subtitles

anne mcknight akmck at sympatico.ca
Sat Oct 26 19:32:48 EDT 2002


It's a fascinating subject, subtitling.  Relating to Jonathan's point about
the cross-over influence that reading on the 'net has had on practices of
reading in other media (erotic writing, in the case he mentioned) I have
often wondered why the new digital technologies have not been more flaunted
in subtitling practices.
    One interesting case I can think of is the anime, Perfect Blue.  There
is a scene where the protagonist Mima is contacted by the stalker who
pursues her throughout the film--the mode of contact is a fax, which allows
the graphic trace of the "ransom-note" style cutout letters that compose the
message "uragirimono."  Or, as it was composed in the subtitle, "tRaiTor,
TraIToR, trAiTOr," or something of the kind (my spelling may differ at the
micro-level).  
    This unruly titling seemed a really great move for several reasons.
One, is that it translated the idea of the lettering as a typographic
environment, establishing the message as something that had significance
over and above the brute meaning of the brutal message.  The 'ransom letter'
style also preserved the discontinuity of the montage of the original fax,
both within the word 'traitor,' and between words.  And moreover, this
attention to the typographical environment does not seem inconsequential in
a film all about the new fantasy spaces of the Internet (where Mima's
stalker later lurks and begins to impersonate her).  This seemed quite
smart, also, to me, in gesturing to a viewing audience which is quite aware
not only of manga styles of lettering, but of graffiti, and how a different
kind of typographical environment than the usual streamlined subtitle was
working. I would use this example to support Jonathan's argument about
cross-reading between media; I think anyone who grew up with MTV, as well,
would be quite practiced at reading the word 'cum,' as part of generic heavy
metal spelling, after the tag on the Quiet Riot anthem that played on early
MTV heavy rotation for about a zillion years, and far too long after that in
my opinion, 'Cum on Feel the Noize.'
    A second interesting case is a 1998 film by Izuchi Kishu, the
screenwriter for Zeze Takahisa, whose subtitles I worked on.  (So help me, I
did not choose the title, Jesus in Nirvana.)  Izuchi & his producer
explained that they had actually timed the subtitles to correspond to actual
utterances, rather than having them printed & legible throughout the entire
shot.  While conceptually this seemed like it might jar the experience of
watching, after a while it seemed even more 'faithful' than regular
subtitling practice--faithful, I mean, to the idea of welding speech to the
direct expression of the actors (in the lingo of Karatani and Meiji
ideologues striving to standardize speaking practices, more
genbun-ichi-like).



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