4 - Japanese Self-Made Film Remakes as Self-Improvement: Professional Desires and DIY Fulfilment, from Panic High School to Tetsuo

Summary

In Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise, Anat Zanger writes, ‘The relationship between original and version [of a film] encapsulates the dialectic of repetition, the dialectic between old and new, before and after, desire and fulfilment’ (2006, 9). Such ‘dialectics’ are especially palpable when directors decide to remake one of their own films, bringing the filmmaker's motivation to retrace or return to past work into metareferential focus. For David Desser, ‘directors remaking their own film within the same broad national context’ represent ‘cases that move beyond the typical auteur who persistently works in the same idiom or with the same motifs’ (2017, 164). Constantine Verevis notes that this phenomenon ‘might be located in a filmmaker's desire to repeatedly express and modify a particular aesthetic sensibility and world view in light of new developments and interests’ (2006, 60).

The extensive history of Japanese cinema features numerous examples of high-profile directors evoking or directly returning to past work. As discussed in other chapters within this volume, Ozu Yasujirō was prone to revisiting and reshaping past ideas. Perhaps the most obvious example of this was his latecareer classic Floating Weeds (Ukikusa, 1959): a colour remake of his earlier silent A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukikusa monogatari, 1934). To give another example, Ichikawa Kon returned to one of his most famous films, the humanist anti-war drama The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956), and remade it as a sweeping colour version in 1985. In both cases, the gap between ‘original’ and ‘remake’ is vast (25 and 29 years respectively), spanning numerous technological and industrial changes that have reshaped film aesthetics and production practices (including changing preferences towards synchronised sound, colour film stock and aspect ratios). They perhaps also fulfil the promise of film remakes as ‘industrial products’ that ‘are “pre-sold” to their audience because viewers are assumed to have some prior experience, or at least possess a “narrative image”, of the original story’ (Verevis 2006, 3, original emphasis). This arrangement satisfied their director's desire to return to past material (whether that be for financial or artistic reasons, or to re-imagine older works with newer technologies), while also providing commercial benefit to the studios that produced them, allowing them to court new generations of audience with pre-existing scenarios.