From Berlin skies to Los Angeles city. Cinema and contemporary aesthetics: case study of media cannibalism

This article deals with the language transformation taking place in the creation of a cultural product belonging to contemporary esthetics, the "replicant", such as called by Omar Calabrese (1987), in the context of the remixing and recycling culture: the cinematographic remake. Through a case study and aiming at understanding the nature and implications of this phenomenon, we analyzed the transformations performed in the making of the Hollywoodian "City of Angels" (1995), Brad Silberling's remake of the European "Wings of Desire" (1987), by Wim Wenders. By means of a methodology developed for this purpose (comparative analyses of pairs of movies), operations such as addition, subtraction, division, etc. are observed. These operations are carried out in a movie that, by playing with form, transforms senses in a media cannibalism phenomenon and reveals how this product, besides being a film in the age of interactive celebration and collaborative networks, is also an exercise of criticism and creative interpretation by a very special watcher, the movie director.