A few days ago I mentioned (or rather hinted at) my preference for subtitling foreign-language films, rather than dubbing them. Maybe it’s because my interests lie more with sound than vision, I dunno, but sound is an important aspect of cinema for me. Even in the most sympathetically and accurately dubbed dialogue, there are nuances of acoustic space and reverberation which my ears pick up and register as being ‘wrong’. Of course, even the “real” dialogue on a film may well have been added later (ADR, or Automatic Dialogue Replacement) but my experience suggests that ADR recordings are generally far more successful, in terms of representing acoustic distance and space, than any foreign language dubbing job.
And that’s before we get to the comical discrepancies between what you see and what you hear. Unless you’re getting into some Brecht-style “Verfremdung”, it’s good to see the characters’ mouths forming the same words as you’re hearing on the soundtrack. Dubbed films just remind me of watching earnest Eastern European children’s dramas on TV during school holidays, complete with the disembodied Home Counties tones of the voiceover actors.
Whatever example of World Cinema1 I happen to be watching2, I want to hear the original language… the screenwriter, ideally, has used that particular selection of words for more than just their meaning. There’s a musicality in the spoken word, both rhythm and pitch, and by obscuring that musicality, you destroy an element of the work. The only perfect solution is to learn the foreign language in question, so that you can experience the film fully on all levels, but in the real world, subtitling makes for a good compromise. It leaves the original film undamaged, while allowing us linguistically challenged folks a “way in”.
With either method, of course, you’re at the mercy of the translator, which reminds me why I started writing this… to link to a fine piece on the subject of dubbing/subtitling by my musical friend Leandro Fanzone.
[1] I hate that term as much as I hate the term “World Music”, but you know what I mean.
[2] And considering the size of the film industries of France and Japan, countries whose languages I speak (a) barely, and (b) not at all, there’s a fair chance my World Cinema (arrggh!) experience will require some sort of translation crutch.