From literature to audio-visual production

The German series “Babylon Berlin” is probably the most re- nowned television production in the second decade of 21st century after “Game of Thrones”. It is a typical example of modern “complex” television storytelling and at the same time offers perfect material for studying the “remake” in a broad cultural context. The first stage of the “remake” is the adaptation of Volker Kutscher’s novels about a Berlin police in- spector. The author himself admits that he was inspired not so much by literature as by television and cinema. The main aspect in the practice of “remake”, introduced by the series, is not just the transformation of the literary plot and characters into a new medium, a completely new reproduction of the world from which they are generated and in which they are functioning. This is the twilight of the Weimar Republic, marked by social unrest, political and economic cata- clysms. At that time, Berlin is the most Americanized European metropo- lis, where heroin is sold in pharmacies, prostitution is a mass profession, 259and the underworld serves high politics.

Released in 2016, Paolo Genovese’s well-received film “Perfect Strangers” has been remade 18 times by July 2019 and was included in the “Guiness Book of Records”. This comparative case study analyses the Italian film, its Spanish version, as well as the French remake and the Russian variation. The paper explores the intermedial content of the orig- inal film representing the smartphone as a dispositive generating framed narratives in the main plot. The forms of remaking as “transcultural ad- aptation”28 are related to different degrees of repetition, transformation and renewal. The premises for the film’s high “adaptative faculty”29 are therefore to be associated with the innovative intermedial structure and the potential of the plot devices to be reinvented and adapted to local reception areas.

The paper undertakes an inquiry in the genre studies of the Western. Interpreting the heterogeneous reiterations of its generic components, it aims at deconstructing the imaginary geography underlying the genre’s name.

The practice of the remake in cinema precedes the notion. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, a plot often migrated from one film studio to another, and with that it was subjected to different produc- tion practices, style, and ideological bias. The defining criteria, according to which a story was chosen to be remade, was its relevance to current social issues. The romantic encounter / clash between representatives of different classes provides the drive of the plot in the screwball comedy. The discourse is organised so as to reach social reconciliation. I will focus on two films, belonging to the genre – “Vivacious Lady” (1938), directed by George Stevens and “Ball of Fire” (1941) authored by Howard Hawks. The current text will study the ideological differences in the way the two films balance their internal contradictions on the route to social consensus. By means of close analysis, I will outline the key differences, which define the ideological paths that they take, and how these transform the discourse of the Hollywood film within the screwball genre.

The article examines video games, the ways in which they influence their audience and attract new fans, as well as the rapid pace at which they develop, thanks to social isolation, a consequence of the epidemic global crisis. Video games are placed in the context of the digital world we live in, as part of the new social organism and its online forms of communication. A review of the Tomb Raider video game series and the film adaptations inspired by the game has been made, paying attention to the specifics of the image of the main character from the series Lara Croft.