Subtitles reduce enjoyment
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it: subtitled films are terrible. Cool your jets. I don’t mean the films themselves are terrible. Just the annoyingly obscured, laughably translated, risibly distracting subtitled versions.
If I wanted to read, I’d stay home with a book.
‘‘ How dare you say such a thing?’’ Cinephiles cry.
‘‘Don’t you know La Dolce Vita has subtitles? Los Amores Perros? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? For God’s sake, how are you supposed to watch Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries?!’’
I admit I’ve watched those films, with subtitles and enjoyed them. Even the Bergman one.
But film is a visual art form, which isn’t something you can concentrate on when your eyes are locked to the bottom of the screen scanning text as the actor gattling-guns through dialogue.
How distracting is it when there are five words of English for a 20-second spurt of Gallic humour or Italian passion?
You know you’re missing out on something. And because English speakers are terrible at bothering to learn foreign languages, we may never know what.
Thankfully, or perhaps annoyingly, since it confirms my fears about subtitling, there are some smarty pants among us who can speak more than one language.
That’s how we know, according to film buff David Wagner of NPR.org, that the ‘‘I met a monster in the spider bush’’, which appears on the DVD version of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, should really say, ‘‘I saw an old woman in the forest’’.
The mistakes can be more subtle.
The DVD version of Swedish vampire masterpiece Let The Right One In gives child vampire Eli’s thrall-cum-molester Haken a limp ‘‘sorry’’ after he leaves Eli starving one night, rather than the desperate ‘‘ forgive me’’ he actually says.
Call it nitpicking, but in a film like Let The Right One In, where nothing is what it seems, those subtleties are crucial.
Of course, some film- makers can take the annoying and turn it into a virtue.
In Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino uses subtitles to create a sense of dread.
In one tense scene, German is left untranslated, aligning us with the French-Jewish anti-hero, who can’t understand the Nazis either.
Woody Allen has played around with subtitles, too.
In Annie Hall, while the two pretentious leads bluff their way through an awkward flirtation, their neurotic, inner monologues are translated below.
As for foreign language films, Russian vampire epic Night Watch uses subtitles as a form of decoration, scattering them over the screen to bleed in and out like the smoky remnants of the nightmare world the vampires inhabit.
So OK, not all subtitles are evil, enjoyment destroyers. Besides, the other option – dubbing films into English – is not really an option at all, unless you want to turn foreign-language films into unwitting comedies.
Guess we’re stuck with reading at the cinema then.