2. Literature Review

Books or periodicals about intercultural communication can be easily found, such as A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Cultures written by Zhu Jifang, which focuses on cultural comparison and contrast and tries to recognize cultural differences, along with the reasons behind these discrepancies. It is the same to those about films, whereas it’s not so easy to find information concerning both of them. 

Perhaps the most famous and complete book about transnational remakes is Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes in 1998, which mainly constitutes of 3 parts, including “next on kin: remakes and Hollywood”, “distant relatives: cross-cultural remakes” and “altered states: transforming media”. In chapter one “Remakes and Cultural Studies”, Robert Eberwin pided remakes into 15 categories in the second section “Kinds of Remakes: A Preliminary Taxonomy”.

John Chua received his PH.D. from the University of Illinois in 2004 in comparative literature. Also as a filmmaker, he had done a research of Chinese interpretations of Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925). Especially, he looked at Maxu Weibang’s Ye Ban Ge Sheng (Song at Midnight, 1937) and its various Chinese remakes to see how filmmakers across cultures, decades and national borders using horror stories to convey their particular ideas and messages according to the political tides.源:自*吹冰~·论,文'网·www.chuibin.com/

Hilary Hongjin He has been doing research on the transformation of Hong Kong cinema under the “one country, two systems” formula since the 1997 handover to the People’s Republic of China. He wrote a comment on the first official Chinese remake of a Hollywood film, an action-crime thriller called Connected (Bao chi tong hua). The text centered on the new case of Chinese remaking Hollywood film and set forth to study the phenomenon of film remakes between Chinese and American cinemas, then probed into what had triggered the trend of remakes of East Asia in Hollywood. 

Besides, Li Jinhua in Purdue University, once studied Chinese and American film remakes. He used five pairs of films that have particular political, gender, and ideological agendas to see how different cultures interpret the same story and what is at stake when audiences and critics distinguish between two types of cognition, but just Hollywoodized Chinese language films from 1990 to 2009, and from the perspective of gender and politics.

However, books and periodicals in regard to film remakes are comparatively sparse, let alone containing both intercultural communication and film remakes. Such cinematic cultural analysis of transnational remakes remains peripheral in previous researches, due to the absence of interest on transnational films. Based on the collected information and materials, this thesis is a two-way study about film remakes between China and America. It falls into three kinds of Robert Eberwein’s tentative taxonomy of remakes, and this paper mainly discusses two film remakes between Hollywood and Chinese cinemas: a Chinese remake--from American What Women Want (2000) to Chinese What Women Want (2008); a Hollywood remake--from Chinese The Eye (2002) to American The Eye (2008).