Subtitles

by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: October 28, 2008

As a child of the sixties, I was subjected to an early diet of badly dubbed TV shows and movies.

This was back in the days when TV stations closed off overnight and the only viewing between midnight and dawn was a hallucinogenic blur of colour called a test pattern accompanied by classical music. Kids viewing kicked off the day and invariably this was either "The Thunderbirds", those floppy jointed heroes rocketing around the world saving people from all manner of disaster, or a dubbed Japanese sword fest called something like "Return of the Ninja", with cloaked figures leaping into trees, disappearing or despatching their foes with elaborate flourishes of their samurai swords. Brilliant, yet often painful to watch, mainly because the dubbing was so far out of kilter that it was hard to work out which characters were saying what. And this is even if you could understand the heavily accented English delivered in gruff staccato fashion.

Sub-titles would definitely have been helpful. Then again, as a kid watching this stuff, it was all about the adventure and goodies (in this case a dubious association given that ninjas were historically hired assassins) triumphing over baddies. My parents must have found it very entertaining to watch my brother and I duel it out with sticks and try to mimic the poor match between mouth movements and voices. A couple of decades later, I had the fortune to work with a fellow who could do this very well and it was brilliant to watch. His efforts were so clever that it made me wonder whether the shows weren't in fact dubbed at all, that the producers just employed a bunch of actors with the same kind of voice wizardry.

I was also a child born of non-English speaking parents and was subjected to a steady diet of foreign language movies. In the 1970s, a foreign language TV station commenced broadcasting in Australia. Up until then, programming on the free to air stations was ostensibly a mix of Australian, US and British movies and TV shows. Like the new found hankering for Italian, Greek and Chinese food, Australian tastes were diversifying, helped along by a flood of migrants mostly from Europe after the end of the Second World War, and there was deemed a sufficient market to sustain a broadcaster that restricted itself to foreign language movies and sport (usually the round ball version of football - called soccer in some parts of the world).

I remember watching German and Hungarian movies with subtitles and see my parents have an occasional giggle at some of the stilted translations. The dubbed movies, often classics that they were familiar with, they considered unwatchable. Their view, that the whole appeal of the movie was lost in the translation. The nuance was lost, and not just because the dubbed voices usually sounded like they were reading from a card and failed to put any emotion into their voices, but also because some foreign languages just don't translate well into English or actually need the foreign language for context. If you think about it, it is like watching a war movie where all the German and Japanese soldiers speak with American or British accents. The movie loses all credibility.

In my view, watching a dubbed movie is much the same as eating a Chinese or Italian meal prepared by one of your countrymen from a recipe. It kind of looks and seems the same, but the taste isn't quite right and you know it is not the real deal. Something is missing. I guess that is why we used to drive an hour into inner Sydney to eat at restaurants renowned for authentic cuisine prepared by chefs trained in that country. Better still, if the menu was in a foreign language, you were served by wait staff with barely a smattering of English and the place was full of obvious ex-pats from the country in question seeking out a meal that reminds them of their homeland. Invariably, my parents were right and we all paid for the times they were wrong by taking a little journey on the porcelain bus.

As an adult, I do enjoy Australian, US and British movies and TV shows; however there is often a formulaic quality with them. They too often have to pander to studio executives to fit an expected demographic to try and turn a profit. Risks are few and they lack the edge that smaller independent, usually foreign studios, can bring. There is also the propensity to recycle old storylines, often merely a remake for the sake of producing a remake, and the interminability of sequels. I blame George Lucas and "Star Wars" for that scourge. Even though the Star Wars trilogy (now IV, V and VI) was well made and the latter episodes held their own in terms of quality of both content and film-making, it spurred a belief that the mere fact of being a sequel to a successful movie will be enough to shore up its own profitability. Then there is all the merchandising associated with movie franchises, just another revenue stream to enhance profits.

I was scanning IMDB last year and noticed a movie in their Top 250 list that I'd never heard of. "Cidade de Deus" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317248/ is a 2002 Brazilian production set in the City of God slum area of Rio de Janeiro. The story starts out in the 1960s and centres on two children, Rocket and Lil Ze, who have very different hopes and dreams of the future. One wants to become a photographer and escape the poverty and misery that is life in the City of God. The other can see no way out and wants to become its lord and master, which in the slums means a ruthless drug lord. The City of God is a brutal and unflinching world; where children perpetrate horrendous acts of violence against all and sundry, including each other. There is no room for compassion or pity, mainly because those thoughts are weaknesses that are often the difference between life and death.

The movie is in Portuguese and the DVD came with a dubbed English version. I watched the sub-titled version first and had to admit that it lived up to its hype. The camera work has a hand held visceral feel to it that serves to plant you firmly in the middle of the unpleasantness to thoroughly engage the viewer. Clever editing and camera angles serve to enhance the quality of this production. It is a powerful piece of film-making that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and doesn't let go until the final credits. It will make you cringe, weep and smile in equal measure and, once the final credits have scrolled past, it will make you think for a long time afterwards, mainly about the choices that we all make and how life can be very different if we had made just slightly different choices, but mostly about the fragile hold that we have on life and how lucky we are to live in circumstances where choices do not usually carry life or death implications.

Then I watched the dubbed version. It may have well been a case of once bitten, twice shy, that in viewing the movie the first time, it lost its impact and originality, but I don't think so. Quality and translation issues aside, you lose the connection and intimacy that made the sub-titled version such a powerful and emotive piece of work. Obviously, sub-titles can be a distracting influence as well, but I personally find poor dubbing more distracting than reading sub-titles. Sadly, nothing is ever going to replace being able to understand the movie in its native tongue, thereby gaining the superior perspective that my parents found so amusing with their German and Hungarian titles. Then again, most of us don't have the time or inclination to learn a whole language for the mere sake of enjoying a movie in such a way.

In my view, sub-titles are an effective compromise, allowing you hear the spoken tongue with their translated equivalent appearing momentarily on the screen. Watch enough foreign language movies and you'll pick up snippets of those languages, especially the curse words. Which I can say occasionally comes in handy. If you work in a tourism-related industry, or any customer service position, it is helpful to know when you are being sworn at or insulted as it is amazing how their attitudes change for the better when they realise that they have been caught out. Dubbed movies deprive you of these little opportunities.

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