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| Yes | 54% | 68 votes | Total: 127 votes | |
| No | 46% | 59 votes |
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Add to FavoritesMovies are supposed to give you a feeling like you are there, but it is also to be an enjoyable experience. If going to see movies or just watching movies in general wasn't enjoyable, then why would anybody do it? Before captioning was discovered, people had to listen very carefully so as to not miss what was said by actors. Captioning gives the viewer the opportunity to hear it all. Not only that, but sometimes the actor is hard to understand.
What makes a movie good isn't the movie itself, but rather how the viewer likes the movie. Take for example the movie critics who claim that certain movies are bad and you seem them a week later and you feel that it had to be one of your favorite movies of all time. People all have different views on the way they would like to go about their movie experiences. There can be many good reasons contributing to why movies should not be captioned, but there can be just as many if not more reasons for why they should be. Some people are deaf or just hard of hearing, during scary movies some people cover their ears so the loud noise doesn't make them jump, or maybe the viewer didn't really want to go to the movie and prefers to read. All of these reasons don't seem like big deals to most, but to the ones that they pertain to, they are.
Watching movies at home: You are watching a movie at home and suddenly your phone rings, but the movie is getting to a good part so you don't want to stop it. So what do you do? You might tell yourself, "Push pause and answer the phone, lazy" or you might put the movie on subtitles, mute the movie, and answer the phone. This way you can keep your positive movie experience going without possibly missing an important phone call. Also, if you are one of those people that cannot concentrate on a movie when other people and/or animals are making so much noise around you, captioning helps remove some of the noise-induced stress.
Watching movies at the theater: When watching a movie at the theater, the screen is probably large enough to ignore the captioning if you have to. To be completely honest, if the captioning at the bottom of the screen can bother someone to such a great extent, they aren't really that into the movie. If you are interested in a movie, you don't want to miss anything. So you don't waste your time looking down at the captions. No, you keep it on the action and the captions become just a side reference. For the people that like the captioning, they learn how to read the captions and watch the movie at the same time. That does sound like a unique skill, doesn't it.
Learn more about this author, Weston Thomason.
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No
What is a movie? A movie entertains audiences with the directors visionary techniques and translation of story to film. The film captivates viewers by what is happening on screen, not by what is said.
Is captioning good? Sure. There are those who are hard of hearing and need captioning to be able to appreciate what is happening in the movie. There is no denying that. But captioning takes away from one of the main elements of film making. Acting.
After the introduction of sound into the motion picture industry acting became more then being able to portray a character visually. Actors must now be able to 'become' their character in all mannerisms. Including vocally. When viewers are reading the dialog they can't 'hear' the character. Sure, they know what is going on, but the acting is absent from that. The 'voice' of the character is gone.
Captioning is good for some movies, particularly foreign movies. But the majority of films rely more on capturing on audience visually and captioning distracts from that. The viewers eyes are focused on reading the dialog rather then appreciating the art.
It is important for people to understand the amount of time and effort it takes to make a movie, and that watching a movie, even if it is purely visual, is more about the seen shot then the spoken word.
What is a movie? A movie entertains audiences with the directors visionary techniques and translation of story to film. The film captivates viewers by what is happening on screen, not by what is said.
Is captioning good? Sure. There are those who are hard of hearing and need captioning to be able to appreciate what is happening in the movie. There is no denying that. But captioning takes away from one of the main elements of film making. Acting.
After the introduction of sound into the motion picture industry acting became more then being able to portray a character visually. Actors must now be able to 'become' their character in all mannerisms. Including vocally. When viewers are reading the dialog they can't 'hear' the character. Sure, they know what is going on, but the acting is absent from that. The 'voice' of the character is gone.
Captioning is good for some movies, particularly foreign movies. But the majority of films rely more on capturing on audience visually and captioning distracts from that. The viewers eyes are focused on reading the dialog rather then appreciating the art.
It is important for people to understand the amount of time and effort it takes to make a movie, and that watching a movie, even if it is purely visual, is more about the scene then the spoken word.
Famous filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted saying, "The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises." Well, it's obvious that sound plays an important roll in motion pictures today and isn't going anywhere, but let's not add to the distraction by placing text on the bottom of every frame.
Most filmmakers today spend so much time and energy creating the scene and setting up the shot, making it the most believable and keeping to the directors vision, that the distraction of captioning is just not warranted. Films like Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Peter Jackson's King Kong are so much visual that a split second of distraction can take away from the most captivating of shots. Other films rely on what is shown on screen so much more then what is said, that missing a sequence can create confusion or even a complete misunderstanding of the story.
Captioning is great for a dvd feature but unless captioning is in the directors original vision of the film, exhibition of motion pictures should be without captioning. Now you should be able to see that all movies do not need to be captioned.
Learn more about this author, Craig Medlin.
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