East Asian Film Remakes - (Screen Serialities) by David Scott Diffrient & Kenneth Chan

About the Book

Considers the remake from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives and positions it alongside other serialized cultural forms.

Book Synopsis

This wide-ranging, historically grounded exploration of motion picture remakes produced in East Asia brings together original contributions from experts in Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas and puts forth new ways of thinking about the remaking process as both a critically underappreciated form of artistic expression and an economically motivated industrial practice. Exploring everything from ethnic Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven (2013), a Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood's Western of the same title, to Stephen Chow's The Mermaid (2016), a Chinese slapstick reimagining of Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989) and Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 fairy tale, East Asian Film Remakes contributes to a better understanding of cinematic remaking across the region and offers vital alternatives to the Eurocentric and Hollywood-focused approaches that have thus far dominated the field.

Review Quotes

East Asian Film Remakes offers a rich banquet of revelations, ranging from directors who remake their own films as they refine their auteur obsessions to vibrant, humorous and even scandalous pop culture appropriations that display breath-taking creativity.--Chris Berry, King's College London