Dear friends,
A Spanish film festival wrote to me yesterday, asking for a transcript of our new film Shelf Life so that they might create Spanish subtitles ahead of a showing this fall. I will gladly oblige. You see, I love subtitles and captions. And as part of my weekly effort to drive up my unsubscribe rate, I will mention a few reasons why, from my perch on an aeroplane over the Atlantic.
I do not manage to sleep well on planes, because a). I’m a restless person and b). seat space is not assigned based on height. It is mostly based on how much money you have or are willing to spend, which I do not think is correlated to height, although I do not know. Anyway, imagine if we all had the same amount of legroom, relative to the size of our legs! I probably still wouldn’t sleep, but that’s because I am too busy watching other passengers’ movies.
When watching other people’s movies on the airplane, over their shoulder usually, you sometimes get lucky and they’re either watching a “foreign” film (with subtitles), or they’ve turned on the captions because the airplane headphones are so janky that there’s no telling what people are saying on screen. In either case, you can read along as the film progresses, and you aren’t burdened by having to watch something on your own screen. (Watching one’s own screen is something we can do at home and it holds no novelty!) Watching another passenger’s movie in an aluminum shell some six miles above the sea, you are a casual, passive voyeur. A robber, a pirate!
I watch a lot of plane movies this way. Sometimes I slip into wondering what The Real Viewer, the person over whose shoulder I’m creepily staring, is thinking about as the film goes along. Are they bored at this part? Why are they fiddling with the tray? Wait, why are they pausing it there?
This is something I think about a lot when working on my own movies. Especially when editing, we have to guess what our viewers are thinking. What is the audience wondering about? What do they know, what do they not know? Are they engaged, entertained? Are they leaning in with a scrunched brow, or are they leaning back and checking their phone?
One of the most beautiful and bizarre things about human life is that we cannot step into another person’s mind and see the world the way they do. All we can do is imagine what they are thinking. (And of course we can ask them, but my shyness around strangers mercifully prevents me from asking other airline passengers what they are thinking about during The Bourne Identity. And who would ever answer honestly anyway?)
Once, on a flight to heaven knows where, I saw someone select one of my movies on the plane and start watching it. Uh-oh. Now I had no choice but to watch them and see if they made it through! I’ve had a few movies show on airplanes over the years, but this was a first, seeing it over-the-shoulder. It was The Most Unknown and the guy didn’t turn on the captions, but I knew the movie by heart. I’m ashamed to say that I lost interest in watching my own movie over this guy’s shoulder, and then I lost track of when he clicked away. Maybe it lulled him into a gentle sleep, or made him order another warm Chardonnay. Maybe he put it on so that he’d look like a chap interested in science to whoever looked over his shoulder, when in reality he was playing shoot-em-ups on his smart phone. Who can say, really, what happens in the mind of The Real Viewer.
Anyway, when Shelf Life gets translated into Spanish this summer, something strange will happen. The meaning of the movie will change. So the other reason I love subtitles, and translations by extension, is that they are not true in any strict or objective sense. They are artistic in nature. Translation isn’t substitution; it’s not like code-breaking where you just swap in this for that. The process of translating something from a foreign language into one’s own language involves judgment, subjectivity, and often - in film subtitles - condensing. You take a sentence in a foreign language, you gather its meaning, its context, its tone and inflections, and you do your best to carry that through the portal into the subtitle.
(Briefly, permit me a clarification. There are important distinctions between what we call subtitles, which are translations of foreign language dialogue into a local language, and captions, which are transcriptions of the dialogue, whatever the language, and sometimes descriptions of what’s happening on screen. When an English-language film like ours shows in Spain, the entire film is subtitled in Spanish.)
The machines are getting better at all this, and we often use software to take a first pass at transcription, and sometimes even at translation. But we’re still dependent on translators to watch the footage and help us shift the foreign into the familiar, or vice-versa.
A good friend of mine’s first novel was translated into 20+ languages, and he had a marvelous time working with his translators and answering their questions about words, references or jokes initially written for an American audience. He and I even dallied with the idea of a whole film about translation. During that dallying I fell into the arms of another wonderful book called Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter, which itself grew out of the author’s fascination with the translation of his first book, Godel Escher Bach.
In Charles de Gaulle airport just now I’ve begun mulling how to translate “bob’s your uncle” into French. I mean, here’s an expression that barely makes sense in English. In French you probably could get away with “Voilà,” but surely there’s a more provincial and nonsensical way of saying it. Hofstadter would know!
Point is, subtitles are not a mechanical prop for the film, they are actually integral to the artistic process — another opportunity to say what you mean as a filmmaker. For this reason, I think some filmmakers prefer working in foreign tongues, because they can condense sometimes inelegant, messy dialogue into crisp, poetic subtitles, and give the film a grace it might otherwise lack. You could call this cheating, but it’s just a different form of editing. When we’re working in the audio track in our own language and condensing what someone says, we’re doing the same thing — shifting something with lots of “ums” and half-steps into something denser and more declarative.
Oddly enough, over the years I’ve gravitated towards just letting people talk, which sometimes makes for longer dialogue clips in my recent films. I like the raw honesty of just sitting with people for a spell, because sometimes in the “ums” and half-steps lie all sorts of nuances and subtle truths.
For different reasons, I’ve also been heading towards the decision to simply caption all of the dialogue in my films. Many cinephiles will balk at the idea that our eyes should be pulled away from the image to read text at the bottom of the screen — these are not books! These are movies! But I like it. And anyway I like books. I like reading along during a movie, in much the same way that I like reading along when hearing poetry read aloud.
Captions of course make the film’s dialogue accessible to people who cannot hear. Last year my friend Jess Harrop asked me to host a screening of the film we made together, The Arc of Oblivion, for some of her family members who live in Maine. Her grandfather is around 100 years old and does not hear so well, so she asked me to caption the entire film, which I gladly did. The film explores our relationship to the things we save, and I’m always interested in how different people’s life experiences shape what they think of memories, archives, legacies.
We showed the film in the ark on a hot summer day, and I watched along, wondering what they were thinking. At the end of the film, we lingered a while and talked, and at some point I mentioned the challenge I’d had when pitching the film: I’d had a hard time describing it in simple, condensed terms. Folks nodded knowingly, and then Jess’s grandfather piped up. “I’ll tell you what this film is about,” he said gruffly. Ever insecure, I braced myself for a slight, but instead he nailed it: “Everything lasts. Nothing lasts.” Bob’s your uncle, he translated it just right.