Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (eds.),
Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film.
An Alphabet City Media Book. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 262 05078 1
544pp
US$35.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

Reading Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour’s fascinating new book, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, I was reminded of my own solitary experience of the craft of subtitling, which was on Bertolucci’s Partner in 1968. It was not an easy film to subtitle, since it was full of Godardian or sub-Godardian puns, not only in Italian but in French as well. It also contains a scene in which some prissy university professors sit around the common room reciting nonsense verse to each other. One verse ran: “San Benedetto/le rondine sotto il tetto/tutte le strade/portano a letto.” I thought I was pretty clever rendering this into English as, “St Benedict said/The swallows are fled/All roads lead to bed”, which is more or less the same words and rhymes as well. Only later did I discover that I was utterly missing the point of the verse, which is all about a subtlety of Italian pronunciation, not known even to the majority of native speakers, whereby the e in “letto” has a broad or open sound whereas in “Benedetto” and “tetto” it is closed. Since these were drama professors, charged with getting student actors to speak their own language correctly, the scene has more of a point to it than I realised.

Something else also happened to the subtitles on the film, for which this time I was not responsible and which produced a rather brilliant unintended artistic effect. Two titles, saying respectively “What’s happening?” and “Nothing”, were repeated at a time when the dialogue they were reporting was not actually being spoken and when in fact there was silence on the soundtrack and just an upwardly tilted shot of trees waving in the wind.

Egoyan and Balfour’s book reports many similar cases, where things are either “lost in translation” or altered in unpredictable ways by the subtitles. French subtitler Henri Béhar, while not owning up to any mistakes, nevertheless comes up with a number of cases where he or another subtitler was flummoxed by an item of dialogue or forced to lose some crucial nuance. Claire Denis, interviewed by Egoyan about her film Friday Night(Vendredi soir, 2002), admits to a moment of weakness when she allowed the English subtitler to put a title under some dialogue that on the soundtrack is barely audible, so that the “foreign” audience, instead of getting less information, as usually happens, actually gets more than does the audience for which the film was originally intended, but in the process the beauty of the scene is destroyed.

Subtitles, then, have a more interesting role to play in the appreciation of a film than is often recognised. They can open up a film to an audience, or they can close it down. They can on occasion be actively confusing or misleading. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Dalla nube alla resistenza (Italy/West Germany/UK/France, 1979) is a difficult enough film at the best of times but difficulties are compounded by the fact that the subtitles keep referring to some people called “republicans”, who you’d expect to be the good guys, whereas the original is repubblichini, who were the supporters of Mussolini’s mini-republic of Salò, i.e. fascists. But it is not only when things go wrong that the written word splashed across the screen affects the construction the audience makes of a film. The written word denaturalises. It can be used deliberately to this effect, as part of the film, in the way Godard does (and Brecht did in the theatre). More often, however, the words that the audience encounters on the screen are not there as part of the film, and their effect is another form of alienation: they point up the film as foreign.

The book Subtitles has its own subtitle, “on the foreignness of film”, and subtitles as such are only a starting point for a further series of reflections on just about anything that can denaturalise the film experience and make a film, for good reasons or bad, foreign to some or all of its audience. The foreignness in question is obviously in the first instance linguistic. It is the language with which the audience is confronted, whether verbal (spoken or written) or filmic, that first marks the film as representing more than just a world the spectator feels naturally part of. To hear words you cannot understand and to have them translated or not translated as the case may be, is to be placed outside the world in which the words are spoken and always made aware, however subtly, that you are in the presence of a representation, not an object, or, if an object, not an object that is yours to possess. The same can be true of non-verbal filmic devices, or unanticipated combinations or disjunctions of image and sound. These, too, address you in another language, one that is not your own, or if it is yours, not as instinct or habit tell you it should be spoken.

The field over which the book can wander, therefore, is vast and the editors have wisely not attempted to map all of it. Nor have they attempted to reduce the sense of its vastness and variety by imposing a reductive overarching theory on it or allowing contributors to over-theorise their subject-matter. The twenty-five contributions to the book (mostly essays, but some interviews and some script and photographic materials) have on the whole an attractive modesty to them. Without being afraid to deploy a range of theoretical concepts, they usually confine them to the matter in hand – a particular film or body of work, or a particular phenomenon that has struck their attention. When they attempt to do more – to theorise modernity, or the Other, or national cinema – it is not necessarily to the good of the book, whose originality lies in what it can achieve with apparently lesser things arising more directly from the original theme.

One thing that links almost all the contributions is a cultural-political belief that denaturalisation, as effected for example through subtitles, is a good thing. For Ruby Rich, one of the most politically upfront of the contributors, the aversion of American audiences for subtitled movies is a symptom of the mentality that brought George W. Bush to power. I sympathise with this viewpoint, but I am not convinced things are quite that simple. Famously, as Rich reminds us, Bushie never went abroad before he became President and his early c.v. probably didn’t involve watching any subtitled movies either. But supposing he watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (USA, 204) in Aramaic, with subtitles, what good would that do him? (Or us?) For his part, Fredric Jameson is captivated by the idea that certain film-makers from the former Yugoslavia (most famously Emir Kusturica) play up the stereotype of the Balkan wild man almost as a challenge to Western audiences. Our awareness of the self-parody, he seems to imply, is somehow affirmative of a kind of Balkan otherness. This may well be the case, but if you were to ask someone on the streets of Zagreb or Belgrade (or Melbourne, for that matter), you might get a more than puzzled reaction. It is not a matter of one side being right or wrong but rather of the perspective to be adopted. What might seem to have a progressive function for a western art-house audience might not work in the same way at home, and of course vice versa. Since it is not always clear who a film is for – a domestic audience or the festival/art-house circuit? – the move from an aesthetic level of analysis to a politico-cultural one in not easy to make. It is also the case, moreover, that without an attentive aesthetic analysis in the first place, the move is not possible at all.

For the most part, however, the contributors are very alert to the interaction of linguistic and cultural difference. Hamid Naficy is very good, as always, on the notion of “accented” cinema – as opposed to the normal, Hollywood kind, experienced as spoken without accent. It is good, too, to have so many contributions by film-makers – Isaac Julien, Egoyan himself, Claire Denis, Patricia Rozema, Ulrike Ottinger, Trinh T. Minh-ha and others – whether as authors or interviewees. All the film-makers chosen, needless to say, are more than able to theorise their own work, as well as illuminate it experientially. (In the case of R. Bruce Elder it is hard to say whether he is a phenomenologist who makes films or a film-maker who draws inspiration from phenomenology.)

In so far as a general conclusion can be derived from this fascinating pot-pourri, it is one provided by Ian Balfour’s Afterword, which draws attention to some of the intricacies of language and subtitling in Godard’s Contempt (France/Italy, 1963) which, as he points out, is a film structured around various forms of translation. One thing he does not mention, and that is the wonderful scene in the viewing theatre where Fritz Lang, after talking in English to Jack Palance, starts quoting Dante in German. Georgia Moll translates, not back into the original, but into French. To save her trouble, Lang takes up the quotation, this time in French himself, and Michel Piccoli, recognising it, completes it. Now here’s the irony. When the film was released in Italy, the distributors decided the audience would not stand for it, and concocted some new dialogue, all dubbed and all in Italian. No poetry, no exchange of languages, no subtitles. All lost, and not even in translation.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
University of London, UK.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06