Shot for Shot Remakes

Abstract

Remakes are often criticised for trying to update originals, often prompting the disapproving question, “if it isn’t broken, why (try to) fix it?” The shot for shot remake, by contrast, takes the original film and creates a new version of it, prompting the equally disapproving question, “why not just rewatch the original?” For Paolo Cherchi Usai, there are three “motivations” for wishing to see the same film more than once. First, “the pleasure of repeating an experience of pleasure”. Second, “a desire to obtain a fuller perception of what has already been seen”. Third, following “a change of opinion”.¹ Anat Zanger expands this logic to encapsulate the motivations of remake audiences, in whom she identifies a masochistic desire “to have the already-known experience repeated”, even though it is “accompanied by the presentiment that it never will be”.² Adapting Deleuze, we can say that there are three modalities to such a desire: one can have the “same” film, an “identical” film or a “similar” film. Of the first, we have the nonsensical notion that I can “have my cake and eat it too” – not another cake, but that exact same cake I just ate; not another film, but the one I have already seen. However, the idea of the “same”, Deleuze argues, “constitutes the greatest and the longest error” on account of the fact that if the thing that returns is indeed the same “One”, it would have “begun by being unable to leave itself”.