Festival Dispatches #3: Words on the Screen

I remember the first subtitled film I ever watched all the way through.  It was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I must have been in my mid-teens at the time.  I found it distracting at first, having to follow the words on the screen whilst simultaneously trying to take in all the images the film threw at me, but eventually I got used to it.  Some people never do.  Whether they genuinely have trouble with the reading/viewing double act (I imagine it’s tough for dyslexics) or they’re just too lazy to persevere, I don’t know, but there are people who can’t/won’t watch films with subtitles, and they’re missing out on a vast amount of cinema.

The Edinburgh Film Festival is an international film festival, and this means that the majority of films it showcases do not have English dialogue.  If you are, like me, shamefully monolingual, you are thus reliant on subtitles for understanding what’s going on in these movies.  The odd botched translation aside, this is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for a film to become defined by its subtitled nature in the minds of an English-speaking audience.  “Foreign films” (as a homogenous, multinational mass) are popularly considered to be a bit more “arty” and pretentious than British and American movies, irrespective of how true this may be on a case-by-case basis.  This reputation may have developed because not everybody has Hollywood’s money, and so low-budget films (with their inevitably greater range of artistic freedom) have made up the bulk of cinematic imports from Europe, Asia and Africa over the last few decades.  It’s also possible that non-English-speaking cultures tend to have a different approach to film-making, or rather that every culture has its own approach to film-making, and the Anglo-American one has become dominated by straightforward films paced quickly for an audience with a short attention span (culturally conditioned or otherwise).  This is of course a grossly sweeping generalisation, but it’s hard not to give it a modicum of creedance from a certain perspective, namely that of an intrepid amateur critic surrounded by a multitude of subtitled films, all of which seem to exhibit a greater degree of patience, depth and philosophy than their non-subtitled counterparts.

Here is the danger.  There is a temptation to create in one’s mind a genre designation of “subtitled films”, lumping together all of those films that have words on the screen and associating them with such “arty” tropes as long takes, a contemplative atmosphere and an eccentric approach to plot logic.  But a moment’s thought reveals the error.  There is a wealth of independent cinema filmed in the English language which exhibits similar traits, and our mistake is to compare small-scale foreign films with mainstream British and American movies.  Cinema from outside the mainstream has the freedom to represent a wider range of cultural variation (blockbusters are generic no matter where you go), but it is in the sharing of this very creative freedom that small-scale cinema is united across national (and linguistic) borders.  All of which is an extremely long-winded way of saying that we should never make assumptions about a film just because it has words on the screen.

This post has of course been full of generalisations and assumptions, but it’s so much more difficult to write an article without them.

Jim Taylor is currently trying to figure out Cantonese through the use of English subtitles, with what may kindly be termed a “limited rate of success”.