Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction: Transnational Film Remakes
- PART I GENRES AND TRADITIONS
- PART II GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
- 5 The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou's A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
- 6 Transformation and Glamour in the Cross-Cultural Makeover: Return to Eden, Khoon Bhari Maang and the Avenging Woman in Popular Hindi Cinema
- 7 Translating Cool: Cinematic Exchange between Hong Kong, Hollywood and Bollywood
- 8 Trading Places: Das doppelte Lottchen and The Parent Trap
- PART III AUTEURS AND CRITICS
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
5 - The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou's A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
from PART II - GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction: Transnational Film Remakes
- PART I GENRES AND TRADITIONS
- PART II GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
- 5 The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou's A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
- 6 Transformation and Glamour in the Cross-Cultural Makeover: Return to Eden, Khoon Bhari Maang and the Avenging Woman in Popular Hindi Cinema
- 7 Translating Cool: Cinematic Exchange between Hong Kong, Hollywood and Bollywood
- 8 Trading Places: Das doppelte Lottchen and The Parent Trap
- PART III AUTEURS AND CRITICS
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. In an era of relative cultural and political ‘openness’ after the Cultural Revolution, and during and after Deng Xiaoping's leadership in the People's Republic of China, a number of the Fifth and Sixth Generation graduates from the Beijing Film Academy have become celebrity fixtures in the international film-festival circuit, with more iconic directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke entering the global cinematic mainstream. These filmmakers have joined their Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Asian American counterparts – the likes of Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Johnnie To, Stanley Kwan, Peter Chan, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu and Wayne Wang – in generating a substantive body of work that constitutes a discursive Chinese cinematic presence in the global film histories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This Chinese cinematic presence seeps across national boundaries, as it rides transnational capitalist media flows, to permeate regional, diasporic and global networks. One could even go so far as to say, as Chris Berry does, that ‘it is precisely because the transnational is a world order that it plays a role in shaping all Chinese film-making activities today’ (2011: 15), producing both a material phenomenon and a critical perspective that Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has earlier classified as ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ (1997). It is within this context that I locate this chapter's examination of transnational Chinese cinematic remaking and, specifically, its critical analysis of Zhang Yimou's 2009 remake of the Coen Brothers’ feature film debut Blood Simple (1984) as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.
Scholars of film remakes have rightly problematised the linear and hierarchical cultural relationship between an ‘original’ filmic source and its cinematic remake. Constantine Verevis, for example, questions how ‘textual accounts of remaking risk essentialism, in many instances privileging the “original” over the remake or measuring the success of the remake according to its ability to realise what are taken to be the essential elements of a source text – the property – from which both the original and its remake are derived’ (2006: 2). The complexity of this source–remake relation is further compounded in the case of cross-cultural remaking when one considers the cultural, economic and political power dynamics of filmic appropriation, reconfiguration and representation that such cross-cultural interaction demands.
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- Transnational Film Remakes , pp. 87 - 102Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017