Cannes is at a loss for words
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/19/cannes-loss-words-film
Jean-Luc Godard's clever misuse of subtitles in his latest film
reveals our linguistical shorcomings
Agnès Poirier
20 May 2010
The world's critics, gathered in Cannes to see Jean-Luc Godard's
latest film, expected many things from cinema's imprecator-in-chief,
ranging from brilliance to ridicule by way of the obscure, but they
didn't expect this, and as always with Godard, he outwitted us all.
Godard's art of subtitles sent the monolinguistic hordes screaming
after three minutes. How dare he? How dare he translate only one word
in five? When a character on screen said, for instance, "L'argent est
un bien public", the English caption on the screen read "money public
good". With never more than three words on screen, widely spaced and
sometimes even joined together, no pronouns and no verbs, Godard does
what no other film director will ever dream of achieving: say merde
to reality. And it does take a truly Wild Bunch, the English-named
French film company which financed the film, to pay to watch an
oeuvre's own sabotage.
Like Zidane's head-butt as a way of adieu, Godard has just signed,
with his latest film aptly named Film Socialisme his own suicide
note. Both men, gods in their fields, can defy the world they live in
and deny reality: the privilege of tragic heroes. By refusing to play
the game of subtitles, Godard is making his film unexportable outside
the ever-shrinking francophone world. But even there, his film
requires from francophones to have a smatter of German, Italian and
Russian as whole scenes in those languages are not translated at all.
When Franco-German politician Daniel Cohn Bendit asked Godard two
weeks ago about translation, in a tête-à-tête engineered by the
French arts weekly Télérama, the Swiss film director replied that he
didn't believe in it. Jean-Luc Godard belongs to Old Europe, a world
where German philosophers, British playwrights, French writers,
Italian composers, Spanish poets, Dutch painters can converse, read
and write in their neighbours' languages. He belongs to a time in
which any enlightened European understood five languages, Latin not
included. Elitist? No, revolutionary.
Today, subtitles in cinema are as tricky as ever. Not only do they
need to translate words but also transfer a culture. When, in
Vincente Minelli's The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire says, " I declare my
independence, it's the new me, 1776", the French subtitle reads
"...Je déclare mon indépendance, le nouveau moi, 1789." But when in
Stephen Frears' latest film Tamara Drewe, recently shown in Cannes,
the writer played by Roger Allam talks ironically about Newsnight,
the French subtitles go awol. As a result, at the press screening,
British critics alone laughed on cue, leaving their foreign
colleagues dumfounded: they knew they had missed something, but
didn't know what.
Once in a while, however, a film finds its subtitles' hero. Remember
Cyrano. I often pondered the film's success in Britain and America. A
film in French verses, in a totally different metric system, surely
couldn't do well anywhere else but in French-speaking countries. That
was until I discovered that polyglot extraordinaire Anthony Burgess
had translated Edmond Rostand's Cyrano and written the film's
subtitles. Like Edgar Allan Poe translated by Baudelaire, here was
another literary and cultural marriage made in heaven.
It is perhaps no surprise that Godard fell for Lilliput subtitles for
a film which takes place on one of those anonymous Mediterranean
cruises where thousands of people of dozen different nationalities
are for ever crossing without meeting. Godard rejects a world
seemingly brought together by globalisation but which, in fact, has
created a new cultural Babel in which the new lingua franca, English,
doesn't pacify nor unify. "Don't translate, learn languages," said
Godard to Cohn-Bendit. The New Wave enfant terrible may well have a point.
--
Film Socialism
Production year: 2010
Country: France
Directors: Jean-Luc Godard
.
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