Due
to a variety of reasons interior and exterior to film, foreign film viewership
increased dramatically in the North American market during the three decades
after the second world war. Despite the fact that Hollywood enjoyed hegemonic
control of the market, foreign films increasingly found North American
audiences over the course of the twentieth century. On a fundamental level,
film has always been about spectacle and visual tourism. The audience bears
witness to the previously unseen, the voyeuristic, and the fantastic, and every
image is always-already presented in a manner which makes it exotic. It should
be little surprise that viewership of foreign films is informed by numerous
market concerns which have come to define what is visible as foreign, as well
as the development of a critical and production discourse of national cinema as
a commercial export item. Cinema production became a more widely accessible
means of cultural expression as the development of increasingly affordable
camera technology has allowed film cultures to develop within economically
marginalised groups and countries. This process has spawned fertile cinemas
representing and advocating for the liminal and transgressive spaces within the
dominant Western culture which self-identify as necessarily political –
African-American cinema, queer cinema, feminist cinema, the numerous diasporic
cinemas, punk and DIY cinema, etc – as well as the emergence of domestic film
production in developing nations. Each of these marginal cinemas enjoys a
similarly exotic relationship to mainstream cinema audiences as do foreign
films. Furthermore, each of them renders their subjects into an object of
resistence to the oppressive gestures of identity interpellation contingent
with mainstream culture. The development of affordable production equipment
allowed the proliferation of these cinematic voices while the development of
affordable home viewing systems fertilised a market for their consumption,
which would not have been possible when film viewing was limited to theatrical
exhibition. Regardless of the means of dissemination, the drive for
representational authenticity remains fundamental for audiences and critics of
foreign films. Much of the critical discourse concerns the process of
authentically presenting a foreign film to a domestic audience, and issues of
language translation and distribution tend to be understood within a framework
of market influences and institutional power structures.
Several critics highlight the fact that there is no standard
manner of translation for the importation of foreign films, and there is
ultimately no critical consensus as to which method produces the best results.
If film as a visual medium is itself a language, how does the process of
subtitling or dubbing a film alter its reception? Technological processes for
translation, with the result of either subtitling or dubbing the film, further
complicate syntactic and aesthetic difficulties inherent to language
translation. The dubbing of a film is typically a process as technologically
and logistically complicated as the initial sound recording. In addition to a
script translation, voice actors and directors are required to interpret the
script within the visual framework of another actor’s performance. If executed
properly, a dubbed film can retain the narrative coherence and performative
nuance of the original while allowing for a larger viewing audience. Of course,
due to the expense and level of production value required to achieve a good
dub, most distributors of foreign films produce dubs of markedly lesser
quality. Indeed, English-language dubs of foreign films were often of such poor
(and laughable) quality that many critics prefer foreign-language films to be
subtitled rather than dubbed. Subtitling a film is relatively easy and
inexpensive to accomplish, but the process did present its own technological
challenges. With a few notable exceptions, such as anime and arthouse
audiences, most theatrical film markets demonstrate a preference for films
which have been dubbed. Contingent with the ‘tourist’ conception of foreign
film consumption which I outline above, these exceptions suggest that part of
the pleasure of experiencing subtitled foreign films comes from the exclusivity
attached to viewing the ‘correct’ version of the film.
A further element which rendered foreign films as ‘attractions’
for the marketplace was the fact that many of them were scandalously received,
typically due to a controversy of representation.[1]
When judged against their Hollywood counterparts, films from some foreign
(principally continental European) cinemas presented controversial images and
themes with a greater degree of naturalism and complexity. Foreign films were
produced outside of the production codes which censored Hollywood efforts, and
were often marketed for their sensational elements. The conception of foreign
cinema as an agent which transgresses puritanical local moralities was perhaps
most visible in films involving sexual themes and images, which by their nature
inherently tend toward the spectacular in visual representation. Their
consumption also represents the expression of an increasing cosmopolitan
sophistication on the part of the well-educated and upwardly-mobile urban
dwellers who were the typical customers of such exoticism.[2] As
a result, the popular reception of most foreign films which were not easily
sensationalised was largely limited to the arthouse market. For perhaps obvious
reasons, the distribution system imported certain films which could be
financial successful and excluded others which presented greater financial
risk. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the financial inputs required to
distribute foreign-language films served as an agent which cultivated a particular
conception of ‘foreign’ in domestic film audiences.
We should not attribute a negative evaluative gesture to the
fact that, at a reductive level, foreign films are interesting to many
audiences for their depiction of locations, actors, and cultures which are
themselves exotic and thus pleasurably experienced as a spectacle. Certainly,
the degree to which Otherness has itself been theorised within the rubric of
pleasure has been well documented in many critical literatures.[3]
Indeed, in this respect Abé Mark Nornes argues in Cinema Babel: Translating
Global Cinema that the pleasure of experiencing Otherness is akin to “the
‘attractions’ of the early cinema” (22). Viewing pleasures associated with
voyeurism and cultural tourism were certainly at play in bringing audiences to
foreign film exhibitions. The exotic could be viewed from a safe distance and
with a uniquely objective cleanliness which packaged certain national and
cultural characteristics while excising others. However, we must put this
rendering of the exotic into a historical perspective which allowed European
film to dominate North American experiences with foreign film. Other national
cinemas would only hesitantly be received by North American viewers, and remain
in limited distribution largely through diasporic immigrant communities
situated in large urban centres. The discursive project of the politics of
identity are indeed allowing an increasing number of marginalised cinemas to
become visible, and at least within specific interpretive communities the
Otherness of the foreign is being mediated. Importantly, however, the ideation
of Otherness is not itself without issue. As Bhaskar Sarkar points out in Postcolonial
and Transnational Perspectives, the danger inherent to such discursive
models in relation to cinema is that they can often present Hollywood codes of
production and reception as the normative mean against which all other
cinematic practises are adjudicated and calibrated. Indeed, national difference itself has been
rendered into a product for export, as “national or regional cinemas are being
globalised, not just in terms of financing and distribution, but also through
the performance ... of national distinction as exotic otherness for a global
audience” (136). A field of cinematic national stereotypes is continually
ritualised and presented as cultural artefacts and character tropes.[4]
Sarkar demonstrates that at times such stereotypes enter into the critical
discourse as some critics are not able to see beyond their Eurocentrism. He calls
for a discursive context for film studies in which cross-cultural analysis
becomes truly relative and self-critical, and warns that “as long as the
anxious discourse about cross-cultural analysis is predicated on the self/other
dichotomy, film studies cannot hope to move beyond its implicit orientalism”
(132). Film studies should indeed be self-conscious about its voyeuristic and
‘tourist’ tendencies by challenging the conception of a modernity which has
already excluded and circumscribed the identities of non-Western subjects.
Thus in Sarkar, as well as in the work of many other critics of
national cinemas, we can locate a desire to bear witness to the authentic. At
the critical level, if not perhaps also at the level of the viewing public for
foreign films, Sarkar implicitly rejects as inauthentic the process by which
cinematic subjects are objectified and made into a viewing spectacle. It is the
conceptual task of film studies to rationalise the ideation of film as
spectacle with the fact that the process of rendering human subjects as
spectacles is somewhat antithetical to the representational challenges
forwarded by critics of identity politics. Rey Chow’s argument in A Phantom
Discipline that cinema produces humans as phantom objects allows some degree
of compromise in this matter. She argues that “the visual is no longer a means
of verifying certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and
truths about this world conveyed linguistically” (1391). It is impossible for
film to avoid its tendency for spectacle, and film studies must therefore
examine the ontology of representation for the discipline to properly
legitimise itself as a critical school and not simply be marginalised as a
pedagogical or demonstration tool for other disciplines. The turn to identity
politics in film studies is politically retrogressive, for “by insisting that
artificial images somehow correspond to the lives and histories of cultural
groups, identity politics implicitly reinvests such images with an anthropomorphic
realism” (1393). One should not read into Chow’s iconoclasm a return to a
position of ethical relativism which would allow racist or stereotypical
representations of cultural difference to proliferate. Rather, her point that
film images are always-already artificial and that human subjects depicted on
film are phantom objects rather than real people is important in that it
highlights an ontological legitimacy for film studies that was lessened by the
fact that film had often been instrumentalised to service other critical
projects.
In order for foreign films to be viewed, they must be imported.
This process involves securing the legal rights for distribution and a
financial investment in order to translate the film into the local language.
Translation presents several conceptual difficulties to the critic. Most
prominent is the fact that any translation, even an exceptionally accurate one,
is a violence against the original text. The violence enacted is one of
circumscription and alteration, as the semiotic play inherent to the original
language is lost in translation. I wish presently to leave the methodological
arguments about language translation aside and focus on one ideation of the
violence of subtitling as stressed by Nornes in Cinema Babel. The fundamental
project of his book is to suggest a translation process which plays with
language in a manner akin to the original and for a translation to exist not
instead of the other, original film but “in the other’s place” (178). Nornes
suggests that the idea of an objective and accurate translation is a critical
misrepresentation which feigns “completeness in [its] own violent world” (156).
Fundamentally, translation is a negational enterprise, as the subtexts,
inferences, and semantic games at play in a language are often excised to
favour a clear, and often literal, interpretation of the text. Nornes uses
examples from Japanese translations of American films to demonstrate that some
translations ignore the political dynamics inherent to speech, while others
focus on narrative movement at the expense of character development or thematic
issues. We must however separate the violence of inadvertent meaning which
precipitates from lesser translations from the premeditated violence which
comes from attempts to render controversial films culturally acceptable. Nornes
argues that many translations of English-language films censor content from the
original film in order to render them more palatable to different markets. As
was the case with many Hollywood films produced after the 1970s, it was “the
whole flowery range of human speech” (216) which most often bore the mark of
censorship. Fundamentally, Nornes posits that translation is a corrupting
force, largely due to market forces which compel most producers to achieve
less-than-optimal results. He favours subtitling over dubbing, implicitly due
to the fact that the lesser production expense of the subtitling process allows
more resources to be deployed to produce an acceptable textual translation of
the script. His argument that dubbing is distracting due to the fact that it
renders actors into ventriloquist dummies has merit, even though it avoids the
support of an obvious critical parallel. In addition to its often comic effect,
dubbing signifies an ontological difference with the original film. The
ventriloquist act of replacing one voice for another renders the actor onscreen
into a parody of the real. The viewer is placed into an abject and uncanny
relationship with the cinematic human subject, who continually reminds the
viewer of the illusory nature of the medium. The dubbed actor exists in a
transitional space between human and non-human, life and death, subject and
object.
Nornes’s suggestion that when properly produced the dubbing
process can avoid this aesthetic weakness may be valid.[5]
However, he fails to account for the use of dubbing as a sound production
technique regularly deployed in domestic cinema, often to ‘punch in’ other
non-synchronous acting takes or when the action depicted onscreen precluded a
‘clean’ recording of dialogue.[6]
Highlighting the entirely negative qualities that result from an audience being
distanced from dubbed actors does not allow for the fact that some poorly
dubbed films enjoyed a great deal of popular success, although Nornes does
point out that the massive popular success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
is partially predicated on the fact that an English dub of the film was
distributed as widely as was the subtitled version. Additionally, some films
purposefully utilise sound dubbing to distance the viewer from the actor[7] or
for comedic effect.[8] The
pleasure experienced by devotees to certain genres such as the various Italian
horror subgenres, Japanese monster films, and Asian martial arts films can
partially be interpreted as a self-reflexive one. As these genres represent
cinemas which have largely been provincialised as direct-to-video releases
catering to niche interests outside of the dominant film and video distribution
channels, many such films were hastily or poorly translated (usually dubbed).
It is possible to suggest that a certain amount of viewing pleasure comes from
the reception of these films in what Nornes would describe as a corrupt state.
Indeed, part of the sense of exclusivity which serves to define fan allegiance
to many cult subgenres involves the discovery of a transgressive pleasure
hidden from or occluded by mainstream tastes. Many of the films in the
subgenres listed above have lower-than-average production values, so a mediocre
dub might not detract from a film but rather add a gloss of kitsch to
it. Audience reception of a film might in this capacity be inadvertently
improved by a poor translation rather than by an accurate rendition of the
original script. In this context, a critical extension of Ien Ang’s suggestion
in Living Room Wars that “communicative practices do not necessarily
have to arrive at common meanings at all” (167) would allow the pleasure
experienced by experiencing certain films by means of poor translations to be
adequately conceptualised. It is therefore possible to require that part of
Nornes’s critical project account for the taint of translation not solely
within a negative evaluation as a compared to an authentic original, but also
within a rubric which allows the taint itself to positively contribute to
meaningful interpretation.
The international popularity of film dubbing, which more
thoroughly damns Nornes’s claim that dubbing must by its nature render actors
as ventriloquist dummies to the detriment of the film, is implied by Ravi
Vasudevan’s analysis of Indian cinema in National Pasts and Futures: Indian
Cinema.[9]
Domestic distribution of Indian cinema presents a unique difficulty in that
there is not a single unifying language in the country. Indian films undergo a
translation process even before they are exported to other national markets.
Vasudevan posits that dubbing is commonplace in India and allows films to be
popularly disseminated across linguistic boundaries. Until the Indian film
consumer, along with those of every other national and cultural context, is
interrogated as to whether or not they view dubbing as a negative or
inauthentic process, we must ultimately reserve subscribing to the
universalising idea that dubbing inherently lessens a film. If, for example, we
are to forward a criticism which accounts for the acceptance of subtitles and
film dubs in certain film markets and not others, is it possible to locate
preference for either along class divisions?[10] If
dubbing is allowed within parody as well as within certain genres and film
practices, should not its origination but rather its deployment be the chief
concern for theorists of film translation? As a final critique of his work,
Nornes fails to account for the fact that his arguments against dubbing remain
valid only for live-action films. International viewers do not interpret
dubbing to be an issue for animated films, attested to by the global popularity
of certain animated characters[11] and
animation companies such as Disney. It is possible that as computer animation
becomes increasingly used in (especially non-action) films, audiences will come
to normalise and accept film dubs.
To its credit, the point of Cinema Babel is not to deny
the mantle of authenticity from films which are translated by being dubbed.
Rather, Nornes wishes to promote the idea of a subversive practise of
subtitling which seeks to dislocate itself from the conveyance of simple
narrative information. Extrapolating from his argument about market
compulsions, unique anomalies, such as Life is Beautiful, Pan’s Labyrinth,
and Amélie, which achieve financial success in North America despite
retaining the language track of their original production, signify for their
audience a fashionable interest in a ‘more authentic’ form of another culture
rendered exotic rather than a structural change in the consumption of foreign
films, and that a conception of authenticity was of importance for the success
of these particular films and not for a dubbed film such as Ong-Bak.
Nornes’s analysis of the subculture of anime fan translations points to a
utopia where translation, when developed outside of market compulsions, can
achieve a pure hybridisation with the original. The basis for this logic is
sound, but one must question why this democratic, ‘open-source’ process – which
would ultimately free film producers and distributors from the labour and
expense of translation and simultaneously allow the viewing of foreign films
not yet subject to the market for translated films – is not more widely visible
in cinema appreciation. Nornes’s argument does indeed have merit, but it must
be interpreted within the limitations of its scope. Translation can often
involve more than just audio cues and dialogue interpretation. While not within
the scope of this present review, it should be noted in conclusion that more
overt forms of censorship do indeed take place to render a film acceptable to a
given market. Typically, scenes depicting acts of violence or sex deemed to
transgress local obscenity laws are excised or altered.[12]
Other forms of implicit censorship abound in productions which seek an
international audience, and often take the form of removing or changing traces
of locality such as distinct accents, geography, or architecture. It is likely
that all of these elements in addition to linguistic translation serve equally
to render films palatable to different markets, and they should therefore be
included in a critical discourse of the conceptual interplay between ‘domestic’
and ‘foreign’.
[1] Regarding
representation, I do not wish to suggest an ontological controversy but rather
a moral one. A comprehensive listing of the numerous transgressions made by foreign
films would indeed be long, so the reduction of the field of
controversy to scenes of nudity and the depiction of sex and violence will have
to suffice. A short
list of films which were notoriously received in North America include I Am
Curious
(Yellow), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Romance,
and In the Realm of the Senses.
[2] One can see a
parallel between the popularity of many sexually-themed and visually
titillating foreign films of the 1970s with the acceptance of pornography into the
mainstream during the same period.
[3] See, for example,
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge.
[4] Witness, for
example, the long cinematic history of coupling American action heros – brash
and charismatic individualists who persevere
through physical effort – with reserved and intellectual British ‘sidekicks’, who often
play professionals (often professors or doctors) or elders. Such Apollo
and Dionysus figurations are common in
adventure and fantasy films produced in America and Britain in the decades
following the second world war.
[5] For Julia
Kristeva, the abject is situated outside of the symbolic order. Viewer
anxieties elicited by poorly dubbed films signal the trauma experienced by bearing witness to the
violent removal of subjectivity from the actor rendered as
object by the loss of his or her own voice. Thus, an effective dub might allow
a viewer to
overcome this problem by returning to the viewer the illusion of the actor’s
subjectivity.
[6] A further example
highly related to the theme of this present survey involves the importation into Hollywood of
foreign-language actors who are not fluent in English. Actors such as
Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jet Li, and Arnold Schwarzenegger often redubbed their dialogue
in studio with the help of vocal coaches and
phonetically-written scripts.
[7] See, for example,
Felini’s Satyricon, which dubbed all of the dialogue and effectively
alienated the viewer from the actors onscreen and thus problematised the
representation of historical subjects.
[8] Usually, these
films are parodies of foreign film genres, such as Kung Fu Hustle.
[9] I wish to invoke
this article despite exorcising a reservation about the author’s ideation of “a
woman’s film” (121) as an essentialised
interpretive category.
[10] This question is
contingent with a reversal of class expectation, wherein the audience for
subtitled films which tends to come from urban middle-class intellectuals and professionals
demands a far less capital- intensive process of
translation than the populist and more expensive dub.
[11] The popular American
sitcom The Simpsons has been translated and exported to many global
audiences, including a version of the show whose
content is localised for the Québécois market.
[12] Notable examples
include the censored North American releases of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999
and Breaking the
Waves in 1997.
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