Constantine Verevis

Daniel Herbert

Bringing together the latest developments in the study of serial formatting practices - remakes, sequels, series - 'Film Reboots' is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the new millennial phenomenon of rebooting. Through a set of vibrant case studies, this collection investigates rebooting as a practice that seeks to remake an entire film series or franchise, with ambitions that are at once respectful and revisionary. Examining such notable examples as Batman, Ghostbusters, and Star Trek, among others, this collection contends with some of the most important features of contemporary film and media culture today.

Film Reboots

Through a set of vibrant case studies, this collection investigates rebooting as a practice that seeks to remake an entire film series or franchise, with ambitions that are at once respectful and revisionary.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke

The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.

Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel

Second Takes

Julia Vassilieva

In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of ‘bad taste’ production on screen. Starting with paracinema or ‘badfilm’ – a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films – this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste. More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ‘bad objects’ in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ‘after taste’ media. Addressing global and local developments – from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django – the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image

Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and a searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted artistic work with exotic fragments drawn from the cinematic past. This study of Smith’s magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

Flaming Creatures

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of the phenomenon of cinematic remaking. Drawing upon recent theories of genre and intertextuality, Film Remakes describes remaking as both an elastic concept and a complex situation, one enabled and limited by the interrelated roles and practices of industry, critics, and audiences. This approach to remaking is developed across three broad sections: the first deals with issues of production, including commerce and authors; the second considers genre, plots, and structures; and the third investigates issues of reception, including audiences and institutions.

Film Remakes

Kathleen Loock

This book provides a dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction – remaking and remodelling – in film, television and new media. Drawing on a wide variety of Hollywood and other examples, this impressive group of contributors considers a wide range of film adaptations, remakes and fan productions from various industrial, textual and critical perspectives. Their case studies discuss new versions of popular texts such as The Manchurian Candidate, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. They provide new perspectives on the unlimited cultural production of classics like The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and they analyze the groundbreaking work of fan appropriations, including Batman and Spiderman fanvids, and fanfic trailer revisions for The Shining and television's The Adventures of Merlin.

Constantine Verevis

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