Books by Constantine E Verevis
Screen Serialities provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum of... more Screen Serialities provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum of serial screen formats-including franchises, series, serials, sequels and remakes. Over and above individual texts that happen to be serialised, the book series takes a guiding focus on seriality as an aesthetic and industrial principle that has shaped the narrative logic, sociocultural function and economic identity of screen texts across more than a century of cinema, television and 'new' media.
Screen Serialities provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum of... more Screen Serialities provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum of serial screen formats-including franchises, series, serials, sequels and remakes. Over and above individual texts that happen to be serialised, the book series takes a guiding focus on seriality as an aesthetic and industrial principle that has shaped the narrative logic, sociocultural function and economic identity of screen texts across more than a century of cinema, television and 'new' media.
Australian International Pictures (1946-75), Co-authored with Adrian Danks , 2023
Australian International Pictures examines the concept and definition of Australian film in relat... more Australian International Pictures examines the concept and definition of Australian film in relation to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although international co-production is particularly acute in the present day, this book examines the porous nature of Australian International filmmaking, and the intriguing transnational and cross-cultural formations created by globally targeted but locally focussed films made in Australia in the period 1946–75.
Flaming Creatures, 2020
Flaming Creatures by Constantine Verevis
Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the ... more Flaming Creatures by Constantine Verevis
Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, and providing an in-depth reading of the film itself, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted, multimedia artistic work with exotic fragments of the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.
“Verevis dissects and maps with great affection the tangled network of intertextual appropriations Jack Smith performed in his landmark film. A feast of historical and filmic information.” —Janet Staiger, author of Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
Film Reboots. Edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 2020
Bringing together the latest developments in the study of serial formatting practices – remakes, ... more Bringing together the latest developments in the study of serial formatting practices – remakes, sequels, series – FILM REBOOTS is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the new millennial phenomenon of rebooting. Through a set of vibrant case studies, this collection investigates rebooting as a practice that seeks to remake an entire film series or franchise, with ambitions that are at once respectful and revisionary. Examining such notable examples as Batman, Ghostbusters, and Star Trek, among others, this collection contends with some of the most important features of contemporary film and media culture today.
Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 3: Documents, Edited by Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams, 2018
Transnational Film Remakes, Edited by Iain Robert Smith and Constantine Verevis, 2017
An in-depth exploration of film remakes within global media culture
Bringing together a range ... more An in-depth exploration of film remakes within global media culture
Bringing together a range of international scholars, Transnational Film Remakes is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. Using a variety of case studies, from Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book provides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address the truly global nature of this phenomenon. Looking at iconic contemporary titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Oldboy, as well as classics like La Bête Humaine and La Chienne, this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.
US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films, Edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, 2015
I n the second decade of the twenty-first century, the term 'independent' is a cornerstone of Ame... more I n the second decade of the twenty-first century, the term 'independent' is a cornerstone of American film studies. Substantially detached from traditional economic definitions in and through the rise of the neologism 'indie', the malleable concept has come to signify a brand or 'genre' of filmmaking, a taste culture, a speciality label for major film studios, a mode of discourse, and a resilient framework for auteurist study. Debate continues over the meaning and connotations of 'independent' in this critical landscape, with the keynote of the term understood in various ways, including as a 'conception of quality' different to conventional, classical Hollywood cinema (Staiger 2013: 21), a sensibility 'both outside the Hollywood film industry and within it' (Tzioumakis 2012: 1), and an '[aspiration] to hipness' (Newman 2013: 71). Whether understood as an 'operational category' (King, Molloy and Tzioumakis 2013: 2), a 'cultural formation' (King 2014: 2), a 'mode of practice' (Staiger 2013: 23) or simply an 'idea' (Berra 2008: 11), indie is unanimously regarded as a concept relational to Hollywood: 'what is at stake is a continuum, not an opposition' (Holmlund and Wyatt 2005: 3). US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films takes this landscape as its theme, delineating 1989 as a watershed moment in which many of these critical concepts became dominant. As many histories of US independent cinema show, 1 this is the moment in which the indie ethos is institutionalised, in and through key developments such as the unprecedented success of Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), the attendant rise of the specialist 'mini-major' industry model following Disney's acquisition of Miramax in 1993, and the consolidation of the Sundance Institute. Describing the late 1980s and early 1990s as the 'classic' indie breakthrough period that announced the arrival of a first generation of films and filmmakers, Geoff King temporalises this 'Sundance-Miramax' era of indie history by suggesting that a second generation emerges around twenty years later as 'indie 2.0'
B Is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, and Cultural Value, Edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, 2014
B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film schol... more B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other "low" genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of "bad"—that is, aesthetically, morally, or commercially disreputable—cinema. While some of the essays share a kinship with recent discussions of B movies and cult films, they do not describe a single aesthetic category or represent a single methodology or critical agenda, but variously approach bad cinema in terms of aesthetics, politics, and cultural value. The volume covers a range of issues, from the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of low-budget production through the terrain of audience responses and cinematic affect, and on to the broader moral and ethical implications of the material. As a result, B Is for Bad Cinema takes an interest in a variety of film examples—overblown Hollywood blockbusters, faux pornographic works, and European art house films—to consider those that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability.
Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1: Critical Positions, co-authored with Noel King and Deane Williams, 2013
In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantl... more In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of ?bad taste? production on screen. Starting with paracinema or ?badfilm? ? a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films ? this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste.
More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ?bad objects? in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ?after taste? media. Addressing global and local developments ? from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django ? the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.
Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches, Edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, 2012
Drawing on a wide range of examples, this book – the first devoted to the phenomenon of the film ... more Drawing on a wide range of examples, this book – the first devoted to the phenomenon of the film trilogy– provides a dynamic investigation of the ways in which the trilogy form engages key issues in contemporary discussions of film remaking, adaptation, sequelization and serialization.
Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake | Remodel, Edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, 2012
This book provides a dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction – remaking and r... more This book provides a dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction – remaking and remodelling – in film, television and new media. Drawing on a wide variety of Hollywood and other examples, this impressive group of contributors considers a wide range of film adaptations, remakes and fan productions from various industrial, textual and critical perspectives. Their case studies discuss new versions of popular texts such as The Manchurian Candidate, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. They provide new perspectives on the unlimited cultural production of classics like The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and they analyze the groundbreaking work of fan appropriations, including Batman and Spiderman fanvids, and fanfic trailer revisions for The Shining and television's The Adventures of Merlin.
Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, Edited by Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, 2010
Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent y... more Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of figurehead of Hollywood's commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film sequel's industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.
Film Remakes is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the phenomeno... more Film Remakes is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the phenomenon of cinematic remaking. Drawing upon recent theories of genre and intertextuality, Film Remakes describes 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. This approach to remaking is developed across three broad sections: the first, remaking as industrial category, deals with issues of production, including commerce and authors; the second, remaking as textual category, considers genre, plots and structures; and the third, remaking as critical category, investigates issues of reception, including audiences and institutions. The film remake emerges as a particular case of repetition, a function of cinematic and discursive fields that is maintained by historically specific practices, such as copyright law and authorship, canon formation and media literacy, film criticism and re-viewing. These points are made through the lively discussion of numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the remaking of classics (Double Indemnity, Psycho), foreign art-films (Solaris, Le Samouraï), cult movies (Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Dead), and television properties (Batman, Charlie’s Angels).
Book chapters by Constantine E Verevis
"The W/hole David Lynch: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" in Marcel Hartwig et al (eds), Networked David Lynch, 2023
In 2007, David Lynch created a short film-HollyShorts Greeting-for his acceptance of the fourth H... more In 2007, David Lynch created a short film-HollyShorts Greeting-for his acceptance of the fourth HollyShorts Film Festival Visionary Award (2008). There is much to admire in this four-minute film, from a variation on the backwards talking from Twin Peaks (1990-91) through an impromptu shuffling dance by Lynch, and on to-in anticipation of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)-a lineup of beguiling chorus cuties. Perhaps of most interest, though, is Lynch's instruction that we 'keep [our] eye on [the] donut, not on [the] hole'. This is, of course, a delicious conceit because Lynch has always been interested in holes-that is, in portals or openingsthat take you somewhere unexpected, somewhere dark and beautiful. Moreover, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, we should never confuse wholes with parts, or sets. Deleuze writes: 'sets are closed, and everything which is closed is artificially closed. [.. .] But a whole is not closed, it is open, and it has no parts' (1986: 10). This chapter appeals to the w/hole David Lynch-his open set of films and artworks-to argue that those who initially objected to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) thought that the part (the prequel film) would close out the set (the first and second seasons of the television series) when in actuality it worked only to extend the mystery. As Lynch would have it: To me, a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something that's unknown, it has a pull to it.. .. When you only see a part, it's even stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have a logic, but out of its context, the fragment takes on a tremendous value of abstraction. (Rodley 2005: 231) If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me frustrated its initial audience-especially its Twin Peaks fan base-then this might be because the experience of (serial) repetition is displaced from a closed set or sequence of texts-the connection and continuation of a film prequel and television series-to an open w/hole.
European Film Remakes, Edited by Eduard Cuelenaere, Gertjan Willems, and Stijn Joye, 2021
Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015) remakes the 1969 French- Italian production The Swimming... more Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015) remakes the 1969 French- Italian production The Swimming Pool (La Piscine) by Jacques Deray, a film that showcased four of the then biggest names in European cinema: the (once) golden couple Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, supported by Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin. Described as 'a glossy Cote d'Azur thriller', the narrative image of La Piscine owes much to Delon's high profile, glamorous lifestyle and the distinctly chic Parisian 'look' of the female lead characters, Marianne (Schneider) and Pénélope (Birkin), whose wardrobes were provided by the high-profile French designer André Courrèges. A Bigger Splash was instigated by Studiocanal (which owned the rights to La Piscine) together with director Guadagnino, who employed the talents of costume designer Giulia Piersanti (formerly of Fendi and Balenciaga) along with (then) Artistic Director at Dior, Raf Simons, to re-fashion the film's costumes, with particular attention given to the clothing worn by the star-character Tilda Swinton (playing Marianne Lane). The presentation of Swinton-Lane as a fashion icon was forged through Swinton's early collaborations with experimental filmmakers Derek Jarman and Sally Potter. More recently, her trans-European (and trans-national) brand has been extended through her work with high-profile directors (such as Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch and Bong Joon-Ho), as well as her collaborations with Guadagnino – in particular, I Am Love (Io sono l’amore, 2009) and A Bigger Splash, which along with Call Me by Your Name (2017) make up Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’, and recently Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).
This chapter focuses on A Bigger Splash, drawing on some ideas around remaking as commercial refashioning and authorial branding to argue that Guadagnino’s film – an English-language, European co-production – exhibits some features typical of the ‘new millennial remake’ (Verevis 2017).
Film Reboots, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 2020
Film Reboots, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 2020
The Other Hollywood Renaissance, Edited by Dominic Lennard, et al., 2020
In A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker attends to the work of writer-director Paul Schrader mos... more In A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker attends to the work of writer-director Paul Schrader mostly in terms of his collaborations with Martin Scorsese-Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), and in particular Schrader's (Bresson-inspired) screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976), an essay on "spiritual isolation and redemption" transformed (by Scorsese) into a film about the "despair and disintegration" of its protagonist, Travis Bickle (231). While Scorsese/Taxi Driver are undeniably key figures/works of the New Hollywood, this kind of emphasis occludes Schrader's own contribution as a filmmaker: specifically, four early films-Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980) and Cat People (1982)-directed from Schrader screenplays and revisions. This chapter attends to these films, examining not only the ways in which the outsider character of Bickle recurs across Schrader's early works, but also interrogating the films to understand how each one activates key themes and prototypes that structure Schrader's career in, and contribution to, the New Hollywood. Born in 1946 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schrader was raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist environment with restricted access to filmed entertainment. In the 1960s Schrader's ambition was to be a minister, but a chance meeting with Pauline Kael provided him with an introduction to UCLA film school where he fervently watched films and became a critic for the LA Free Press. In the early 1970s Schrader worked as an editor for Cinema magazine and published his MA dissertation as Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972). Schrader's first success as a screenwriter came with The Yakuza (1974),
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Books by Constantine E Verevis
Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, and providing an in-depth reading of the film itself, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted, multimedia artistic work with exotic fragments of the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.
“Verevis dissects and maps with great affection the tangled network of intertextual appropriations Jack Smith performed in his landmark film. A feast of historical and filmic information.” —Janet Staiger, author of Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
Bringing together a range of international scholars, Transnational Film Remakes is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. Using a variety of case studies, from Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book provides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address the truly global nature of this phenomenon. Looking at iconic contemporary titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Oldboy, as well as classics like La Bête Humaine and La Chienne, this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.
More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ?bad objects? in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ?after taste? media. Addressing global and local developments ? from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django ? the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.
Book chapters by Constantine E Verevis
This chapter focuses on A Bigger Splash, drawing on some ideas around remaking as commercial refashioning and authorial branding to argue that Guadagnino’s film – an English-language, European co-production – exhibits some features typical of the ‘new millennial remake’ (Verevis 2017).
Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, and providing an in-depth reading of the film itself, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted, multimedia artistic work with exotic fragments of the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.
“Verevis dissects and maps with great affection the tangled network of intertextual appropriations Jack Smith performed in his landmark film. A feast of historical and filmic information.” —Janet Staiger, author of Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
Bringing together a range of international scholars, Transnational Film Remakes is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. Using a variety of case studies, from Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book provides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address the truly global nature of this phenomenon. Looking at iconic contemporary titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Oldboy, as well as classics like La Bête Humaine and La Chienne, this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.
More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ?bad objects? in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ?after taste? media. Addressing global and local developments ? from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django ? the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.
This chapter focuses on A Bigger Splash, drawing on some ideas around remaking as commercial refashioning and authorial branding to argue that Guadagnino’s film – an English-language, European co-production – exhibits some features typical of the ‘new millennial remake’ (Verevis 2017).
convergence to determine how these factors have been worked in and through the concepts of adaptation and remaking.
essential to understanding Japanese cinema, and its cultural meanings and adaptations.
(ACMI) in Melbourne reconfigured the State Film Centre of Victoria
(SFCV) for a new millennial moment of cinema and media, and
within the context of the new languages of post-production,
media convergence, digitisation, and globalisation. This occasion,
with its ongoing emphasis on immediacy and the future, urgently
requires a substantial research project that looks backwards and
forwards at the same time: that is, a project that at once provides
an understanding of the historical underpinning that gave rise to
the present institution, and also of the current context that will
give shape to the institution as it evolves into the future. Like all
public institutions, ACMI evolved from, and is currently made up
of, a complex series of threads drawing on a host of ancillary
organisations, events, locations, and individuals that have a
similarly intricate history that stretches back to the immediate
post-WWII period. This essay provides an outline of a larger
research project that will investigate the ways in which these
various forces have given rise to the character of ACMI, informing
an ongoing understanding of the place of ACMI within Australia’s
cultural profile. In this way the project will explain how ACMI has
become – and can continue to be – an enormously successful
model for government-supported, cultural institutions locally and
internationally.
arguably, may have deserved the slap). Promoted with the tagline ‘whose side are you on?’ each of the eight episodes of the series advances the story from the viewpoint of a
different character, in the process allowing barely concealed tensions of class, gender and ethnicity to rise to the surface. Upon the release of the series, Tsiolkas noted the
specificity of the drama, stating that its approach to multiculturalism ‘reflected the Australia that we do live in’, but the unique programme format attracted international
interest, NBC/Universal announcing that it was set to remake the series in the US with Matchbox Pictures’ show runner, Tony Ayres, as a co-executive producer. This essay engages critical frameworks of adaptation and translation studies to interrogate various
formats of The Slap. It considers not only the cross-cultural remaking of the Australian
mini-series for US television, but also the adaptation of Tsiolkas’ high profile novel to ‘quality TV’ – in ABC’s description, ‘a bold, provocative television drama series that forensically examines the mores and morality of contemporary middleclass life’ (The
Slap, Official ABC website). This analysis consists not only of an interrogation of the industrial situations and narrative strategies of the mini-series, but also – and given that Tsiolkas’ novel was heralded locally and internationally as a comment upon
contemporary (post-conservative government) Australia – an understanding of its reception contexts.
description that accounts for the way in which a blockbuster movie is itself remade: that is, a definition in which a blockbuster becomes the cornerstone for the entire architecture of a blockbuster cycle. This article explores the idea of a blockbuster remake, and blockbuster initiated cycle, in and through a case study of the prototype of all modern blockbusters: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Specifically,
the article interrogates the way in which “Bruce,” the great white
shark of Jaws, initiated a rogue animal cycle consisting in the first instance of the Jaws franchise – Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws 4: The Revenge (1987) – and also a series of replicas that included Grizzly (1976), Orca (1977), and Piranha (1978).
1960s Smith ran ‘Cinemaroc Movie Studios’, an underground film scene that paralleled and influenced Andy Warhol’s film Factory. Jordan assembles Smith’s friends and associates, contemporary artists and critics, along with excerpts from Smith’s films, performance pieces and audio tapes, to provide an account of the artist’s ‘lifework’, including his best-known film, Flaming Creatures (1963). This article takes up James Clifford’s notion of ethnographic surrealism to examine Smith’s life-work as an open exercise in self-portraiture, an intensively personal vision, but one that strives for the guarantee of objectivity, a type of ‘documentary truth’.
and seriality, still less by seeking to absorb either one of them into the other, but rather by raising questions of common concern to both fields and encouraging practitioners in both to share their views and facilitate collaboration.
Titles in this series include:
Film Reboots, Edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis
Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake, By Laura Mee
Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television, By Maria Sulimma
European Film Remakes, Edited by Eduard Cuelenaere, Gertjan Willems and Stijn Joye
Superhero Blockbusters: Seriality and Politics, By Felix Brinker
Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films: Class, Gender and Stardom, By Agnieszka Rasmus
East Asian Film Remakes, Edited by David Scott Diffrient and Kenneth Chan
Reviews:
“Covering a wide range of examples, this is essential reading for anyone interested in film cultures and fan practices. Loock and Verevis have brought together a great mix of chapters. Contributors might be exploring recycling and remaking, but there’s nothing retro about their scholarship. Quite simply, Remake | Remodel is a model of excellence.”
-- Matt Hills, University of Cardiff, UK
“This exhilarating collection is guaranteed to make you think twice about the boundaries between adaptations and remakes, beginnings and endings, fiction and history, academics and fans, and especially reading and writing. Whether the contributors are discussing the endless generations of Sherlock Holmes or the land of Oz or the brave new world of fan videos and trailers, they're constantly removing the Do Not Disturb signs earlier theorists posted all over the textual landscape, and incidentally expanding our idea of what constitutes a text in wonderfully invigorating ways.”
-- Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, USA
“Disproving the assumption that adaptations and remakes are simply uninteresting commercial ploys, this excellent collection of international scholars amply demonstrates the creative power and cultural work of such serial forms as created by both industries and fans, impressively spanning media, historical eras, and modes of production.”
-- Jason Mittell, Middlebury College, USA"