Volume 44, Issue 3

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.

This article analyzes the industrial and cultural dynamics of transnational film remakes, focusing on the recent rise of remake rights representatives and the production of comedy remakes for local-language markets. Through the use of in-depth interviews with remake rights representatives and the analysis of primary and secondary sources, we scrutinize the strategies of these players in mediating the production processes of remaking foreign popular films into local-language hits. The article takes on two tasks: First, it dissects the work of the different agents at play in buying and selling remake rights and examines their business models and tactics; second, it looks at the generic contents that these agents are circulating through selected catalogs. In this context, comedy becomes a privileged interface to link diverse national markets and manufacture an ideal of proximity, whereby foreign popular comedies – unknown to local audiences – are remade with a local flavor and presented as ‘new’ national hits.

Centered on Richard Dyer’s model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series’ inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

This article argues that the 2016 television remake of Winnetou reconfigures German fantasies of Native Americans ( Indianer ) and the Wild West in the post-reunification era. The remake raises questions about the historically constructed meanings and the appropriateness of Winnetou in Germany today, presenting an occasion to probe processes of German nation building and their continued – and increasingly controversial – reliance on metaphorical meanings of “Indianness”. Taking a cultural studies approach, the article develops a theoretical framework around remaking, generationing, and cultural memory, and examines the remake against the background of Germany’s still ongoing inner reunification and Native American claims to self-representation.

This essay reviews five different ways in which commentators have described what Hollywood does in remaking European films which audiences frequently regard as having a uniquely intimate connection with their European subjects: Hollywoodizing, Americanizing, Europeanizing, appropriating, and reframing them. After considering the relations among these terms, the problems raised by each of them, and their respective limitations, it proposes a sixth term, scripting, which it argues is less parochial, invidious, or value-laden than any of the others, and more likely to invite further productive dialogue on the subject of remakes that cross cultural borders.