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 readinghistorical
as well as criticalof the
many practices of subtitling, dubbing,
remaking, or censoring of "foreign"
movies. It is also a study of the mediums
"foreignness" itself. To quote
here the two editors: "Beyondor
distinct fromquestions 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 technologiesall
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 Derridas
"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 Hollywoods
xenophobia and allophobia; instead, it
appears in Subtitles as the exteriority
that helpsor forcesus
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 Doanes 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 Egoyans "The Sweet Hereafter",
proposes a superb reading of Derridas
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.
Cadzyns approach is the perfect
synthesis of what Egoyan and Balfourss
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 readers 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.