“Ghost in the Machine” by Marcus Civin

These days, we remake, reboot, or remix almost everything. “A remake renders the archival malleable,” the Los Angeles artist Matthew Lax wrote in 2021 for a journal called MARCH, arguing that remakes bring “another artifact or possibility into an established lineage.” Lax’s 2016 video Lil’ Tokyo Story opens up one of the final scenes from the 1953 film …