<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Sato Makoto has been on my mind of late. I presented <i>Living on the River Agano</i> and <i>Memories of Agano</i> at Berkeley this spring. Last week in China, the director of the Nyon Visions Du Réel documentary festival gave me last year's catalog and I noticed that they had dedicated the festival to Makoto after his tragic death. And, finally, I spent several weeks in April tweeking the subtitles for three of his films as they were being digitized for DVD. Yesterday, the DVD's arrived in my mailbox. <div><div><br></div><div>Siglo, producer of most of the films, has just released a Sato Makoto DVD Box. It's a six-disc set with all of his major films except the Said film. The sixth disc has two shorts and some extras. The discs can be ordered separately as well. </div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; "><a href="http://www.cine.co.jp/php/detail.php?siglo_info_seq=100">http://www.cine.co.jp/php/detail.php?siglo_info_seq=100</a></div></div><div><br></div><div>This is a good opportunity to see Sato's work, if you haven't already, or acquire it for your library. But I wanted to bring this set to your attention for another reason. I know some of you are aware of my article "Toward an Abusive Subtitling" or its dismantled and expanded version in <i>Cinema Babel.</i> As a matter of fact, I developed these ideas about subtitling through working with Makoto. It's a nice example of theorization and practice being inextricably linked. Upon the publishing of Siglo's DVD Box, I thought I was write about subtitling with Sato and invite you to pick up the discs. It's so nice to see subtitled, Region ALL DVDs coming out of Japan!</div><div><br></div><div><i>Living on the River Agano</i> (1992) was the second film I attempted to subtitle, and it was a harrowing introduction to the problem of dialect. As anyone who has seen the film can attest, the Niigata-ben is incredible. Wonderfully inpenetrable for most of the film, which is why it was originally subtitled in Japanese. When I translated the film, I felt a tension between the anonymous English demanded by conventional subtitling practice and the beauty of the Niigata-ben. It was so central to the texture of the film, that the thought of erasing it completely was unbearable. I tried writing marked English, but recognized why subtitlers avoid this strategy; it was a bit jarring, and too quickly evoked the American south. I compromised—with myself and with SOP—by using more contractions than usual and by transliterating and preserving the onomatopoetic phrases so many people were using: <i>zafuu-zafuu,</i> to describe the throwing of fishing nets, for example. </div><div><br></div><div>(The subtitles on the disc have been revised, but for the better. For the original translation, I was given only the Japanese subtitles which were themselves incomplete and just enough for speakers of standard Japanese to understand the film. Now I had the published script, and Akamatsu Ryuta of the translation house Passo Passo helped me figure out the many tough parts.)</div><div><br></div><div>A few years later, Makoto asked me to do the subtitles for <i>Mahiru no hoshi/Artists in Wonderland</i> (1998). My essay "Toward an Abusive Subtitling" was in peer review at <i>Film Quarterly,</i> and so I accepted his invitation wondering how these new ideas would translate into practice. <i>Artists in Wonderland</i> is about mentally handicapped artists. As you might expect, their speech is quirky. Sometimes it doesn't make sense. It's often montage-like. And sometimes it's individually distinct, as with one artist who constantly repeated things over and over and over and over again. Standard subtitles would probably give you the sense of their speech acts, but perhaps not the flavor. For instance, even if someone repeated a phrase five times, they would use only one subtitle with one complete sentence. Makoto and I discussed this at length, and I told him about my article. We decided that the subtitles should be in tune with each artist's personality—using various strategies like repetition and unusual punctuation—and were abusive in this sense. It could be that few people noticed the difference, but no doubt it did make a difference. We liked the results very much. </div><div><br></div><div>There's also one moment where the abuse was graphic. One of the artists wrote countless notes to a female social worker he was sexually obsessed with. He made an installation with a video confession, and plastered the walls with his notes. They fill the screen. For that moment, Makoto and I decided to plaster the screen with subtitle as well: </div><div><br></div><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="166" width="223" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:0A961B0B-E5E0-4C11-A38F-B966487CE336"></div><div><br></div><div>The "sub"-title disappears just as the camera starts panning to reveal hundreds of these notes. We thought this was also very nice, and I'm grateful that Siglo and Passo Passo went the extra mile to preserve this in the new DVD subs. </div><div><br></div><div>Finally, Makoto asked me to do the subtitles for his sequel to <i>Living on the River Agano.</i> Entitled <i>Memories of Agano</i> (2004), I think it's the work of a great documentary filmmaker at the peak of his powers. Its success relies completely on the first film; if you haven't seen <i>Living on the River Agano, </i>one would probably find it rough going. But this utter dependency on a previous work, which it references in the most complex of ways, is a good thing I think. Since his debut Makoto had written forcefully on the work of artists like Jonas Mekas, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Chris Marker. The experiments of this film with montage and temporality show the fruits of this contact with other great filmmakers. </div><div><br></div><div>And so does his approach to language. For this film, he decided NOT to use Japanese subtitles. This meant that if you weren't from Niigata or thereabouts, you were stuck with semi-comprehension. Most people understood only a fraction of the film. It was a daring move, and also a controversial one. I vividly remember the press screening when all these critics left the theater scratching their heads and chuckling, "Did you understand anything??!?"</div><div><br></div><div>I thought it was brilliant, and was flabbergasted when he asked me to do the English version. How does one translate a film you're not supposed to transparently understand? If you put standard subtitles, it would be an experience of language close to that of Niigata-ben speakers. But upon talking to Makoto, it was clear that the "subject position" he built into the film was outside Niigata. You were supposed to struggle with comprehension. You invited to hear the language as music. </div><div><br></div><div>I told him I thought it would possible to do something interesting to the degree that the subtitles were thoroughly abusive. By this point in his career he was quite adventurous and happy to experiment. So I polled various Japanese spectators to find out what exactly they understood, scene-by-scene. And then I used <i>this</i> as my "script," writing fragmentary subtitles with incomplete sentences, strange punctuation, and even parenthetical asides—except those scenes in standard Japanese, which got standard subtitles. </div><div><br></div><div>Makoto half-joked that the English subtitled version was better than the original, half-joking because the theory behind the subs dovetailed so cleanly with his conception of the film. Siglo's new DVD has transfers of both the original unsubtitled Niigata-ben film and the English-subtitled 16mm print. Take your pick. He would have wanted you to.</div><div><br></div><div>So I invite you to pick up the Sato Box, and not just for the subtitles. They are wonderful films from a director we will miss very, very much. </div><div><br></div><div>Markus</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>PS: For those interested in reading my essay, the book is best. But here is the reference to the essay and the translations and reprint that include slight but significant theoretical revisions to the original: </div><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";
color:black;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">“Toward an
Abusive Subtitling: Illuminating Cinema’s Apparatus of Translation,” <i>Film
Quarterly </i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";
color:black;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">52.3 (Spring
1999): 17-34. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'American Typewriter Condensed'; color: black; ">Revised and reprinted in <i>The Translation Studies Reader,</i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'American Typewriter Condensed'; color: black; "> ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2004), 447-468. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; "><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";
color:black;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Reprinted in German as “Ein Pladoyer fur den Mibbrauch von
Untertiteln,” trans. Gabriele Pauer, in <i>Minikomi </i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";color:black;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">61 (March 2001): 9-18. </span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";color:black;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Reprinted in Japanese as “Akutai-teki
Jimaku no Tame Ni,” trans. Yamamoto Naoki, in <i>Gengo Bunka</i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";color:black;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> 22 (2005): 161-195.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'American Typewriter Condensed'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><br></span></font></div><div><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"American Typewriter Condensed";color:black;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><!--EndFragment-->
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