‘Crazed Heat’: Nakahira Ko and the Transnational Self-remake

Transnational film remakes present a variety of complicating issues – of geography, culture, translation, and temporality, among others. Directors have remade their own films, sometimes quite directly, other times by shifting genre, but the case of a director moving from one national situation to another and remaking an earlier film is rare. What makes such an auto-remake particularly interesting is that it calls into question issues of authorship. This chapter will look at the case of Nakahira Ko who made the influential Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit,1956) and later in his career remade the film (under the Chinese pseudonym Yang Shu-hsi) as Kuang lian shi (Summer Heat, 1968). The case of Crazed Fruit and its transformation into Summer Heat is interesting, partly due to the stature of the Japanese original and also due to some of the more obvious transformations, such as from Ishihara Yujiro in the original to a more generic male star in the remake. More significantly, while Crazed Fruit was part of a cycle of Japanese films examining post-war disaffected youth, the Hong Kong remake is far less implicated in a cultural moment.