Histories of cinematic remakes arising between Japan and the United States have long captured the attention of both popular and scholarly audiences. Emphasis tends to rest upon the post-war reception of Japanese cinema via international film festivals and the resultant generic influences that manifested most readily between jidaigeki films (historical dramas often situated during Japan's pre-modern period prior to 1868) and Westerns. Discourses of cinematic remakes between the two nations reveal much about how their leaders and their cultural producers have addressed societal change in an increasingly transpacific context. After the Second World War, both nations converged in a manner that would mutually shape their geopolitical and ideological futures, resulting in extensive cultural crosspollination while also complicating and at times overriding regional, colonial and traumatic legacies in East Asia. In some ways, cinema was an ideal medium for both nations to engage with each other and explore new power dynamics and societal restructuring. Both Hollywood and Japan's film industry favoured genres well-suited to addressing the convergence of tradition and modernity. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the jidaigeki and the Western would develop a reciprocal relationship, particularly through cinematic remakes.

This is not to say that the genres of jidaigeki and the Western are simply interchangeable; rather, they are able to accommodate the increasingly transnational aspects of cinematic (co)production, distribution and reception that emerged after the Second World War, perhaps more adeptly than other popular genres (such as the comedy, the family melodrama and the musical, which are comparatively ‘cloistered’ in their spatial configurations). Most often, the heroes of jidaigeki films and Westerns are ‘social outsiders who restore order or help people fighting against the villains while being fully aware that their virtuous action does not allow them to reintegrate themselves in a renewed social order’ (Yoshimoto 2000, 231). As exemplified by Alan Ladd's titular gunslinger in Shane (1953) and Toshiro Mifune's titular swordslinger in Sanjuro (1962), the appeal of these characters arises from their mysterious pasts, mastery of weapons and a stoic concern for the wellbeing of the communities they briefly inhabit. A seemingly necessary violence follows these characters and what manifests through them goes beyond clearly defined morality and instead draws attention to the liminal worlds and wanderers that inhabit the spaces between periods of stability.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos has argued that globalisation is not a ‘spontaneous, automatic, unavoidable and irreversible process which intensifies and advances according to an inner logic and dynamism strong enough to impose themselves on any external interferences’ (2006, 395). It is not, in other words, an uncontrolled force which can be tapped into by all nations equally; rather ‘globalization results from a set of political decisions which are identifiable in time and space’ (ibid.), and in fact promotes exclusion stemming from neoliberal policies that maintain the structural inequalities constructed during the colonial era. This continuity between colonial and neo-colonial structures is referred to as ‘coloniality of power’ by Aníbal Quijano, who argues that Europe constructed itself as ‘the central place of the new pattern of world- Eurocentered colonial/modern capitalist power’ (2000, 217–8) and created a

Quijano here exposes the global constructions of racialised identities who are deemed exploitable, a subjection that has been maintained from colonial times to the present through global capitalist structures. As Samir Amin argues, technology plays an integral role in the creation and structuring of inequalities which enables the North to profit from the South. He outlines the five monopolies which facilitate the coloniality of power:

While technological initiative is here listed as its own category, it is clear that technology is an inherent part of the other four monopolies and that it enables the sustaining of global inequalities. However, as David Arnold argues, the role of technology in coloniality is not one of an ‘advanced’ civilisation dominating another, but one of exchange in which indigenous knowledge was ‘appropriated, hybridized, or empirically arrived at, then became part of Europe's store of technical know-how (with its colonial origins often quickly forgotten)’ (2005, 99).

The stream ran so strong at the ferry that the boat was taken across by the force of the current acting on the helm, counteracted by a rope, on which she swung like a pendulum. Close below the ferry, the old bridge was then being constructed from the opposite bank of the river; but the rope was not long enough to allow the boat to reach it, which the infatuated woman had, in her madness, embarked to do. Jumping on board, she pushed into the stream, and not being acquainted with the use of the rudder, was presently in the middle of it, where the boat hung at the end of the rope, a few feet above the bridge.

When we reached the bank of the river, the devoted creature, incapable of returning as of proceeding, and equally so of reaching that portion of the bridge by which she might have attained the opposite shore, was standing triumphing and clapping her hands in the odious foolery of boastful drunkenness. A great crowd of alarmed and disgusted spectators stood in silence on the shore. The peril of her situation had hushed their ribaldry, and they awaited her fate, many expressing their indignant wishes that it might be speedily consummated.

In the mean time, several young men had gone up the river to the Napoleon Ferry, with ropes, to cross to the opposite side, in order to assist her from the bridge; and they reached the bridge just as we came in sight. They were not long in flinging an end of the rope to her, which they called to her to fasten to the boat-ring; Mr. Herbert entreating them not to be in such haste, for she was in no condition to fasten it properly, and begged and prayed, though the evening was closing, to let her remain as she was, until her reason was in some degree recovered. This advice they heeded not, but took their own way.

After some three or four attempts, she succeeded in catching the rope, but refused to fasten it at all.

The proposal to send me to the legislature was perplexing. It was an honour—undoubtedly a great honour; but it is harder to deal with proffered honours than with threatened evils. What shall I do?—and I reasoned myself thereon, till for satisfaction I earned but vexation.

When adversity marks us for her quarry, and her evils are ready to pounce upon us, our part is to stand firm, to summon our native courage, and to trust to Providence for aid to withstand the onset— then to have confidence in himself and in his destiny, sets the man upon the rock of fortitude, above the waves and the tides of fortune; but when the evil is more doubtful, and may yet by strength or adventure be overcome, then is the time to call in friends to counsel and to solicit their aid. I could play my part better, thought I, in either case, than where the question is the acceptance of honour; for there is some chance that under misfortune pity may move to good and sincere advice—but honours are enviable; it is not fair to expect from human nature sincerity of opinion, when you would propose yourself to be a candidate for offices which will raise you above your friends, unless it be from your adversary.

Such aimless and unamiable reflections molested my brain all the remainder of that day;—my sons evidently counted on my acceding to the proposal; and Bradshaw Cockspur, who called at night on one of his wooing visitations to my daughter, set it down as a settled matter, and joked with me about my speeches. He did not then know I had been one of “The Friends of the People,” and accounted among them a rising orator, though in the fashion of my figure there was but little dignity.

Mr. Bell, the minister, an ambitious man, also called in during the same evening, to combat my scruples, for he did me the justice to believe I had really conscientious scruples; but the course he took was extraordinary.

Mr. Dinleloof, as the courteous reader probably recollects, is the sticket minister whom Miss Beeny Needles, my wife's aunt, recommended to my attention, as “a perforated clergyman.” On the increase of the town, he was induced to set up a school, of a grade inferior to that of Mr. Bell, and was also nominal editor of Mr. Semple's newspaper, “The Chopper, or the Oracle of the Woods.” He was a man that, from natural modesty, shrunk out of society; but those who were within the narrow circle to which he limited himself, spoke favourably of him. I knew him but slightly, for he was such a sequestered creature that, unless you went and drew him out of his shell as you would a whilk or a snail, you could make no acquaintance with him, and I had too many things at all times upon my hands to be able to do that often. Perhaps he therefore thought that I did not pay him quite so much attention as Miss Beeny had led him to expect; for once or twice, when I fell in with him in the street, it struck me that he eschewed me; if he did so, it was without reason.

As I have intimated, it was late in the evening when we of the session resolved to ask him to preach, and but one day could be allowed for him to prepare, if he agreed. I may be wrong in supposing that Mr. Bell, by leaving us no time to procure a minister, counted on drawing a part of our congregation after himself to his new tabernacle: whether this was an unjust supposition on my part, or was the effect of a fair estimate of the man's inordinate character, I leave it to the sagacity of the reader to determine.

When I entered the humble habitation of Mr. Dinleloof, he was certainly much surprised, and gazed at me with a look of alarm, as if he thought I had come with strange news or evil tidings. He was about going into his solitary bed, for he was a bachelor; his upper garments were already cast off, he had also quitted his trowsers, and was standing in his drawers, with one leg bare, and a stocking in his hand.

Gothic is dark. The desert is light. Gothic is characterised by ‘an absence of the light associated with sense, security and knowledge’ (Botting 2014, 2). It is cold, clammy, wreathed in fog, and is traditionally set in shadowy castles or decrepit houses full of winding passages, hidden rooms and ancient secrets, heavy draperies and other forms of folded and private spaces. The desert is none of these things. Defined by an intensity of light and a lack of precipitation, while also presenting wide open spaces in which little or no human construction is to be found, ‘Desert Gothic’ may therefore seem oxymoronic. Conceptually, the desert does not lend itself easily to traditional gothic tropes.

If the desert is in general resistant to gothic theorising, a similar sense of imperviousness to gothic can be seen in that historically the desert came late to the gothic colonial canon. With its origins in Europe, later manifestations of gothic outside the European continent could be relied on to replicate at least some of the core characteristics of the original template. American gothic, for instance, may be short on ‘medieval history, ghosts in crumbling castles, emotional extremes, and a debased aristocracy’ (Weinstock 2017, 1). Nevertheless, it ultimately reimagined central gothic figures of darkness and dereliction in novel yet still familiar forms through the by now stock (American) gothic tropes: the cabin in the woods, native American burial grounds, the freak show, the horrors of slavery, and the plantation house (Murphy 2009, 2013; Simmons 2017; Weinauer 2017; Crow 2017). With the desert routinely perceived to exist fully outside of history (rather than in, before or after), such ‘attraction to the imagined vitality of past ages’ (Botting 2014, xiii) was however not so easily transferred to a space that had become ‘a trope, a cipher signifying deficiency, lack, absence’ (Gersdorff 2009, 16). It is telling that early American gothic tales like Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) unfold in the New England woods rather than in the Mojave Desert, just as Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is set in a damp and dilapidated manor by a tepid lake in what is likely to be New England, rather than next to a salt pan on a sunbaked mesa somewhere in the Southwest. This is reflected in the critical literature, too.

The manner in which my daughter had cleared out with Walter Bell greatly disturbed me; I was angry undoubtedly, but sorrow was mingled with my anger. She had connected herself with a set that I did not like; it would be harsh to say they were bad, though the young man's conduct was far from being in good odour; but they were all heady and irascible, and something was daily befalling the minister to exasperate his fierce passions. On more than one occasion, his behaviour had been so wild, that some folk said he was touched in the brain, and others that he was fey, and would surely commit some rash act. Loving, therefore, as I did with all fatherly affection my poor misguided Mary, as my anger cooled my grief increased, and I wist not what to do; but I had a large experience of my wife's good sense and prudence in the midst of my affliction.

So long as she saw my mind in a state of heat and irritation she said nothing, and she cautioned my friends and the rest of the family to abstain from speaking to me on the subject; John Waft was not permitted to enter the door: but when the whirlwind was over, and I was beginning to gather again my scattered thoughts and affections, she softly led me into a discourse on the necessity of helping the young couple. I had myself been turning the matter in my own mind, and was pleased with the motherly kindness which led her to be the first to speak of it. It was therefore agreed between us, that in consideration of Walter Bell's unsteady character, the settlement from me should be on Mary, for her own particular behoof.

Accordingly, in the course of the same day, I went to Mr. Document, the attorney of Hoskins and Todd, and directed him to prepare a deed to that effect;—he did the business of the concern; but Mr. Hoskins had another, one Mr. Special, who managed his private affairs: indeed, there was no lack of the profession, nor of doctors either, in the town:—it could not be that such an accumulation of life and property as had taken place at Judiville would yield no carrion for the birds and beasts of prey.

If a man marry once for love, he is a fool to expect he may do so twice—it cannot be: therefore, I say, in the choice of a second wife, one scruple of prudence is worth a pound of passion. I do not assert that he should have an eye to dowry; for unless it is a great sum, such as will keep all the family in gentility, I think a small fortune one of the greatest faults a young woman can have; not that I object to the money on its own account, but only to its effects in the airs and vanities it begets in the silly maiden, especially if her husband profits by it.

For this reason I did not choose my second wife from the instincts of fondness, nor for her parentage, nor for her fortune; neither was I deluded by fair looks. I had, as I have said, my firstborn needing tendance; and my means were small, while my cares were great. I accordingly looked about for a sagacious woman—one that not only knew the use of needles and shears, but that the skirt of an old green coat might, for lack of other stuff, be a clout to the knees of blue trousers—and such a one I found in the niece of my friend and neighbour, Mr. Zerobabel L. Hoskins, a most respectable farmer, from Vermont, who had come to New York about a cod-fish adventure that he had sent to the Mediterranean, and was waiting with his wife and niece the returns from Sicily.

This old Mr. Hoskins was, in his way, something of a Yankee oddity. He was tall, thin, and of an anatomical figure, with a long chin, ears like trenchers, lengthy jaws, and a nose like a schooner's cut-water. His hair was lank and oily, the tie of his cravat was always dislocated, and he wore an old white beaver hat turned up behind. His long bottle-green surtout, among other defects, lacked a button on the left promontory of his hinder parts, and in the house he always tramped in slippers.

My trip to Albany did me much good. I returned reinvigorated both in body and mind. The doubt which had still hung about me, as to the prudence of resuming my old business, was dissipated: I had discovered a new field, and was eager to enter on the cultivation.

No time was lost in making the necessary arrangements for the removal of my family to the western part of the state,—the Genesee country; which, at that period, as I have already hinted, was fast filling with settlers, emigrants from Europe, and swarms from Pennsylvania and New England.

Peace having been restored a short time before, the number of passengers from London and Liverpool, all bound for the new settlements, was extraordinary. They came by the earliest ships in the spring, and brought great accounts of the multitudes who were to follow in the autumn. The prospects, in consequence, of the land-jobbers, as well as of the settlers, were cheering; insomuch that Mr. Hoskins, who took a deep interest in my proceedings, talked vastly of the prosperity I should see come to pass. He even hinted that I need be none surprised if he sold off his land and betterments in Vermont, gave up all speculations, and operated with his capital within the tract where I proposed to settle. Our exodus from New York thus commenced under the happiest auspices.

I had reflected on what Mrs. Micklethrift had said about the inconvenience of lugging and hauling furniture so far to the back of beyond; and accordingly, after due consultation with my wife, it was agreed between us that, saving the ark, whereof mention has so often been made, and some three or four boxes with necessaries, we should set out as light-handed as possible; and our purse, as the courteous reader is well aware, not being one of the weightiest, we made our calculations that it would be cheaper to take passage in one of the Albany schooners than by the steam-boat. This I accordingly did; and made an agreement with the skipper of the Van Egmond, of Troy, a Dutchman, for less than a third of the money.

In coming to the fifth epoch of my story, I must solicit the courteous reader to bear patiently with the details I have to relate: they concern less the progression of my fortune, than incidents not uncommon in human life.

The course of my business, and the increase of my means, were both, in a manner, so established, that with health and constancy of purpose, I had no reasonable imagination to authorise me to fear I might not, in due season, retire from the troubles of the store, and of the settlement, and have, between the setting of the sun and the close of the twilight, a time for pastime and pleasantry. That I had, as related in the foregoing pages, an experience both of adversity and sorrow, cannot be questioned; but nothing had I met with to give me cause for distrust, nor to justify me in thinking my success had not been equal to the fairest promises fortune had ever made me. Indeed, that contentment of nature, which enabled me to discern the dawning morn constantly behind the darkest hour, had prepared me to accept both good and ill, with the calm mien and the tranquil heart of equanimity: and therefore I may justly say, without more ado, that the fifth epoch of my life began under circumstances which gave a glowing assurance of continued prosperity, and also of enjoyment, with those moderated desires, which, though often the consequence of disappointment and dismay, are yet the best ingredients of rational happiness. But yet, notwithstanding the wide-spreading tendrils that covered my bower, and the clusters swelling to ripeness among the branches, there was a serpent at the roots, and caterpillars among the fig-leaves that overshadowed me.

In a light and airy passage of my younger years, it will be recollected that I spoke with reminiscences of kindness concerning a monkey. That most diverting creature was called Jacko, and was extraordinarily fond of nuts, and of certain sons of Quakers who attended a school close by, and who, in the intervals between the school-hours, came often to the nail-shop, where my brother and I made our daily bread by hammering iron.

During South Korea's cinematic Golden Age of the 1960s, motion picture remakes – especially those that were based on non-Korean productions – could be called ‘illicit’ in either one of two ways. As exemplified by director Kim Ki-duk's notorious 1964 release Barefoot Youth (Maenbaleui cheongchun), ‘illicitness’ might refer to unlawfulness, or the legal complications that arise when movie producers do not follow the proper channels of copyright clearance or other protocols involved in making near-replicas of existing works (Yecies and Shim 2016, 82, 94–5). In this case, Kim's controversial youth romance about a pair of star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the track, financed by Geukdong Heungeop (a film company that the director had co-founded five years earlier) and written by Seo Yoon-seong (who would later re-team with Kim to concoct the endearingly cheesy Godzilla knockoff Yongary, Monster from the Deep [Taekoesu Yonggary, 1967]), copied the screenplay of Nakahira Kō's Mud-Spattered Purity (Dorodarake no junjō, 1963) without seeking permission to do so from the author of the original novel (Fujiwara Shinji), the Japanese filmmaker or the studio for which Kō worked (Nikkatsu). As archival scholar Chung Chonghwa elucidates, however, a license to produce Barefoot Youth had been obtained from the original film's screenwriter, Baba Masaru, though as the ‘adapter’ of the novel he was falsely referenced as the sole arbiter on the issue of remake rights, which was made more complicated by the fact that ‘the Republic of Korea (ROK) was not then a party to the Universal Copyright Convention’ (Chung 2016, 15).

A side-by-side comparison of the two films – each of which was shot in anamorphic widescreen (although the Japanese original was photographed in colour and features a running time of 91 minutes encompassing 126 scenes, whereas the Korean remake was photographed in black-and-white and features a running time of 117 minutes encompassing 122 scenes) – reveals significant thematic, tonal and visual differences (Chung 2016, 11–24; Chung 2017, 68). Nevertheless, despite those textual disparities and the now-verified belief (supported by archival evidence) that approval had been given (albeit in an unconventional, unofficial manner), Barefoot Youth was and still is commonly referred to by journalists and cultural historians as not just an inferior copy or pale imitation but an outright ‘plagiarism’ (pyojeol) of the original (Lee 2002, 71; Chung 2017, 68; Klein 2020, 120).

The next day opened with one of those bright, blithe, and breezy mornings, which are only to be met with, and not often, on the old world's side of the ocean sea. The lark, twinkling in the clear blue sky, was singing her sweet ditties at heaven's gate; and the children, as they ran gamboling to school, swung their book-pocks with a flourish, and shouted as they leaped along, prompted by the universal gaiety. In strolling on the bank of the river, I passed a troop of ducks, leisurely sauntering to their accustomed pool; the drake, a bold and gaudy beau, looked slyly up at me as he passed, and said, as pleasantly as ever eyes could speak, “Is not this a delightful morning?”

Sometimes in America I have seen mornings almost as beautiful; but the air was not so lively, nor the birds so melodious, not even by the glad sea-side—never do the new inland settlements enjoy such an effervescence of cool airs and sparkling sounds.

There the breeze, as it comes from the surrounding lofty woods, is wersh, compared with the brisk freshness of the Scottish summer's free westlin wind—it is as the river's vapid water, compared to the living draught that dances from the spring. The singing-birds, few and far between, were only beginning to come to the environs of Judiville before my departure.

Making these similitudes as I strayed heedlessly from field to field—for I was early abroad, and had no purpose in my walk—my fancy began to draw comparisons between many other things in the two countries; and I thought, if I could meet with a real sensible woman, to be a friend and companion in old age, I, perhaps, could not do better than marry, and set myself down for enjoyment at home among old scenes. I had but few old friends remaining.

Film scholarship has generally ignored the cinema of Hong Kong director Benny Chan Muk-sing (1961–2020). An avowed ‘commercial’ filmmaker, steeped in the traditions and trappings of popular genres, Chan could prima facie be dismissed as a slave to formula, beholden to the artistically suspect practices of filmic recycling and referentiality. His career encompasses sequels both legitimate (Gen-Y Cops [Te jing xin ren lei 2, 2000]) and nominal (A Moment of Romance II [Tian ruo you qing II: Tian chang di jiu, 1993]; New Police Story [Xin jing cha gu shi, 2004]). He braids his films with intertextual allusions and citations (for instance, The White Storm [Sou Duk, 2013] memorialises John Woo's heroic bloodshed sagas, and Call of Heroes [Ngai sing, 2016] pastiches Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns). He plunders Johnnie To's All About Ah-Long (A lang de gu shi, 1989) in the male melodrama Son on the Run (Dai zi hong lang, 1991), while his historical drama Shaolin (Xin shao lin si, 2011) furnishes a loose reworking of the Shaw Brothers’ martial arts classic Shaolin Temple (Shao Lin si, 1982). There are, as well, numerous borrowings from Hollywood staples: Michael Mann's Heat (1995) in the crime thrillers Big Bullet (Chong feng dui nu huo jie tou, 1996) and Raging Fire (Nou fo, 2021), The Karate Kid (1984) in the sports comedy What a Hero! (Hua! Ying xiong, 1992) and a welter of Marvel superhero movies in the high-concept blockbuster City Under Siege (Chun sing gai bei, 2010). Not least, in Connected (Bo chi tung wah, 2008), there is that rare species of Hong Kong film: an authorised remake, co-produced by Hollywood, Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese companies, and modelled on David R. Ellis's American thriller Cellular (2004). In all, Chan's oeuvre might be seen to typify Hong Kong cinema's ‘scavenger aesthetic’ (Bordwell 2011, 7), so thoroughly does it rely on pre-existing source texts. For the critic attracted to filmic innovation and iconoclasm, Chan's cinema may seem too derivative, not to say too frankly profit-driven, to encourage scholarly attention.

At the turn of the millennium, the British Board of Film Classification was undergoing its own process of reform, shifting its emphasis (and public image) away from censorship and toward a model of consumer information, bringing its policies into closer alignment with the aims and processes of the Motion Picture Association of America's current ratings system. Despite this shift toward the censor's self-cleansing, important distinctions persist between the operations of government classification bodies on both sides of the Atlantic and their industry-oriented American counterpart. Chiefly, the MPAA's rating process remains a voluntary one, which filmmakers and distributors can forgo if they are willing to assume the commercial risks of doing so.

By contrast, the mandatory review processes of the OFRB, the OFLC, and BBFC render criminal the exhibition of films that have not received government certification. The rationale for the persistence of this legal stricture—that it is a safeguard, albeit flimsy, against the exposure of children to adult material—is potentially complicated by the fact that censorship processes generate continuous revenue from the filmmakers and distributors who must pay fees to have their products reviewed. Furthermore, the voluntary nature of the MPAA's rating system places the power to ban or confiscate illegal filmic materials within the jurisdiction of a given state's criminal code, highlighting the redundancy of intermediary institutions with remit to censor film content. The OFRB retains that mandate exclusively, where “pornography” is concerned, and the BBFC extends it even further by continuing to censor “mainstream” commercial films containing only allegedly lurid depictions of sexual violence (A Serbian Film [2009] and Human Centipede II [2010] being two high-profile examples). Nevertheless, the implementation of institutional protections of free expression for filmmakers, if limited, that occurred in Ontario and Britain in the wake of the Fat Girl controversy can certainly be viewed as progress toward a more liberal reception of films.

With its emphasis on informing consumers and its de-emphasis on suppressing “dangerous” or “harmful” materials, classification is a proposition altogether less affronting to foundational principals of Western liberal democracies than censorship.

In his influential discussion of ‘the Noriko Trilogy’, a sequence of post-war films directed by Ozu Yasujirō and starring Hara Setsuko as the trilogy's eponymous female lead, Robin Wood argues that what unites the otherwise loose affiliation of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Early Summer (Bakushū, 1951) and Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953) is the notion of any ‘resistance to definition’ (1998, 94). For Wood, the idea of ‘definition’ refers uniquely to the issue of the films’ complex projection of Noriko's subjectivity and the articulation of female desire within a generic structure that ultimately denies her full agency. This chapter pursues the matter of Ozu's projection of feminine agency across the three films, but also returns to a more foundational question concerning ‘definition’. What does it mean precisely to define these films retrospectively as a ‘trilogy’? What are the aesthetic and political consequences of considering this set of films in sole relation to the recurring name of a character played by their central female star? Is it possible to read the films in relation to each other in other mutually informing ways that continue to be critically meaningful in the context of recent scholarship on the politics of film trilogies? By opening up these issues, especially in relation to the subject of mobility on both a textual and contextual level, this chapter thus aims to shed new light on the complex ways in which Ozu's interest in pattern, repetition and difference operated at this transitional moment in popular Japanese cinema.

Of course, the very notion of a screen trilogy is in itself a mobile concept and, to this extent, Wood's definition of a screen trilogy, at least to some degree, matches one of the variations proposed by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis in their foundational work on the topic. Perkins and Verevis's notion of ‘authorial remaking’ argues for a specific form of attention ‘to the repetition of themes, settings, styles, characters, and actors’ that may occur across a set of three films directed by a single director in ways that can be said to typically constitute an ‘authorial vision’ (2012, 12). Ozu's work fits the bill on a number of levels, not least because his singular filmmaking method involves such a visibly recognisable set of distinctive stylistic attributes that his mode of looking is visible in every single frame of the films in question.

I had invited Mr. Bell to take a cup of tea with us, and likewise Mr. Herbert, the schoolmaster, who was a most superior man indeed; but I was so much disconcerted by what I had heard from that ill-speaking bodie, John Waft, that I could hardly muster courage enough to take me home to join them.

The more I reflected on the story, I was the more displeased with the meddling. Mr. Bell had told me, as we were coming from Olympus together in the wagon, that he had been married ten years, and had seven children,—a heavy handful. His manners were of a regulated methodical mildness, and he had a calm look of resignation, which begot a good opinion of him. It was impossible he could have been long within that ten years addicted to disorderly courses; and there was a fatherly solicitude in the manner he spoke of the reasons which had induced him to come to America with his family, that showed he was not only a man of gentle affections, but likewise animated by a right religious principle: I could have wished that the tongue had been cutted out of the mouth of that John Waft.

The first movement of my mind, after parting from him, was to consult Mr. Herbert and Mr. Hoskins; but, upon better consideration, I thought it would not do—Mr. Herbert being of the sect of the Church of England, and of course prelatic and concupiscible in his notions, could have no right sense of the case; and Mr. Hoskins, being an indefinite Methodist, could have no sense of it at all. Truly, that afternoon, I was in great straits; and I took a turn in the woods by myself, cogitating what was to be done.

After the best consideration I was able to bestow on the subject, it appeared to be a matter in which I ought to have but a small concern.

Introduction: World-Gothic and the White Man's Grave

Of all the environments to find their way into literary representation, none is more associated with psychic breakdown than the tropics. Across a range of historical and fictional texts, the tropical environment has been predominately represented as the site wherein all psychic integrity is lost. As Charlotte Rogers notes, ‘tales of men going mad in the wilderness have been popular in novels and films for over a century’ (2012, 1). Many of these texts, the most famous of which is undoubtedly Heart of Darkness, narrate the story ‘of a seemingly rational individual who ventures into the forest, loses his mind, lives among “the natives,” and turns his back on society for good’ (Rogers 2012, 1). This use of white mental instability as thematic device developed from colonial accounts of the excessiveness of the tropical world, because the extreme heat of the tropics was believed to generate mental and corporeal degeneration.

In geographical terms, the tropics marks the region that lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It includes large proportions of the Americas, central Mexico, the Caribbean, the majority of Africa and most of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as most of Oceania. These tropical regions, as Rod Edmond has argued, have functioned culturally ‘as Europe's other, a thick belt around the middle of the globe which white bodies entered at their peril’ (2005, 176). The term ‘tropicality’ first came into being with the arrival of European explorers and settlers, who travelled to the tropical regions of the world in search of new resources. Thus, the tropics became ‘a category’, as Paul Sutter puts it, ‘created by outsiders to the region with interests in it’ (2014, 179). This category was then employed as a means of organising ‘disparate phenomena in ideological ways [which] constantly needed defence against instabilities and anomalies’ (Sutter 2014, 179).

During the eighteenth century, fierce debates developed about whether white bodies could acclimatise to the tropics. Some insisted that this was possible, sparking the term ‘seasoning’ to describe the period in which white bodies supposedly adapted to the new climate. Others were not convinced. Among these sceptics was British sociologist Benjamin Kidd, whose treatise The Control of the Tropics (1898) served as an influential text in justifying the colonial endeavour through the discourse of

You Could Tell He Would Mention a Painter …

In the first part of the long poem The Prodigal, Walcott writes: ‘here it comes, the light / out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, / (you could tell he would mention a painter)’. He was right: his readers would definitely expect him to mention a painter. Walcott's poems, plays and essays, in fact, are punctuated with references to artists as diverse as Giotto and Vincent Van Gogh or Rembrandt van Rijn and Romare Bearden; characterised by exact chromatism and a careful composition of scenes and arrangements of images, they often establish a creative dialogue with a particular painting or evoke a painter's use of the colour palette, perspective, tonal quality, light and shadows. Likewise, it is not uncommon for Walcott's unpublished papers, notebooks and sketchbooks to contain allusions to or actual cut-outs from reproductions of past masterpieces; even in Walcott's creative writing classes and workshops, references to painters, paintings and painting techniques were not at all unusual. This recurrence of visual references is not altogether surprising if we consider that Walcott began his career as a painter or, at least, as a young man moved by a keen desire to become one.

In Another Life, his 1973 autobiography in verse, Walcott wrote at length about his apprenticeship as a painter with his friend Dunstan St. Omer in the workshop of the St Lucian artist Harold Simmons and explained that, unlike St. Omer who became a distinguished painter and muralist, he decided to focus on writing. Yet, Walcott never stopped painting as testified by reproductions of his own works on the jacket covers of some of his books or the inclusion, in the hardbound edition of the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000), of twenty-six of his watercolours, oils, gouaches and pastels. Over the years, and particularly after the 1990s, Walcott's paintings were also exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions in the Caribbean and the United States; in 1993 one of his paintings was reproduced in a St Lucian stamp, and in 1994 he completed a calendar for Colonial Life Insurance (Clico) with sketches and watercolours accompanied by extracts from his poems and plays.