The Seen, the Heard, and the Read

THE SEEN, THE HEARD, AND THE READ SUBTITLES: ON THE FOREIFNNESS OF FILM Edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press and Alphabet City Media, 2004, 532 pp. This beautiful and clever tome, ninth volume Alphabet City Design list, takes a stand for its overarching ambition-and aesthetic estrangementeven before you open it. Little and squat, cut to size of 1.6:1 academy ratio aspect, at nearly 550 pages of glossy paper and color photographs, this book-thing aims to resist fitting into standard bookshelf line-up, even while being too fine-printed for your standard coffee table book skimming and certain to fall apart if you wanted to Xerox some of its pages more than once. Its intellectual stance and table of contents will attract bona fide theorist, who in turn may be irritated by lusciously scrimmed woman's face its covernothing if not a Dietrich-esque come-hither for (book-buying) fetishist. The category-defying look and mix of genres jointly signal book's central thesis. Subtitles, write volume's editors, literary theorist lan Balfour and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, only most visible and charged markers of way in which films engage, in direct and oblique fashion, pressing matters of difference, otherness and translation. Hence title's other half: on [he of film. The editors' premise is that this foreignness is most apparent when a word and a picture do not simply brush against but, as it were, penetrate each other in space of cinema as well as inside screen's frame. More generally, however, dual register of words spoken in one language, then translated and written up in another, stands in here for any semiotic clash of seen/heard with read, apprehended with understood, familiar with strange. The book's nearly thirty contributors find this clash of materialities in a wide array of formal and thematic arrangements, and they do so while straddling a range of methodologies and categories: straight theoretical essays, close readings of individual films, short think-pieces, poetic monologues, director interviews and script samples share book's pages with photographed paintings, photographs, stills, collages and photo-images of uncertain origin. Indeed, subtitled still emerges here as a sui generis mixed-media format, with its own genealogy in conceptual art/multimedia. The overall response book's arrangement implicitly invites is principally aesthetic: reader is above all to be surprised and delighted. But because claims made in it are also factual as well as political, book as a whole deserves more analytical kinds of judgment as well. The essays concerned explicitly with subtitling can be divided into subcategories. First of all, there are hands-on practitioners of inter-linguistic transfer such as critic/programmer B. Ruby Rich and Anglo-French subtitler supreme Henri Behar. The former's essay how U.S. distributors have come to use trailers to dress up wolf of foreign-and worse-subtitled films in sheep's clothing of anglophone movies palatable to mall audiences, is hilarious enough to be a scene in some latter-day Lubitsch comedy. But it is her final point that sets up what in my opinion is one of book's key questions: why is it that viewers in U.S. are only demographic group in world still presumed to be largely incapable of handling either subtitles or dubbing? That is the of film tout court. And what are consequences of this particular form of American exceptionalism? It is one thing to ponder answers theoretically, as some writers here do; it is another to actually track causes and persistence of what is either a fatal cultural and political blind spot, or perhaps a conspiracy part of MPAA oligopoly-a properly film-scholarly detection task that remains to be done. …

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