An excellent volume of Marcel Carné's film criticism has just appeared:
Marcel Carné: Ciné-reporter (1929-1934), edited by Philippe Morisson and published by
La Tour Verte.
One section, entitled 'Cet art qui fut muet et devint parlant: Articles sur les talkies' [That art that was dumb and became talking: Articles on the talkies], includes pieces published in
Cinémagazine and other film magazines between August 1929 and April 1931, at the height of the transition from silent to sound films. Carné covers what it is like on a film set shooting a sound picture, discusses the technical requirements and skillsets required to shoot and edit sound film (at a time when the camera was just emerging again from its soundproof booth), and debates with Marcel Lapierre about whether silent film has, in fact, had its day.
One of the pieces, 'De l'internationalité du film parlant' ['On the internationalism of the talking picture'] published in
Cinémagazine 48, 29 November 1929, gives a fascinating viewpoint on the development, and unpopularity, of subtitles in France. This is so relevant to my own research on film translation between the silent and the sound periods (see
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2015/Splendid_Innovations.cfm) that I hope I will be forgiven for quoting it at some length. It is also cited by my colleague Dr Jean-François Cornu in his 2014 book
Le doublage et le sous-titrage. Histoire et esthétique (Presses Universitaires de Rennes),
I have taken the liberty of putting a few particularly interesting phrases in bold, including the speculation that talking films might, like great books, one day have translators of their own (gosh!); and the condemnation that subtitling was a cognitive impossibility for audiences. The first of these statements is not false as such; but the low status of film translators relative to literary translators (see
this post for more on this) makes it in some ways a slightly skewed prediction.
The translation that follows, and any errors in it, are my own.
Le seul reproche - il est vrai qu'il est de taille - qu'on puisse adresser aujourd'hui au film parlant, est que du jour où le cinéma a trouvé la parole, il a cessé d'être un art international par excellence.
Encore faudrait-il s'entendre là-dessus; le cinéma parlant est national au même titre que la littérature ou le théâtre. Et nous verrons tout à l'heure qu'il est fort possible que, d'ici quelque temps, le film parlé, produit d'une race, ait, lui aussi, ses traducteurs, tout comme un chef-d'oeuvre de la littérature ou une pièce consacrée dans son propre pays, par un succès éclatant.
À l'origine des talkies, on imagina, pour tourner la difficulté, de sur-impressioner sur l'image des sous-titres explicatifs. Au début, la curiosité l'emporta: il nous suffit de citer le succès du Chanteur de jazz et de La Chanson de Paris. Pourtant, ce que les spectateurs toléraient pour les premiers films, ils l'admirent moins facilement par la suite.
C'est ainsi que Weary River, pour n'en citer qu'un, valant très largement les deux premiers, connut un succès honorable, certes, mais ne souffrant pas la comparaison avec ses deux devanciers. Encore plus que l'absence d'une très grande vedette (car Barthelmess, malgré son grand talent, n'a pas la célébrité d'un Chevalier), les nombreux sous-titres français intercalés dans Weary River ne furent pas étrangers à cet état de choses. Il n'est, au reste, pas une personne à l'heure actuelle qui n'ait compris que ce système n'est qu'un pis-aller qui ne saurait subsister bien longtemps encore. Outre que cela est fort désagréable, il est matériellement impossible à un spectateur de suivre à la fois le jeu parlé des acteurs et de lire les sous-titres inscrits dans le bas de l'image.
Et puis n'est-il pas paradoxal que le film parlant, au lieu de supprimer les sous-titres comme on était en droit de attendre de lui, les multiplie, au contraire, à l'infini?
Un établissement des boulevards n'annonce-t-il pas actuellement un film parlant américain cent pour cent parlant avec de nombreux sous-titres français; alors qu'une telle annonce eût fait fuir les spectateurs il y a seulement un an! Enfin, les lecteurs de cette revue n'ont pas été sans remarquer que le procédé de surimpression des titres nécessite, ce que l'on appelle en termes techniques, un contretype, c'est-à-dire un double tirage du négatif, ce qui a pour efet d'obscurcir singulièrement la photographie la plus lumineuse.
Donc, à tous les points de vue, le système s'avérait détestable. Aussi, a-t-on cherché autre chose. Et la lumière nous est venue, cette fois, de l'Angleterre. [...]
My translation: The only reproach - though, to be fair, a substantial one - that could be directed today to the talking film, is that from the moment that cinema discovered words, it ceased to become the international art
par excellence.
Let us be clear: the sound cinema is national in the same way as literature or theatre are. And we will see shortly that
it is entirely possible that, some time in the future, the talking film, as a national product, will itself also have its translators, just as a literary masterpiece might, or a theatre play which has been a major success in its own country.
When talkies began, someone came up with the idea of solving the problem by superimposing explanatory sub-titles on the image. This passed muster with early spectators, as witness the success of
The Jazz Singer and
Innocents of Paris. But what spectators tolerated in the first sound films was less welcome to them as time went on. That explains why
Weary River, for instance, every bit as good as the two earlier films, met with fair success, sure, but nothing like its two predecessors. This will have been partly due to the lack of a major star (because Barthelmess, while a very talented actor, has nothing like Maurice Chevalier's fame), but the many French subtitles in
Weary River were also a factor. There isn't anybody, at this point, who hasn't realised that this system [subtitling] is nothing but a shabby compromise whose days are numbered.
Apart from the fact that it is very disagreeable, it is materially impossible for a spectator to follow the actors' performances and to read the subtitles at the bottom of the image at the same time.
And is it not paradoxical that the talking film, instead of suppressing titles as we might have expected, is instead proliferating them into infinity?
Is a popular Paris cinema not currently advertising a 100 per cent talking American film with many French subtitles, though such an advertisement would have made spectators take to their heels only a year ago! And readers of this periodical have taken the opportunity to observe that the superimposition of titles on the image requires what is technically referred to as a
contretype, in other words a duplication of the negative, the result of which is a noticeable darkening of even the brightest photographic image.
So, on all fronts, the system has proven detestable. Another solution was sought. And the light came, this time, from England. [...]
(c) for the translation Carol O'Sullivan, 2016. Many thanks to Sam B. for picking up a couple of errors in the draft.
