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Memento in Mumbai: ‘A Few More Songs and a Lot More Ass Kicking’

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Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age
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Abstract

On 25 December 2008, Geetha Arts India released Ghajini, a Hindi language remake of a Tamil film of the same name from 2005. Directed by A.R. Murugadoss, the film closely replicates much of the plot from the earlier film and is representative of a broader trend within the Hindi language industry for producing remakes of South Indian cinema. What is especially significant with Ghajini, however, is that the Tamil film was itself an unacknowledged remake of the American independent film Memento (2000). Borrowing many of the narrative elements from director Christopher Nolan’s film, yet adapting them to fit with the dominant narrative structure of commercial Indian cinema, the case study of the Hindi Ghajini presented in this chapter offers a privileged insight into the adaptation of narrative forms across different national and institutional contexts.

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Notes

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© 2015 Iain Robert Smith

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Smith, I.R. (2015). Memento in Mumbai: ‘A Few More Songs and a Lot More Ass Kicking’. In: Pearson, R., Smith, A.N. (eds) Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388155_7

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