fulfill some functions of modern-day folktales: stories that are adapted for the needs and interests of their contemporary audiences but that simultaneously tend to reaffirm and promote traditional ideologies. By analyzing shifts and alterations in narrative, visual and structural tropes and changes in trends of representation, I examine the ways in which such phenomena as political and social movements and historic events are depicted and consider what cultural needs these representations may fulfill for their audiences. My process was driven by several research questions. First, what kinds of films get remade? Secondly, what are the differences in content and structure in each set of films analyzed in this study and what are the relationships between the remakes and their original source films? Finally, my primary questions are: how do narrative structures, characterizations and plots change or stabilize within the same story over time? How can we utilize these changes and constants to identify the cultural functions remakes may serve that make them so prevalent right now? / Mass Media and Communication

No / This article begins by examining in general terms the remaking of European films by Hollywood and considers the reasons for the growth in this cultural phenomenon. It goes onto argue that analysis of this process has much to tell us about intertextuality: how texts are read and transformed. Focusing on Vanilla Sky (US 2002), the Hollywood remake by Cameron Crowe of Alejandro Amenábar's film, Abre los ojos (Spain 1997), it explores the similarities and differences between the two films. In addition, it also considers the extent to which a filmic remake like Vanilla Sky might be read as a self-conscious reflection on the processes which are at the very heart of intertextuality as we understand it.

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