Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) is a supremely violent, unnerving Austrian film. In March next year it is going to acquire a supremely violent, unnerving, American remake. However, while the Hollywood revision essentially translates originals into “American” by Americans, this case saw Haneke remain as the director. Furthermore, as we are talking of a player of his calibre (The Piano Teacher [2001], Caché or Hidden [2005]), the remake had to be a minute shot-for-shot repetition of the original, having specifically Naomi Watts in the lead role.

Michael Haneke is operating within the Hollywood paradigm, with the reprisal and the original separated by a time-frame as short as a decade. It is usually dangerous for a director to “jump the fence” and repeat himself quite in the same breath. I seem to remember that there was a time when the remake still meant that what was being remade was a dated film, its language judged alien for the current generation of moviegoers. Similarly, the adaptation would have had for some sort of book for its source, effectively updating the material in order to capture a new audience range.

This is not to say that the remake does not have quite a pedigree of its own, or that vague memories are something to be absolutely believed. Even in the ’40s and ’50s, Hollywood recycled its own produce, giving films sequels, prequels and spin-offs. Although today the key difference is of course that film industries inhabit many more countries than North America. However, Hollywood remaking a current film by transplanting its cinematic language is something very now, especially as this means that the source is foreign.

America’s global culture industry has peaked. The issues at stake in this claim merit a much longer discussion, but in this case it is only possible to play about with the phenomenon of America becoming shorthand for Hollywood. Japanese horror, Hong Kong epics, police sagas and South Korean visually innovative vanguard as well as its prolific output of romantic T.V. dramas: these are not only feeding their respective domestic markets. Hollywood has not been too slow to notice this, having most visibly taken it up in the form of the remake.

The remake means translating ideas from different cultural backgrounds and importing them for the consumption of a customary target audience. It does this through the medium of choosing familiar actors, cutting techniques and often even geographical framing. Films sourcing from films is quite a recent phenomenon. The Departed (2006) and The Lake House (2006), for instance, are revamps of the Hong Kong Infernal Affairs (2002) and South Korean Il Mare (2000), respectively. The plotlines can be re-contextualised simply by buying up the original products and reshuffling their ingredients lists. Lastly, the transformation is neatly sealed by a new label. Is this to do with a reluctance to read subtitles? Or some sort of a conundrum in distribution rights so that originals really can’t be distributed widely enough within the continent? Note that no one remakes American films but Americans themselves.

Evidently, Haneke’s Funny Games taps into a debate about how to, in turn, translate or rather invert American cinematic language within this broad context. The film is a niche-product from the outset, like most influential films. Haneke’s reasoning behind accepting and directing the remake was that the original Funny Games had actually been made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence (John Wray, N.Y.T., Sept. 23, 2007). The context changes as does the spoken language, but not the original rhetoric.

The production design of the new film is American. The promotion poster displays Naomi Watts’ tear-splattered face, as opposed to reprising the rather more unnerving image of a seated person with a pillow-case on their head – another funny game – from the decade before.

The storyline concerns the events of less than two days, when an upper middle class family – Anna, Georg and their son Georgie – arrive at their holiday home by a river. While Georg and the boy are out piecing the boat, Anna receives a visitor, Peter, from next door, asking to borrow a few eggs. Soon they are accompanied by Peter’s friend Paul and the rest of the family upon which the guests’ behaviour turns increasingly threatening, eventually involving a series of sadistic games that concern the viewers of the film as well as the characters.

If the film was originally made to subvert the complacency of Hollywood storytelling, it was not reasonably expected to reach its object of critique. The fact that this transformed cinematic depiction of violence was done within a European context and is now being “redone” (as opposed to remade) in America, rids American language of its recognisable style. Should this production be apprehended as a “foreign” film in the customary sense of the word?

Violence is a language. It is notoriously difficult to make this language speak of itself through the medium of the film, since commenting on violence involves the depiction of violence and hence also a part of that troublesome scopophilic complacency. Haneke’s device is to relegate violence to a largely off-screen role, to film not the act but the reaction, and to frustrate heroic narrative. Often the only indication of a person being hit is their groan, and Anna’s grabbing at the gun is rebuffed with a patronising “tsk, tsk”.

This “redo” is a species apart from the remake because the source, like Infernal Affairs, did not tap into a familiar police thriller genre with a clear, A-shoots-B-falls take on filmic violence. The remake reprises an exotic take on something recognisable, the “redo” as of yet seems a Hanekeism.

The straightforward, cross-language remake speaks of insecurity, of the abundance of resources and of cashing up on the lack of daring. What is cooking here is the possibility of a tactile as well as theoretical intrusion, and the presentation of a foreign object through which the surface familiarity with a spoken language is being redone as a funny game.