”Whatever the case, while some remakes are demonstrably failures, others are undeniably superb, and almost all interesting for what they reveal, either about different cultures, about different directorial styles and aesthetic orientations, about class or gender perceptions, about different social-historical periods and changing audience expectations, about the dynamics of the genre film, or simply about the evolution of economic practices in the industry.”
– Forrest & Koos¹

Since the turn of the millennium, film production in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) has witnessed the rise of a remarkable trend: Popular Dutch films are being remade in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking, northern region of Belgium), and popular Flemish films are being remade in the Netherlands. Because both regions, together including only 23 million inhabitants, share the same official language (Dutch, with some differences in accent and vocabulary), the Dutch-Flemish monolingual remake phenomenon appears to be highly exceptional. Moreover, these remakes are temporally immediate and geographically adjoining. In combination with the shared language, this makes them unique and very uncommon in international film production; they are thus a particularly relevant case to study in the context of contesting and reframing existing discourses on the global remake practice. In this article, we will explore the theoretical and conceptual relevance of the Dutch-Flemish monolingual remake phenomenon for on-going debates in the field of remake studies.

Starting from this observation, the article explicitly rejects what we would call the ‘anti-remake debates’. This critical disdain for remakes can be divided into two periods, linked to two general discourses on remakes. First, there is the neoromantic ”belief in the auteur as a heroic, visionary, and idiosyncratic artist”² which prevailed during the 1950s and 1960s and had great influence until at least the 1980s. This stance towards remakes coincided with the influential auteur theory, advanced by members of the Cahiers du cinéma, including André Bazin and François Truffaut, as well as other scholars and critics related to the Nouvelle Vague. The auteur theory states that directors, or auteurs, (must) express themselves in their films, i.e., their thoughts and feelings about a certain subject, or in broader terms their Weltanshauung. Accordingly, films that are original creative conceptions and reflections of a “genius auteur or artist” cannot, or should not, be remade. In this respect, if one chooses to remake a film, critics that are inclined to this discourse are apt to compare the remake to the original rather than judging the film an sich. As such, the issue of fidelity towards the original is central. Similar criticism has also plagued the field of adaptation studies, in which the comparison of, for example, a book and a film has always situated the film as the inferior work of art.³ However, beginning in the 1980s, a second discourse on the remake came to the fore, influenced by postmodern theories. These conceptualised the remake “as a privileged cultural articulation and simultaneously deconstructed the former cultural hierarchies by which they were degraded”.⁴ From then on, critics and scholars alike focused on remakes’ reflections of (national) cultural identities and attitudes, instead of directors’ visions or worldviews.

This evolution notwithstanding, a discourse of antipathy towards remakes remained prevalent, although now in terms of cultural domination or assimilation, often labelled as “Americanisation” because many European—most often French—movies were remade in Hollywood at that time. The notion of Americanisation reflected the anxiety about cultural globalisation, which matched strongly with a postromantic conception of film art.⁵ Today, these negative assertions about remakes are still significant and often articulated in public and scholarly discourse. However, when one distances oneself from this normative discourse towards the remake practice, the outcome of the discussion might be more fruitful than expected. Of course, we do not refute such criticisms, but we do argue that one should look beyond the economic incentives and the often perceived and/or presumed (artistic) inferiority of the remake.

Therefore, this article proposes a more nuanced reading of the remake practice. It is our goal to redefine or reframe the often normative discourse surrounding (global) remakes by evincing their overall elucidatory analytical capacities and theoretical relevance within (and beyond) media studies. A thorough examination of the Dutch-Flemish monolingual remake practice allows us to take a fresh look at some of the established concepts and theories within remake studies. Likewise, deconstructing the common understanding of the remake an sich provides useful insights.

In the first part of this article, we claim that the discourse on film remakes in general, and the non-commercial aura surrounding the European remake in particular, should be revisited and deconstructed. Next, our case of Dutch-Flemish monolingual remakes points at the possible explanatory power of the study of remakes when the normative perspective is abandoned. On that account, the Dutch-Flemish remake practice demonstrates an urge for a more nuanced and layered understanding of intercultural media practices, including the cultural proximity theory. Lastly, we ask ourselves how the directors of the monolingual remake practice perceive cultural identity and in what way these observations fit within existing scholarly debates on the remake.

The remake’s aura

The main incentive behind producing a remake is often said to be financial gain. Film is indeed a highly unpredictable and risky business without profit guarantees, in which remakes, with their pre-tested material, are seen as relatively ‘safe’ profit makers.⁶ This preference for pre-sold, canned projects is generally linked to Hollywood’s commercially driven film industry,⁷ which is in stark contrast with Europe’s more artistic stance on film (re)making. The latter viewpoint is strengthened by the so-called inability of Europe’s film industry to compete with Hollywood.⁸

The claim that remakes made in Europe are less commercially driven explains why critical debates on these films are generally less pejorative, or at least appear to be so. The underlying conceptualisation of European remakes not only (mistakenly) denies the possibility of a commercially motivated qualitative cinema but also indicates an inaccurate perception of reality.⁹ This is illustrated by the Dutch-Flemish remake phenomenon, of which all nine source films have been highly successful, both in terms of cinema admissions and in terms of financial gains. Moreover, all of them were produced or promoted as commercial (genre) films, targeted to a large audience. For instance, when the Flemish producer of the Dutch film remake Mannenharten (2013, de Cloe) talked about his movie in a Flemish newspaper, he quickly referred to its commercial success abroad: “The original story of the film originates from Germany, where ‘Männerherzen’ was a huge success in 2009. In the Netherlands, a Dutch version was made in 2013, ‘Mannenharten’, and it was also a commercial hit. To not confuse the audience, the title of the Flemish version was changed”.¹⁰ The commercial incentive behind the same-language remake practice is undeniable and—contrary to what is often claimed by scholars but similar to the Hollywood case—also negatively received. Indeed, after pointing out the monolingual remake practice, the Dutch critic Ekker concludes: “Commercial? Indeed. That’s how these things go”.¹¹

However, by focusing too much on the financial aspect, one tends to forget that, as Forrest and Koos remind us, “cinema is both a business and a producer of art” and that the remake is “integral to an understanding of the relation between the two positions”.¹² Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The work of art in the mechanical age of reproduction¹³ touches on the core of this debate surrounding the commercialisation of art, while also discussing the importance of originality and faithfulness towards the initial (master’s) work. Arnzen states that remakes “particularly those rare ones which revive what popular critics term the ‘buried treasures’ of film history—both support and complicate Benjamin’s notion”.¹⁴ He adds that, although film itself is inherently a mechanical reproduction, the remake causes authentic fictions to lose their aura due to the process of reproducing the narrative. Moreover, Arnzen argues that these remakes do reify the aura of the original, but only for the sake of profit. At the same time, the “reliance on overdetermined narrative codes” also makes the narrative of the original implode, “asserting that narrative itself is a plural process of repetition and reproduction across time”.¹⁵ However, according to Ginsburgh, Pestiau and Weyers,¹⁶ Benjamin’s assertion that technically reproducing works of art degrades or even destroys the aura of the original does not appear to be valid when applied to remakes:¹⁷ “copies do not destroy the aura of the original, but contribute to its value”.¹⁸ The latter assumption can be linked to one of Leitch’s four categories of the remake: the homage.¹⁹ This type of remake accepts the authority or prestigious status of the original and tries to reveal and valorise it in a well-intended manner. Often, directors of this kind of remake want the original movie to be remembered and commemorated through the remaking. The important difference here is that Leitch suggests that this idea of a remake contributing to the original is only one form or manifestation of the remake practice, whereas Ginsburg et al. claim that this idea is valid for all remakes. Leitch also states that “remakes typically invoke the aura of their originals rather than their memory”.²⁰ By this, he demonstrates that producers do not want the original per se to be remembered by the audience (memory); then, the two movies may have to compete with each other. Instead, they want to invoke an immaterial atmosphere that seems to emanate from the original (aura).

The assertion that remakes always contribute positively to the value of the original seems to imply that remakes testify to the importance or relevance of the original film, which might be correct to a certain degree. However, this principle is only applicable to a certain type of remake (i.e., remakes of canonical films), as was already pointed out by Leitch. It could, however, also be the other way around (see Figure 1), as one of the many negative comments on the trailer of the Point Break (2015, Core) remake remarked: “You are about to create a horrible remake and worse yet, give the original movie a bad name”.²¹ This is similar to what Braudy claims when talking about rethinking the concept of the remake: “the remade film is less frequently an homage or revival than an effort to supplant its predecessor entirely”.²²

Figure 1: Illustrative examples of YouTube users’ reactions to the Point Break (2015) trailer

Benjamin’s thesis further postulates that through reproduction, an essential bundle of elements (of the original) is appropriated due to changes in the films’ inherent context. Therefore, the original “disappears, leaving behind a ghostly afterlife of manipulated intertextual signs”.²³

As Arnzen already mentioned, film itself is intrinsically mechanically reproduced, which by definition means that there is no original to be found, nor is there an inherent aura connected to it. Nevertheless, what he fails to mention is that this is where the beholder, or the audience, comes into play, attaching (contextual) meaning to the movie. Hence, the aura is subjectively and socially constructed. In this way, a film sometimes attains the status of a ‘cult movie’, and this status or nature of cult movies can subsequently be altered when being remade. However, when the majority of an audience is not even aware of the existence of the original, how can its aura be (positively) altered because of a remake? This is the case for the Flemish/Dutch monolingual remake, given that the original film generally did not receive any public attention across the border, nor was the existence of an original acknowledged in the promotional campaigns surrounding the remakes, nor did the directors of the remake take into account the possibility that part of the audience would be aware of the original. These matters apply to Hollywood remakes of non-American films as well, which confirms the assumption that, contrary to what is frequently suggested, European and American remake practices have more in common than generally assumed.

It appears that Hollywood is very aware of the pejorative connotation of the remake label, as is illustrated by a remarkable shift in recent communication strategies. As film writer Ben Child²⁴ claims, the term ‘remake’ itself, alongside the kin term ‘reboot’, seems to have become a dirty word in Hollywood. American studios reacted to the negative aura of the remake practice by promoting the films using different language: “For the record, we are NOT making a reboot, but rather a continuation of the awesome JUMANJI story”,²⁵ as leading actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson wrote on his Instagram profile (see Figure 2) when talking about his upcoming film Jumanji (2017, Kasdan).

Figure 2: Dwayne Johnson posting about the film remake Jumanji (2017) on his Instagram profile

Moreover, an interview with the producer of Terminator: Genisys (2015, Taylor) illustrates that Johnson was certainly not the first to promote his film as not being a reboot or remake: “I think what’s important to remember when thinking about this movie is that it’s not a sequel, and it’s not a remake”.²⁶ Other examples of this apparently new ‘non-remake strategy’ are even more explicit, as the director of The Amazing Spider-Man (2012, Webb) states that it is “really important for us to be able to communicate that this isn’t a remake of Sam Raimi’s movie. There’s a new territory, there’s a new villain, it’s a different Peter Parker”.²⁷ This differs significantly from what we read in older scholarly accounts (2006) on the remake practice, claiming exactly the opposite: “Several marketing executives emphasise the high marketability of artistic imitation. Terry Press, the then marketing chief of DreamWorks, for instance wrote about promoting sequels: ’When you have a title people recognise, part of your battle is already won’”.²⁸ It thus seems that the negative aura of the remake phenomenon quite recently triggered an awareness in contemporary Hollywood, whereby the promotion and communication strategy of a movie is increasingly focused on communicating the non-remake status of the film.

Remakes’ explanatory power

Remakes are often understood ”to be worth ’less than‘ those texts that stand alone, a model of art appreciation borrowed, to film studies’ and television studies’ detriment, from the world of fine art and the valorization of ‘aura’”.²⁹ Drawing on our case of the Dutch-Flemish remake phenomenon, we prefer a more nuanced, intertextual reading of the remake practice to a focus on the possible decay of a so-called aura of the original work of art due to remakes, which almost directly implies adopting a normative way of looking at remakes. This echoes Leitch’s claim about the triangular intertextual relationship that differentiates film remakes from other movies. Accordingly, what defines remakes is a liaison that they “establish among themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are based”.³⁰ We support this claim, but only to a certain degree. As many other scholars³¹ have already suggested, such a relationship wrongfully requires that remakes are inevitably made on the basis of a non-cinematic source, which is somewhere to be found in the intertextual chain. By consequence, remakes that are directly derived from films without previous non-filmic iterations are excluded. Additionally, as Herbert³² states, Leitch does maintain a, though rhetorical, distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy’, which actually reinforces the hierarchy he tries to avoid. Although Leitch certainly makes some strong points and is one of the first scholars to do so, we would like to take this discussion a step further.

In what Baudrillard calls the ”postmodern age of cinema”,³³ remakes are omnipresent and symptomatic, as illustrated by our object of study and the emerging trend of Dutch-Flemish remakes. Herbert argues that “every text is an unoriginal intertext, including the ‘original’ texts from which adaptations and remakes purport to derive”.³⁴ The aforementioned (rather pessimistic) arguments tend to revolve around a lack of originality, which, according to us, overlooks the fact that reinterpreting an existing story and readapting it to a new (geographical, linguistic, cultural) context does not exclude creativity and originality,³⁵ but actually involves and incites a great deal of these qualities. Umberto Eco clarifies this eloquently in his essay on how to interpret serials (which include the retake, remake, series, saga, etc.):

“Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical art was in vast measure serial, and the ‘modern’ avant-garde (at the beginning of this century) challenged the romantic idea of ‘creation from nothingness,’ with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on. The same type of repetitive procedure can produce either excellence or banality; it can put the addressees into conflict with themselves and with the intertextual tradition as a whole; thus it can provide them with easy consolations, projections, identifications”.³⁶

Additionally, the earlier mentioned normative claims neglect the fact that remakes are relevant cultural artefacts for what they disclose, either about cultures, divergent director’s styles and aesthetic directions, class or gender viewpoints, different social-historical times, altering audiences and their expectations, the dynamism of the genre film or the changing economical practices in the media industry.³⁷ Moreover, the film remake practice is not a recent phenomenon; it has a long history across and within different continents and nations, even going back to the earliest days of cinema.³⁸ Thus, because remakes are a fundamental property of (the history of) cinema, and because films can unveil a lot about the cultural circumstances in which they are produced,³⁹ remakes might disclose more than just a specific filmic trend. Of course, one can only claim this when keeping in mind that ”any relation of a text to its social context is complex, mediated and decentred”.⁴⁰

In this respect, we believe the concept of cultural proximity to be strongly connected to, and elucidatory for, remakes in general and the Dutch-Flemish remake phenomenon in particular. Its main thesis postulates that audiences prefer cultural products that are “as similar as possible to one’s own language, culture, history and values”.⁴¹ It should be noted that this so called proximity is a dynamic matter: When no local productions are available, audiences tend to prefer products of other cultures that are similar to their own.⁴² Thereby, the proximity theory claims that language is a primordial aspect in defining audiences, next to, for example “jokes, slang, historical references, political references”.⁴³ Although there are some (small) differences in vocabulary, grammar and accent,⁴⁴ the majority of Dutch and Flemish people perfectly understand each other, and “do not need to switch to another language variety to be understood”.⁴⁵ Thus, according to the proximity theory, this would mean that Dutch and Flemish cinemagoers like each other’s films and prefer them over, for example, non-Dutch language European films. When we look at the domestic cinema admissions provided by the annual reports of both regions, there seems to be a contradiction between theory and reality. That is, since the 1990s, box-office hits from the Netherlands have hardly managed to attract Flemish (or Belgian) cinemagoers, and vice versa. Before the 1990s, some films—such as Mira (1971, Rademakers), Flodder (1986, Maas) and Hector (1987, Coninx)—were highly successful in both countries. However, from the turn of the millennium on, box-office hits were no longer able to cross the border successfully, as the following examples show: Dossier K. (2009, Verheyen) with 408,176 visitors in Belgium⁴⁶ versus only 1,000 visitors in the Netherlands,⁴⁷ and Komt een vrouw bij de dokter (2009, Oerlemans), with 1,200,000 visitors in the Netherlands⁴⁸ and less than 16,000 visitors in Belgium.⁴⁹

At the same time, the Dutch and Flemish film industries do choose to structurally remake each other’s films, and not, for example, Scandinavian, French or even Korean films. In other words, it seems that we are dealing with a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, there is a clear mutual repulsion between both regions; Dutch and Flemish cinema audiences do not consume each other’s films anymore. On the other hand, there is also a mutual attraction: Dutch and Flemish filmmakers choose to remake each other’s films, and audiences are eager to consume these remakes. Although language has been determined as the principal indicator of cultural proximity and as a crucial binding factor of geo-linguistic regions,⁵⁰ our case of same-language remakes hints at an urgent need for a more complex understanding of such intercultural media practices in general and the cultural proximity theory in particular.

Remakes, directors and cultural identity

The remake’s explanatory power goes further; there is also a remarkable distinction between academic conceptions and the opinions or motivations of our monolingual remake directors. Although we do not claim that an analysis of these (monolingual) remakes reveals clear-cut objective differences in Flemish and Dutch cultural identities, we would argue that it is the filmmakers’ perceived differences between Flemish and Dutch culture that clearly come to the surface.

For example, Erik Van Looy, director of the Flemish Loft (2008), refers to the existence of a ‘big cultural wall’ between both regions when explaining why the Flemish version of his film would not work in the Netherlands, thus forcing the film distribution team to opt for a remake. Together with the Dutch remake’s director Antoinette Beumer and common producer Hilde De Laere, Van Looy argues that although the film evolves around ‘universal themes’, some culture-specific elements needed to be changed to attract the Dutch audience. The women in the Dutch Loft (2010, Beumer) are, for example, portrayed in a more sympathetic way and are less disapproving towards adultery. Beumer also explains this choice by stating that these women would be more recognisable to the Dutch audience. In addition, the representation of nudity and sexuality is more present and explicit in the Dutch remake of Loft. Once more, Van Looy explains this by referring to Dutch people’s nature as more extraverted, claiming that “the Dutch audience would not have tolerated it” if the film had been shot differently.⁵¹ Another Flemish remake director, Jan Verheyen, similarly mentions large differences in cultural identity: “Dutch people are just more brutal than we [Flemish] are. We have indeed opted for a softer version. That is related to national character traits”.⁵²

These statements reveal a more ‘classic’ and simplified approach to the cultural proximity theory and assume rather homogenous (sub)national audiences that “tend to prefer their own local or national productions first”.⁵³ This interpretation of the cultural proximity theory contradicts the more recent approach of broadening and differentiating the notion of proximity by claiming that “the audience is not simply embedded in a general culture that is locally or nationally determined … it is differentiated into different milieus and lifestyles, and differs in its socio-demographic characteristics”.⁵⁴ Moreover, the above statements reveal an essentialist interpretation of cultural identities, claiming that every culture is built upon different “core values’, including historical, religious, linguistic, political, legal and economic patterns.⁵⁵ This viewpoint on cultural identity differs greatly from the (social-)constructivist approach, which is common in the fields of remake studies and cultural studies.⁵⁶ The latter claims that the subject is at all times fragmented, existing out of different identities and susceptible to constant changes. On the other hand, the Dutch-Flemish remake directors construe (cultural) identities rather than ‘objectively reflecting’ them, which is in line with Hall’s influential notion of identity as “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”.⁵⁷ The revealed discrepancy between the essentialist interpretation of (cultural) identity as articulated by the remake directors and the constructionist stance of many scholars confirms Brodwin’s thesis that outside the field of cultural studies and the academic world as a whole, these essentialist notions of identity remain omnipresent.⁵⁸ Again, this demonstrates a need for a profound contestation and deeper understanding of the proximity theory, as well as broader intercultural media practices. For this, remakes in general and monolingual remakes in particular prove to be an excellent stepping stone towards acknowledging remakes’ reflexive potential.

Conclusion

Distancing oneself from a normative viewpoint on the remake practice might eventually lead to a more nuanced stance towards remakes of films in general, and the reframing of the (dominant negative connotation of the) term ‘remake’ in particular. As discussed above, the Dutch-Flemish monolingual remake obliges us to adopt such a standpoint, which enables its deconstruction and demonstrates its explanatory power. In the first part of this article, our case hinted at a more nuanced difference between American and European film remakes. It is often said that the Hollywood remake practice is (purely) commercially driven, whereas the European is not, or is less focused on financial gains. However, Dutch-Flemish monolingual remakes are usually financially driven, which disproves the latter assumption. Moreover, our case also points at a more complex interpretation of the relationship between Benjamin’s concept of the aura and the remake practice. We also claim that instead of focusing on the pros and cons of the remake, an intertextual reading of the phenomenon actually proves fruitful. In this way, the rapidly emerging Low Countries’ remake practice brought up an urge for a refinement of the proximity theory in particular and for intercultural media practices in general. Finally, our case also revealed a remarkable difference between the essentialist and constructionist conception of cultural identities put forward by same-language remake’s directors and the academic field, respectively.

Notes

1 Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 4–5.

2 Daniel Herbert, Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2008), 189.

3 Ibid., 20.

4 Ibid., 198.

5 Ibid., 206.

6 Kathleen Loock, “Retro-Remaking: The 1980s Film Cycle in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema,” in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 280.

7 Chelsey Crawford, “Familiar Otherness: On the Contemporary Cross-Cultural Remake,” ibid. (University of Texas Press), 112.

8 Forrest and Koos, Dead Ringers, 12.

9 See for example Leo Braudy in the afterword of the book Play it again Sam (1998): “But to conclude that remakes happen primarily for financial reasons obscures the way in which the remaker must also believe that this particular story still inspires what Ira Konigsberg here calls ’another attempt to get it right’”.

10 “Romantische Komedie over Gevoelens Van De Man,” Het Belang van Limburg, February 13, 2015, accessed October 28, 2016, http://gpr.me/svaj8ku4vh/.

Authors’ translation, original citation: “Het verhaal van de film komt oorspronkelijk uit Duitsland, waar ‘Männerherzen’ in 2009 een gigantisch succes was. In Nederland werd in 2013 een Nederlandse versie gemaakt, ‘Mannenharten’, eveneens commercieel een schot in de roos. ‘Om geen verwarring te zaaien met de Nederlandse versie hebben we voor de Vlaamse film een andere titel gekozen’”.

11 Jan Pieter Ekker, “Nederland-Vlaanderen En Vice Versa,” November 9, 2010, accessed October 12, 2016, http://www.jpekker.nl/nederland-vlaanderen-en-vice-versa/.

Authors’ translation, original citation: “Commercieel? Inderdaad. Zo gaan die dingen”.

12 Forrest and Koos, Dead Ringers, 29.

13 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction,” in Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 166–77.

14 Michael A. Arnzen, “The Same and the New: Cape Fear and the Hollywood Remake as Metanarrative Discourse,” Narrative 4, no. 2 (1996): 190.

15 Ibid., 190–91.

16 V. A. Ginsburgh, P. Pestiau, and S. Weyers, “Are Remakes Doing as Well as Originals,” CREPP Working Papers (2006): 3.

17 Some might even argue that Benjamin’s claim has nothing to do with remakes, because cinema as such is an example of infinite reproduction. There is no such thing as an ‘original film in time and space’, and what is left is an endless, splintered duplication. However, we think this lecture of Benjamin’s work is not very fruitful and, furthermore, implies a very direct, literal and non-symptomatic reading of his work.

18 Ginsburgh, Pestiau, and Weyers, “Are Remakes Doing as Well as Originals,” 3.

19 Thomas M Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake,” Literature/Film Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): 144.

20 Ibid., 142.

21 Warner Bros Pictures, “Point Break – Official Trailer [Hd],” YouTube (2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncvFAm4kYCo.

22 Leo Braudy, “Afterword: Rethinking Remakes,” in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 327.

23 Dorothy Wong, “The Remake as a Translation: Localism, Globalism and the Afterlife of Horror Movies,” Translation Quarterly, no. 66 (2012): 29.

24 Ben Child, “Don’t Call It Reboot: How ‘Remake’ Became a Dirty Word in Hollywood,” The Guardian, August 24, 2016, accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/24/film-industry-remakes-hollywood-movies.

25 Dwayne Johnson, “Instagram,” September 2016, accessed October 11, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BJTMZqIDCCA.

26 Ryan Lamble, “Terminator: Genysis Is ‘Not a Sequel, and It’s Not a Remake’,” Den of Geek!, June 9, 2015, accessed November 2, 2016, http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/terminator-genisys/35701/terminator-genisys-is-not-a-sequel-and-its-not-a-remake.

27 Brian Gallagher, “The Amazing Spider-Man Is Not a Remake Says Marc Webb,” Movieweb, 2012, accessed November 2, 2016, http://movieweb.com/the-amazing-spider-man-is-not-a-remake-says-marc-webb/.

28 Joye, Stijn, “Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, no. 15 (2009): 61.

29 Amanda A. Klein and Barton R. Palmer, “Introduction,” in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 12.

30 Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake,” 139.

31 Herbert, Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity, 30.

Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2005), 14–15.

32 Herbert, Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity, 31.

33 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 33.

34 Herbert, Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity, 31.

35 Joye, Stijn, “Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry,” 68.

36 Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 95.

37 Forrest and Koos, Dead Ringers, 4–5.

38 Kurt Van den Vonder, “De Remake Als Model Van De Filmgeschiedenis En Middel Voor Filmgeschiedschrijving: Een Macrohistorische Verkenning,” Communicatie (1997): 2–28.

Michael Harney, “Economy and Aesthetics in American Remakes of French Films,” in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (2002), 65.

39 John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 17.

40 Janet Staiger, “The Future of the Past,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 128.

41 Joseph D. Straubhaar, Robert LaRose, and Lucinda Davenport, Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology (Cengage Learning, 2012), 502.

42 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

43 Straubhaar, LaRose, and Davenport, Media Now, 502.

44 Johan De Caluwe, “Nederland En Vlaanderen: (a) Symmetrisch Pluricentrisme in Taal En Cultuur,” Internationale neerlandistiek 51, no. 1 (2013): 45–46.

45 Leen Impe, Dirk Geeraerts, and Dirk Speelman, “Mutual Intelligibility of Standard and Regional Dutch Language Varieties,” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (2008): 102.

46 “Jaarverslag,” Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds, accessed October 15, 2016, http://www.vaf.be/sites/vaf/files/jaarverslagen/vaf_filmfonds_jaarverslag_2009.pdf.

47 “Jaarverslag,” Historie Film- en Bioscoopbranche, accessed October 16, 2016, http://film-bioscoopbranche.nl/issue/JRV/2009-01-01/edition/01%20Jaarverslag/page/1?query=.

48 Ibid.

49 Ekker, “Nederland-Vlaanderen En Vice Versa.”

50 S. Waisbord, “Mctv Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats,” Television & New Media (2004): 359–83.

51 Erik Van Looy, interview by Sarah Goorix, Master’s thesis at Ghent University, 2011. Authors’ translation, original citation: ”Ja, ik ben nogal verlegen en ik durf dat niet vragen om alles uit te doen. Wij hadden van in het begin de intentie om die scènes heel tactvol en stijlvol te maken en niet ‘bonk erop’. In Nederland was het iets meer ‘bonk erop’, maar ik denk dat dat daar ook moest. Ik denk dat de Nederlanders het anders niet anders zouden hebben gepikt. Ze zouden gezegd hebben: ‘Dat is wat flauw’”.

52 Jan Verheyen, interview by Nora De Ketele, Master’s thesis at Ghent University, 2015. Authors’ translation, original citation: “Dat is ook weer zo… Nederlanders zijn gewoon iets brutaler dan wij. Wij hebben inderdaad ook voor een softere versie gekozen. Dat heeft ook weer met volksaard te maken, of hoe wij dan op dat moment onze volksaard hebben afgemeten aan de Nederlandse”.

53 Joseph D. Straubhaar, World Television: From Global to Local (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007), 91.

54 L. Mikos and M. Perrotta, “Traveling Style: Aesthetic Differences and Similarities in National Adaptations of Yo Soy Betty, La Fea,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2011): 85.

55 J. Smolicz, “Core Values and Cultural-Identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, no. 1 (1981): 75–90.

56 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (3rd Ed.) (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008), 218.

57 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 210.

58 Paul Brodwin, “Genetics, Identity, and the Anthropology of Essentialism,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 323–24.

Notes on Contributors

This article stems from a recently initiated research project called Lost in Translation?, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). The project aims to scrutinize the various cultural and economic dynamics and dimensions involved in the Dutch-Flemish same-language film remake phenomenon. Eduard Cuelenaere is a PhD candidate working as the main researcher on this four-year research project, which is supervised by Dr. Stijn Joye and Dr. Gertjan Willems. All authors are members of the research group Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) at Ghent University.

Bibliography

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Barker, Chris. 2008. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (3rd Ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

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Child, Ben. “Don’t Call It Reboot: How ‘Remake’ Became a Dirty Word in Hollywood.” The Guardian, August 24, 2016, accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/24/film-industry-remakes-hollywood-movies.

Crawford, Chelsey. 2016. “Familiar Otherness: On the Contemporary Cross-Cultural Remake.” In Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, 112–29. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Daniel, Herbert. 2008. Transnational Film Remakes: Time, Space, Identity. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.

De Caluwe, Johan. “Nederland En Vlaanderen: (a) Symmetrisch Pluricentrisme in Taal En Cultuur.” Internationale neerlandistiek 51, no. 1 (2013): 45–59.

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Eco, Umberto. 1994. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ekker, Jan Pieter. “Nederland-Vlaanderen En Vice Versa.” November 9, 2010, accessed October 12, 2016, http://www.jpekker.nl/nederland-vlaanderen-en-vice-versa/.

Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard R. Koos. 2012. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. New York: SUNY Press.

Gallagher, Brian. “The Amazing Spider-Man Is Not a Remake Says Marc Webb.” Movieweb, 2012, accessed November 2, 2016, http://movieweb.com/the-amazing-spider-man-is-not-a-remake-says-marc-webb/.

Ginsburgh, V. A., P. Pestiau, and S. Weyers. “Are Remakes Doing as Well as Originals.” CREPP Working Papers (2006): 1–10.

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Harney, Michael. 2002. “Economy and Aesthetics in American Remakes of French Films.” In Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, 63–87. New York: SUNY Press.

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Filmography

Dossier K. (Jan Verheyen, 2009)

Flodder (Dick Maas, 1986)

Hector (Stijn Coninx, 1987)

Jumanji (Jake Kasdan, 2017)

Komt een vrouw bij de dokter (Reinout Oerlemans, 2009)

Loft (Erik van Looy, 2008)

Loft (Antoinette Beumer, 2010)

Mannenharten (Marc de Cloe, 2013)

Mira (Fons Rademakers, 1971)

Point Break (Ericson Core, 2015)

Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015)

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012)

To honour iconic Japanese film‐maker Yasujiro Ozu in the year 2003, the year of his birth centenary, critically acclaimed Taiwanese film‐maker Hou Hsiao‐Hsien co‐wrote and directed Café Lumière: An Homage to Yasujiro Ozu¹, his first film set completely in Japan. When Hou was invited to make this Japanese film he was widely regarded as the obvious choice for the job². Although thematically Hou and Ozu portray similar themes (the comparative here is Café Lumière and specifically Ozu’s post war films that focused on the life of the ordinary Japanese family³ where generational divides and everyday matters eventually disintegrated this bourgeois unit⁴) and Café Lumière is a faithful updation of Ozu’s thematic concerns⁵, this essay seeks to examine the cultural complexities that Hou navigates through in making this transnational and transcultural film that belongs to not just Ozu but is also Hou’s own. In this homage, his influences are not just from Ozu’s oeuvre but primarily stem from his own difficult political and cultural Taiwanese background. Café Lumière is:

the story of Yōko, a young Japanese woman researching the life and work of a Taiwanese composer (Jiang Wen‐ye). When not working she spends time with a friend, Hajime, who records the sounds of Japan’s trains and railways and who runs a bookstore. Whilst visiting her parents Yōko tells her mother that she is pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend but that she intends to bring up her child by herself, which seems to displease the mother. Later, Yōko tells Hajime a frightening dream she has had and he procures for her a fairy tale that seems to resemble it; and as she conducts further research she feels the effects of her pregnancy. In addition, this matter continues to agonize her parents⁶

Browne writes that Hou’s work is informed by autobiography, history and cultural critique⁷ and all three factors are significantly present and intermingle to an influential effect in Café Lumière. This being a production to honour Ozu’s cinema, Hou includes his own important themes and visual styles that align with Ozu’s concerns as well, to enable Café Lumière to become a film that truly represents Hou’s and Ozu’s thematic concerns and identities. How Hou accomplishes this is the focus of this essay. Berry says a transnational film always is encountering and negotiating with national spaces and cultures⁸ while Lim writes that the supranational flow is celebrated at the expense of cultural, historical and ideological context in which these exchanges take place⁹. These are pertinent to Café Lumière because Hou does not succumb to these factors. He highlights them by dealing with his own concerns thus avoiding superficiality in his detailing of the characters and spaces both physical and cultural.

In Café Lumière, like in The Puppetmaster (1994), Hou taps into the past to get a historical Taiwanese figure immersed in art and born during a time when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. The Puppetmaster presents the autobiography of legendary Taiwanese puppetmaster Li Tian‐lu, born in 1910, the same year modernist music composer Jiang Wen‐ye was born, who makes his presence felt in Café Lumière (long after his death in 1983, a good fifteen years earlier than Li). Although both went on to lead very different lives under colonial rule, this intertextual¹⁰ evoking by Hou emphasizes his desire for due recognition of long forgotten l e g e n d s o f Taiwanese history. In Li’s case it wasn’t so much a need for recognition of his stature but the necessity that Hou and his screenwriter Chu T’ian‐wen felt to document his life ‐ a cinematic testimony ‐ for they knew that he was old enough to die any moment¹¹. This creation of an archive, for posterity of Taiwanese cultural identity has always been a necessity for Hou. In Café Lumière the continuation of this manifests in the introduction of Jiang Wen‐ye. In The Puppetmaster Li was the protagonist and in this film of Hou, Jiang is the protagonist’s (Yōko’s) subject of research. Hou steps into Ozu’s Tokyo not without a piece of historical Taiwan that influenced both Japanese and Taiwanese (and Mainland China as well as Jiang moved to Beijing eventually in the late nineteen‐thirties) cultures of that time.

Higbee and Lim posit:

Café Lumière weaves the complex (post)colonial relationship between Japan and Taiwan into its narrative because of Jiang Wen‐ye’s presence demonstrating the complexities of the triangulated relations among China, Taiwan and Japan from the last two centuries until today are as complex as Jiang Wen‐ye’s multiple identities and transnational career¹².

Hou brings to light these very complexities and Jiang’s struggle for an identity in changing times does reflect in understanding the identity of Taiwan as it stands today. Yet Higbee’s and Lim’s inference that the unborn child of Yōko being the symbol of reconciliation between Japan and Taiwan¹³ does not stand strong because the interview with Jiang’s wife is conducted with his daughter as well who was born during a time when Taiwan was under Japan’s rule. The daughter had to face paternal abandonment just as Yōko experienced maternal abandonment when she was young although in a different era. There is no reconciliation because like during Jiang’s time when he does not return to his family in Japan, Yōko decides to not return to Taiwan to make a family with her Taiwanese boyfriend. Hou problematizes the historical relation between Japan and Taiwan not because the ending of Café Lumière is ambiguous and unresolved with Yōko and Hajime¹⁴ but because the ending strongly indicates a content, happy future that Yōko creates for herself as she stands alongside Hajime who records different sounds at the train station. In the scene before this, when they meet, Yōko is fast asleep during a train ride. Hajime enters the train later, notices her, goes to her and stands silently, smiling, watching her sleep. The next and penultimate scene cuts to both of them at the station with each other and with no presence of Taiwan (represented by her estranged boyfriend), not in the now and nor in the future. For Hou, the present equation between Japan and Taiwan is as separated as it was in the past, during Jiang Wen‐ye’s time.

Hou’s access to contemporary Japanese culture, portrayed primarily by his young protagonists Yōko and Hajime, is by keeping a foot in the cultural historical past that belonged to both Taiwan and Japan. He accomplishes this by introducing Jiang Wen‐ye as Yōko’s subject of research who is writing about his music and life. This bit of Taiwanese past represented by art (Jiang’s music) is harmoniously brought forth to the Japanese present but the two cultures still do clash as Yōko is unable to live with her (overriding) Taiwanese boyfriend and decides to raise her unborn child on her own. Yōko’s present is influenced by Jiang Wen‐ye’s past when his wife says that her relationship with her husband was seen to be controlling by the world. Yōko doesn’t agree to this and seeing Jiang’s family picture album says they seemed to have a perfect relationship. A relationship that insinuates that it is like hers now. The past and the present of two cultures (via the relationships of Yōko and the composer) have the same differences and this non‐negotiability is one that creates tension for Hou. At the same time, Hou does portray local rituals and cultural practices, specifically when Yōko goes home to visit her parents. These are rooted in the native culture. Yōko’s family rituals of eating together, visiting relatives and performing the rites of grave cleaning are reminiscent of Ozu’s familial times and are shot similarly as well using long and low angle shots when seated, deliberately invoking Ozu’s capturing of Japanese family times.

The tensions of the past and the present that Hou creates attests to the fact that transnational film does not make a smooth transition, as Berry warns it usually does¹⁵ from one culture to another, being fraught with uneasiness by not foregoing their respective specificities. This is particularly significant in Café Lumière as Hou brings the turbulent past of Japanese colonization of Taiwan through the life of the composer Yōko is writing about. Making her personal life similar to that of his turbulent one, Hou does not fear to create discomfort through these cultural interactions.

Hou also uses voice and language as “strategies of remembrance” to qualify the film’s exploration of historical memory¹⁶. In his films, he has always focused on giving native Taiwanese dialects and languages a voice (first in Boys of Fenggui, 1986) being clearly influenced by nativist literature and nativist writers Chu Tian‐wen and Nu Wian‐jen. Lupke states, Hou being aware of how Japanese language and culture is steeped within Taiwanese culture makes him focus on language in his films and this becomes the most striking Sinophonic¹⁷ aspect of Hou¹⁸. Shih, Yue & Khoo concur as:

The notion of the voice is taken less literally and more figuratively to signify the conferring of representation to an oppressed group. This figurative notion of the voice is shared in Sinophone studies, whose agenda includes ‘[giving] space for minoritized and colonized voices within China (Shih, 2012, p. 5)¹⁹.

The spoken language in Café Lumière is Japanese, but the native voice is not forgotten by Hou. Jiang Wen‐ye’s music is, when heard via the CD being played with Yōko and Hajime listening in, for the first time, diegetic. This piano piece is the introduction to Hou’s language and soon after pieces from Jiang’s work take over as the background score of the film. Hou is known to not use non‐diegetic sounds20 and here, in this Japanese film as the historical Taiwanese connection is as important and vital as his previous films, Hou incorporates the Sinophonic voice through the language of Jiang Wen‐ye’s music and the motif of Sinophone sound is Jiang’s piano music pieces. The use of this music also enables Hou to make a smooth transcultural shift drawing attention to an aesthetic rather than politics thus creating space for both Japan and Taiwan to co‐exist and coalesce21 through the art of Jiang Wen‐ye. The piano pieces composed by Jiang Wen‐ye becoming the background score underlines the historical Taiwanese connection Hou wishes to highlight.

When the music is heard along with the visuals it styles the scenes with a mood that is just appropriate for the characters’ inner emotional states. Music implies traits, thoughts and identities of characters at their most intimate22. Intimate this is in Café Lumière as the music brings a harmony amongst the characters (Yōko and Hajime) and within the lead character (Yōko). In the hands of Hou music becomes a transcultural form understood as a collective experience, a complex communication transcending cultural boundaries and enriching existing aesthetic and cultural practices23. At the same time, Hou derives a cultural identity that bleeds into the national (or the lack of the unified national) in every film of his highlighting the issue of national identity. If the mix of Taiwanese, Mandarin and French in Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon complicates the film’s national identity24, language is no less important in Café Lumière. The film’s spoken language is Japanese throughout but the recurring presence of the music score by Jiang on its soundtrack creates the same kind of uncertainty.

If Hou invokes the presence of strained historical links between Japan and Taiwan via the introduction of historic native icons and their arts, he also accesses the past, the history, through different media. Intermediality in cinema can be understood as:

the theory of intermediality has brought the intricate interactions of different media manifest in the cinema into the spotlight, emphasizing the way in which the moving pictures can incorporate forms of all other media, and can initiate fusions and “dialogues” between the distinct arts²⁵.

These dialogues and interactions that the filmmaker initiates serve a bigger cohesive purpose and Hou in Café Lumière uses them to expose both personal (characters’) and national histories. When Yōko meets up with Jiang’s wife for an interview, they peruse the pictures in her old photo album. The camera does not linger on the women instead drawing to a long, close‐up shot (from Yōko’s point of view) of the photos in the album. The pictures of Jiang and his life, some snippets of them are made very clearly visible to the viewer. If the aim of intermedial analysis is the uncovering of the possible functions and meanings of these figurations in a film²⁶, by the ongoing conversations of Yōko, the old wife and their (Jiang’s and wife’s) daughter and the display of photographic images, memories of a time gone by are brought forth. Hou here creates a visual path to understanding a historical time through personal memories evoked via spoken words and old images. This is also seen before in the film when Hajime and Yōko listen to Jiang’s music on his CD player and she describes to him Jiang’s past in Japan and Taiwan.

If Yōko opens the doors to an older time through her documenting of sounds of the past, Hajime records the sounds of the present. An anthropologist²⁷, he records the sounds of trains and the sounds at train stations to later transcribe them into another medium – they become his computer generated art. Drawing elaborate and intricate images of rail networks and mapping them with the sounds that he records, he hopes that these recordings (each time he records at the station he says the sounds are distinctly different) will be of help in the future. In this way, he is ensuring in the preservation and archival of the ‘present history’ just like Hou is, in his own individual way. Hajime also tracks down the names of the stations (including the historically old names) and mentions to Yōko that some were in Chinese characters that made his work more difficult. At a personal level, his intermedial art also becomes a means of communication between him and Yōko because he shows his work to her for the first time, when he visits her home, the first time after learning about her pregnancy. Sometime before the film when Yōko tells Hajime that she is pregnant, Hou blocks his reaction (the scene is a medium long shot on a busy street and Hajime’s face is obscured by a pillar and people walking about). The images of trains surround a baby in a womb in the piece of picture art that he shows Yōko. It seems to convey that even though he is not the biological father of the baby to whom she will give birth he is willing to be Yōko’s supportive partner in her quest both to be a mother and to retain her mobility and independence²⁸.

Yōko accesses her own past, via her dreams and memories that come vividly to her upon reading (the story of which Hajime finds very similar to that of her dream) a children’s picture book, Maurice Sendak’s ‘Outside Over There’ (1981) a book that has also has a strong maternal absence²⁹ (as well as paternal, an absent father that connects Hou to Ozu thematically in their films) as its thematic prime. This intermedial referencing by Hou is made pertinent because the author Maurice Sendek, influenced by his own childhood experiences, largely wrote and illustrated stories about the story is about a girl, Ida, who has to take care of her baby sister when the father is away but irresponsibly allows her to be kidnapped by goblins abandonment and the peril of children in an adult world. This strongly connects the subject of the story to Yōko’s nightmare. Second, choosing a work of literature as an intermedial link brings back Yōko’s childhood memory of being abandoned by her mother and resolves her childhood trauma^30. It alsoconnects Hajime to Yōko on a very simple and direct level. It is he who is able to interpret her dream. As someone who exists and works in the world of books and words he is able to bring Sendek’s book to her to decipher her trauma.

Each medium that Hou introduces participates with its own cognitive specificities, shaping the messages conveyed by the cinematic flow of images³¹. This mode invites the viewer to get in touch with a world that is perceived in terms of music, painting, architecture forms [and words]³², a world that no longer exists but one that Hou is determined to document. This locates him at the centre of a temporal web where remembering coexists with the necessity to understand time and memory and their relation with the filmic image. Cinema thus becomes a technology of remembrance for Hou, making him ‘hopelessly hopeful against the implacable march of time understanding the impossibility of accessing the past while obsessively attempting to do so, retrieving memories by means of all kinds of technology’³³.

If cinema, music, photography, text ‐ orally through conversations about the past and images like old maps that have both pictures and words and story books – and computer graphics (Hajime’s art) are technological media that aid Hou in recreating the past, he also finds it important and imperative to search and document physical remnants of a past long gone. In Café Lumière, Hou, foremost, has to negotiate with how to represent the space of Tokyo, a representative place for Ozu. He navigates the city space by making his protagonists travel by trains, be obsessed by them (Haijime’s hobby to record the sounds and graphically archive the intricate rail networks). Trains symbolize the passing of time as well as the physical displacement of characters in different spaces. Yōko conducts her research by visiting old bookstores and cafes that Jiang Wen‐ye frequented more than sixty years ago. As she and Hajime walk around parts of Tokyo, using old maps to guide them, they find physical evidence of the past razed with new commercial complexes come up in the same space instead. This loss of evidence and thus the inability to completely record and archive the historical past seems very important for Hou and his Tokyo is the Tokyo of not today but one that has spaces (or the remnants of them) that had cultural significance in the historical past.

If Hou reveals a different Tokyo through historicity as a cityscape with important but lost connections to historical past and his main characters (Yōko and Hajime), are created and influenced by Taiwanese and Japanese cultures he does not forget that his film is meant to be a homage to Yasujiro Ozu, a Japanese filmmaker known for his detailed domestic stories derived solely from his own native Japanese culture³⁴. He negotiates this cinematic space by keeping one foot in the cultural world of his own understanding, yet bringing forth Ozuesque themes to the forefront in Café Lumière.

Hou’s protagonists in his films have changed from lonely youths and hot‐blooded men to drifting and wandering young women. The young girl becomes Hou’s main narrator and recorder of events. Women in Hou’s films are survivors of disasters. She travels through the glass wall of the presence of sealed history. In films where women are the main protagonists, (Daughters of the Nile; Good Men, Good Women (1995); Flowers of Shanghai (1998); Millennium Mambo (2001); and Coffee Jikou (2004), female protagonists are alone in their struggles against the ghostly impact of history and memory in the metropolis³⁵. If concerns for the young, single woman is of thematic significance in Hou’s later films, concern for the young unmarried daughter has been an important topic for Ozu as well in his later post war domestic films. Yōko in Café Lumière clearly is a callback to the young women in Ozu’s later films. This intertextual reference is not simply borrowed by Hou from Ozu’s oeuvre. Hou, in the documentary Métro Lumière_ Hou Hsiao‐Hsien à la rencontre de Yasujirô Ozu (2004) notes that post WWII Ozu’s attitude changed and a certain worry for the future reflected in his family dramas. Today, a lot more has changed because of the ability of the woman to be independent and survive on her own terms. Yōko could very well be a contemporary, updated version of Setsuko from Ozu’s Equinox Flower (1958), Akiko from Tokyo Twilight (1957) and Noriko of Early Summer (1951). All the women in these Ozu films (Hou mentions these films when he talks about Ozu in the documentary) make their own decisions about marriage and having a family and the family eventually comes around to accept their decisions. Just as Yōko makes her own choices in Café Lumière and her parents and Hajime, the closest to her, come around to accepting her decision.

Semblances in Hou’s and Ozu’s films are also reflected thematically in the relationships between Yōko and her parents. The inability to communicate between the father and Yōko represents the generational gaps, a reflection of Ozu’s post‐war family melodramas that had the father being less and less effective in terms of reigning over his children³⁶. This is reflected in the silence of the father as an absence of the father figure in Taiwan New Cinema, from where Hou emerged, and was always in search for³⁷. The absence of the father is also very prominent in contemporary Sino‐French films by Hou, Cheng Yu‐chieh and (Malaysian born) Tsai Ming‐liang³⁸. Hou takes this theme further in Café Lumière where the father although physically present, does not speak a word about Yōko’s pregnancy to his wife nor Yōko even as the former gently goads him to advise. This presence and absence, at the same time, confuses, because one does not know if Yōko’s father is acceptable of the situation or is simply too uncomfortable to talk about the problem. For Hou, this relationship breakdown between the father and daughter exists in the cultures of Taiwan and Japan belonging to both, belonging to none in exclusivity. Hou also ropes in acclaimed Japanese critic Shiguehiko Hasumi for the role of owner / manager of Café Erica, a cozy, quiet café that Yōko frequents to sit at the far corner table, busy with work. Hasumi has written extensively on Ozu and one of his focuses is on the emotional expressiveness that marked their own way of resisting and opposing to conventions³⁹ of the women in Ozu’s films. By bringing the critic in a cameo role in Café Lumière, Hou seems to draw attention to his and Ozu’s similar thematic sensibilities.

All in all, as much as there is this chasm, Hou seems to emphasize the new world order in the urban space where the young live life first and foremost for themselves. Hajime and Yōko each have different lives, separate and connect and bond because of their mutual interests and an alikeness in thinking. Each is first and foremost happy in his /her own space. They connect when they want to, respectful of this individual space of the other. As Hou notes (in the documentary) this is the time when a working woman lives life on her own terms. Her decision to create and have a family is hers alone and she respectfully disregards her elders’ advices which draws attention to Ozu’s young independent daughters as well, a definite updating of Ozu’s themes⁴⁰. This new configuration of relationships between men and women is the bright kernel of Hou’s film states Thornbury⁴¹. Elaborating she adds that Hou underscores the need to reimagine what it means to be a fully functioning adult in Japan today where old structures (including conventional modes of employment and marriage, (Ozu’s pet themes)) are crumbling or at least losing their former meaning. If ‘corporate Japan built Tokyo’s highly networked rail systems (Ozu’s protagonists’ generation), its children – women and men like Yōko and Hajime, who grew up in and on that system – are now constructing their own lives and their own gendered narratives in ways that their mothers and fathers likely could not have envisioned’⁴².

Stylistically, Hou adheres to Ozu’s trademark low angle stationary shots⁴³ in the domestic scenes at Yōko’s Tokyo home and her parents’ home whom she goes visiting. Although he uses slight pans to horizontally reframe the shots, the enclosed onscreen space that was Ozu’s area of dramatic action is evoked here as well by Hou. Yet Hou holds the off-screen space as important as onscreen⁴⁴ and when he does, he ensures that the off-screen action is later referred to the onscreen thus enclosing the space of action like Ozu always did in his films. As an example, when Yōko is in her apartment, her landlady visits and their conversation is held off-screen at the door. They can be heard but not seen as Yōko walks back and forth to the onscreen space during this. Later, when Yōko’s mother visits the landlady, Hou captures this scene as a long take, from outside Yōko’s house clearly showing the mother’s exit from Yōko’s home as she walks to the left (of the screen) to the landlady’s house. This visual connection to the first scene gives a complete picture of Yōko’s home and brings the off-screen space of then onscreen now and encloses it, like Ozu does.

Hou also introduces his trademark empty shots⁴⁵ like Ozu’s pillow‐shots⁴⁶ in Café Lumière. The static shot of the empty landscape as Yōko and family drive away (after performing the grave cleaning ritual) off-screen reminds one of the empty landscape shots of Ozu’s films. Temporal ellipses are also used by both filmmakers to convey the occurrence of certain events at certain times without feeling the necessity to show them explicitly. If Ozu did not show the marriage of Noriko in Early Summer (1951) or the funeral rites in Tokyo Story (1953), Hou does not bother with showing. Yōko’s visits to the doctor or her relationship details with her estranged boyfriend. This disappearance of certain events is important to both Hou and Ozu to focus on the more important dramatic events like, in Café Lumière, Yōko’s dynamics with her parents and Hajime and for Ozu, the parent–child relationship tensions and familial drama that unfolds over time and over events.

Ozu and Hou both connect via the visual motif of the train. Café Lumière opens with a train at a diagonal long shot crossing the screen from the mid left to the mid right and ends with a multitude of them passing various bridges in a busting Tokyo. For Ozu trains have always been a visual representative of Tokyo, the urban cityscape. The intertextual referencing of Ozu (which belongs to Hou as well) is an assertion that Café Lumière is a homage to Ozu but it is as much a Hou film offering a different perspective of Tokyo. More importantly, rather than adapting a specific Ozu film Hou seeks the spirit of Ozu’s films in this homage that blurs the line between direct adaptation and intertextual referencing that could be called as an expanded intertextuality⁴⁷. In the documentary Metro Lumière, Hou precisely says this, that it is his search for who Ozu is through his films that was his primary lead for Café Lumière.

Just as Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) is a hybrid, multicultural film⁴⁸, Café Lumière can be considered to be hybrid as well as Hou does not shift from one (Taiwanese) culture to another (Japanese) in complete. This hybridity is what makes Café Lumière a very unique homage in that it does not blindly create a film of the one to whom the homage is paid to and neither does it completely appropriate the former’s thematic and stylistic aesthetics into its own. A new language is created in finding an understanding, a meaning, or as Bloom says, a spirit of the original work (or oeuvre)⁴⁹.

Conclusion

If Hou, in making a Japanese film in Japan complicates the film’s national label⁵⁰, it has to be so because in a makeover, as defined by Horton⁵¹, especially an early twenty‐first‐century auteurist work, the source film [or oeuvre] is one intertext among many⁵². In Café Lumière, Ozu is but one of Hou’s influences. He understands that it has to be his foremost as the film is designed to be a homage to Ozu and he reflects on this in a way that brings to the front his core mode of accessing the present – via history. This conveying of his own thematic concerns is as important to depict the urban space of and times of the young (and the family) in Tokyo in Café Lumière, as Ozu found it in his own way by accessing the changes occurring in the very present of his times for the past barely existed for Ozu⁵³. This history that Hou focuses on expectedly has Taiwanese roots (both for Yōko and Hajime, his protagonists, and is introduced via their professions and likenesses). In Café Lumière, Hou makes a film that is a homage to a masterful filmmaker of a country that has had brutal historical ties with Taiwan. He chooses composer Jiang Wen‐ye because he has a connection to both Japan and Taiwan and in the end was misunderstood and disowned by both (and Mainland China) as political changes took place in these countries after WWII. This disownment and abandonment is central to Café Lumière but is never alluded to directly. What stays in the present is his music, his art that Hou presents via his protagonist Yōko. The encounters between both his and Ozu’s cultures that Hou creates through the mediums of art, history, technology and native cultural rituals makes Café Lumière his own film as much as it is a homage. This film is a homage to Ozu but it never allows one to forget the creator of the homage, Hou Hsiao‐Hsien. His personal stamp and thus his national and ethnic identity⁵⁴ are as clearly seen and felt as Ozu’s cinematic spirit in the film.

Sinophone directors like Hou Hsiao-Hsien do not simply shoot films in the diaspora. Non‐ Sinophone organizations invite them in order to meet the demands of an increasing global audience through transnational film productions⁵⁵. Café Lumière was commissioned by Shochiku studio in Japan, the home base⁵⁶ of Yasujiro Ozu to commemorate the centenary birth of the Japanese filmmaker. This was not the first time that Shochiku had partnered with Hou (the studio was the main producer of Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai, 1991⁵⁷). Hou in the documentary mentions that his films are popular in Japan, much to his surprise. In this sense, he not stepping into an alien land and neither is he making this film for an unfamiliar audience. This apart, the fact that stylistically and thematically his films were compared favourably to Ozu’s was the primary motivation to instate Hou as the director to make a homage film to Ozu. Second is his international repute that reflected his transnationality and market⁵⁸. If transnational cinema focuses on cultural formations that sustain cinemas that exceed the borders of individual nation states⁵⁹, Café Lumière encompasses the individual cultures of both Japan and Taiwan because the Tokyo that Hou depicts is the present with historical links to the past where there was a Taiwanese presence. The place is not rendered completely local as it did for Ozu.

Transnational films are not always made for profit maximization and do originate from other factors driven by mutual interests, aims, and desires⁶⁰. Shochiku Studio’s signing up with the iconic Taiwanese auteur to make a film as a homage to Yasujiro Ozu for his birth centenary falls into this category. The mutual interest and desire to honour Ozu by invoking his unique cinematic spirit through the work of a filmmaker from outside of Japan (unlike award-winning Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda whose films critics note that are stylistically and thematically similar to Ozu⁶¹) and who belongs to the other end of the mainstream/auteur spectrum⁶² simply proves that this homage was not intended as a commercially motivated project. In 2003, the National Film Center in Tokyo, for the centenary celebrations of Ozu, conducted a two-day symposium that was broadcast on national television and also included the world premiere of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s Café Lumière⁶³. This television broadcast of a feature film was very much in line with the spirit of Ozu’s cinema who made films for the masses. If transcultural cinema is defined as filmmaking strategies and tactics capable of transcending geographic and cultural boundaries⁶⁴ Café Lumière stands foremost not just as another transnational production but as an authentic transcultural film that stays true to its source and its destination cultural references. Café Lumière is and will always be recognized as a Hou Hsiao‐Hsien film made in the true essence of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema.

1 Stein and Di Paolo, Ozu International, 133.

2 Jinhua and Jingyuan, “Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films,” 240.

3 McDonald, Reading a Japanese Film, 94.

4 Stein and Di Paolo, Ozu International, 133.

5 Udden, No man an island, 173.

6 Bettinson, Directory of World Cinema Volume 12, China, 137.

7 Browne, “Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Puppetmaster,” 1.

8 Berry, “What Is Transnational Cinema?,” 112.

9 Ibid., 113. (cited in)

10 Lim, “Positioning Auteur Theory in Chinese Cinemas Studies,” 226.

11 Berry, “Words and Images,” 700.

12 Higbee and Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” 16.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Berry, “What Is Transnational Cinema?,” 113.

16 Yeh and Hu, “Transcultural Sounds,” 39.

17 Shu defines Sinophone studies ‘the study of colonized peoples and their cultures now known as national minority people or minority nationalities within the nation‐state of China’ and one of its ‘focus areas is the study of languages of the minority groups’ (Shi, Bernards, and Tsai, Sinophone Studies, 3,6).

18 Lupke, The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1.

19 Yue and Khoo, Sinophone Cinemas, 65.

20 Wang, Chinese Women’s Cinema, 284. 21 Yeh and Hu, “Transcultural Sounds,” 33. 22 Ibid., 34.

21 Yeh and Hu, “Transcultural Sounds,” 33.

22 Ibid., 34.

23 Ibid.

24 Bloom, Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas, 115.

25 Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality, 1.

26 Ibid., 2.

27 Thornbury, “Tokyo, Gender and Mobility,” 60.

28 Ibid.

29 the story is about a girl, Ida, who has to take care of her baby sister when the father is away but irresponsibly allows her to be kidnapped by goblins

30 Silverman, “Sendak’s Legacy,” 1.

31 Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality, 4.

32 Ibid., 5.

33 Montero, “Film Also Ages,” 108.

34 Richie, Ozu, 1.

35 Jinhua and Jingyuan, “Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films,” 247.

36 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, 43.

37 Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 5–7.

38 Bloom, Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas, 1.

39 Hasumi, “Ozu’s Angry Women,” 1.

41 Thornbury, “Tokyo, Gender and Mobility,” 60–61.

42 Ibid.

43 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, 76.

44 Chen, “Cinema, Dream, Existence,” 89

45 Ibid., 82.

46 Burch, To the Distant Observer, 60.

48 Ibid., 111.

50 Ibid., 115.

51 Ibid., 111.

52 Ibid., 112.

53 Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 31.

54 Bloom, Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas, 116.

55 Ibid., 110.

56 Bordwell, “Watch Again! Look Well! Look! (For Ozu),” 1.

57 Udden, No man an island, 146.

58 Bloom, Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas, 113.

59 Berry, “What Is Transnational Cinema?,” 113.

60 Ibid., 123.

Notes on Contributor