Remaking the World

»Verfilmen ist wie Verwursten« (Jean-Marie Straub)

»Der Kopf ist das Organ der Tauschakte, das Herz aber das in die Wiederholung verliebte Organ. (Freilich betrifft die Wiederholung auch den Kopf, aber nur als dessen Schrecken oder Paradox.)« (Gilles Deleuze)

»The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ›degraded‹ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ›quote‹, as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.« (Frederic Jameson)

Doubts about the relationship between artifice and truth have followed me through multiple viewings of Far From Heaven, yet each time I've seen it I've found it more moving, not less. I've come to realize that my suspicions about Haynes's ambiguous relation to the period may have as much to do with my own confusion about this material as with his. I'm prepared to believe that his relationship to the material has at least as much emotional and political authenticity as Sirk's ever did. And I'm touched not so much by the unlikely proximity of kitsch and truth… as by the truth that's found within the kitsch, at the end of a long train of thought and emotion that began with falsity. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

»Film adaptions - we could include remakes - are understood as hypertextes (new films) derived from preexisting hypotexts (literary or other textualised sources) that have been transformed through a particular series oder operations, inculing "selection, amplification, concretisation, actualisation, critique, extrapolation, analogisation, popularisation, and reculturalisation. (...) The language of translation suggests that the film adaption (film remake) ist not ›a faded imitiation of a superior authentic original... (but) a ›citation grafted into a new context and thereby inevitably refunctioned‹ or ›disseminated‹.« (Constantine Verevis)

»Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste. The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music.[1] Today, Remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the Internet.« (Eduardo Navas)