Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley

What is it that seduces film-directors into producing “remakes” that retell a previously successful story time and again? What hidden features cause us to repeatedly consume specific tales as Carmen, Joan of Arc and Ripley?

Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley is the first full-length book dealing with the instrumentality of chains of remakes, and their disguises, along the history of cinema. It suggests an alternative path for examining the imaginary archive of cinema, thus delineating the pervasiveness of specific stories in cinema across its entire history. From Olympia to Carmen Hip- Hopera, from Jeanne d’Arc to Aliens and Breaking the Waves, and from Suzanne and the Elders to Psycho and the 2002 Pompidou Center’s installation on Hitchcock’s Psycho, the book traces the “re-significations” of the same, familiar tales and the various ways they amplify, echo, and disguise each other.

Anat Zanger adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective to probe the junction of institutional, intertextual and feminist approaches in the cinema. Addressing a wide range of issues, such as the relation of source to adaptation; repetition and trauma; mythology, historiography and censorship, the author identifies chains of remakes - and their logic of repetition through differentiation - as particularly significant “traces” of the broader changes in the politics of the cinematic institution, as film challenges literature and the arts to become our prime medium of cultural memory.

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Anat Zanger is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the Film & Television Department,Tel Aviv University.