Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox

While commercially successful, Hollywood remakes have never been as popular in academia as with cinema audiences. With some notable exceptions, the subject of the Hollywood remake in Film Studies is less a key debate, more a ’straw man’ evoked to denounce the loss of original filmmaking. With a particular emphasis on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as his often difficult relationship with psychoanalysis, Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox offers a new philosophical approach to cinematic remaking. By moving away from a ’spot the difference’ approach, it shows how cinematic repetition often articulates the same problems in different ways, just as it expresses core differences in similar ways. The book will appeal to anyone interested in Deleuzian Film Theory, Remake Studies, or the film-philosophy subjects of identity and time, difference and repetition.

Daniel Varndell is an independent scholar who teaches cultural and critical theory in English and Film Studies. This is his first book, and it marks the culmination of a long period of research on the subject of repetition and difference in Hollywood cinema. It will be complemented by a shorter, companion piece of work on David Lynch and Deleuze’s figure of the ’dark precursor’.