The term transnational originated in the historical field when, in the late 1990s, lan Tyrrell wrote a seminal essay entitled ＂What is Transnational History？＂ and changed the course of the academic discipline, clai...The term transnational originated in the historical field when, in the late 1990s, lan Tyrrell wrote a seminal essay entitled ＂What is Transnational History？＂ and changed the course of the academic discipline, claiming that studying the history of a nation from inside its borders was outmoded because the study of history concerns the movements of peoples, ideas, technologies, and institutions across national boundaries. The study of cross-national influences and the focus on the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation spilled over into many other fields, especially into cinematic studies. Today transnational refers to the impossibility of assigning a fixed national identity to much cinema, to the dissolution of any stable connection between film＇s place of production and the nationality of its makers and performers. Because there is a lot of critical debate about what constitutes national and transnational cinema, the study of international remakes is a promising method to map the field with some accuracy. This essay will analyze the journey from Hammett＇s novel to Kurosawa＇s film and then to Leone＇s western, and will demonstrate how the process of adaptation functions and what happens to a ＂text＂ when it becomes tmnsnational and polysemic. Because Leone is the creator of the Italian western, the one who initiated the cycle that was copied many times over for a decade, we must look at A Fistful of Dollars as a prototype, a movie that when dissected can shed light on the national-transnational dichotomy of the spaghetti western. However, before studying the prototype, we must look at the complex history of the origin of the first spaghetti western, taking into account that A Fistful of Dollars was ＂transcoded＂ by Leone from Kurosawa＇s Yojimbo （1961） that derived his script from Dashiell Hammett＇s RedHarvest （1929）.展开更多
文摘The term transnational originated in the historical field when, in the late 1990s, lan Tyrrell wrote a seminal essay entitled ＂What is Transnational History？＂ and changed the course of the academic discipline, claiming that studying the history of a nation from inside its borders was outmoded because the study of history concerns the movements of peoples, ideas, technologies, and institutions across national boundaries. The study of cross-national influences and the focus on the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation spilled over into many other fields, especially into cinematic studies. Today transnational refers to the impossibility of assigning a fixed national identity to much cinema, to the dissolution of any stable connection between film＇s place of production and the nationality of its makers and performers. Because there is a lot of critical debate about what constitutes national and transnational cinema, the study of international remakes is a promising method to map the field with some accuracy. This essay will analyze the journey from Hammett＇s novel to Kurosawa＇s film and then to Leone＇s western, and will demonstrate how the process of adaptation functions and what happens to a ＂text＂ when it becomes tmnsnational and polysemic. Because Leone is the creator of the Italian western, the one who initiated the cycle that was copied many times over for a decade, we must look at A Fistful of Dollars as a prototype, a movie that when dissected can shed light on the national-transnational dichotomy of the spaghetti western. However, before studying the prototype, we must look at the complex history of the origin of the first spaghetti western, taking into account that A Fistful of Dollars was ＂transcoded＂ by Leone from Kurosawa＇s Yojimbo （1961） that derived his script from Dashiell Hammett＇s RedHarvest （1929）.
