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Subtitles. On the Foreignness of Film

by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, Editors
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004 and Alphabet City
544 pp., illus. 41 b/w, 77 col. Trade, $35.00
ISBN: 0-262-05078-1.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

jan.Baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be

This collection of essays, interviews, reflections, and artworks on the "foreignness" of film is one of the most fascinating and exciting books on film studies I have read for many years. Despite the great variety in tone, scope, and content of the more than twenty-five contributions, this is both a real book and a splendid collection of independent essays, which renew an apparently old-fashioned subject.

The common feature of the volume is not just the cultural reading——historical as well as critical——of the many practices of subtitling, dubbing, remaking, or censoring of "foreign" movies. It is also a study of the medium’s "foreignness" itself. To quote here the two editors: "Beyond——or distinct from——questions of national or regional cinematic difference and stylistically coded forms of otherness, contributors to Subtitles also asked how film itself might be considered foreign, that is to say, non-natural, in its formal qualities" (27). This move from ideological "Otherness" (with capital O) to formal foreignness, a concept that includes all types of o/Otherness, is a very important one, since it helps to discard a too narrow political viewpoint of subtitling and the like, in order to start analyzing film as foreign in and of itself.

If Egoyan and Balfour had followed only the first line, that of the now well-encapsulated o/Otherness, the basic message of this collection would have been only predictably politically correct. The book would have produced once again a vibrant condemnation of the American dislike, to put it nicely, of foreign movies, dubbed or subtitled, and a demystification of the way Hollywood "naturalizes" such a dislike by its emphasis on the mechanisms of narrative immersions (those mechanisms, as we know, are simultaneously cause and effect, tool and aim: Immersion, which indeed seems incompatible with subtitling, is what narrative needs but also what narrative is looking for). What Subtitles achieves at this level is much more than such a political stance. The editors rightly stress that the traditional dichotomy of Hollywood versus the rest of the world has ceased to be relevant. The emergence of migrant cinema (which is not the same as the better conceptualized notion of post-colonial cinema), the mutation of most international film festivals (which have become, de facto, a showcase for migrant cinema and an important player in the film distribution system), and the rapid spread of new technologies——all these elements make the global film market much less globalized than some decades ago. Subtitles bears witness to these changes, beyond all simple and simplistic Hollywood-bashing.

Furthermore, by enlarging the topic of subtitling to that of foreignness, Egoyan and Balfour also manage to shift from a formalistic and historical viewpoint to a deeply philosophical one, mainly based on the notion of Derrida’s "supplement". Although this concept is not quoted in each article or put forward in the editorial interventions, it is obviously the bottom line of the whole book. The very refusal of subtitling and dubbing does not simply reveal Hollywood’s xenophobia and allophobia; instead, it appears in Subtitles as the exteriority that helps——or forces——us to see a different logic at work in the very heart of the filmic image itself, always in need of some impossible translation.

This is a crucial displacement in film theory, and one can only hope that Subtitles will prove to exert a lasting influence on the ongoing discussions on specificity and hybridization in film. On the one hand, Egoyan and Balfour make room for new debates on specificity, no longer in terms of visual purity (the famous Arnheim stance, which has maintained a strange seduction on many theoreticians since the 1930s). On the other hand, the editors of the book also disentangle the too-easily-mixed-up notions of hybridity and multimedia.

Yet stressing the merits of the volume as a whole should not cloud the exceptional qualities of many of its individual essays (most of which can be read separately). In Subtitles, one finds, broadly speaking, three types of essays: 1) essays on subtitling and dubbing, 2) essays on migrant cinema or, rather, on "accented" cinema in a globalized world, 3) essays on film theory (of course, in many cases the boundaries are unclear, and many articles manage to combine several viewpoints). Within each of these categories, which are not displayed in autonomous sections, there are at least two or three contributions that may become real classics in the field.

For the third category, general essays on film, this is absolutely the case for Mary Ann Doane’s text on time in cinema. Her reflections on the notion of "real time" and (temporal) indexicality deserve to be read alongside the famous and often reprinted articles by Rosalind Krauss on the importance of (spatial) indexicality in modern art since Duchamp (Krauss 1977). The same praise should go to Slavoj Zizek, whose reading of Egoyan’s "The Sweet Hereafter", proposes a superb reading of Derrida’s supplement in relationship with the topic of "community" versus "society" (Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft). In the group of essays on world cinema, all readers interested in close reading cinema should start with the articles by Hamid Naficy and Negar Mottahedeh, the first on migrant cinema and the second on Iranian cinema (and the various ways Iranian filmmakers tackle the issue of censorship in formal ways). And as far as subtitling is concerned, one will find an important essay on anthropological film by Brenda Longfellow and a study by Eric Cazdyn on the paradoxical rise of running subtitles in American television. Cadzyn’s approach is the perfect synthesis of what Egoyan and Balfours’s collection is at its best: a combination of historical depth and critical commitment, a good balance of a strong awareness of "glocal" film culture and of close-reading details, and a permanent shift between "thick description" and audacious interpretation.

Unfortunately, nothing is perfect. With its glossy, flickering pages, its unusually small "Italian" format, and its excessive weight (more than a kilo!), this book tortures the reader’s hand and arm. The reason for this unhandy design seems to be the eagerness to reproduce the format of the screen in book-form. The result is catastrophic, but given the content, it would be unfair to complain.

References:
Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America." (Part 1), October (Spring 1977), 3: 68-81.
"Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America." (Part 2), October (Fall 1977), 4: 58-67.

 

 




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