Laughter, Tears and Rage

In 1945, in one of the last of the short writings on film that he published in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur, Jorge Luis Borges ventured an ambiguous reflection on the still novel practice of cinematic dubbing. The technique, lately conceived by Hollywood, gives birth, wrote Borges, to an uncanny kind of filmic monster: a prodigy as alarming as the mythic Chimera, as intricate and confusing as the theological doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they are usually frightening’: dubbing is a ‘malignant artifice’ that tries to pass itself off as natural and domesticated. The writer prefers instead the honest alienation of the original, even if (as in the case, say, of an Eisenstein epic) he is quite lost in its language. Inveighing against dubbing’s sham intimacy, Borges, oddly, has nothing to say about its alternative the subtitle, which you might have thought he’d relish as an emblem of cinema’s baroque textual possibilities.
That hybrid strangeness is precisely what animates the essays in a recent book edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (2004) suggests that its subject is no mere subordinate or practical addendum to the film proper, but the image of everything that is seductive and peculiar about cinema itself. Every film, note the editors, is a foreign film (foreign to somebody, somewhere), and the subtitle is an alluring reminder of its oddity. As Egoyan puts it: ‘my love of cinema is founded on subtitles […] they were my passport to an exotic world, and I loved the feeling of being surrounded in a foreign conversation to which I had access. It made me feel both exhilaratingly outside and inside at the same time.’
The subtitle is an invitation and a barrier: nowhere more so than in those remembered films where we’re not quite sure whether what we recall was seen, heard or read. Expanded DVD releases can thicken the plot, and in the case of certain movies the confusion seems calculated. I’m still uncertain if my first viewing of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) was of the English-language version or the simultaneously released German (with English subtitles); every encounter with either is now a shock, as if I’ve woken the undead.
Even the terminology is perplexing; ‘subtitles’ once denoted what we know in retrospect as ‘intertitles’: those punctuation marks (dialogic or explanatory) in the flow of silent film. The first notable use of the modern version came in 1929, at a showing in Paris of The Jazz Singer (1927). But something like the subtitle had already been patented in 1909 by one M. N. Topp, whose Sciopticon, a ‘device for the rapid showing of titles for moving pictures other than those shown on the film strip’, involved a second projector, producing an entirely separate image. Since that first clumsy suturing the history of subtitling has been largely a search for the most seamless integration of image and word: whether the legend was first typeset, printed and photographed, then stamped directly into the film’s emulsion, or, more recently, etched by laser from a text prepared on computer. ‘Bad’ subtitling, so common sense asserts, draws attention to the distance between picture and lexicon. But maybe the real essence of the form is in that gap and is glimpsed in another tradition entirely, one now lost. Before the advent of subtitles Japanese cinemas employed an individual to translate and interpret for the audience. The benshi (heir of the stage-side speaker of the bunraku puppet theatre) carved the cinematic entertainment in two, made of it a weirdly striated spectacle.
Which cleavage, as several contributors to Subtitles remark, is just the formal wound that Hollywood is eager to heal when faced with the tricky prospect of ‘foreign’ film. As B. Ruby Rich points out in an essay on ‘subtitles, trailers and monolingualism’, so ingrained is the expectation that anglophone (especially American) audiences will balk at having to read at the multiplex, that foreign-language films are now routinely advertised with trailers entirely devoid of dialogue. The tactic pays off, as films such as Cinema Paradiso (1989), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) attest. But the notion at its core seems archaic, predicated on the idea (now, surely, outdated) that our technological future will be given over wholly to images rather than text. The ‘purity’ of the film experience was, anyway, never what it seemed in the first place, and the weary cinematic logophobe perks up and pays attention when plonked in front of a PC.
Perhaps the venerable filmic subtitle always seems a little belated, arriving just too late to ‘explain’ the image. Certainly the convention is often culturally tardy (not to say frankly repressive) when used on television. British TV, unfathomably, seems increasingly to subtitle the English-speaking, often native, ‘foreigner’: the guttural provincial, the refugee or the black urban teenager. At the same time another sort of subtitle speeds ahead of the media’s own game, promising an almost Brechtian clash between vague rhetoric and telling statistic: the CNN-style running headline can occasionally outpace and outwit the solemn talking head. As Atom Egoyan puts it, hoping that the gulf between word and image may one day widen enough for us to see our own foreignness: ‘subtitles embed us.’