Scene from A Bout de Souffle by Jean Luc Godard, who has refused subtitling in some films
In his seminal teaching notes on filmmaking, Alexander Mackendrick, the director best known for Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers, defines cinema as an essentially “pre-verbal” medium. A good movie, he says, should be 90 per cent understandable even if it’s in a language that nobody in the auditorium speaks.
But what of the other ten per cent? If it happens to be in a language we don’t understand, we are reliant upon subtitles. But even as Nordic noir muscles onto our television screens and new foreign films by the likes of Michael Haneke and Thomas Vinterberg win acclaim at Cannes, this crucial tool remains underexamined.
Perhaps it is because the mark of a successful subtitle is its invisibility. A dozen years ago, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the first foreign language film to play in multiplexes across the American Midwest, a survey found that by the time the credits rolled, a portion of the audience had stopped noticing that it wasn’t in English. The very best that a subtitler can hope for, it seems, is to be overlooked.
Their work tends to go equally unsung within the industry—it’s not quite cinema, nor is it much acknowledged by literary translators. “It’s a lonesome profession,” a studio executive confirmed. Asking who the subtitler is on any given project, she says she’s often told something along the lines of “Oh, the director’s second assistant speaks good English.” Worse still, they will resort to a subtitling agency.
Yet subtitles are almost as old as commercial cinema itself. Rooted in silent movies, subtitles predated the talkies, whose international distribution they evolved to facilitate. As translation, in addition to conveying connotations, jokes and puns, they must submit to a unique set of temporal and spatial constraints. After all, the eye can only absorb so much text in a given amount of time. Done well, subtitling is an idiosyncratic art form—one that’s long overdue an ovation.
As one of Woody Allen’s favoured translators, Candace Whitman is well versed in its challenges. An American who has lived in Europe since 1970, she is fluent in five languages and spoke to me from Barcelona, where she’s working on making Allen’s latest film intelligible to Catalan-speaking viewers.
“The best subtitle is the one that isn’t on the screen,” she says. “A film is not meant to be read, it’s meant to be heard and watched. You are absolutely distracted when you have something to read. What if somebody on screen winks and you miss it because you’re reading?”
The key, she says, is to “compress, compress, compress.” She recalls a scene from a Spanish film in which two paparazzi are looking through the window of a restaurant at a couple of celebrities who have just met. When they decide to get a room, one paparazzo says to the other, “Where’d they go?” His pal’s long answer boils down to “Well, where do you think?” but there was neither space nor time for that as a subtitle. Her solution? A three-letter “Duh!”
But the verbal landscape of this supposedly visual medium doesn’t consist solely of dialogue. Consider a scene in which a song plays in the background. What of its lyrics? They are rarely translated, yet as critic and veteran film festival jurist Gabriel Klinger notes, “In the emotive sense of the film, they’re completely central to the plot.”
Klinger, a Chicago-based Brazilian with a thick moustache and an accent that can only be described as global, participates in a website so heavy on copyright breaches that he insists I refer to it only as “the secret cinema society website.” Created by web-savvy movie buffs it is, he says, “the greatest film library in the universe.” These digitised films are accompanied by multiple subtitle files that have been further modified by successive fans. It’s part of a growing phenomenon known as “fansubbing,” and has been made possible by new software.
These same advances are enabling stylistic experimentation, too. When Klinger taught a Brazilian cinema class and grew frustrated by the lack of available films with subtitles, he downloaded a program called DVD Studio Pro. “You can pick where on the screen you want to have the subtitles, which font, which colour. In most films the subtitles are in the same place, where they’re least distracting. I guess people don’t want to give the viewer’s eyeballs a workout, but I like working out my eyeballs,” he explains.
In his defence, he points to Jean-Luc Godard, who believes that however concise and discreet it is, text inevitably becomes part of the image. For this reason, Godard has flatly refused subtitling on several of his films and presented another, Socialisme, with polyglot subtitles he called “Navajo English.”
Translation of any kind introduces infidelities but for most cinephiles, subtitles are the least obtrusive way of accessing films that would otherwise remain out of reach. This they do without competing with the original dialogue, instead letting the ear absorb its rhythms while communicating with haiku-like brevity its essence—which might, after all, be the ten per cent that turns a good movie into a great one.
In his seminal teaching notes on filmmaking, Alexander Mackendrick, the director best known for Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers, defines cinema as an essentially “pre-verbal” medium. A good movie, he says, should be 90 per cent understandable even if it’s in a language that nobody in the auditorium speaks.
But what of the other ten per cent? If it happens to be in a language we don’t understand, we are reliant upon subtitles. But even as Nordic noir muscles onto our television screens and new foreign films by the likes of Michael Haneke and Thomas Vinterberg win acclaim at Cannes, this crucial tool remains underexamined.
Perhaps it is because the mark of a successful subtitle is its invisibility. A dozen years ago, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the first foreign language film to play in multiplexes across the American Midwest, a survey found that by the time the credits rolled, a portion of the audience had stopped noticing that it wasn’t in English. The very best that a subtitler can hope for, it seems, is to be overlooked.
Their work tends to go equally unsung within the industry—it’s not quite cinema, nor is it much acknowledged by literary translators. “It’s a lonesome profession,” a studio executive confirmed. Asking who the subtitler is on any given project, she says she’s often told something along the lines of “Oh, the director’s second assistant speaks good English.” Worse still, they will resort to a subtitling agency.
Yet subtitles are almost as old as commercial cinema itself. Rooted in silent movies, subtitles predated the talkies, whose international distribution they evolved to facilitate. As translation, in addition to conveying connotations, jokes and puns, they must submit to a unique set of temporal and spatial constraints. After all, the eye can only absorb so much text in a given amount of time. Done well, subtitling is an idiosyncratic art form—one that’s long overdue an ovation.
As one of Woody Allen’s favoured translators, Candace Whitman is well versed in its challenges. An American who has lived in Europe since 1970, she is fluent in five languages and spoke to me from Barcelona, where she’s working on making Allen’s latest film intelligible to Catalan-speaking viewers.
“The best subtitle is the one that isn’t on the screen,” she says. “A film is not meant to be read, it’s meant to be heard and watched. You are absolutely distracted when you have something to read. What if somebody on screen winks and you miss it because you’re reading?”
The key, she says, is to “compress, compress, compress.” She recalls a scene from a Spanish film in which two paparazzi are looking through the window of a restaurant at a couple of celebrities who have just met. When they decide to get a room, one paparazzo says to the other, “Where’d they go?” His pal’s long answer boils down to “Well, where do you think?” but there was neither space nor time for that as a subtitle. Her solution? A three-letter “Duh!”
But the verbal landscape of this supposedly visual medium doesn’t consist solely of dialogue. Consider a scene in which a song plays in the background. What of its lyrics? They are rarely translated, yet as critic and veteran film festival jurist Gabriel Klinger notes, “In the emotive sense of the film, they’re completely central to the plot.”
Klinger, a Chicago-based Brazilian with a thick moustache and an accent that can only be described as global, participates in a website so heavy on copyright breaches that he insists I refer to it only as “the secret cinema society website.” Created by web-savvy movie buffs it is, he says, “the greatest film library in the universe.” These digitised films are accompanied by multiple subtitle files that have been further modified by successive fans. It’s part of a growing phenomenon known as “fansubbing,” and has been made possible by new software.
These same advances are enabling stylistic experimentation, too. When Klinger taught a Brazilian cinema class and grew frustrated by the lack of available films with subtitles, he downloaded a program called DVD Studio Pro. “You can pick where on the screen you want to have the subtitles, which font, which colour. In most films the subtitles are in the same place, where they’re least distracting. I guess people don’t want to give the viewer’s eyeballs a workout, but I like working out my eyeballs,” he explains.
In his defence, he points to Jean-Luc Godard, who believes that however concise and discreet it is, text inevitably becomes part of the image. For this reason, Godard has flatly refused subtitling on several of his films and presented another, Socialisme, with polyglot subtitles he called “Navajo English.”
Translation of any kind introduces infidelities but for most cinephiles, subtitles are the least obtrusive way of accessing films that would otherwise remain out of reach. This they do without competing with the original dialogue, instead letting the ear absorb its rhythms while communicating with haiku-like brevity its essence—which might, after all, be the ten per cent that turns a good movie into a great one.
