Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood by Yiman Wang (review)

Remakes have always remained a fascinating subject among film critics and scholars. While few other art forms maintain their creative vigor and refreshing fascination when remade, film stands as the most popular expressive art form that creates original works through remakes and adaptations. Such resilience and malleability are even more characteristic in trans-cultural film remakes, where filmic texts transcend social, cultural, geo-political, and linguistic borders. Film scholars have been so confounded and intrigued by the combination of repetition and innovation in the diptych of the original film and its trans-cultural remake that they habitually resort to figurative language and metaphors in their analyses of such pairs. For example, Anat Zanger, in his Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley (2007), touches upon the potential symbiosis between original and remake. Treating film remakes as products of a society’s survival mechanism that both preserves and reconditions its own cultural meta-narrative, Zanger goes beyond apparent differences between originals and remakes to reveal a common typology along the vertical historical axis of cultural reproduction.

Most recent critical treatments of Chinese-Hollywood film remakes acknowledge an interdependence between the post-1997 Hong Kong cinema and Hollywood. But, as Yiman Wang expounds in her intellectually rigorous Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, previous works on cross-Pacific film remaking are inevitably circumscribed by the dichotomies of center/periphery, original/imitation, and dominance/subordination. Using Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood as historical and cultural coordinates in her investigation of the “historical complexity of the practice of film remaking,” Wang proposes a new theoretical approach that draws upon the socio-historical concept of Fredric Jameson’s “Utopia” and the subaltern discourse in postcolonial theories to tease out “the emergence of a collective, location-specific subject positioning” (1-2). Focusing on the understudied Shanghai and Hong Kong remakes of Hollywood films and Hong Kong remakes of Shanghai and Hollywood films, Wang contends that the discourse on film remaking should consider such cultural phenomenon as location-specific and highly historicized events, in the sense that film remakes always depend on contemporary social and historical realities and should be understood as symptomatic of how the Chinese Self negotiates the foreign Other.

Specifically, Wang conceptualizes Shanghai and Hong Kong’s remaking of Hollywood films as a “peripheral subaltern film remaking” in a semi- and sub-colonial China between the 1920s and 1949, and reexamines Chinese social, political, and historical conditions during this period (4). Moving away from both the binary dynamic between the original and the remake as original vs. copy and a later critical discourse that substitutes such binarism with intertextuality and textual hybridity, Wang shifts her analytical focus to subaltern remaking as bilateral and reciprocal. In other words, while the remakes are necessarily historicized cultural products, they in turn reshape their own historical environment and socio-political structure. As a result of such reciprocity and mutual influence between films and social conditions, subaltern remakes engender collective subject positioning and thereby political agency.

Wang structures her investigation of cross-Pacific film remakes around genre films because they are intrinsically repeatable and repetitive, but at the same time constantly evolving to maintain their viability. While a genre undergoes the remaking process, it inevitably encounters a “crisis of representation” as it becomes “destabilized, hybridized, and reformulated” (12). These changes allow Wang to employ genre as “an interactive map” to navigate the remake’s representation and anticipation of a historicized society and to trace the remade genre’s innovative “strategies in order to register shifting geopolitics and actively reconfigure it” (12). By comparing the generic representational strategies and patterns of the original with those of the remakes, Wang argues that to “remake a film is…to critically engage in dialog with that film, with the goal of producing a new vision through reversing” (13). In order for such dialog to form, therefore...