when they know in advance
that the movie is not in
English. Unfortunately, this
bias means that many great
movies never reach audiences
outside of major metropolitan
areas. Nonetheless, most film
lovers would rather be
distracted by reading subtitles
than by an imposed and often
awkward imposition of one
performance onto another.
In director-screenwriter
Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck’s The Lives of
Others(2006), which explores
the repressive surveillance of
East German citizens by the
Ministry of State Security
(known as the Stasi), language
is unusually important. Spying or wiretapping activities were
ubiquitous in East Germany
in the 1980s, and people were often jailed or murdered
for what they said. Thus, it was essential for the movie to
have subtitles that conveyed precisely what the characters
were saying so that the viewer could follow the story and
evaluate the moral dilemma that is at its heart. Fortunately,
its subtitles are succinct, clear, and as faithful as they can
be to the original German. Indeed, they are so good that
the scriptwriter might have had eventual subtitling in
mind when he wrote it.
In the scene pictured here, the movie must make it clear
that the Stasi routinely used surveillance and torture to
achieve its goals. It does this by intercutting between two
events: an earlier one in which Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler
(Ulrich Mühe) conducts a lengthy interrogation of a prisoner
(unidentified), who finally begs, “Please, let me sleep!” [1] and
a later one in which Wiesler explains his methods to students
and one of them, Benedict Lehmann (Ludwig Blochberger,
right), speaks out against the practice of sleep deprivation,
saying “It’s inhuman” [2]. The explicit, objective language
in both scenes is clearly conveyed in the subtitles. After
Lehmann’s remark, we see Wiesler marking an “X” next
to the man’s name on his class roster, a gesture full of
implications. Wiesler then tells the class that torture is
sometimes necessary to get a prisoner to tell the truth.
These subtitled images convey the moral dilemma that is
at the heart of this film.144 CHAPTER 4 ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
12Narrative in foreign filmsThe narratives of most movies
we see depend on language——the spoken language of
dialogue and narration——but we are presented with a
different viewing situation when the movie is shot in a
foreign language. In that case, we have to rely either on
subtitles or rerecording (also known as dubbing). Subtitles,
which provide a visual translation into English of a film’s
dialogue or narration, are usually displayed at the bottom of
the screen. Rerecording involves actors (sometimes the
actual actors we see on the screen, but more likely other
professional actors who are fluent in spoken English) who
watch the footage, synchronize their delivery as closely as
possible to the lip movements of the actor on the screen,
and reread the lines. Obviously, rerecording provides a more
accurate account of the film’s language, but the process——
which often obscures a significant portion of the original
performance——is also expensive, so subtitling remains the
standard, particularly with those foreign films that have a
limited release in the United States and, thus, cannot bear
the cost of rerecording. The challenge with subtitling is to
provide, in a limited graphic way, a viable summary of what is
being said on the screen. However, in an effort to have the
subtitles match the action on the screen, the subtlety, idiom,
and nuance inherent in spoken language are often, and of
necessity, neglected by the person supervising their
preparation. While subtitles (or close-captioned devices in
selected theaters) are essential for hearing-impaired viewers,
most American mainstream audiences avoid subtitled movies