Politics of transnational film remakes: Turkish and German national cinemas
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In his introduction to Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Thomas Leitch observes that “the scope of adaptation studies remains largely Anglo-American rather than international; indeed, many adaptation scholars outside the English-speaking world prefer to focus on Hollywood adaptation studies” (6). Highlighting the field’s lack of interest in different voices and examples from world cinema, and especially marginal cinemas, Leitch emphasizes the exigency of a turn in adaptation studies to break down the information bubble that has left the conversation in a loop since its beginning, a turn that can be achieved, or at least ignited, by international scholars and should be supported by Anglo-American institutions. Seeing the importance of such a direction, my dissertation, “Politics of Remaking,” traces the impact of this Anglocentric position by considering how adaptation studies evolved, as well as how and where remakes are positioned within the field due to dominant scholars and scholarship and how this positioning affects discussions on transnational remakes and the directions that may or may not be offered with such a trend in the academia. ☐ The scholarship on remakes is very limited. Moreover, film scholars’ discussions of transnational remakes have largely been limited to exchanges between one national culture and another, with the focus on cross-cultural fertilizations, appropriations, or domination of one culture by another. By studying the remaking practices of German and Turkish cinemas, I challenge the notion of “transnational,” a term that is currently reserved to crossing borders between different nations and national cinemas. My aim is to diversify and internationalize film studies while enabling future scholars to study transnational cinema under a more generous paradigm. ☐ In chapter one, I analyze the evolution of adaptation studies and the current standing of remakes within the field. My aim is to analyze the dominant position of Anglo-American scholarship and the ways in which it affects the approaches scholars take toward transnational remakes and the directions they avoid. In chapter two, I challenge existing trends by exploring Turkish cinema and its remakes of Hollywood films from the 1960s to the 1980s, a period during which Turkey went through two actual and four attempted coup d’etats. While current scholarship on remakes argues that the motive for remaking is the success of the original film and its potential acceptance by a new audience, I argue that Turkish cinema’s embrace of remakes stemmed rather from internal economic, industrial, and political problems that did not emphasize the original films’ familiarity and relevance but the remakes’ distant and alien nature, raising the question whether we can refer to these films as “transnational” even though they cross national borders. To do so, I do close readings of two Turkish mockbuster films. First is Nejat Saydam’s My Friend Frankenstein (Sevimli Frankenştayn, 1975), which is a remake of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), and the second is Metin Erksan’s Satan (Şeytan, 1979), a Turkish remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). In chapter three, I turn to German film remakes made between the 1920s and the 1960s, another politically turbulent time in history. The aim of film remakes in Germany, which had recycled its own history, was to rewrite the Weimar past in Nazi Germany in an era that questioned the concept of nation with its racial anxieties. I argue that although German cinema remade its own films, the remakes that were produced within national borders were even more “transnational” than their counterparts that have been identified as transnational in their revelations of cultural and political clashes. In this chapter, I look at the remakes of Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1911 novel Alraune, made in 1928, 1930,1952, and F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) and its 1955 remake directed by Harald Braun. In chapter four, I discuss the relationship between nations, genres, and remakes. By looking at the remaking practices of nations in different times and places, I speculate about the generic convention and uses of remakes and how we can refer to them as a genre of its own.
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Keywords
Adaptation studies, Film remakes, German cinema, Turkish cinema