Subtitles, Please

My husband and I love to go to the movies and often find that the foreign and small, independent films are the ones we savor and end up talking about again and again. Some of them are so moving and wonderful that I'm filled with regret for the people who won't see them.

There is an audience for these films, but many people don't have access to the limited number of places where they are shown. Fortunately for us, here in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, we have Cinema Arts Theatre, an independent theater that devotes its six screens to these films. Since it opened a few years ago, we've had the pleasure of having convenient access to these movies--no more driving downtown and searching for parking only to end up in a small, slightly seedy art house. When we go to see foreign movies that have been well reviewed, we invariably find that almost every seat in the house is filled.

Perhaps it is an acquired skill, but I find that when the movie is good, I don't even notice that I'm reading the subtitles. I encourage the teenagers I know who say they don't like subtitles to rent "Run Lola, Run" (German) to change their minds. Who could fail to be intrigued and amused by it?

I had hoped that DVDs might rekindle interest in foreign movies. In fact, they are, if anything, harder to find in DVD format than they were in VCR.

Likewise, letterbox format, my other passion, which I had expected to find on all or most DVDs. In fact, they are also extremely rare. Instead, we get thrown at us every scrap of film from the cutting room floor, and all sorts of poorly done interviews and "commentary."

What good are wide-screen and high-definition TV's when the content is so terrible?

I share your sentiment and I lament today's youthful audience's narrow taste.

Please continue to rave about foreign films. Hopefully our 20 and 30 somethings and our youthful audience will give it a try and get converted. If teenagers can play a video game, you would think it's less taxing to read subtitles than to play a complicated grand-auto-theft game.

I recently saw "Behind the Sun" on a rental DVD, I still find foreign films to be intriguing and enjoyable. I wish more people would share our love of foreign films.

I think Mr. Morgenstern loses the battle for foreign films when he dismisses dubbing as more intrusive than subtitles. The fact is that the non-English speaking world embraces American films and TV because they are available in their own language. Modern dubbing techniques provide a very satisfying result. Sticking to the snob-appeal of subtitles will always limit foreign films to art house venues and deprive the wider public of enjoying foreign cultures the way others have embraced American culture.

I don't think the situation is as bleak as you may think. In the immediate Raleigh area alone (not a large market), we have three art houses--each alive and well. If you include the larger "Triangle" area (Chapel Hill and Durham), the number goes up to seven. Many of the features shown are subtitled, and while the audience does skew older, it's more a reflection of the content of the movies shown, not the presence or absence of subtitles.

On the flip side, sometimes American movies would be better with subtitles. While in Cancun, we had a rainy night, so we went to a movie. The only thing showing was the stinker "Wild, Wild West," in English with Spanish subtitles. It was so very bad that we found ourselves trying to read the subtitles instead of listening to the awful lines (we don't speak or read Spanish). It would have been nice to lose something in the translation.

I recall watching "Das Boot" as originally distributed in the U.S.--in German, with English subtitles. I thought it was a fabulous movie, and the actors' native German language contributed substantially to the feeling of compelling unreality that gave the movie such a powerful effect.

I enthusiastically took friends to see it again some months later--after it had gotten popular, and was dubbed into English--and found that the dubbing had stripped much of the movie's dramatic power. It still wasn't "Hogan's Heroes Under the Sea," but when exiting the theater I didn't have the same remarkable feeling I'd had with the original, when I'd felt like I was a German sailor escaping a steel-walled watery tomb.

Several years ago I worked in international motion picture distribution. While I am not aware of the current regulations placed on importing films into France, I do remember that the French would not permit subtitled films. All the English language films had to be dubbed into French. Is that still the case? Perhaps we need to do that. And, while we're at it, how about English language versions of all the Spanish language shows on television? SAP only works one way. Why?

My girls (11 and 13) will happily watch subtitled films--perhaps because we haven't told them about dubbing. We started by reading aloud the subtitles of the miniseries "Le Comte de Monte-Cristo" four years ago, which tactic I recommend.

A few weeks ago we all sat for four hours to watch (and read) "Lagaan." The key is simple: Just treat subtitles as perfectly normal.

But I do wonder how many American teenagers and adults (like my youngest at the age of seven) simply don't read fluently enough to keep up. That could explain a lot.

There are wonderful foreign movies, but most movies critics are entirely untrustworthy. Stephen Hunter is an exception. So neither I nor my wife will risk our precious time or plentiful cash on a foreign movie--especially if it has been praised by movie critics, many of whom seem to be snobs. The crud/gem ratio is simply too high.

Admittedly, foreign films are a tough sell. Before you brand us all as illiterate swine, however, you might check the circulation desk at the local library. My local library has a fine collection of foreign films in video and DVD and does a brisk business of same. I am sorry if your local library is not similarly fortunate.

Regarding subtitles, if you remember, it was not too long ago that a film with a large portion of the dialogue in Lakota Sioux with English subtitles won the Academy award for best picture--"Dances With Wolves--"so I doubt it's the subtitle issue. I think there are less insidious reasons, like content and marketing.

Mel Gibson is releasing a film in 2005, "The Passion," about the last day of Jesus' life. The dialogue will be in ancient Aramaic, with English subtitles. Perhaps then we can revisit the subtitle issue to see if it's a matter of audience stupidity or the movie's content and word of mouth that determines its success.

I've often wondered why I have so much trouble finding the Italian films I crave. If I didn't work for Barnes & Noble where I can get most of them, I would be out of luck.

I've studied Italian for several years and found that one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to watch subtitled movies. Though there are many errors an word substitutions in translations, there is no better way to study a language in everyday context, complete with body language, pronunciation and nuance than by watching subtitled films.

This may seem like a trivial thing to many of your readers, but Americans are far behind the rest of the world in learning foreign languages. Even the most insular of us must realize that we cannot ignore the rest of the world. Look for example at how the U.S. government agencies have been hunting everywhere for Arabic speakers since Sept. 11. There is no better way to understand others than by learning their language.

It is astonishing the first time you realize that you can understand what a foreign speaker is saying to you and well worth the effort it takes to learn a language.

Thanks for raising an important topic.

Mr. Morgenstern's comment that the decline the audience for foreign films in the U.S. is directly linked to the decline of reading rang very true. What has happened in the last 20 years to facilitate these declines? One important factor is the decline of leisure time among teenagers. School curricula are far more demanding than they were, and to what result: People aren't reading anymore. In order to improve education (as measured by standardized tests), we have killed literacy and only literate people watch foreign films.

If I want to read a good story, I read a book. There are many, many good books worth reading, including many foreign translations.

A movie is visual. I want to see what the director wants me to see, not the bottom of the screen. I want to see the expressions on the actors' faces as they deliver lines. I want to see the elements in the background that they're referring too.

Many other nations do very well dubbing American movies. Indeed, in France they watch movies dubbed in Quebec because the Quebecois take such pride and effort to do the dubbing right. There are unions in Italy who have honed dubbing to an art, and you look for their seal when choosing an American movie. Why can't Americans dub movies that well?

It would be wonderful if we could only find subtitled movies, or even small released films, in less than an hour's drive. One would think the large megaplexes could devote one screen to them. Maybe even one pay per view station. Oh well.

My all time favorite is "Cinema Paradiso"!

I gave up reading movies years ago. I can enjoy foreign films if they're dubbed. When anyone asks "What is the worst film you ever saw?" my immediate reply is "Crouching Tiger."

By the way, is the Bleaker Street Cinema still there?

When I go to a movie I want to watch it and not read it.

I would watch more foreign films but when a person has to focus on reading the print on the bottom of the screen rather than the scenes and characters the film loses some of its impact. One of the classic movie channels on cable airs foreign films every Friday night but it becomes an exercise in frustration. Try reading white print on a black and white movie. Many of the words wash out, making the dialogue unintelligible at times unless you sit three feet from the TV. If the script is fast paced forget it. Imagine a 25-year-old on a hot date. His mind may occasionally focus on the subtitles. Sometimes art can be a futile experience.

However foreign films offer a different perspective. Many of the foreign films released in the U.S. are more creative and achieve a higher artistic standard. With the emphasis on art--and hopefully some commerce--the films refreshingly lack the predictable and unimaginative qualities churned out by the domestic studios.

My all time favorite import is director Kihachi Okamoto's 1966 "Sword of Doom." In beautiful black and white, the film follows the fate of a gifted samurai in 1860s Japan who abandons the spiritual and disciplinary aspect of the art in pursuit of becoming the master at slaying the enemy with his sword. His exploits bring him endless enmity and despair. There was enough doom and gloom in this movie to be drop kicked into the trash can of any Hollywood executive. No Hollywood studio could have captured the essence of a warrior, his sword and his ultimate destiny in such a masterful fashion.

I will try hard not to sound like a 43 year-old waxing nostalgic, but why is it that, even before my time as a young adult the kids of the late '60s and early '70s cut their intellectual teeth on foreign films and music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Burt Bacharach? Why have the young adults of this generation chosen to homogenize their cultural experience into various forms of hip hop and attention deficit curing two-hour carnival rides on film? I hope for the pendulum to swing back the other way (and this time stay there) with the offspring of this arrested development generation. Hopefully our grandkids and great grandkids will not have to wait in line for their Ritalin fix before entering the movie theater.

I'm bored with movies. I e-mailed Mr. Morgenstern awhile back and asked if he had some suggestions for purchasing foreign films on DVD. Fairbanks has no theater that shows foreign films. I never received an answer.

By the way, I'm aghast that people are actually calling people on their cell phones from inside the theater. I've not seen that yet, but I'm no longer a frequent movie goer.

I've lived and worked in both Germany and Switzerland for the last 13 years, so I have a good feel for seeing movies in both countries.

In Switzerland, due to the multiple languages spoken there, English-language films are shown in the original language and have no less than three subtitles: German, French and Romansch, the Italian dialect spoken in Switzerland.

In Germany, all films are dubbed. Virtually no exceptions.

I dug into the reasons for this. In Switzerland it was decided that dubbing into three languages and producing different copies of the films involved was onerous, especially considering that there are still a large number of very small, regional cinemas around. Hence three layers of subtitles--and you can sometimes get a very different view of a film when the subtitles in French are different from those in German, and neither have much to do with the spoken English (I remember this one from seeing Batman in Basel)!

In Germany, the situation is different. German filmmaking never really got into the concept of a sound stage, where actors speak their dialogue and it is recorded along with the film. This is a legacy of the old Defa film days. As a result, actors dub their own voices once the film is made, and any good actor can recreate the emotions that went into the scene in the first place.

Given this tradition, it should come as no surprise that there are a large number of actors in Germany that make a decent living dubbing films. There is the film voice for Bruce Willis, for Patrick Stewart, for Melanie Griffith, etc: Their voices are fairly well studied counterparts, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

The second aspect of dubbing in Germany is audience acceptance. Germany prides itself on having lots of people learning foreign languages, but for exactly the same reason as nobody in the U.S. likes to watch subtitled movies--it distracts from the experience--the acceptance for subtitles films in Germany is low.

The German film industry is in pretty poor shape: Good people leave for Hollywood, and getting subsidies for making films is heavily bureaucratic, resulting in literally hundreds of films being made by people who are good at getting money and really, really bad at making films. Most of these never see the front side of a projection screen, let alone break even. If the German government was sensible, it would ban film and TV dubbing entirely in order to generate demand for German-language films and TV shows: The market place would provide the demand to allow filmmakers to make a living by providing commercial success, rather than government subsidies.

I believe the situation is hardly as dire as Mr. Morgenstern claims. There is a limit to how many screens Nemo can be found on in a single theater. With 16 screens to fill, multiplexes around here often have that strange furrin stuff on as many as two or three.

The real problem is simply one of boredom. I gave up on Hollywood years ago, and I make an effort to go see the "interesting" foreign films. Unfortunately, they usually aren't. Even the much-hyped ones, with major international stars playing artsy roles, are as dull as dirt. Back in high school, the major attraction of a snoozifying French film was the standard pointless sex scene (which the French somehow managed to make about as erotic as Reader's Digest). Nowadays they don't even bother with those.

The real surprise in the last few years is how quickly some of the worst "blockbusters" dropped off the screens, while barely-marketed but nicely-made movies like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" made fortunes. Moviegoers are sophisticated enough to know when the studios are trying to force-feed them garbage. "Crouching Tiger" and "Monsters Inc." became hits, subtitles or no, because they were good films. Other foreign movies can do the same; all they need is the quality.

Americans generally don't watch foreign films because they've grown accustom to the fast pace, fast editing bid budget Hollywood movies. Foreign films are generally slow, thought provoking and lyrical. By the way, I noticed you steered clear of mentioning any French foreign films.

When it comes to foreign films, movies like "The Man from Snowy River" and "Kolya" have a certain appeal. Its not that they can be interchanged with parts of the U.S., well that would be difficult with Kolya because it's set in 1989 Czechoslovakia.

However, foreign films which do well speak to the heart within the heart with a language that is not condescending. So, what does this mean for the future of foreign films in North America. My guess is, there will be an audience for films what make a person feel refreshed when they leave the theater, and not just because the movie has ended.