With the enormous span of time embedded in the very grain of the celluloid, old films and footage touch, in a sensate way, the strange and familiar longing for the archaic past which lies at the heart of the modern dilemma. Walter Benjamin‘s suggestion - that when delving into the secrets of modernity, including its technology, the archaic is never that far off - grows palpable when watching film from the archives. This project could just be called, ‘Why do we love old movies?’ To begin to grasp how old films touch us, its instructive to look at how technology functions within films. The power of degraded technology to create intimacy does not go unnoticed by filmmakers today where its use extends from the avant-garde to popular cinema. To further understand such effects, this paper focuses on one way technology provokes intimacy: how people fall in love in the movies.

This interview took place on 8 September, 1976, at the London Filmmakers’ Coop, Fitzroy Road, London. Frampton already had a reputation as one of the major theorist-filmmakers of the contemporary avant-garde, although his work was comparatively little known in Britain at this time.

Jean-Luc Godard‘s Sauve qui peut (la vie) holds a uniquely pivotal position in the directors oeuvre and provides the occasion for a case study in how he conceives and develops his works. Amongst the salient features of this process are Godard‘s invention of the ‘video-scenario’ format, enabling him to couch his ideas in visual rather than verbal form from the very moment of their inception; his desire to “look at things a bit scientifically”; and a use of commissioned and pre-existing music which lies at the very heart of his creative method.

In studio publicity, trade papers, reviews, articles, and educational materials, Joseph L. Mankiewiczs Julius Caesar (1953) was described and accepted as a faithful and mostly pleasing adaptation of Shakespearean drama to the Hollywood screen. As Variety accurately predicted, it achieved four Oscar nominations, one award for art direction and set decoration, high grosses, a hit soundtrack album, and several subsequent revivals. With the content more or less given, contemporary discussion focussed closely on how the verbal had been visualised, on how theatre had been turned into cinema – in short, on the film‘s style. It is with contemporary and subsequent readings of the film‘s style that this article is concerned, where, following David Bordwell, style is taken to mean ‘a films systematic and significant use of techniques of the medium’. But whereas Bordwell analyses film style directly in terms of an aesthetic history he considers to be distinct from the history of the film industry, its technology, or a films relation to society, I explore interpretations of one film‘s style that are heavily invested with socio-political meaning. If, in Bordwell‘s organic metaphor, style is the flesh of film, these readings of style explicitly dress that flesh in socio-political clothing. This analysis of Julius Caesar, then, is not another contribution to debates about adaptation, theatre on film, or Shakespeare on screen, but about the politics of film style.

What is film remaking? Which films are remakes of other films? How does remaking differ from other types of repetition, such as quotation, allusion, adaptation? How is remaking different from the cinemas ability to repeat and replay the same film through reissue, redistribution and re-viewing? These are questions which have seldom been asked, let alone satisfactorily answered. This article refers to books and essays dealing directly with ‘film remakes’ and the concept of ‘remaking film’, from Michael B. Druxman‘s Make It Again, Sam (1975) to Horton and McDougal‘s Play It Again, Sam (1998) and Forrest and Koo‘s’ Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (2002). In addition, this article draws upon Rick Altman‘s Film/Genre, developing from that book the idea that, although film remakes (like film genres) are often ‘located’ in either authors or texts or audiences, they are in fact not located in any single place but depend upon a network of historically variable relationships. Accordingly this discussion falls into three sections: the first, remaking as industrial category, deals with issues of production, including industry (commerce) and authors (intention); the second, remaking as textual category, considers texts (plots and structures) and taxonomies; and the third, remaking as critical category, deals with issues of reception, including audiences (recognition) and institutions (discourse).