Abstract
The practice of Dutch-Flemish film remaking that came into existence in the new millennium quickly appeared to be of great importance in the film industries of Flanders and The Netherlands – and consequently of Europe. Inspired by methods used in television (format) studies, this article conducts a systematic comparative film analysis of nine Dutch-Flemish remakes together with their nine source films. Considering the remake as a prism that aids in dissecting different formal, transtextual, and cultural codes, and subsequently embedding the practice in its specific socio-cultural and industrial context, we found several similarities and differences between the Dutch and Flemish film versions and showed how these can be made sense of. More generally, we distilled two encompassing principles that administer the remake practice: even though a great deal of the remake process can be explained through the concept of localization – or, more precisely, through the concepts of ‘manufacturing proximity’ and ‘banal aboutness’ – we found that it should certainly not be limited to these processes – as both (trans)textual, such as the mechanism of ‘filling in the gaps’, and contextual elements were found.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Special Issue: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Editorial
- Editorial: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Articles
- Local flavors and regional markers: The Low Countries and their commercially driven and proximity-focused film remake practice
- Manufacturing proximity through film remakes: Remake rights representatives and the case of local-language comedy remakes
- Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema
- Remaking Winnetou, reconfiguring German fantasies of Indianer and the Wild West in the Post-Reunification Era
- Instead of the real thing: Six ways to talk about what Hollywood does to European films
- Book Reviews
- Meir, C. (2019). Mass producing European cinema: Studiocanal and its works. New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 272 pp.
- Evens, T., & Donders, K. (2018). Platform power and policy in transforming television markets. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 304 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Special Issue: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Editorial
- Editorial: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Articles
- Local flavors and regional markers: The Low Countries and their commercially driven and proximity-focused film remake practice
- Manufacturing proximity through film remakes: Remake rights representatives and the case of local-language comedy remakes
- Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema
- Remaking Winnetou, reconfiguring German fantasies of Indianer and the Wild West in the Post-Reunification Era
- Instead of the real thing: Six ways to talk about what Hollywood does to European films
- Book Reviews
- Meir, C. (2019). Mass producing European cinema: Studiocanal and its works. New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 272 pp.
- Evens, T., & Donders, K. (2018). Platform power and policy in transforming television markets. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 304 pp.