Life, Camera, Action

(Above: The Five Obstructions)

You’ve probably noticed I write for a music-and-film magazine. And the fact that music comes first in that list is fine with me. I love music, and it has a lot in common with cinema, especially in the Paste world, where the auteur is a songwriter, of sorts, and the songwriter is an auteur.

But as similar as they can be, film and music occupy pretty different parts of our lives, by their very nature. A dedicated music fan may set aside time to do nothing but listen to an album, but most of us listen while we’re doing something else—working, driving or cleaning house—or at least we can, whereas movies demand the attention of both our ears and eyes. Maybe this explains why we spend less time with movies: they don’t lend themselves to multi-tasking.

And maybe this also explains why pop music is designed for repeated listens but Netflix and Blockbuster have built businesses out of loaning you a movie for what’s usually a one-time experience. If it’s a really good movie, you may want to see it again one day, but not as often as you’d play your favorite new album.

Something about the human brain seems to like repetition in music, especially when it has just a touch of variety every now and then—a remix, a cover, a key change in the bridge—and even though we experience music and film so differently I think we like repetition when we’re watching movies, too.

Which finally brings me to my topic: remakes. I know that as a movie critic I’m supposed to denounce them to the ends of the earth as evidence that Hollywood studios have no originality, no cajones to try something new and so little respect for their audiences that they foist the same junk on them over and over again.

But I’m less interested in why Hollywood likes remakes than why audiences like them, which we clearly do, lining up in numbers to see them. From that side of the equation, I can’t think of any reason to knock them. When people are genuinely elated to hear about a new film adaptation of, say, The Lord of the Rings, I think they’re excited for two reasons: they love the story and they love the medium. And what could possibly be wrong with that?

Even great filmmakers have remade movies. Not under duress, not in a time of weakness, but by choice. Alfred Hitchcock surely could’ve made any movie he wanted when he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, his own movie. Long before that, in 1929 at the end of the silent era, he made two versions of a movie called Blackmail, one a silent and one a talkie, sharing most of the same footage. Maybe he was hedging his bets in a time of great technological change, but what a fun exercise that must’ve been.

Stranger than the two Blackmails are the two versions of The Blue Angel that Josef von Sternberg made a year later, one in German and one in English. The strange part is that he made the two simultaneously, with the same sets and the same actors. They’d shoot a scene in German and then shoot it again in English, so the result really is two entirely different but very similar movies. (Ask anyone who’s seen them both; the German one is better.)

These alternate versions are akin to now-common “directors’ cuts,” but for a different variation, take the popular Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu who not only remade a few of his movies—loosely, exploring them from different angles—but also spent his latter years making movies about themes he’d explored many times before. Far from simply repeating himself, Ozu made each film fresh, as if the themes of fathers and daughters, marriage and family, still had untapped potential even after all those earlier films. And he was right.

Even movies that aren’t strictly remakes may still be working within a familiar set of unwritten rules. We call them genres, of course, and while not every movie needs to fit into one, those that do usually follow the rules but twist them in some unexpected way, just a bit, so that viewers are on solid footing but get a few surprises.

In fact, the brain’s affinity for repetition and slight variation may be as important to filmmakers and musicians as it is to the people who enjoy their work. Many artists—of all stripes—find that their creativity kicks into high gear when they’re backed into a corner, for the same reason that necessity is the mother of invention.

This phenomenon is on full display in Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions (now on DVD). Von Trier is the controversial Danish filmmaker who’s been called sadistic even by his fans. After all, he’s the guy who put Nicole Kidman in chains, Björk on death row and Emily Watson in situations you wouldn’t wish on anyone. But in The Five Obstructions he may have met his match: a fellow filmmaker named Jorgen Leth who made a short film in 1967 called The Perfect Human, which von Trier particularly admires. For Obstructions, von Trier forces Leth (a willing participant) to remake The Perfect Human five times, each time with a different set of constraints. The first obstruction: no shot can be longer than half a second, Leth must shoot the film in Cuba, and he can’t build any sets. “That’s just the first obstruction?” Leth worries.

But his worry spawns a brilliant streak of creativity. As adept as von Trier is at applying technical and psychological pressure, Leth does him one better by shining at every turn, even when he looks like he wants to beat his head against the wall.

Repeating yourself without repeating yourself takes some doing, but I think it’s a worthwhile approach to filmmaking. Maybe a part of me still cringes when I hear a Hollywood studio is going to remake yet another Japanese thriller only two years after the original was released, thus capitalizing on the walls around the theaters in this country that make foreign films seem so distant. But it’s not the remaking itself that I object to, so much as the reason.

Remake those movies if you want. Retell those stories. But don’t think it lets you off the hook. Don’t expect to phone it in. If you’re telling our favorite stories, put some effort into it. Respect the malleability of the medium and the power of the story’s constraints, or else we’re going to look at you and your movie the way we look at someone who can’t tell a joke. If you’re going to cover Bob Dylan and The Beatles, at least turn to Jimi Hendrix and Joe Cocker for inspiration.