Constantine Verevis,
Film Remakes.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 7486 2186 5 (hb) £45.00
ISBN: 0 7486 2187 3 (pb) £16.99
198pp
(Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press)

It’s the summer of 2006, and Hollywood seems primarily interested in Supermen, Pirates and other forms of remakes and sequels. But we are also living in an age when the term “remakes” has become much more diversified than simply remaking a specific film using even the same title – Jean Luc Godard’s 1959 A bout de soufflé in 1983, for instance, as Jim McBride’s Breathless in Hollywood. For now we see films that become television series (M*A*S*H, for instance), and even amusement rides become films (Pirates of the Caribbean). For all of these reasons and more, Constantine Verevis’s recent study, Film Remakes is a welcome addition to the growing discourse on the sea of topics that “remakes” embrace that will prove invaluable for students, scholars of media studies as well as for disciplined general readers of cinematic culture.

Verevis sets up his study well, as he explains he is, “drawing upon recent theories of genre and intertextuality,” to describe remaking “as both an elastic concept and a complex situation, one enabled and limited by the interrelated roles and practices of industry, critics and audiences” (vii). In brief, he does a thorough and concise job of summarizing “remakes” studies of the past and then moving on to broaden the horizon by applying not just highly theoretical works ranging from Rick Altman, Michael Druxman, Fredric Jameson, Henry Jenkins, Robert Nowlan, Imelda Whelehan and Paul Willemen, but also popular commentary by critics and cultural observers such as Jim Hoberman, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert and Scott Foundas (yes, for the latter on the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a Variety piece).

As someone who has enjoyed wrestling with “remakes” myself (Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, co edited with Stuart McDougal. U of California Press, 1998), I particularly appreciate that Verevis highlights the complexity of what constitutes a remake and to what degree an “original” is redone and how such a “new” work is to be received and interpreted. To mention one point he makes extremely well, there are those films that, “…do not credit an ‘original’ text, but which do repeat both general and particular elements of another film’s narrative unfolding (22).” In such a category, for instance, he identifies Lawrence Kasden’s The Big Chill(US 1983) which Verevis accurately sees as an “unacknowledged remake” of John Sayles’s The Return of the Secaucus Seven (US 1980). Verevis has, thankfully, thus taken film studies past the simple and direct approach to remakes of presenting, say, Cape Fear (US, 1961, 1991) mentioning only or mainly basic “differences” between the two productions.

Verevis’s three prong approach – industrial (commerce and authors), textual (texts and genres) and critical (audiences and discourse) is an effective way of leading readers through a multitude of insights into “remakes”. If we pull even further back away from film to narrative itself in any form we are aware, of course, that everything is a “remake” in one way or another. Much within Homer’s masterful epics, for instance, has been identified as coming from other sources in other countries, but it is Homer’s particular “spin” on each episode that makes them his own though influenced by previous works.

Particularly useful, I feel, is the first section on “commercial” aspects of the remake. In fact, I would suggest that in a “reprinting” of his text, the title be reworked to include not just film but “media” for he has much that is cogent to say about the interaction of television and cinema and other media (we are fast approaching a time of watching Casablanca or Cape Fear on our i-pods!). He deserves credit, for instance, for adding the dimension of “re-run” to the discourse on “remakes” by reminding us that television has allowed viewers to re-see/observe. What does it mean for a viewer to see I love Lucy as a re-run rather than as a “first-run”? Related to these observations are his explorations of the remaking of a series that is originally a television series for television and then later the “remaking” for box office theatrical release: Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, McHale’s Navy, Mission Impossible and The Addams Family to mention but a few.

Each reader whether simply a cineaste or a true scholar will find her or his favorite sections in Verevis’s often unexpectedly informative text. And in this spirit I share his quoting of Godard on what he had wanted to do in making A bout de soufflé. Verevis helps us take in the enjoyable complexity of “remakes” for cinephiles such as Godard who said, “What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done (158).” Verevis then highlights what we have all known before – Godard’s love of American-B crime films – but given the topic of “remakes”, he is able to help us view Godard with fresh appreciation.

Verevis concludes with a glance at the filmmaker who has absorbed and remade consciously and perhaps also unconsciously so many films within each of his films, Quentin Tarantino. The danger of being so hugely into “remaking” Verevis reminds us by quoting from Roger Avary, is that Tarantino’s films are much more about film than about life. One can think of no better closing of such a perceptive study of moving images as Verevis’s work than that there is life to be lived for each of us beyond the cinemas and our home media centers!

Andrew Horton
The University of Oklahoma, USA.

Created on: Thursday, 23 November 2006