Subversive Pleasures Bakhtin Cultural CR

THE CINEMA AFTER BABEL- 35
LANGUAGE, DIFFERENCE,
POWER
BY ELLA SHOCHAT AND ROBERT STAM
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on April 1, 2015

T H E R E A L I T Y O F language difference, the world-wide babble of
mutually incomprehensible tongues and idioms, entails consequences 1
For Bakhtin's ideas
for the cinema which have yet to be explored. While contemporary theo- concerning language,
see Problems of
retical work has concerned itself with film as language, little attention Dostoevski's Poetics,
has been directed to the role of language and language difference within Ann Arbor, Ardis,
1973; Rabelais and His
film. Working out of the tradition of Saussure-derived linguistics, cine- World, Cambridge,
MIT Press, 1968; and
semioticians have examined the analogies and disanalogies between The Dialogic
'natural language' and film as a discursive practice, but they have not Imagination, Austin,
University of Texas
delineated the impact on the cinema of the prodigality of tongues in Press, 1981. See also V
which it is produced, spoken and received. Our purpose here will be to N Volosinov, Marxism
and the Philosophy of
explore, in a necessarily speculative fashion, the myriad ways in which Language, New York,
the sheer fact of linguistic diversity impinges on film as a signifying prac- Seminar Press, 1973.
The authorship of this
tice and on the cinema as an 'encratic' institution deeply embedded in last is disputed; there
multiform relations of power. ' is considerable
evidence that Bakhtin
By language, we refer, first ofall, to the clearly distinct idioms - English, wrote substantial
portions or at least
French, Russian, Arabic-recognised as linguistic unities by grammars worked in extremely
and lexicons. We refer as well, however, to the multiple 'languages' inhab- close collaboration
with Volosinov. See
iting a single culture or a single speech-community, at least in so far as also the 'Forum on
these intra-linguistic differences bear on questions of inter-cultural film Mikhail Bakhtin', a
special issue of Critical
reception. Here we follow the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom the Inquiry (vol 10 no 2,
'crude' boundaries separating natural languages ('polyglossia') represent December 1983)
devoted to Bakhtin, as
only one extreme on a continuum. For Bakhtin, every apparently unified well as the Revue de
linguistic community is also characterised by 'heteroglossia', or 'many- VUniversite d'Ottawa/
University of Ottawa
languagedness', in which the idioms of different generations, classes, Review, vol 53 no 1,
races, genders and locales compete for ascendancy. For Bakhtin, lan- January/March 1983.
guage is the arena for the clash of differently oriented social accents; each
word is subject to conflicting pronunciations, intonations and allusions.
Every language is a set of languages, and every speaking subject opens
onto a multiplicity of languages. All communication entails an appren-
ticeship in the language of the other, a kind of translation or coming to
terms with meaning on the boundaries of one's own set of languages and
those of another. Thus inter-linguistic translation has as its counterpart
the j«rra-linguistic 'translation' required for dialogue between diverse
individuals and between diverse communities.1
Contemporary thought has been haunted by the idea of language. Cen-
36 tral to the project of thinkers as diverse as Russell, Wittgenstein, Cassirer,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and even Derrida, is the idea that language so
completely structures our grasp of the world that 'reality' can be seen as an
effect of linguistic convention. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
language is culture, and those who 'inhabit' different languages might be
said to inhabit different worlds. The grammatical and semantic fields of
a language, indeed its entire conceptual framework, install speakers in
habitual grooves of perception and expression which predispose them to
experience the world in culturally specific ways. This linguistic 'rela-
tivity principle' has as its corollary the view of all languages as funda-
mentally equal. For contemporary linguistics, languages do not exist in a
hierarchy of value. The notion of'primitive' languages, rooted in the

evolutionary assumption that the complex develops from the simple,
here lacks pertinence since every language is perfectly suited to the cul-
tural needs and cultural reality of its speakers.
But if all languages are created equal, some are made 'more equal than
others'. Inscribed within the play of power, languages are caught up in
artificial hierarchies rooted in cultural hegemonies and political oppres-
sion. English, for example, as a function of its colonising status, became
the linguistic vehicle for the projection of Anglo-American power, tech-
nology and finance. Hollywood, especially, came to incarnate a linguistic
hubris bred of empire. Presuming to speak for others in its native idiom,
2
One might easily posit Hollywood proposed to tell the story of other nations not only to Ameri-
an analogy here cans, but also for the other nations themselves, and always in English. In
between English as the
international language, Cecil B De Mille epics, both the ancient Egyptians and the Israelites
and dominant cinema spoke English, and so, for that matter, did God. In Hollywood, the
as the film language,
with alternative idioms Greeks of The Odyssey, the Romans of Ben Hur, Cleopatra of Egypt,
being reduced to the Madame Bovary of France, Count Vronsky of Russia, Helen of Troy
status of 'dialects'.
and Jesus of Nazareth all had as their lingua franca the English of South-
3
ern California. Hollywood both profited from and itself promoted the
See Christian Metz,
Language and Cinema, universalisation of the English language as the idiom of speaking sub-
The Hague, Mouton, jects, thus contributing indirectly to the subtle erosion of the linguistic
1974. One element not
emphasised by Metz is autonomy of other cultures. By virtue of its global diffusion, Hollywood
the interarticulation of became an agent in the dissemination of Anglo-American cultural hege-
written materials in
the image with the mony.2
specifically cinematic
codes. The diverse
directionality of the
scripts of different
languages-the fact Theoretical Preamble: Language in the Cinema
that Hebrew and
Arabic are read
'horizontally' from Before exploring the question of language difference and power, we
right to left, for must first examine the theoretical basis of our discussion. That we can
example, or that
Chinese is read in consider the role of language difference in film at all is made possible by
vertical columns-can
inflect camera
the fact that language itself variably penetrates the diverse 'tracks' of the
movements over cinema. At what points, then, does language, and therefore language dif-
script. Wayne Wang's
Chan is Missing (1982), ference, 'enter' the cinema? Metz in Language and Cinema stresses the
for example, linguistic character of two of the five tracks-recorded phonetic sound
repeatedly pans down
vertically over Chinese and writing in the image.3 (These two, we might add, can exchange
written materials. places, with written material substituting for phonetic dialogue, as in the
celebrated 'dialogue of the book covers' in Godard's Une Femme est une
Femme). Language, at least potentially, however, pervades all the filmic 37
tracks. The music and noise tracks, for example, can embrace linguistic
elements. Recorded music is often accompanied by lyrics, and even
when not so accompanied, can evoke lyrics. The purely instrumental
version of'Melancholy Baby' in Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) elicits in the
spectator the mental presence of the words of that song. Kubrick in Doc-
tor Strangelove (1964) exploits this evocation of remembered lyrics to
ironic effect when he superimposes the well-known melody of 'Try a
Little Tenderness' on images of nuclear bombers. Even apart from
lyrics, the allegedly abstract art of music is permeated with semantic
values. Musicologist J J Nattiez, for example, sees music as deeply
embedded in social discourses, including verbal discourses.4 Nor are

recorded noises necessarily 'innocent' of language. Setting aside the
question of the cultural relativity of the boundaries separating noise 4
See J J Nattiez,
from music from language-one culture's 'noise' may be another cul- Fondements d'une
ture's 'language', as in the case of African talking drums-we discover semiologie de la
musiqus, Paris, Union
the frequent imbrication of noise and language in countless films. The Generate d'Editions,
stylised murmur of conversing voices in classical Hollywood restaurant 1975.
sequences renders human speech as background noise, while Jacques
Tati films give voice to an international esperanto of aural effects - 5
See 'Le percu et le
vacuum cleaners that wheeze and vinyl seats that go 'pooof-character- nomme', first
published in Pour une
istic of the post-modernist environment. esihitique sans entrave
-Melanges Mikel
But the linguistic presence cannot be confined to the soundtrack or to Dufrenne, Paris,
written materials within the image: the image track itself is infiltrated by Editions 10/18, 1975
and reprinted in Essais
the ubiquitous agency of language. This infiltration of the iconic by the Semiotiques, Paris,
symbolic, to borrow Peircean terminology, takes many forms, ranging Klincksieck, 1977.
The concluding
from the perceptual-lexical to the more diffusely anthropological. Per- section of the essay is
ception itself is oriented by the linguistic. The codes of iconic recogni- translated as 'Aural
Objects', in Yale
tion and designation, as Metz points out in 'The Perceived and the French Studies no 60,
Named', structure the very vision of the spectator who thus brings lan- 1980, a special issue
entitled Cinema/
guage, as it were, to the image.5 So tyrannical is the hold of linguistic Sound.
form on our visual orientation that we perceive even lines and shapes as
The 'dialogue of the

book covers' in Une
Femme est une
Femme.
38 'straight' or 'curved' or 'zigzag' according to the classificatory sugges-
6
Sec Boris tiveness of the linguistic terms themselves. Our language provides us
Eikhenbaum,
'Problems of Film with orienting metaphors having to do with the conceptualisation of
Stylistics', in Screen, space (having power is to be 'at the top') and the spatialisation of emotion
Autumn 1974, vol 15
no 3, pp 7-32. (happy is 'up'). Verbal discourse structures the very formation of images.
Boris Eikhenbaum, viewing film metaphor as parasitic on verbal
7
See Stephen Heath,
metaphor, speaks of image translations of linguistic tropes.6 Spectators
'Language, Sight and understand visual metaphors only when a corresponding metaphoric
Sound*, in Stephen
Heath and Patricia expression exists in their own language; otherwise, the metaphor goes
Mellencamp (eds), unperceived. In a still broader sense, the anthropological figures genera-
Cinema and Language,
Frederick, Md, ted by a language or culture, such as the structural metaphor linking
University light and intelligence in classical Greek, or the association of darkness

Publications of
America, 1983. with obscurity and the sinister (as in Freud's 'dark continent of female
sexuality', with its suggestive linking of Africa and Woman) shape our
8
A number of critics
vision and thinking in ways yet to be charted.
have commented on The verbal-visual nexus has suggestive ramifications for film practice.
the patterned doubling
of this opening Camera angles can literalise specific locutions such as 'look up to' or
sequence. See, for 'oversee' or 'look down on'. In such 'literalisms', as Stephen Heath
example, Ronald
Christ, 'Strangers on a points out, the visual impact derives from strict fidelity to a linguistic
Train: The Pattern of
Encounter', in Albert J
metaphor.7 Vandamm's coded threat to Eve Kendall in North by North-
La Valley (ed), Focus on west (1959)-This matter is best disposed of from a great height'-is
Hitchcock, Englewood
CUffs, Prentice-Hall,
literalised by Hitchcock's abrupt self-referential shift to a high angle.
1972. Hitchcock's films, in fact, constantly highlight the interface of word and
image. At times, whole sequences and even entire films are structured by
9
Hitchcock further
linguistic formulations. The Wrong Matt (1957) is informed in its entirety
develops the trope of by the quibbling sentence: 'Manny plays the bass'. He plays the bass,
the 'birds' eye view' in quite literally, in the Stork Club, but he also plays the role of the base
The Birds, this time in
both aural and visual when he is falsely accused and forced to mimic the actions of the real
terms. For more on thief. The overture sequence of Strangers on a Train (1951), similarly,
verbally informed
structures in both orchestrates an elaborate verbal and visual play on the expressions 'criss-
Hitchcock and cross' and 'double-cross' (crossed railroad tracks, crossed legs, crossed
BuHuel, see Robert
Stam, 'Hitchcock and tennis raquets, tennis doubles, double scotches, alternating montage as
Bunuel: Desire and double, lap-dissolve as a 'criss-cross' of images and so forth).8 Hitchcock's
the Law', Studies in the
Literary Imagination cameo appearance, significantly, shows him carrying a double bass, in a
Fall 1983. film featuring two doppelgdnger characters, each, in his way, 'base'. At
times, the interplay of verbal-visual puns and equivalences becomes at
once subliminal and pervasive. The first post-credit shots of Psycho, for
example, subtly prefigure that film's obsession with avian imagery by
literalising the notion of a 'bird's eye view' of a city appropriately named
Phoenix, while the air-borne crane shots visually mimic the soaring
movements of a bird through the air.9
At times, language enters the cinematic experience in ways only
obliquely related to the five tracks of the film text. Within the apparatus
itself, in certain locales and at certain historical moments, intermediary
speaking figures have been employed to negotiate, as it were, between
text and audience. Noel Burch has emphasised the silent-period Lectu-
rer whose role was to construct continuity and comment on the action
and thus orient audience response, and in To the Distant Observer he
-i^mi
•.>.'.
40 speaks of the Lecturer's Japanese cousins, the Benshi who read and inter-
10
See Noel Burch, To preted filmic images for their narrative content, avatars of an institution
the Distant Observer:
Form and Meaning in
which persisted into the late 1930s.10 We might also speak in this context
the Japanese Cinema, of those films which create a space, as it were, for dialogue with the spec-
Berkeley, University tator. Radicalising Bela Balazs' call, in the '30s, for post-screening politi-
of California Press,
1979. See also Noel cal discussions, the Argentinian film-makers Solanas and Getino in La
Burch, "Approaching
Japanese Film', in
Horn de los Homos {Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) incorporate into the text
Stephen Heath and programmed interruptions of the projections to allow for debate con-
Patricia
cerning the central political issues raised by the film. Thus the cinematic
Mellenchamp (eds),
Cinema and apparatus, which generally favours only deferred communication, opens
Language, op cit, for itself up to person-to-person dialogue, in a provocative amalgam of
some brief
speculations on the cinema/theatre/political rally. The passive and silent cinematic experi-

role of language in
constructing what
ence, that rendezvous manque between exhibitionist and voyeur, is
Burch calls the transformed into a 'theatrical' and linguistic encounter between human
'profound otherness'
of classical Japanese
beings present in the flesh.
cinema. Along with such programmed linguistic interventions, language
enters the cinematic experience in other, more extemporaneous ways.
11
Some New York Dialogue, already present in the film, and metaphorically evoked in the
theatres have
institutionalised
'dialogue' between film and spectator, at times becomes literal through
silence with pre- the impromptu verbal participation of the audience. This participation
feature intertitles:
'Talking during the
can take a multiplicity of forms. Boisterous talk sometimes disturbs the
Projection of the Film reverential silence of the art theatres, behaviour that is quickly shushed
Disturbs Others:
Please Be
or reprimanded, as if a religious rite were being desecrated.11 (The ideal
Considerate.' in the cinema, Eikhenbaum points out, is not to sense the presence of the
(Apparently the other spectators, but to be alone with the film, to become deaf and dumb
cinematic institution
has links not only to to the rest of the world.12) In some communities, conventions of spectat-
the theatre and ing are such that the 'naive' audience is encouraged to address verbal
religion, but also to
the library.) warnings or approval to the actors/characters on the screen (the rest of
us, Metz suggests, confine such thoughts to the privacy of our minds);
12
See Boris thus the collectivity celebrates its own existence. At times, a full-scale
Eikhenbaum, op cit. dialogue can break out among the spectators themselves in the form of
repartee or argument; the film, in such cases, loses its diegetic hold over
the audience as the spectacle is displaced from screen to audience, pro-
ducing a form of distanciation generated not by the text but by its receiv-
ers. A similar distanciation takes place when paralinguistic expressions
such as feminist hisses question and relativise the macho wisdom of a
paternalistic 'hero'. In all these cases, the presence of language within
the movie theatre substantially modifies the experience of the film.
This linguistic assertiveness on the part of the audience takes extreme
forms within the cult film phenomenon. In the '60s, audiences at Hum-
phrey Bogart retrospectives began to deliver Bogart's lines in unison,
verbally reinforcing the text and at times anticipating specific words and
gestures (punctuating Bogart's climactic pistol shots in Key Largo, for
example, with rhythmic chants of 'more! more! more!'). This trend
reached its apotheosis with the US cult of the Rocky Horror Picture
Show, in which an audience of repeat-viewers elaborated a dynamically
evolving parallel parody text, combining the synched repetition of songs
and lines from the film with interpolated phrases which 'play ofF and
mock the official dialogue, in a kind of subversive pop culture equivalent
to the traditional school memorisation of classical texts. 41
13
Even when verbal language is absent from both film and movie theatre, See ibid, p 14.
semantic processes take place in the mind of the spectator through what
14
the Russian formalists called 'inner speech'. Inner speech, in this sense, Sec L S Vygotsky,
Thought and
refers to the intra-psychic signification, the pulse of thought which is Language,
implicated in language. Film viewing, according to Eikhenbaum, is Cambridge, Mass,
MIT Press, 1962; S
'accompanied by a constant process of internal speech',-whereby images M Eisenstein, Film
and sounds are projected onto a kind of verbal screen which functions as Form y New York,
Harcourt Brace &
a constant ground for meaning." Inner speech, which we address to our- World, 1949; V N
Volosinov, Marxism
selves, provides the discursive 'glue' between shots and sequences. Our and the Philosophy of
purpose here is not to summarise the theoretical work performed on Language, New York,
Seminar Press, 1973;
inner speech by Vygotsky, Voloshinov, Eisenstein, Heath and Wille-

Stephen Heath,
men14, but only to speculate on its relevance to the question of language 'Language, Sight and
Sound1, in Questions
difference in the cinema. of Cinema, London,
If all film experience involves a kind of translation-from the images Macmillan, 1980; and
Paul Willemen,
and sounds of the text into the internalised discourse of the spectator- 'Reflections on
inter-lingual cinematic experiences entail specific and more complicated Eikhenbaum's
Concept oflnternal
mechanisms. In the case of the subtitled film, we hear the more-or-less Speech in the
alien sounds of another tongue. If the language neighbours our own, we Cinema', Screen,
Winter 1974/75, vol
may recognise a substantial proportion of words and phrases. If more 15 no 4; and 'Notes
on Subjectivity',
distant, we may find ourselves adrift on an alien sea of undecipherable Screen vol 19 no 1,
phonic substance. Specific sound combinations might remind us of locu- Spring 1978, and
'Cinematic Discourse:
tions in our own language, but we cannot be certain they are not phone- The Problem of
tic faux amis. The intertitles and subtitles of foreign films, meanwhile, Inner Speech*, Screen
vol 22 no 3, 1981.
trigger a process of what linguists call 'endophony', i.e., the soundless The notion of inner
mental enunciation of words, the calling to mind of the phonetic signi- speech has
philosophical
fier. But the interlingual film experience is perceptually bifurcated: we antecedents in such
hear another's language while we read our own. As spectators, we forge a thinkers as Herder,
Humboldt, Thomas
synthetic unity which transcends the heteroglot source material. The Aquinas and even
processes of hearing and reading, furthermore, are not identical; each Plato. See James
Stam, Inquiries into
sets in motion a distinct form of inner speech. Reading is relatively cere- the Origin of
bral, while hearing prompts associative processes more deeply rooted in Language, New York,
Harper and Row,
our psychic past. We must also distinguish between the experience of the 1976.
silent versus that of the sound film. While the lecturers, choral accom-
paniments and titles of 'silent' cinema hardly suggest a wordless Bazin-
ian freedom of the imagination, sound dialogue may inflect inner speech
in a more overdetermined manner. Theoreticians of the film experience,
in any case, have not adequately explored the nuances of the presence of
language and language difference, the subtle ways in which an inaudible
but nonetheless real aggregate of discursive privacies, the accumulative
pressure of inner speech, quietly alters the film experience.
The Vagaries of Translation: Film Titles
We have yet to examine the implications of language difference for film.

What are the practical, analytical and theoretical consequences of the
intersection of film and natural language? The import of such questions
becomes evident already with the translator of titles, intertitles and sub-
42 titles. Title translations, for example, often involve serious miscalcula-
tions due to haste, laziness or insufficient mastery of source or target lan-
guage. (While publishers would never engage a hack translator for A La
Recherche du Temps Perdu,filmdistributors, perhaps out ofvestigial scorn
for a low-status medium, regularly engage incompetents.) A Rumanian
bureaucrat, for example, misled by the phonetic resemblance between
Italian moderato and Rumanian moderat (quiet, cautious) and between
cantabile and comtabil (bookkeeper, accountant), construed Moderato
Cantabile, the Peter Brook adaptation of the Duras novel, as The Quiet
Accountant. But the question of film translation is more complex than
such an egregious error would suggest. Perfect translation is in the best
of circumstances a virtual impossibility. Languages are not ossified

nomenclatures, parallel lexical lists from which one need merely choose
matching items on the basis of a one-to-one correspondence. Even an
untranslated title can subtly change by virtue of acquiring a new linguis-
tic and cultural environment. Proper names, for example, may shift pro-
nunciation or connotation in a new context. Even a technically correct
translation entails subtle modifications. The English Day for Night cor-
rectly renders the cinematographic procedure known in French as La
Nuit Americaine, but a nuance is lost with the disappearance ofam/ri-
caine, pointing, as it does in the Truffaut film, to the nostalgic memory
of the classic Hollywood film.
A truly perfect translation, George Steiner points out, would offer an
interpretation so exhaustive as to leave no single unit in the source text -
phonetic, grammatical, semantic, contextual-out of account, yet at the
same time would add nothing in the way of paraphrase or explication.15
Since interlingual translation merely intensifies the usual slippages and
detours of all communication, since all language is caught up in the
unending spiral ofdifferance, and since all discourse is intensely conven-
tionalised and embedded in cultural particularity, no absolute transpar-
ency is possible; there remains always a core of mutual incommensura-
bility. Our emphasis here will not be on the 'loss' of an original purity-a
notion traceable to the traditional belief that no sacred text or divine
expression can be transcribed without forfeit-but rather on a dynamic
process of cultural recoding, a change in the form of linguistic energy
rather, than a fall from Edenic purity.
The translator wishing to be 'faithful' to an original film title is con-
fronted with myriad choices. To what, first of all, is one to be faithful-
to the literal denotation, to the attendant connotations, or to the tone and
stylistic form? Since each word exists at the crossroads of multiple
semes, any translation arrests in a knot a process of infinite association,
of constantly shifting undertones and overtones. Puns and wordplay, in
this sense, constitute a paradigmatic instance of the challenges posed by
15
See George Steiner,
verbal polysemy. The 'pieces' in the film Five Easy Pieces, for example,
After Babel: Aspects of are at once musical, filmic and sexual. Another language is hardly likely
Language and to feature the same relation between the phonemic and the semantic
Translation, New
York, Oxford . (what linguists call paranomasia) and thus be able to orchestrate the same
University Press,
1975.
constellation of meanings. The Hebrew rendering Resisei Hachaim
('Shards of Life'), for example, diminishes the rich resonances of the
English title. The 'wave' in Michael Snow's Wavelength, similarly, con- 43
denses multiple significations-sea waves, sine-waves, sound-waves,
new wave - and anticipates the film's structuring play on 'sea' and 'see', all
of which would be virtually impossible to convey in another language.
Given the challenge of an unattainable adequation, the translator, in
'principled despair', must settle for a semantic and affective approxima-
tion.
The title, as that sequence of signs which circulates in the world in the
form of advertisement or announcement prior even to the film's screen-
ing, constitutes an especially privileged locus in the discursive chain of
film. As hermeneutic pointers, titles promise, prefigure, orient. Titles
are generally assumed to bear an indexical relation to the signified of the

narrative events. Even when they are reflexive -A Movie-or perversely
non-indexical-lfa Chien Andalou-m\zs still point to some feature of
the text in question. When original titles seem insufficiently indexical,
translators are sometimes tempted to 'improve' them. But if a change is
to be made, which narrative events should be evoked and in what man-
ner? Since titles posit enigmas and nudge the audience in the direction of
a specific reading, to change the title is to change, however subtly, the
reading. The Brazilian rendering of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) as Um
Corpo Que Cai ('A Body that Falls') provides a teasing clue, not present
in the original, and anticipates events that occur far into the narrative.
Some translations virtually destroy the hermeneutic mechanism at the
centre of the film's diegesis. The shock of the climatic revelation of
Psycho (1960), for example, is severely compromised when it is entitled,
as it was in Portugal, 0 Homen Que Era Mae ('The Man Who Was
His Mother').
Even the flagrant ineptitude of this last example would still not author-
ise us to posit a norm of total adequacy in translation. First, we naively
assume that the original title is somehow 'correct', involving a motivated,
necessary and natural relation between signifier and signified. But the
original title as well might have been different; Un Chien Andalou, we
now know, almost became It is Dangerous to Lean Inside, and L'Age d'Or
was almost entitled The Icy Waters of Selfish Calculation. Every title rep-
resents an arbitrary freezing of a Heraclitean swirl of possibilities. There
can be no unproblematic return to origins; the process of translation sim-
ply reopens a question arbitrarily foreclosed at an earlier point. Given
this arbitrariness, some translators, not surprisingly, take liberties with
the original by making strong gestures of interpretation.16 Three distinct
renderings of Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) show the nature of this
process. The German rendering as Der Stadt Neurotiker ('The City 16
Godard's descriptive
A Bout de Souffle
Neurotic') operates at least two transformations; it elides the feminine (Breathless) became in
proper name in favour of a presumably masculine functional Japanese an
imperative
substantive, and it implies a causal relation between the city and the exhortation (perhaps
protagonist's neurosis. The Brazilian Noivo Neurotico, Noiva Nervosa reflecting a distant
observer's caricatural
('Neurotic Boyfriend, Nervous Girlfriend') also elides the feminine view of French
proper name, this time in favour of quadruple alliteration and a existentialism): Kane
ni Shiyagare ('Do
farcically judgemental title strongly reminiscent of the Italian erotic Whatever you Like!')
comedies then popular in Brazil. The Israeli Haroman Sheliim Annie ('My
44 Romance with Annie'), finally, retains mention of Annie but specifies
genre-romance-while shifting focalisation to the male hero, seen as
author of the romance and titular proprietor of the female protagonist.
Discourse is always shaped by an audience, by what Todorov calls the
allocutaire- those to whom the discourse is addressed—whose potential
reaction must be taken into account. A film title is one turn taken in a
kind of dialogue, forming part of an ongoing interlocution between film
and spectator. Torn from its normal linguistic environment, the title in
translation enters an alien field of what Bakhtin calls 'prior speakings'.
The English phrase 'horse's mouth', for example, enters a paradigm of
proverbial expressions such as 'straight from the horse's mouth' and
'don't look a gift horse in the mouth', a fact lost on the Polish translator

who literally construed the Ronald Neam film The Horse's Mouth (1958)
as Konsky Pysk ('Mouth of the Horse'). Since the figurative expression
'straight from the horse's mouth' does not exist in Polish, the title became
inadvertently non-indexical and surrealist, leading frustrated viewers to
expect a horse that never materialises. Commercial considerations,
meanwhile, lead to 'parasitical' translations which strive to exploit a pre-
vious film's box-office success. Israeli distributors, hoping to capitalise
on the success of Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974), rereleased Brooks'
earlier Twelve Chairs as Kis'ot Lohatim ('Blazing Chairs'). The commer-
cial intertext also motivates the gratuitous eroticisation of titles. In a
particularly grotesque example, Bergman's Persona became in Brazil
Quando as Mulheres Pecam ('When Women Sin'); thus the rich resonan-
ces of the original title-at once psychoanalytic, theatrical and philo-
sophical-yield to the calculated sexism of a title whose puritanical lasci-
viousness led local spectators to expect a film in the tradition of the
Brazilian pornochanchadas.
The heavy or tragic tonalities of an original title at times modulate in
translation into a more cheerful or even comic mode. The explosively
oxymoronic title, linking love and death, of Resnais' Hiroshima Mon
Amour, is defused, ironically, in Japan, the scene of the original necropo-
lis, to become a subdued Nijuyokikan no jdji ('Twenty-Four Hour
Affair'). Murnau's Der Letzte Mann ('The Last Man', 1924), by a similar
process, becomes in English The Last Laugh, thus deflecting attention
away from the tragic thrust of the core story to the comic resolution of
the happy end. In the case of New German cinema, titles have under-
gone analogous metamorphoses: Margaretta von Trotta's Der Blierne „'
Jahren ('The Leaden Years') becomes a more innocuous Marianne and f
Julianne, suggesting a tale of female friendship, in which the assonance
of the two names performs a variation on the alliteration of Jules and
Jim. The rendering of Wim Wenders' Im Laufder Zeit ('In the Course of
Time'), with its philosophical and cinematic resonances, as a playful
Kings of the Road, with its echo of the Roger Miller song, similarly, turns
it into just another road movie. In such cases, the reflective angst asso- {
ciated with many New German films, seen by the film-makers them- \
selves as part of a political duty to keep the spirit of negation alive in the (
post-Nazi years, has been kidnapped by an alien optimism. j
At times the political and ideological subtext of such connotative shifts 45
is closer to the surface. Krysztof Kieslowski's Amator ('Amateur'), a
reflexive film about a Polish worker-cineaste, was rendered in English as
Camera Buff, which highlights the protagonist's fascination with film-
making but elides another connotation operative in the Polish title,
namely that the hero's amateurism is not only cinematic but also politi-
cal, whence his difficulties with the authorities who quietly scuttle his
career. Many translated titles perform this kind of subtle depoliticisa-
tion. The English rendering of Salvatore Giidiano as Bandit's Revenge
transforms a highly politicised film into what sounds like a revenge west-
ern. (The Japanese rendering as Shishirino Knsoi Kuri— 'Black Fog in
Sicily'-in contrast, politicises the title since 'black fog' in Japanese can

connote governmental corruption.) Ousmane Sembene's La Noire de...
('The Black Woman From...'), rendered as Black Girl, sheds both the
ambiguity of noire as 'woman/girl' and the ellipsis implying that the pro-
tagonist might have come from any number of African countries.
Bunuel's titles have especially suffered from a process of sentimentalisa-
tion and depoliticisation. The masculine subject pronoun of El ('He',
1952) suggests a broad critique of patriarchy. Translated as This Strange
Passion, it emphasises the schizophrenic comportment of a pathologi-
cally jealous madman, rather than the 'normal' pathology of machismo.
Los Olvidados ('The Forgotten Ones', 1950), similarly, became in
English the more melodramatically enticing The Young and the Damned.
While the original title implicitly indicts the bourgeois audience-it is
they who have forgotten the slum-dwellers-the English title promises a
kind of lurid youth picture offering more conventional satisfactions for
the spectator. In French, Los Olvidados became a lachrymose Pitiepour
Eux ('Pity for Them'), exemplifying exactly the kind of condescending
charity excoriated by the film.
Sound and Language Difference: Subtitles
The challenge of translation took on special complexity with the advent

of sound. Major film industries experimented with diverse approaches;
initially, dubbing, subtitles and native-language translators were tried.
In 1929, MGM embarked on an expensive programme to replicate all its
feature films in three different linguistic versions and in 1930, Para-
mount established a studio near Paris to create foreign films in five lan-
guages. The British, French and German industries, meanwhile, fol-
For a discussion of
lowed Hollywood's lead in multiple versions, albeit on a smaller scale.17 the transition to
In Czechoslovakia, Josef Slechta invented a 'sound camera' which sound in Europe, see
Douglas Gomery,
sharply reduced dependence on German and American sound equip- 'Economic Struggle
ment. Eastern European audiences flocked to the movie theatres to hear and Hollywood
Imperialism; Europe
local stars speak and sing in their native language. In Latin America, Converts to Sound',
similarly, local industries were encouraged by the arrival of sound. Hop- Yale French Studies
(Cinema/Sound) no
ing to break North American domination of their markets, film-makers 60, 1980.
developed the popular carnival-based chanchada in Brazil and the tango
46 film in Argentina, while Mexico competed with Argentina in supplying
Latin America with Spanish-speaking films. Despite earlier European
resistance to Hollywood domination, it was only with the coming of
sound, ironically, that many Latin American film critics and spectators
began to complain about the 'foreignness' of North American films.
Silence had had the effect of masking the national origins of the films.
Thanks to the 'visual esperanto' of silent film, which includes many
cross-cultural codes, spectators not only read the intertitles in their own
language but also imagined dialogue in their own language. Cinema was
retroactively perceived as foreign and colonialist, precisely because
other-languaged dialogue destroyed the masking effect of silence.18
With sound, the transition from an imagined universality into nation-

ality and language difference modified the relationship between specta-
18
For more discussion tor and film. Despite the sensation of plenitude engendered by the addi-
on Brazilian critics' tion of sound, the change also brought certain psychic losses. With silent
response to sound,
see Ismail Xavier, cinema, the desiring spectators dreamed, as it were, phantasmatic voices
Setima Arte: Um to match the faces of their favourite stars. With sound, spectators were
Culto Moderno, Sao
Paulo, Editora obliged to confront particular voices speaking particular languages not
Perspectiva, 1978. necessarily identifiable with their own. Greta Garbo, it turned out, had
Also see Jean-Claude
Bernardet and Maria an 'attractive' Swedish accent but John Gilbert's voice was 'reedy' and
Rita Galvao, O 'unpleasant'. 'Chariot' wasn't French after all-although of course
National e o Popular
tut Cultura Brasileira, French spectators knew Charlie Chaplin was Anglo-American; we speak
Sao Paulo, Brasiliense here of the psychic regime of 'je sais, mais quand-meme'. The effect of
/Embrafilme, 1983,
pp 230-31. loss was analogous, in some respects, to that experienced by lovers of a
novel when dreamed characters are incarnated in a film by specific actors
19
See Mary Ann with specific voices and physiognomies. At the same time, silent cinema
Doane, 'The Voice in was retroactively perceived as mute or silent, its 'lack' revealed by the
the Cinema: The
Articulation of Body encroaching presence of sound. Silent film intertitles, Mary Ann Doane
and Space', in Yale has pointed out, had the effect of separating an actor's speech from the
French Studies
(Cinema/Sound), no image of his/her body.19 The terms proposed to designate the redefined
60, 1980. cinematic entity, not surprisingly, celebrate the reuniting of voice and
body by emphasising the dialogue track: 'the talkies', le cinema parlant,
20
Multi-lingual films cinema falado ('spoken cinema', in Portuguese). Other designations, less
such as Le Mepris
(Contempt, 1963) vococentric, were more inclusive in their perception of the role of sound:
require some subtitles 'sound cinema', cinema sonore, and perhaps the most adequate to a
wherever they are
screened. In medium of images and sounds: the Hebrew kolnoa (sound-voice/move-
Contempt, they form ment).
an integral part of the
signification of a film Once it became obvious that the production ofmultiple foreign-language
deeply concerned
with diverse versions of films was not a viable option, producers, distributors and
'translations' within exhibitors were left with the fundamental choice of either subtitles
the polyglot
atmosphere of (dominant in such countries as France and the United States) or post-
international co- synchronisation (the standard practice in Italy and Germany). In the case
productions. Italian
postsynchronisation of subtitles, all the processes characteristic of title translation —filtration
eliminated the role of of meaning through ideological and cultural grids, the mediation of a
the interpreter,
leading Godard to social superego-operate with equal force. For those familiar with both
dissociate himself
from the Italian
source and target language, subtitles offer the pretext for a linguistic
version of the film. game of 'spot the error'.20 There would be little point in cataloguing
such errors; our intention is only to plot the trajectory of their slippage,
the direction of their drift. That the English version of God&rd's Mascu- 47
lin, Feminin (1965) translates bruler a napalm ('burning with napalm') as 2 i The Brazilian
subtitles of Woody
'burning Nepal' is not, finally, crucial. More significant is the tendency, Allen's Everything
with New Wavefilms,to bowdlerise the French dialogue. (Censorship, for You Always Wanted
to Know about Sex, in
Freud, we are reminded, was a kind of translation'.) The English subtitles anticipation not oniy
ofBreathless, for example, consistently play down the aggizssivsgrossierete of Brazilian censors
but also of an
of the original. Belmondo's opening 'Je mis con' becomes an inoffensive audience not always
'I'm stupid', and his 'Va te faire foutre!' addressed directly to the camera/ attuned to the
cultural ramifications
audience, is rendered by a desexualised 'Go hang yourself.21 The ten- of Jewishness, elided
dency to shy away from sexually connoted words reflects, perhaps, a all that was explicitly
sexual or specifically
higher coefficient of puritanism within a society, or at least among its Tewish.
translators. Repressive regimes, meanwhile, have exploited subtitling

and dubbing as a mechanism for censorship. To avoid any hint of adul- 2 2 See the New York
tery between Ava Gardner and Clark Gable in Mogambo, the censor- Times, Nov 7, 1983.
translators of Franco's Spain reportedly transformed the pair into brother
and sister, thus arousing audiences with the even spicier theme of It should be pointed
out that titles can also
incest.22 operate in the
Some films are striking in their omission of subtitles. Film translators opposite direction.
Certain English
tend to be vococentric, concentrating on spoken dialogue while ignoring subtitles for Godard's
other linguistic messages such as background conversation, radio Sauve Qui Peut (la
Vie) render readable
announcements and television commercials, not to mention written what was barely
materials such as posters, marquees, billboards and newspapers. Thus audible, even for
native French
the spectator unfamiliar with the source language misses certain ironies speakers, in the
and nuances.23 The non-French speaker, for example, misses the play original.
between text and image generated by the written materials pervading
Deux ou trois choses queje sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know about24 See Roland Barthes,
Her, 1966), a film which might be seen as a gloss on Barthes' dictum that 'Rhetoric of the
24 Image', in Roland
'we are still, more than ever, a civilization of writing'. The omission of Banhes, Image/Music/
non-vocal linguistic messages can also compromise a film's political ten- Text (ed Stephen
Heath), New York,
dency, since it is often precisely through such messages that a story is Hill and Wang, 1977.
socially or historically contexted. Radio allusions to the war in Algeria in
Agnes Varda's Clio de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962), scandalised the
Text and image

interplay: Deux ou
trois choses queje sais
d'elle.
48 partisans of L'Algerie Franchise but went untranslated in the English
version. At times, the linguistic strategies ofafilmcompromise its political
thrust. In Costa-Gavras' Hanna K (1983), presumably a pro-Palestinian
film, Arabic dialogue is left unsubtitled, while English masquerades as
Hebrew, thus affirming an Israel-US cultural link while downplaying
any specific Jewish-Israeli identity. Subtitles, finally, can inject revolu-
tionary messages into non-revolutionary films. In the late '60s and '70s,
French leftists reportedly 'kidnapped' Kung Fu films, giving them revo-
lutionary titles such as La Dialectique Peut-EUe Casser les Briques? ('Can
the Dialectic Break Bricks?') and incendiary subtitles. A sequence of
devastating karate blows would be subtitled: 'Down with the bourgeoi-
sie!' thus providing a left political 'anchorage' for what were essentially

exploitation films.
The linguistic mediation of subtitles dramatically affects the film
experience. For audiences in countries where imported films predomi-
nate, subtitles are a normal, taken-for-granted part of the film experi-
ence. Literalising the semiotic textual metaphor, spectators actually read
films as much as they see and hear them, and the energy devoted to read-
ing subtitles inevitably detracts from close attention to images and
sounds. In many Third World countries, in fact, the penetration of sub-
titled foreign films has indirectly led to the physical neglect of the sound
systems in the theatres, exhibitors being guided by the spurious logic
that spectators occupied in reading subtitles will not be overly concerned
with the quality of sound.25 In countries such as India and Israel, the
spectator is at times confronted with vertical tiers of multi-lingual sub-
titles. In cases where the films themselves are multi-lingual, subtitles
have an effect of homogenisation for the foreign spectator. The exuber-
ant polyglossia of such films as Moshe Mizrahi's Habait Berchov Chlush
(The House on Chloush Street, 1975), which features Hebrew, Arabic,
Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish and Russian, or YoussefChahine's Iskinairiyya
Leh? {Alexandria Why?, 1979), which deploys the diverse languages
spoken in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the '40s, is 'levelled' by mono-
lingual subtitles when shown abroad.
Sound and Language Difference: Post-Synchronisation
The choice of post-synchronisation as opposed to subtitling has signifi-

cant consequences. Post-synchronisation, or 'dubbing', can be defined
for our purposes as the technical procedure by which a voice, whether of
the original performer or another, is 'glued' to a visible speaking figure
in the image. With dubbing, the original and adopted texts are homogen-
ous in their material of expression: what was phonetic in the original
In Israel, films
spoken in Hebrew
remains phonetic in the translation, unlike subtitles, where the phonetic
have at times been original becomes graphological in the translation. With subtitles, the dif-
subtitled in Hebrew
due to lack of
ference in material ofexpression allows for the juxtaposition oftwo parallel
confidence in the texts, one aural and the other written, and thus for the possibility ofcompa-
sound systems of the rison. Errors become potentially 'visible', not only to privileged spectators
movie theatres.
familiar with the languages in question, but also to the general viewer con-
scious of small inconsistencies: a disproportion in duration between 49
26
spoken utterance and written translation, for example, or the failure of A panial exception to
this rule occurs in the
subtitles to register obvious linguistic disturbances such as a lisp or a case of that hybrid
stutter. The single-track nature of dubbing, in contrast, makes compari- form, common in
documentaries and in
son impossible. Without the original script or version, there is simply newscasts, which
nothing with which to compare the dubbed rendition.26 Given our desire combines the dubbed
voice of a translator
to believe that the heard voices actually emanate from the actors/charac- simultaneously with
ters on the screen, we repress all awareness of the possibility of an incor- the original voices, at
low volume, in the
rect translation; in fact, we forget that there has been any translation at background.
all.
While subtitling resembles a kind of summary prose translation, dub- 27
See Istvan Fodor,

bing is more comparable to the complex juggling of sense, rhythm and Film Dubbmg:
Phonetic, Semiotic,
technical prosody involved in poetic translation. Subtitles can concentrate Esthetic and
meaning, transforming redundant into more efficient language, or, on the Psychological Aspects,
Hamburg, Buske
other hand, they might (although this possibility is rarely explored) expli- Verlag, 1976. Fodor's
cate a punning reference or offer contextual footnotes. With dubbing, in book is thorough and
useful, but limited by
contrast, each visible sign of speech activity must be somehow rendered; an underlying
words or sounds must be fitted to the moving mouth. Dubbing,' in this assumption of the
ultimate possibility of
sense, poses immense technical as well as linguistic challenges. Interlin- a virtually total
gual dubbing substitutes a separate and new sound recording in a second adequation between
language for the original text. The newly recorded dialogue, separated original and dubbed
version. The book
out from the noise and music tracks, must be carefully matched with the also limits itself to
articulatory movements and the audible speech results in what Istvan European languages.
articulatory movements and the audible speech results in what Istvan

Fodor calls, on the analogy of 'phoneme' and 'morpheme', a 'dischro-
neme', i.e., the minimal unit of non-coincidence of speech and move-
ment, in contrast with the 'synchroneme' or successful matching of
dubbed voice and articulatory movement.27 This matching is diversely
articulated with specific cinematic codes such as angle, scale, lighting
and so forth, with exigencies'varying according to whether a shot is
close-up or plan ame'ricain, profile or frontal, well or dimly lit. Direct
address at close camera range-the extreme close-up of Kane's 'Rose-
bud' or the disembodied lips mouthing the lyrics of the initial song in
The Rocky Horror Picture Show - poses the greatest challenge because it
amplifies attention to speech movement. A long or darkly-lit shot, mean-
while, can blur the distinctive visual features of speech production, and
the noise and music tracks can divert attention from the speech organs.
Even screen format affects our experience of synchronous matching;
wide-screen splays out the speech organs and thus poses more difficult
challenges than standard format.
Along with phonetic synchrony, dubbers also strive for what Fodor
calls 'character synchrony', that is, the skilful match between the timbre,
volume, tempo and style of the speech of the acoustic personifier (the
dubber) and the physical gestures and facial expressions of the screen
actor. As with any translation, the rendering can never be fully 'faithful';
the chameleonism of dubbing is always partial. While words are socially
shared and therefore more-or-less translatable, voices are as irreducibly
individual as fingerprints. The same word pronounced by a Marlene
Dietrich, a Woody Allen or an Orson Welles is in a sense no longer the
50 same word; each voice imprints a special resonance and colouring. The
practice of dubbing can lead to a number of anomalous situations. When
the target audience is aware, from other films, of the voice and acting
style of a given player, the dubbed voice is often an irritant. Those fami-
liar with Jean-Pierre Leaud, for example, are likely to be annoyed by the
dubbed English version of Truffaut's Day for Night. The memory of the
'real' voice provokes a kind of resistance to the substitute. In international
co-productions, meanwhile, a multi-lingual player might dub him/herself
into a second or even a third language for foreign versions; so that each
linguistic situation results in a new dubbing configuration. At times, the
dubbers themselves achieve a certain status and notoriety. In the '30s in
Germany, according to Jay Leyda, dubbers earned salaries in proportion

to the stars they were dubbing (since audiences insisted on hearing the
same voice), resulting in a kind of parasitic star system. In India, mean-
while, stardom is 'bifurcated', as imaged stars share popularity with the
unseen 'playback singers' whose voices they borrow.
The Italian situation as regards dubbing calls for special comment.
Post-synchronisation has been a feature of Italian cinema since fascism,
but forms part of a process of cultural levelling which dates back to the
unification of Italy. Since most Italian actors speak 'dialect' rather than
the 'official' Tuscan, they are made to speak an artificial language
uttered in studios by a specialised corps of dubbers. While well-known
actors (Gassman, Mastroianni, Vitti) dub themselves, many lesser-
known actors have never been heard in their own voice. The dubbing of
foreign films, meanwhile, results in Italians seeing bastardised versions
in which cultural specificities are flattened. Within the specialised lin-
guistic code developed for translating the Western, for example, as Geof-
frey Nowell-Smith points out, the Union and the Confederacy are ren-
dered as 'nordista' and 'sudista', geographical terms with precise conno-
tations in Italy (evoking the tension between 'feudal' South and develop-
ing capitalist North), so that the Civil War is read in 'terms of the Risor-
gimento'. Such abuses led in 1967 to an angry manifesto, signed by
Antonioni, Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Rosi and others, denouncing
obligatory post-synchronisation: 'Contemporary developments in theo-
retical studies on the sound film imply the need to take up a position at
the outset against the systematic abuse of dubbing, which consistently
compromises the expressive values of the film.' Post-synchronisation and
the dubbing-translation of foreign films, the authors conclude, 'are the
two equally absurd and unacceptable sides of one and the same prob-
lem. ... > 2 8
Post-synchronisation exploits our naive faith in cinematic reality, our
belief that the temporal coincidence of moving lips with phonetic sounds
points to a causal and existential connection. Buiiuel subverts this faith
in Cet Objet Obscur du Desir (1977) by having two actresses, dubbed by a
28
See Geoffrey Nowell- third voice, play the same role. Split in the image, the character regains a
Smith, 'Italy Sotto
Voce*, in Sighi and semblance of unity through the soundtrack. Post-synchronisation also
Sound, vol 37 no 3, forms part of the film's elaboration of the themes of Frenchness and
Summer 1968, pp
145-147. Spanishness: a film by a Spaniard who has lived in France, adopting a
French novel about Spain (La Femine et k Pantin) whose Spanish protag-
onist is transformed by Buriuel into a Frenchman, but played by a Span- 51
iard (Fernando Rey) and dubbed by a well-known French actor (Michel
Piccoli). Other film-makers deploy more explicitly disruptive strategies
to highlight the factitious nature of post-synchronisation. Godard in
Tout Va Bien (1972) and Hanoun in Une Simple Histoire deliberately
misdub in order to sabotage the fictive unity of voice and image. A Brazi-
lian film, significantly entitled Voz do Brasii ('Voice of Brazil') after a
widely-detested official radio news broadcast, shows an American film
being dubbed in a Brazilian sound studio. As the film loop of an emo-
tionally-charged sequence passes on the screen, the dubbing technicians
do their work and exchange trivialities. We are struck by the disjunction
between the passionate drama on the screen and the apparent boredom

in the studio, as well as by the contrast between the glamorous star and
the ordinary-looking woman lending her voice. Film dubbers usually
remain, to borrow Pierre Schaeffer's term, acousmatique, their voices
are heard but the real source of the enunciation remains invisible. The
provocation of Voz do Brasii is to reveal the hidden face of these nor-
mally acousmatic dubbers and thus render visible the effaced labour of a
particular cinematic process.
The marriage of convenience that weds a voice from one language and
culture to an imaged speaker corning from another often triggers a kind
of battle of linguistic and cultural codes. Linguistic communication is
multi-track; every language carries with it a constellation of corollary fea-
tures having to do with oral articulation, facial expression and bodily
movement. Certain locutions are regularly accompanied, often without
the speaker's awareness, by codified gestures and automatic motions.
The norms of physical expressiveness, moreover, sharply vary from cul-
ture to culture; extroverted peoples accompany their words with a live-
lier play of gesticulations than more introverted peoples. Michael
Anderson's Around the World in Eighty Days contrasts the expressive
codes of the phlegmatic Englishman Phineas Fogg with those of the
The gesticulating
Frenchman and the
phlegmatic
Englishman in
Around the World in
Eighty Days.
52 vehemently gesticulating Frenchman Passepartout. In Trouble in Para-
dise (1932), Lubitsch humorously counterpoints the speech manners of
southern and northern Europeans. Recounting a robbery to the Italian
police, the Edward Everett Horton character speaks in English (posited
as putative French) while the Italian interpreter ferries his words over to
the police. Horton's speech .is unemotional, efficient and gestureless,
while the interpreter's is flamboyant and animated with lively facial
expressions and emphatic Italianate gestures. In a single long-take,
Lubitsch recurrently pans with the shuttling translator, alternately plac-
ing with Horton or the police but never with the police, thus further
underlining the linguistic and cultural gulf between them.
To graft one language, with its own system of linking sound and ges-

ture, onto the visible behaviour associated with another, then, is to foster
a kind of cultural violence and dislocation. Relatively slight when the
languages and cultures closely neighbour, this dislocation becomes
major when they are more distant, resulting in a clash of cultural reper-
toires. Brazilian television, like many in the Third World, for example,
constantly programmes American films and television series in which
American media stars speak fluent dubbed Portuguese. The match of the
moving mouths of Kojak, Colombo and Starsky and Hutch with the
sounds of Brazilian Portuguese, however, results in a kind of monstros-
ity, a collision between the cultural codes associated with Brazilian Por-
tuguese (strong affectivity, a tendency toward hyperbole, lively gestural
accompaniment of spoken discourse) and those associated with police-
detective English (minimal afiectivity, understatement, controlled ges-
tures, a cool, hard, tough demeanour). A Brazilian avant-garde film, Wil-
son Coutinho's Cildo Meireles (1981), exploits this gap to satiric effect by
- matching the image of John Wayne on horseback to incongruous dis-
course in Portuguese. Wayne's moving lips, in this case, are made to arti-
culate contemporary theories otdifferance and deconstruction. When his
antagonists resist his intellectual claims, our hero guns the heretics
down.
Language and Power
Although languages as abstract entities do not exist in hierarchies of

value, languages as lived operate within hierarchies of power. Language
and power intersect not only in obvious conflicts concerning official
tongues, but wherever the question of language difference becomes
involved with asymmetrical political arrangements. As a potent symbol
of collective identity, language is the focus of fierce loyalties existing at
the razor edge of national difference. In South Africa, blacks protest the
imposition of Afrikaans as the official language of education; in the
United States, hispanics struggle for bilingual education and examina-
tions. What are the implications of this language/power intersection for
the cinema? What is the linguistic dimension of an emerging cinema
within a situation of 'unstable bilingualism' such as that of Quebec?
How many of the estimated five thousand languages currently in use are
actually spoken in the cinema? Are there major languages completely lack- 53
ing in cinematic representation? How many appear briefly in an ethnogra-
phic film and as quickly disappear? How many films are never subtitled
due to insufficient funds and therefore never distributed internationally?
What about anti-colonialist films (Pontecorvo's Burn) artificially made to
speak a hegemonic language to guarantee geographic distribution and
economic survival?
The penetration of a hegemonic language often helps clear the path for
cinematic domination. In the aftermath of World War II, English became
what George Steiner has called the 'vulgate' of Anglo-American power.
Countless films in the post-war period, as a consequence, reflect the pres-
tige and projection of English and the axiomatic self-confidence of its

speakers. The producer Prokosch, in Godard's Contempt, embodies the
self-importance and linguistic arrogance of the industrial managers of
American cinema; while he is more or less monolingual, his European col-
laborators move more easily from language to language. In Der Amerika-
nische Freund {The American Friend, 1977), Wim Wenders calls attention
to the lack of linguistic reciprocity between American and European.
The major non-American characters all speak English along with their
native language, while the American friend Tom, the 'cowboy in Ham-
burg', speaks only English. Jonathon's last sentence to the Swiss doctor
— 'It hurts in any language' —echoes another filmic 'demonstration of lin-
guistic non-reciprocity: Miguel/Michael's response in Touch of Evil to
Quinlan's insistence that he speak English and not Spanish: 'I think it
will be unpleasant in any language.' Like many New German films, The
American Friend critically foregrounds the widespread dissemination of
English and of American popular culture, thus illustrating the ways that
'the Yanks', as another Wenders character puts it in Kings of the Road,
'have colonised our subconscious'.29
One could speak as well, in this context, of any number of metaphor-
ical 'colonisations' having to do with region, class, race and gender. 2 9 The wide
dissemination of
Human beings do not enter simply into language as a master code; they American cultural
participate in it as socially constituted subjects. Where there is no true forms accounts for
the frequent non-
communality of interest, power relations determine the conditions of translation into
social meeting and linguistic exchange. Even monolingual societies are German of American
film titles: Easy
characterised by heteroglossia; they englobe multiple 'languages' or 'dia- Rider, American
lects' which both reveal and produce social position, each existing in a Graffiti, Taxi Driver,
Hair, Apocalypse Now
distinct relation to the hegemonic language. The 'word', in Bakhtin's and Reds were all left
sense, is a sensitive barometer of social pressure and dynamics. In many untranslated for
German exhibition.
British New Wave films, upper-class English is worn like a coat of arms, In other cases, titles
an instrument of exclusion, while working-class speech is carried like a were changed into
different English
stigmata. A cynical reincarnation of Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of titles: Being There
Clive Donner's Nothing But the Best (1964), gradually sheds his working became Welcome, Mr.
Chance. Or an
class speech in favour of Oxbridge English in order to scale the social original English title
is supplemented by a
heights. In Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973), similarly, the German addition: The
singer-protagonist's lower-class status is marked by his speaking Jamai- Fog becomes: The
Fog: Der Nebel des
can 'dialect' while the upper-class figures more closely approximate Crauen ('The Fog of
'standard' English, thus positing a homology between class and linguis- Horror').
tic hegemony. (A dialect, it has been said, is only a 'language without an
54 army', or, we might add, without economic or political power.30) Issues
30
The use of the term of race also intersect with questions of language, power, and social strati-
'dialect' apparently fication. Black English in the United States was often called 'bad' Eng-
dates back to the
early colonial era, lish because linguists failed to take into account the specific African-
when it was assumed historical roots and imminent logical structure of black speech. Not
that verbal
communication unlike women, blacks developed internal codes of communication and
systems defence, a coded language of resistance.31 One of the innovations of Mel-
unaccompanied by
extensive written bin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadaas Song (1971)-whose very
literature were title resonates with black intonations-was to abandon Sidney Poitier
somehow unworthy
of the term just-like-white-people middle-class diction in order to get down and talk
'language'. Thus, black.
Europe speaks
The interest of Sembene's Black Girl lies in having the film's female

languages while
Africa, for example,
speaks 'dialects'. In
protagonist stand at the point of convergence of multiple oppressions-
• fact, a country like as maid, as black, as woman, as African-and in conveying her oppres-
Nigeria speaks sion specifically through language. Diouana, who the spectator knows to
hundreds of
languages, i.e. fully be fluent in French, overhears her employer say of her: 'She understands
developed linguistic French... by instinct... like an animal'. The colonialist, who, according
systems which, unlike
dialects, are not to Fanon, cannot speak of the colonised without resorting to the bestiary,
mutually intelligible. here transforms the most defining human characteristic-the capacity for
language - into a sign of animality. The gap of knowledge between the
31
A study of the spectator, aware of Diouana's fluency, and her unknowing French
relation between
sexual difference and employers, serves to expose the colonialist habit of linguistic non-
language difference in reciprocity. This typically colonialist asymmetry (Diouana knows their
the cinema would
necessarily touch on
language but they do not know hers) distinguishes colonial bilingualism
the play of gender in from ordinary linguistic dualism. For the coloniser, as Memmi points
films whose diegesis
features multiple
out, the language and culture of the colonised are degraded and unwor-
languages (e.g. the thy of interest, while for the colonised mastery of the coloniser's tongue
association of
Catherine in Jules
is both means for survival and a daily humiliation. The colonised lan-
and Jim with the guage exercises no power and enjoys no prestige in everyday life; it is not
German neuter and
androgyny); and the
used in government offices or the court system, and even street signs
implications for film make the native feel foreign in his/her own land. Possession of two lan-
of the fact that guages is not here a matter of having two tools, but rather entails partici-
different languages
'see* gender pation in two conflicting psychic and cultural realms. Through a long
differently. apprenticeship in unequal dialogue, the colonised becomes simultan-
eously self and other. The mother tongue, which holds emotional impact
32
For Memmi on and in which tenderness and wonder are expressed, is precisely the one
colonial bilingualism,
see The Colonizer and least valued.32
the Colonized, Boston,
Beacon Press, 1967. For the coloniser, to be human is to speak his language. In countless
films, linguistic discrimination goes hand in hand with condescending
characterisation and distorted social portraiture. The Native Americans
of Hollywood westerns, denuded of their own idiom, mouth pidgin Eng-
lish, a mark of their inability to master the 'civilised' language. In many
films set in the Third World, the language of the colonised is reduced to
a jumble of background noises while the 'native' characters are obliged
to meet the coloniser on the latter's linguistic turf. In films set in North
Africa, Arabic exists as an indecipherable murmur, while the 'real' lan-
guage is the French of Jean Gabin in Pipe le Moko or the English of
Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. Even in David Lean's Lawrence of
Arabia (1962), pretentiously, even ostentatiously, sympathetic to the
Arabs, we hear almost no Arabic but rather English spoken in a motley 55
of accents almost all of which (Omar ShariPs being the exception) have
little to do with Arabic. The Arabs' paralinguistic war cries, meanwhile,
recall the 'barbaric yawp' of the 'Indians' of countless westerns. The
caricatural representation of Arabic in the cinema prolongs the Eurocen-
tric 'orientalist' tradition in both linguistics and literature. Ernst Renan
invented the contrast, flattering to Europe's self-image-, between the
'organic' and 'dynamic' Indo-European languages, and the 'inorganic'
Semitic languages - 'arrested, totally ossified, incapable of self-regenera-
tion'.33 For romantics such as Lamartine, Nerval and Flaubert, mean-
while, the Orient served as a mirror for their western narcissism, when it
was not a backdrop for the pageant oftheir sensibilities. Lamartine saw his

trip to the Orient as 'un grand acte de ma vie interieure' ('a great act in my
interior life') and discoursed with supreme confidence on the subject of
Arabic poetry despite his total ignorance of the language.34 Twentieth-
centuryfilm-makers,in certain respects, have inherited the attitudes ofthe
nineteenth-century philological tradition (so ably anatomised by Said),
pointing out 'defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the lan-
guage, the people and the civilization'.35
Colonising cinema, meanwhile, committed its own 'barbarisms' in
relation to the languages of the colonised. One of the Italian directors
who dominated the early history of film-making in Egypt, Osato, out-
raged the Islamic community in his El Zouhour el Katela {Fatal Flow-
ers, 1918) by garbling well-known phrases from the Koran. A similarly
cavalier attitude toward linguistic sensitivities led to the misattribution
of major languages. Mervyn Leroy's Latin Lovers (1953), for example,
mistakenly suggests that the national language of Brazil is Spanish.
Although Carmen Miranda was called the 'Brazilian bombshell', the
names given her characters (such as Rosita Conchellas in A Date with
Judy, 1948), were more Hispanic than Brazilian.36 Although she report-
edly spoke excellent English, she was prodded to speak in her distinctive
caricatural manner (the linguistic correlative of her Tutti-Frutti hat),
thus reflecting one of many ways that Latins were ridiculed by Holly-
wood cinema. The dubbed version of Marcel Camus' Orfeu Negro
(Black Orpheus, 1959), finally, substitutes a variety of Caribbean accents
in English for the Brazilian Portuguese of the original, thus placing
diverse Third World communities under what Memmi calls 'the mark of 33
See Edward Said,
the plural': 'They are all the same'. Orientalism, New
York, Pantheon,
The existing global distribution of power makes the First World 1978, p 142.
nations ofthe West cultural 'transmitters' while it reduces Third World
nations to 'receivers'. Given this unidirectional flow of sounds, images 34
ibid, pp 177-78.
and information, Third World countries are constantly inundated with
North American cultural products —from television series and Holly- 35
ibid, p 142.
wood films to best-sellers and top-forty hits. The omnipresence of Eng-
lish phrases in Brazil, for example, can be seen as a linguistic symptom of ' Stanley Donen's
Blame It on Rio
neo-colonialism. A carnival samba penned shortly after the arrival of continues this
American sound films already lamented the widespread currency of tradition of
Hispanicising
English phrases: 'Goodbye, goodbye boy/Quit your mania for speaking Brazilian names.
English/It doesn't become y o u . . . ' . One stanza explicitly links the dis-
56 semination of English to the economic power of the Anglo-American
Israel, interestingly, electricity monopoly 'Light'; 'It's no longer Boa Noite or Bom Dia/Now
offers a similar it's Good Morning and Good Night/And in the favelas they scorn the
phenomenon. Many
members of the film kerosene lamp/and only use the light from Light.' Hollywood, mean-
milieu considered while, became the beacon toward which the Third World looked, the
Hebrew as
intrinsically non- model of 'true' cinema. The linguistic corollary of domination was the
cinematic and an
'obstacle' to 'good'
assumption that some languages were inherently more 'cinematic' than
dialogue, implicitly others. The English 'I Love You', Brazilian critics argued in the twen-
suggesting a kind of
shame about speaking ties, was infinitely more beautiful and cinematic than the Portuguese
a Semitic rather than 'Eu te amo'. The focus on the phrase 'I Love You' is in this case highly
a European language.
The protagonist of a overdetermined, reflecting not only the lure of a romantic model of
'70s TV series^ Hedva cinema projecting glamour and beautiful stars, but also an intuitive

ve Ani ('Hedva and I')
complained that it is sense of the erotics of linguistic colonialism-i.e. that the colonising lan-
impossible to say 'Ani guage exercises a kind of phallic power. Behind the preference as well
Ohev Otach' (Hebrew
'I Love You') because was the notion that there are 'beautiful' and 'ugly' languages, a notion
unlike 'I Love You' which came to pervade countries with a colonised complex of inferior-
or 'je t'aime' it is
'ugly'. ity.37 It was in the face of this prejudice that Brazilian film-maker
Arnaldo Jabor defiantly entitled his recent film Eu Te Amo (1981) and
insisted that the title remain in Portuguese even when distributed
abroad.
It is against this same backdrop that we must understand the linguistic
duality of Carlos Diegues' Bye Bye Brazil. Precisely because of the wide-
spread dissemination of English, the film was titled in English even in
Brazil. The theme song by Chico Buarque features English expressions
like 'bye bye' and 'night and day' and 'OK' as an index of the American-
isation (and multinationalisation) of a world where tribal chiefs wear
designer jeans and backwoods rock groups sound like the Bee Gees.
Even the name of the travelling entertainment troupe-'Caravana Roli-
dei'-a phonetic transcription of the Brazilian pronunciation of the Eng-
lish 'holiday'- reflects this linguistic colonisation. A typical colonial
ambivalence operates here: on the one hand, sincere affection for an alien
tongue, and on the other, the penchant for parody and creative distor-
Colonial
ambivalence: cultural
duality in Bye Bye
Brazil i.SS
tion, the refusal to 'get it straight'. 57
Many Third World films ring the changes on the subject of linguistic
colonialism. Youssef Chahine's Alexandria Why?, a reflexive film about
an aspiring Egyptian film-maker who entertains Hollywood dreams,
explores the linguistic palimpsest that was Egypt at the time ofthe Second
World War. Chahine offers an Egyptian perspective on western cultural
products and political conflicts. From the protagonist's point of view, we
watch his adored American musical comedies, subtitled in Arabic, and
European newsreels with Arabic voice-over. (At certain points, in a lin-
guistic Chinese box effect, the Arabic subtitles of the American film-
within-the-film are enclosed within the English subtitles of Alexandria
Why? itself.) In another sequence, an Egyptian theatre production pokes

fun at the occupying powers. Each European power is reduced to a
stereotypical cultural emblem: Hitler's moustache, Churchill's cigar, a
French chef, an Italian pizza. In a reversal of traditional representation,
it is now the colonised who consciously caricature the coloniser. As rep-
resentatives of the Allied and the Axis powers chaotically pursue each
other across the stage, each mumbling their own idiom, the Egyptian
characters remain seated, spectators of an alien war on their land. Irra-
tionality, a feature insistently projected by the West onto Arabs and their
language, here boomerangs against the Europeans.
Language is a social battleground, the place where political struggles
are engaged both comprehensively and intimately. In Xala (1975), Sem-
bene again inter-articulates questions of language, culture and power.
The protagonist, El Hadji, a polygamous Senegalese businessman who
becomes afflicted with xala- a religiously-sanctioned curse of impotence
-embodies neo-colonised attitudes of the African elite so vehemently
denounced by Fanon. Sembene structures the film around the opposi-
tion of Wolof and French as the focal point of conflict. While the elite
make public speeches in Wolof and wear African dress, they speak
French among themselves and reveal European suits beneath their Afri-
can garb. Many of the characterisations revolve around the question of
language. El Hadji's first wife Adja, representing a pre-colonial African
woman, speaks Wolof and wears traditional clothes. The second wife,
Oumi, representing the colonised imitator of European fashions, speaks
French and wears wigs, sunglasses and low-cut dresses. El Hadji's
daughter, Rama, finally, representing a progressive synthesis of Africa
and Europe, knows French but insists on speaking Wolof to her franco-
phile father. Here again conflicts involving language are made to carry
with them a strong charge of social and cultural tension.
The title of Glauber Rocha's Der Leone Have Sept Cabegas subverts the
linguistic positioning of the spectator by mingling the languages of five
of Africa's colonisers. Rocha's Brechtian fable animates emblematic
figures representing the diverse colonisers, further suggesting an iden-
tity of roles among them by having an Italian speaker play the role of the
American, a Frenchman play the German and so forth. Another polyglot
fable, Raul Ruiz' Het Dak Van de Walvis (The Top of the Whale, 1981)
also focuses on the linguistic aspect of oppression. The point of depar-
ture for the film, according to Ruiz, was his discovery that certain tribes
58 ^ ^ ~ ^ ^ ^ ^ ~ " " in Chile, due to their traumatising memory of genocide, spoke their own
38
See 'Emretien avec language only among themselves and never in front of a European.38 The
rf«c&JtoTMareh" resulting tale, about a French anthropologist's visit to the last surviving
1983. members of an Indian tribe whose language has defied all attempts at
. interpretation, is turned by Ruiz into a sardonic demystification of the
colonialist undergirdings of anthropology.
The intonation of the same word, Bakhtin argues, differs profoundly
between inimical social groups. 'You taught me language', Caliban tells
Prospero in The Tempest, 'and my profit on it is, I know how to curse.
The red plague rid you for learning me your language.' In the social life
of the utterance as a concrete social act, we began by saying, each word is
subject to rival pronunciations, intonations and allusions. While the dis-

course of Power strives to officialise a single language, one dialect among
many, into the Language, in fact language is the site of heteroglossia,
open to historical process. There is no political struggle, according to
Bakhtin, that does not also pass through the word. Languages can serve
to oppress and alienate, but also to liberate. We have tried to question the
presumption of the masters of language. The 'system' of language so
dear to the Saussureans, we have implicitly suggested, is subject to what
Bakhtin calls centripetal and centrifugal forces; it is always susceptible to
subversion. By shifting attention from the abstract system of langue to
the concrete heterogeneity of parole, we have tried to stress the dialogic
nature of language in the cinema, its constantly changing relationship to
power, and thus point to the possibility of reappropriating its dynamism
in the world.
We would like to thank Jay Ley-da, James Stam and Richard Porton for their generous sug-
gestions. We would also like to thank the following for proposing noteworthy examples of
inaccurate title translation: Wilson de Barros, Kyoko Hirano, Lynne Jackson, Joel KanofT,
Daniel Kazamiersky, Ivone Margulies, Margaret Pennar, Peter Rado, Jerzy Rosenberg,
Susan Ryan, Bill Simon, Harald Stadler, and Joao Luiz Vieira.
ERRATUM
Re Screen vol 26 no 2, March-April, 1985
Unfortunately, some pages of Sandy Flitterman's article, 'Thighs and

Whiskers — the Fascination of Magnum, p. i.', became transposed. As
printed, pp 52 and 53 should be read before pp 50 and 51. This error was not
due to our printers.

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THE CINEMA AFTER BABEL- 35

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The 'dialogue of the

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The Vagaries of Translation: Film Titles

We have yet to examine the implications of language difference for film.

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Sound and Language Difference: Subtitles

The challenge of translation took on special complexity with the advent

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Text and image

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Sound and Language Difference: Post-Synchronisation

The choice of post-synchronisation as opposed to subtitling has signifi-

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articulatory movements and the audible speech results in what Istvan

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Language and Power

Although languages as abstract entities do not exist in hierarchies of

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Re Screen vol 26 no 2, March-April, 1985

Unfortunately, some pages of Sandy Flitterman's article, 'Thighs and

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