An Elaborate Quotation of Things:
The art of the shot-for-shot remake
Remakes of movies occur all the time in Hollywood, far too often by some people’s standards and usually with the sole intention of cashing in on a franchise that has proven itself successful in the past or with a foreign audience. But typically, the aim of the film is to re-imagine the original, infusing it with a modern day perspective or a sly ironic twist. “Staying true to the original” is a term that you will hear in certain instances but this intent is usually reserved for the spirit of the piece and not the actual content of the frames.
It is something entirely different to try and make an exact copy. In fact, this act is frowned upon by the industry and audience alike and purposefully avoided by a director determined to put his/her own stamp on their work. When a film does arguably cross over into the realm of duplication, as was the case with Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winning film The Departed, great conspiratorial lengths are taken to spin opinions away from these accusations. Ultimately, it was a combination of an incontestable prior body of work and the past guilt of the Academy that handed Scorsese the award for this movie. But it is impossible to watch the clip below and not acknowledge the irony that this film also picked up statues for Editing and Adapted Screenplay.
All of that said, I wonder what it is that makes a movie so precious that it becomes almost sacrilegious to make it a second time. It would be preposterous to suggest that once a symphony was performed by an orchestra, that piece should never be re-performed. Or that a play should be restricted to a single cast and stage. All of these works of art have a similar structure: a score or script that serves as the blueprint for the performance; and an interpreter in the form of a conductor or director who decides how it should play out. Certainly the difference is not simply a matter of finance, that the production of a film can often run into the millions so its re-creation is something less feasible? Perhaps it has more to do with intention: that the other two works are essentially meant to be enjoyed in the moment of their performance whereas a film is intended to be a document for the ages. And yet, in our current digital age where media exists more often that not as public domain, a file to be hacked, shared and manipulated, where old film lies in storage fading like distant memories and new footage is uploaded onto the internet at a volume that surpasses the collective decades that came before, even this notion of permanance seems somewhat antiquated, a relic from the 20th century.
Michael Haneke’s film (or more accurately, films) Funny Games (1997, 2008) is probably the best example of a director who intentionally remade a movie — in this case his own movie — shot for shot. As is to be expected, fans and critics alike lay blame for the second film on the unsophisticated North American audience and our intolerance for subtitles. But such accusations severely miss the point of Haneke’s intentions, that as a film maker and one who repeatedly references the medium of his craft in his work, the challenge of re-making one of his own films as accurately as possible was a cinematic exercise unto itself. Haneke states, “in order to decide to do a shot-by-shot remake, you have to be masochistic to some point, because it is a much greater challenge. If you do an original film, and you don’t like a scene, you just cut it out. But if you do a shot-by-shot remake you don’t have that option; you have to be sure it succeeds.” Haneke went so far as to build a replica of the house from the original for the second film. Setting aside any comparisons of performances in the two movies or even the of the film itself, as an exercise in the creation of a carbon copy, Funny Games is incredibly successful.
The other more infamous shot for shot remake is Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1968 classic “Psycho”. The movie was a major flop for a number of reasons, most notably because a good portion of the audience could not see past the iconic cultural status of the original. In his defense, Van Sant chose Psycho for the very reason that it was a classic piece of cinema that was being missed by younger generations and he chose to remake it shot for shot because it seemed even more inexcusable to try and re-envision something that is considered close to perfect in its original form.
James Naremore provides a brilliant analogy when he states that “movies have as much in common with novels as with theater, and Van Sant’s Psycho is not simply a re-filming of Joseph Stefano’s script, but an elaborate quotation of things that were literally printed on another film.” One of the main criticisms of Van Sant’s Psycho, by those who got past the initial grand objection of remaking a classic, was that the new version was missing the soul of the original, that it simply went through the motions, replicating the shots and script but without adding anything of its own to the process. There is a part of me, the artist not the audience, that enjoys this idea, that the remake becomes a carbon copy, devoid of a soul; that this notion could be taken even further and a shot for shot remake of Van Sant’s version of Psycho would produce something even more deteriorated and so on and so on until you achieved something entirely devoid of human life.
Ultimately, in the age of YouTube, there are countless instances of videos that recall, recreate, and reinterpret each other getting posted every minute. In my own research for this post, I came across instances of shorter shot for shot pieces that include a Smurf remake of Fight Club (below), the now legendary remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark by a couple of teenagers in Mississipi, a near perfect trailer for There Will Be Bud and a Battle Star Gallactica edit to the Beastie Boys’ video Sabotage. As the frontiers of cinema continue to expand we can only expect to see more shot for shot projects explored.
Originally published at kevinbroome.com.
