Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice

8. Hiring Practices: Simenon/Duvivier/Leconte

Jacques: Our story, sir, isn’t the only thing that’s been rewritten. Everything that’s ever happened here below has been rewritten hundreds of times, and no one ever dreams of finding out what really happened. The history of mankind has been rewritten so often that people don’t know who they are anymore. Master: Why that’s appalling! Then they (indicating the audience) will believe we haven’t even got any horses and had to trudge through our story like tramps? Jacques (indicating the audience): They? They’ll believe anything ! (69) —Milan Kundera, Jacques and His Master (1981) In the recent “documentary” Lumière et compagnie (Moon, 1995), whose goal was to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the invention of cinema, an original Lumière cinematograph was made available to forty international directors who subsequently used the apparatus to create C H A P T E R E I G H T ��� Hiring Practices: Simenon/Duvivier/Leconte LEONARD R. KOOS 203 their own films by employing the mechanical conditions of production of the dawn of filmmaking. The French director Patrice Leconte’s effort with the supposedly primitive machine serves as the prefatory offering. By way of introduction the iconographical moving images of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1896 short film Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat are shown. Then, period still photographs of La Ciotat’s vigorous palm trees further establish the southern French locale as Leconte’s voice-over commentary is heard in which he explains his motivation for participating in the project as well as what he hoped to convey in his film. He insists that his interest in the project revolved around the idea of “recording the differences .”1 In the film that Leconte does make with the cinematograph, the familiar yet different image of a contemporary La Ciotat railroad station appears on the screen. Despite the similarly diagonal axis of action along the railroad tracks with respect to the camera throughout the single , stationary shot, a camera position which invites immediate visual comparisons to the Lumière brothers’ film, in Leconte’s film the platform holds no waiting passengers. The train, shiny and modern, approaches the station from the right of the frame, does not slow down, and disappears off screen to the left, making no stop at La Ciotat.2 So much for the differences. And yet, Leconte’s contribution to Lumière et compagnie, ostensibly a remake of the Lumière brothers’ film, albeit brief, suggestively implicates the entire history of cinema in the process of remaking and exhibits fundamental characteristics and issues of that process, not least of which is the remake’s problematic and potentially contradictory rhetoric of originality within the framework of an avowed repetition. Documenting differences would seem to inscribe and maintain the inescapable referential presence of the original in the remake. Moreover, Leconte’s insistence on recording the differences while at the same time remaking the Lumière brothers’ film—here historical, political, cultural, and economic , just as much as aesthetic—underscores, within the consistency of a continuation of sameness, a formidable anxiety of influence that emerges in the predatory oppositionality by which Leconte signs his film, particularly in the radically remade ending. The rhetorical and aesthetic statement made by Leconte in the prologue to Lumière et compagnie informs upon his film Monsieur Hire (1990), a remake of Julien Duvivier’s postwar allegory of collaboration and conformism Panique (1946), itself a somewhat liberal adaptation of the 1933 novel Les Fiançailles de M. Hire by Georges Simenon.3 204 LEONARD R. KOOS THIS GENRE FOR HIRE Norma Desmond: Just a minute you. You’re a writer, you said. Joe Gillis: Why? Norma Desmond: Are you or aren’t you? Joe Gillis: That’s what it says on my guild card. Norma Desmond: And, you have written pictures, haven’t you? Joe Gillis: Sure have. Want a list of my credits? Norma Desmond: I want to ask you something. Come in here. Joe Gillis: The last one I wrote was about Okies in the dustbowl . You’d never know it because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat. —Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1950) Film remakes can provide the film critic or historian with a potentially rich opportunity to examine the aesthetic, economic, political, social, and cultural development of the medium. Moreover, when the remake is...