Retrospective Serialization: Remaking as an Operation of cinematic Self-Historicization

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank Kelleter
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: Funded in 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 68338857

"Remaking" is one of Hollywood cinema's most efficient methods of telling a familiar story anew. While media with short-cycled rhythms of production and reception (newspapers, television, but also early film serials) encourage the ongoing serialization of narrative material, American feature films since the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system have been forced to employ slower and more laborious strategies of repetitive variation. Our project investigates remaking as an operation that, while being related to more explicit forms of narrative serialization in other media, generates specifically cinematic formats of continuation and organizes them in historically variable categories ("remake" in the more restricted sense of a filmic iteration, but also sequel, prequel, trilogy, franchise, etc.). Compared to periodic series, which produce popular culture in close interaction with committed audiences, these formats operate at a more abstract level of imagined collectivization: they structure generational and media-historic sequences (rather than rhythms of everyday life), they foster far-ranging forms of knowledge, e.g. cinephile cultures, rather than concentrated fan cultures, and they provide expansive continuity markers that can inspire large-scale practices of self-performance, e.g. at the level of national (rather than merely personal) identities. Against this backdrop, the subproject investigates a serial operation that can be observed particularly well in cinematic remaking formats: the retrospective serialization of initially unconnected "versions" of one and the same narrative. On the basis of influential case studies from the period of 1927 to 2013, the project asks for the most important fields of action (production, reception, aesthetic practice): (1) which formats of cinematic variation have been created by remaking, (2) how remaking always expands a story's possibilities of variation while integrating what has already been told and limiting its scope of action, and (3) how, in doing so, remaking contributes to cinematic and pop-cultural modes of self-historicization that might be described as second-order serial narratives. Within the Research Unit, the subproject deepens the conceptual analysis of serial narration's recursive dynamics, building directly on the work done during the group's first research phase in TP4 (on the proliferation of genres and roles) and TP5 (on serial oneupmanship). Moreover, the project follows up on the results of TP3 concerning the relationship of seriality and mediality, implementing them in a systematic fashion for American feature films. Thus, the subproject takes as its focal point a central phenomenon of popular culture, the serial dimension of which has so far been neglected. Overall, this project advances to the outer rim of the Research Unit's field of study, into areas of popular culture where practices of seriality are constantly strained and challenged by changing medial, narrative, and cultural requirements or conditions (e.g. discourses of the oeuvre within popular culture, renegotiations of episodic and ongoing narration in slowmoving formats, cinematic practices of legitimation).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1091: Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice