Claire Perkins

Dancing on My Own: Girls and Television of the Body

In all the critical hype around HBOs Girls (2012–), remarks on its intense physicality have been foremost — centering on Lena Dunhams blunt presentation of her ‘imperfect’ body in situations from sex to exercise to bathing to sleep. This article will consider the kinaesthetic affect of this, and other posing and performing bodies in Girls. Arguing that the choreographed body is central to the pleasures and accomplishments of the series as television, I suggest that its impact can be interpreted through the medium and art of dance.

Transnational television remakes

This special issue of Continuum seeks to provide a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes. Assembling an international team of scholars (from Australia, Germany, Israel, the UK and the USA), this edition draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation that extends beyond those approaches that seek to reduce the phenomenon of television remakes simply to one of economic pragmatism. While recognizing the commercial logic of television formats that animates and provides background to these remakes, the collection develops a framework of ‘critical transculturalism’ to describe the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a unitary one-way process of cultural homogenization but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another (see Smith 2008). More specifically, the essays attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialization and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series (on services such as Netflix Instant and Sky Arts) shape an audience’s reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture – for example, the case of Till Death Us Do Part (UK 1962–1974), All in the Family (USA 1972–1977), and Ein Herz und eine Seele (DE 1973–1976) – but also recognizes the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although recent years have witnessed a substantial body of critical work devoted to film remakes – Horton and McDougal (1998), Mazdon (2000), Forrest and Koos (2002), Verevis (2006), Loock and Verevis (2012), Smith (2015) – comparatively little has been produced specifically in the area of television. Notable exceptions include Moran (1998), Lavigne and Marcovitch (2011), McCabe and Akass (2013), and a short essay, ‘TV to Film’, in which Constantine Verevis describes the remaking of classic television series (of the 1960s and 1970s) as new theatrical feature films and potential cross-media platforms (2015, 129–30). This cycle of remakes – which has precursors throughout the 1970s and 1980s – intensifies with the critical and commercial success of The Addams Family (1991),

Translating the television ‘treatment’ genre: Be’Tipul and In Treatment

In Treatment (2008–2010) was the first Israeli series to be remade for US television, and its largely positive critical reception established a reputation for Israel as a home for quality drama – setting the stage for the remake of Hatufim (Prisoners of War, 2009–2012) into Homeland (2011–). This article takes up the case of In Treatment to examine how the process of transnational television remaking can illuminate the concept of US quality television in the millennial era. Arguing that the aesthetic and industrial brand of ‘quality’ is defined by the theme and device of transformation, the article analyses how the American remake gradually diverges from the original series Be’Tipul (2005–2008) to accentuate this concept in its stories and narrative style. The resulting text presents the quintessential contemporary example of what I call the television ‘treatment’ genre: a mode of programming that operates by centripetal narrative complexity to present ‘serial selves,’ or characters whose time in therapy produces progressive or regressive modifications in their emotional state. When read against the more halting and circular narratives of Be’Tipul, this format demonstrates a clear socio-cultural remapping of its topic: where therapeutic culture in America is presented as a site that is underpinned by contested neoliberal ideologies on the government of subjectivity.

Remaking and the Film Trilogy: Whit Stillman's Authorial Triptych

he trailer for the 2006 Melbourne International Film Festival features a scruffy, bespectacled teenager sandwiched between two suited Hollywood executive types in the back of a limousine. As the car moves through a neon-lit streetscape, the execs use a nonquestion initially directed at the kid—“Okay, so your script is a sequel, right?”—to launch into a breathless exchange concerning the relative economic benefits of sequels, prequels, and postsequel prequels before deciding between themselves that a sequel remake (which they term a “sequel-sequel”) is the way to go with this project and turning again to the kid to ask him how much he wants for the trilogy or, better, the tetralogy, reassuring themselves and him that “he can stretch . . . he’ll stretch . . . we’ll stretch it . . . yeah, yeah.” The scene fades to black over their final mumblings, and the tagline for MIFF 2006 comes up: “It’s a long way from Hollywood.” This trailer raises a number of pertinent issues relating to the field of film remakes and sequels. First, and most obviously, it gestures toward the actual ubiquity of sequels, prequels, and remakes in Hollywood right down to the parodied categories of “quadrilogies” (Scary Movie 1–4 [Keenen Ivory Wayans/David Zucker, 2000–06]), “sequel remakes” (Dawn of the Dead [Zack Snyder, 2004]), and “postsequel prequels” (the second Star Wars trilogy [George Lucas, 1999–2005] or the parody-worthy case of the couplet Exorcist: The Beginning [Renny Harlin, 2004] and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist [Paul Schrader, 2005]). Second, the parody, notwithstanding the fact that it is parody, expresses the longstanding tendency within “serious” film circles to conceptualize the film remake and series in only such commercial terms—as, precisely, Hollywood typified. And third, in much the same way that the humorously specific categories actually reflect contemporary Hollywood output, the confusion the T Remaking and the Film Trilogy:

The post-mortem star discourse, or, loving Adrienne Shelly

The image of the prematurely dead film star is a site for the perception of cinema’s paradox of presence, or the romantic characterisation of a reality that is not ‘there’. Repeated evocations of this kind have given rise to a veritable cult of dead stars, where single names have the power to instantly convey the affective phenomenon: Marilyn, River, Brandon, Heath, Brittany … Across a number of case studies this paper is concerned with this ‘post-mortem star discourse’ as an effect of film criticism and writing. Taking a central interest in the process by which the writing frames dead stars with an intensity that exceeds the environment of the films in which they appear, it argues that this discourse demonstrates the centrality of the spectator to a notion of cinematic ‘presence’ – as something that does not simply pre-exist performance but is produced by performance during its reception. Taking cues from Roland Barthes and Laura Mulvey, it frames this writing as a ‘lover’s discourse’ that strives to recover and convey a sense of corporeal presence in both the star body and cinema itself. The article then examines how this logic can apply to the case of indie star Adrienne Shelly, whose acting and directing work offers a site in which the post-mortem star discourse collides with the self-reflexive theorisation of performance and artifice.

Introduction: Three Times

In one of the most self-reflexive moments of Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1998), a group of college students in a cinema studies seminar discusses the merits of sequels. Randy (Jamie Kennedy) — the “movie geek” of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) — asserts that “sequels suck” and “by definition alone are inferior films,” only to be contradicted by classmates who claim that many sequels have surpassed their originals — Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991) and House II: The Second Story (Ethan Wiley, 1987) are all offered up as examples.1 At a sorority party that evening, another film student — Mickey (Timothy Olypant), a character who is eventually revealed as one of Scream 2’s killers — continues the conversation: passing Randy, he bluntly nominates The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), claiming, “better story, improved effects.” Randy’s retort is automatic: “Not a sequel. Part of a trilogy. Completely planned.”

The Scre4m Trilogy

As a trilogy with a belated fourth installment, the Scream films offer a tangible example of the tension between limitation and expansion that the tripartite form sustains. The films are also defined by the tension of self-reflexive genericity, where they achieve a double-voicing that makes explicit their recognition of the codes of the slasher film, while simultaneously mobilizing these codes to conventional effect. From the first sequel onwards, this double-voicing applies not only to the historical codes of the slasher genre but also to the self-reflexive codes of the “postmodern horror” genre that Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) itself made so popular in this way. The tautest examples of quotation in Scream 2 (Craven, 1997), Scream 3 (Craven, 2000), and Scream 4 (Craven, 2011) are therefore those that point backwards (and forwards) to themselves and their own conceit. This chapter will examine the intersection of these tensions in the Scream films to argue that they advance a triadic dialectic that is constituted — and maintained — not through interlocking narratives but through techniques of nesting and ekphrasis. Like a set of Russian dolls, each Scream film neatly fits within the installment that succeeds it, with Scream 4 (Scre4m) nesting, and thus consolidating, the whole original trilogy.

In Treatment: The Five Obstructions

ABSTRACT The Five Obstructions is a critically acclaimed cinematic game between Danish auteurs Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, staged as the confrontation of two distinct film-making philosophies: Leths observational approach and von Triers domineering approach. The encounter enables an insight into the directors respective methods of attending to human psychology, as well as their status as auteurs, where Leths remote ‘visionary’ persona is in stark contrast to von Triers visible and self-reflexive alter ego. Produced under the rubric of the Dogumentary code that sought to bring Dogmas particular ‘authenticity’ to the mode of documentary, von Trier identifies the film as a ‘Help Jørgen Leth Project’ that aims to bring Leth out of himself. This article takes up the specifically therapeutic dynamic suggested here as a way of discussing how—for both directors—The Five Obstructions collapses self-revelation with a staging of self.