Subtitles

People used to tell me I should see Fellini films. The conversation would go something like this:

FRIEND: You should see Eight and a Half.
ME: Isn't that in Italian?
FRIEND: Yeah, it's amazing.
ME: I can't read subtitles.
FRIEND: You don't have to read the subtitles. It doesn't really make sense anyway.

Well, I saw it, and I'm pretty sure it made about 100% less sense to me than it did to anyone else in the room. Call it a wild guess, but I'd surmise that the subtitles did help a little.

Fully-sighted people don't understand just how helpful those little words at the bottom of the screen can be when every word of the film is in a foreign language. I do speak French, but I don't understand it when other people speak more than a sentence at a time, so I'm pretty much relegated to films in English. My French class took use to a film about a French queen once, and at the end of the movie, I figured out who the king was.

Having said all that, it's also pretty distracting to sit in a movie theater and have somebody whisper the subtitles in your ear. It's necessary sometimes: I went with friends to see Kill Bill, which we expected to be in English, and half of it turned out to be in Japanese. Had it not been for my roommate reading me the subtitles, it would have been a lot like Fellini (except for the bloody sword fights). But I do prefer to just watch the film and pick up on what's said by the context, if possible. I'd rather just hear the actor speak and concentrate on the stuff I can see.

I saw Gran Torino last night. There were a few subtitles, but it was brief, and I could tell the tone of the lines without knowing the actual words. People did laugh, and knowing the subtitles would have clued me in to the specific joke, but it was funny to me too. And, luckily, they stopped subtitling once we saw the Mung families through the old bigot's eyes. I thought it was great.

Incidentally, my favorite film set in a foreign country is Lost in Translation. There are no subtitles. We're all in the same boat.