Refresh, Reload, Reboot, Remake: What are film remakes good for?

Undergraduate / Graduate

Film remakes are, and have been, a ubiquitous phenomenon in popular cinema. Film remakes take many shapes and forms: transnational (from Japan to the US), transcultural (from French to American), trans-modal (from animation to live action), and trans-medial (from games to the cinema screen). This course takes up the remake as not merely a citation, but as a new object that, in repeating, creates new meanings. It treats the remake as a repository where one can not only find new technologies of seeing and showing, but also track changing ways of imagining the world on cinema. For this course, then, the film remake serves as an emblem of difference, one which contains the situated imaginations of films past and present. By studying the remake, the goal of this class is to come out with a better understanding of cinema's difference from the other arts in its capacity to repeat the same story to produce different results.