Films about industrial action (on the occasion of the UCU strike, 2019)

As the Universities and College Union strike goes into its second week, I find myself moved to blog about it. Followers of this blog will have noticed it's been a bit quiet recently.

(More accurately, it's been like this recently:)

via GIPHY


Unfortunately, blogging is one of the things I found much less time for as work has got more and more hectic. This is one of the issues that lies behind the strike (the link downloads a pdf with key issues around academic workloads).

But I have found blogging hugely rewarding over the years and I want to pick it up again, and so I'm taking the opportunity of the strike to talk about movies.

There's a grand tradition in Higher Education of the 'teach out' during industrial action, where students and staff come together to talk about ideas off campus as an alternative to cancelled classes and/or to crossing the picket line. I wanted to think about films that could allow us to talk through ideas about industrial action.

There are more moving and entertaining films about strikes out there than we might think! The ones I know reflect my own filmgoing and TV-watching generation:

Brassed Off (Herman 1996) is a musical about the miners' strike.

Bread and Roses (Loach, 2000) is based on the 'Justice for Janitors' campaign, waged by janitorial workers in Los Angeles who were trying to unionise.

The title Bread and Roses is based on the song of the same name, apparently originally inspired by a speech by the American union activist Rosa Schneiderman on the occasion of the 1912 Lawrence textile strike.

The 2004 BBC miniseries North & South is a romantic drama based on Mrs Gaskell's social realist novel about industrial unrest in the cotton mills of the north of England. Come for Richard Armitage's brooding but beautiful baritone, stay for the friendships across strict nineteenth-century British class boundaries:

 
Made in Dagenham (Cole, 2010) is the story of Rita O'Grady and the women machinists at Ford in Dagenham who went on strike for equal pay in 1968, which was followed by the passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1970.

Pride (Warchus, 2014) is about the miners' strike and the activism of a London-based group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners:

The film also includes a beautiful rendition of the song 'Bread and Roses':



Other films that have been suggested by friends and colleagues include I compagni, starring Marcello Mastroianni, a film about a textile workers' strike in Turin in the late nineteenth century:

(From a #filmtranslationhistory perspective I cannot help noticing that nothing is said in this vintage American trailer about the industrial action itself, though there's plenty of the Mastroianni-as-star and women-in-their-undergarments typical of contemporary US perceptions of Italian cinema).

John Sayles's Matewan is set during a coal miners' strike in 1920 in West Virginia (see here for Sayles talking about some of the film influences on Matewan, which include The Organizer):

Kevin Brownlow's 1975 film Winstanley, a historical drama about Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, is available to watch on the BFI player.

For fans of Russian cinema and silent film I must mention Eistenstein's silent 1925 Strike and Pudovkin's 1933 silent Deserter, both watchable in various versions on Youtube.

On Tuesday last we saw Comrades, directed by Bill Douglas, released in 1986, an extraordinarily beautiful and moving film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Run, do not walk, to see this film (though be aware that it is 183 minutes long). It has recently been re-released and looks brilliant on a big screen.

On Monday afternoon I will be showing Pabst's Kameradschaft [Comradeship] (1931) at Twentieth Century Flicks video shop on the Christmas Steps. This is a film not about industrial action but about international solidarity between workers, which was not available for many decades but has now been re-released. The film was shot in French and German as a way of respecting both communities equally. Bristol folks who would like to come, please DM me on Twitter.

Again, run rather than walk to see this film. It's a lost treasure, and one of the first films to be released in the UK with English subtitles (by Paul Rotha). The re-release has new subtitles.

I hope these suggestions for filmwatching will help to inspire and energise my fellow strikers and our students, many of whom have been providing stalwart support in the form of hot drinks, cake and solidarity. Suggestions for more good films about industrial action are warmly welcome in the comments.

Why typography is important in subtitling

"Well, I'm back," she said.

I'm thinking about a paper I'm writing for the conference Beyond Words: Multimodal Encounters in Translation, which will take place in Cambridge in July 2018.

Part of the paper will talk about meaning-making in typography and specifically in film intertitles and subtitles. (I've said something about this before here)

Now I have come across this splendid fansubtitled video about Thranduil and the gems of Lasgalen, from Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptation. Every character gets a different subtitle typeface:

So, two questions:

1) Which typeface is best suited to its character? Answers in the comments please. 

2) Which can you actually read without eyestrain? The video is shooting for accessibility, which is always a good thing, but the typefaces are not, really.

And if readers out there want to rank the typefaces in order of most to least accessible, I'm all ears! 

Two upcoming events: research seminar and film screening

I am very happy to announce two imminent events:

The first is a research seminar tomorrow, which looks fascinating and is free and open to all:

When Translation Multiples Tell Their Own Story

Dr Kasia Szymanska, Oxford University

Tuesday 17 April

16:00 - 17:30 | LR2, 43 Woodland Rd, University of Bristol

Kasia Szymanska is a Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Oxford University, where she is a member of the committee of the Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre.  Her research lies in literary translation thought, experimental translations, and multilingual poetics - especially with reference to the East European context.  She was awarded the 2015 EST Translation Prize and is currently serving as one of the judges of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

*****

The second event is an ultra-rare 35mm film screening on Sunday 22 April: 

Treasures from the Turin Film Museum

The silent period was a golden era for Italian cinema, with pioneer directors like Giovanni Pastrone, whose 1914 epic Cabiria influenced filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith. Historical epics were particularly popular. This event features five restored films from the collections of the Turin Film Museum, all with a classical theme. They include Pastrone’s Fall of Troy (1911) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1910), from the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which was the first Italian historical epic. The programme also includes Hero and Leander and Dido Abandoned from 1910; and Judas from 1911.

Followed by a Q&A featuring Stella Dagna from the Turin Film Museum, Professor Maria Wyke from UCL, Dr Pantelis Michelakis from the University of Bristol, and our distinguished accompanist Mr Stephen Horne.

The event is generously supported by a grant from the Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol. Organised in partnership with South West Silents.

Tickets are available here at the Watershed website (booking recommended): https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/8824/treasures-from-the-turin-film-museum

An Odd Adventure: New Year's musings on subtitles from 1932

Regular readers of this blog or of my Twitter feed will know that I'm working on the history of subtitling. As a happy new year greeting to all three of my faithful readers, here's a short piece from Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times, published on 2 January 1932, a few months after subtitles had begun to appear in the United States (previously audiences had either had to speak the language in question, or make do with a synopsis in the programme).

They were called 'superimposed titles' to differentiate them from intertitles, which were interpolated between moving picture footage, rather than superimposed. Intertitles were referred to at the time as subtitles, to add to the confusion. Reading the rather plodding explanation below, we should remember that these were viewers used to silent films, where the action had to stop when a title card appeared. The idea of a title running concurrently with the action was a bit revolutionary:

Superimposed Titles
Witnessing a picture with superimposed titles, so-called, is an odd adventure. Superimposed titles are explanatory subtitles printed on scenes in the film, which translate the purport of what is being said in another language. They are being used in Europe on the American pictures. The words spoken in English are those translated into German, French or some other language, depending on what country the picture is shown in, so that its dialogue may be understood by the audience.
   I saw the French film, 'David Golder,' with superimposed German titles, and a knowledge of that language made it exceedingly easy to folow. The words spoken in French, which is often a difficult language to understand conversationally, acquired meaning as the picture progressed. It would seem, therefore, that the viewing of pictures with superimposed titles is an aid in acquiring a knowledge of a different tongue. Nor is it as complicated nor as distracting a method of witnessing a picture show as might be imagined.                      (2 January 1932, p.19)

Harry Baur, as David Golder (Duvivier, 1931) with his horrible daughter Joyce, played by Jackie Monnier

As a bonus extra feature on this blog post, here's a snippet by Harrison Carroli a few months later in the Evening News of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:

A superimposed title, in case the term leaves you with a blank feeling, is the old-fashioned silent title cut down to a narrow strip and imposed across the bottom of the image on the screen. In Japan it's a perpendicular strip along the side. This title translates or explains the English dialogue, which goes on without interruption.(22 April 1932, p.9)

Mystery dubbed film: WW2 film 'Behind these Walls'?

Hello gentle readers, I've been burrowing in Irish newspaper archives recently, for my own nefarious research purposes, and am a bit perplexed by something (well, more than one thing, but you know what I mean).

On 23 May 1948, Noel F. Moran, film critic of Ireland's Sunday Independent, reviewed an Anglo-French coproduction by the title Behind These Walls in his regular column 'This week's Films' (p.2). I'm unable to find any record of a film with this title, and as you will see below, he doesn't give any helpful information about actors, director etc., because he is too busy complaining about the dubbing.

I'm casting this one out to the 'verse, and would be very grateful if any readers or their acquaintances could shed any light on what the film might be. Here's what NFM says about the film:

The Anglo-French film "Behind These Walls" (Regal) is more notable as a technical experiment than as a story of the French Resistance Movement. It is, to my mind, an experiment that fails but, let me hasten to add, not on the technical side.
     The background is French: the characters are French. By means of the De Lane Lea process of English speech recording (it is known as "Lingua Synchrone"), these characters are given English voices to speak the English dialogue. Technically, as I have already implied, the process is a success. The synchronisation is a definite advance on the old hit-and-miss methods of dubbing, utilised largely on the Continent and in America. But, what has happened to the atmosphere and the realism? They have gone with the wind.
     At its best, the picture could never be regarded as another "Open City". It has not the same scope or stature, nor does it seek to give the same comprehensive survey of a great nation under the heel of the invader. Made with R.A.F. co-operation, it is a recreation of a true incident. A group of ordinary people face a tragically simple problem - whether or not to blow up a German benzine [sic] train and sacrifice the lives of 50 of their fellow countrymen, held as hostages. Emphasis is on the reactions of these hostages as they await their fate - the Mayor, outwardly calm but sick inside; the doctor; the old beggar, facing destiny philosophically; the spiv; the coward; all the unspectacular heroes and heroines of the back streets.
     The characterisation has all the visual appeal and the sensitivity one has come to associate with the French cinema - all set at nought by those English voices, which make the film neither fish, flesh nor good red herring, to to speak. The cockney-like voice of the tramp, for instance, is described in the publicity sheet as "a forthright accent that drives home the essential provincialism of the French original hero of this dramatic part". My imagination is not sufficiently vivid to catch the analogy. Give me the original French version, with English sub-titles, however inadequate. When I go to see a French film, I want to see a French film. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

UPDATE later that evening: Warm thanks to Lucy M. and Sam B. who have solved the mystery. The film is Jericho, also known as Behind These Walls, directed by Henri Calef and released in 1946. There does appear to be some confusion about the title. The film was reviewed in the New York Times on 6 December under the title Jericho ("exultant drama in the truly fine, French tradition"). There is no mention of the translation but it seems more likely that it was the subtitled version since it played at the 55th St. Playhouse which showed a lot of subtitled imports. Jericho was also the French release title. It was reviewed twice in the Monthly Film Bulletin in the UK, on 1 January 1947 for the dubbed version under the title Behind These Walls, on 1 January 1948 for the English-subtitled version, under the title Derrière ces murs. The subtitles were referred to as 'adequate' and the dubbed version 'not too offensive'.

Image taken from http://kebekmac.blogspot.it/2015/08/calef-1946-jericho.html with thanks.

Short course on silent film in Bristol

Yet another of the cornucopia of cinematic delights with which Bristol abounds (she says, grandiloquently but in no way exaggerating): this upcoming short course on silent cinema, given by Dr Peter Walsh of South-West Silents (@SWSilents on Twitter).

I'm trying to work out if I can steal enough time from writing to take the course myself. It will take place at the enchanting Twentieth-Century Flicks video shop (and when I say video shop, I mean a place where you can still rent a VHS tape (of certain, rare titles) and take it home and watch it in your VHS player).

Contact details for the silent film course are in the flyer above.

'Cinema and Media Studies in Translation' Call for Proposals **deadline extended to 3 April 2016**

Cinema and Media Studies in Translation
Call for Proposals 2016 (**DEADLINE NOW EXTENDED**)

With courses on World Cinema (generally understood as the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries) and Global Media increasingly included in the curricula of Film and Media Studies departments, there is a need for English-speaking students and scholars to recognize the vast body of critical work published on film and media productions outside the Anglophone world. Many of those texts are written by nationals working in their language, which provide a depth of cultural knowledge and insight impossible to replicate by scholars based in a different culture, and/or who do not speak the language concerned. It is also the case that some of the best theoretical work and critical analyses of film and media are written in languages other than English; it is important that they be made accessible to Anglophone readers.

With these factors in mind, the Translation/Publication Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies invites proposals for the translation of outstanding scholarly texts in languages other than English, for publication in Cinema Journal. Journal articles, book chapters, or self-contained sections of a book that focus on a particular topic in a unified, coherent way can all be appropriate for this purpose.

Proposals should include:

1. The author, title, and publication details of the work being proposed (including the place, press, and date of publication).
2. A statement identifying the significance of the work, and why it might be interesting to film and media scholars and students, SCMS members in particular.
3. A clarification of the copyright status of the original source material.
4. An indication of likely word length.
5. The name and credentials of a prospective translator.

Proposals are welcome for a work published in any language other than English. One grant-in-aid of $1,000 will be paid to the translator. The scholar leading the project should provide an introduction that lays out the importance of the author and the text. The total word count of the introduction and translated text should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words in English. In some cases, shorter projects of 5,000 words (text and translation) will be considered (in which case the grant-in-aid will be adjusted accordingly). Self-nominations will not be accepted.

The due date for the proposals has been extended to April 3, 2016.

The due date for the final submission has been extended to August 14, 2016 (for a 2018 publication date). Subsequent rounds will be announced later in the year.

The proposals should be sent to Nataša Ďurovičová, natasa-durovicova [at] uiowa.edu.

Translation/Publication Committee 2015-6:

Nataša Ďurovičová (University of Iowa), Chair 2015-6
Chris Baumann (Stockholms Universitet)
Robert von Dassanowsky (University of Colorado)
Alistair Fox (University of Otago)
Mattias Frey (University of Kent)

Bristol seminar: Filmic Translation and Transmediation, 3 December

We are delighted to welcome Professor Karin Littau of the University of Essex to give a research seminar on Thursday 3 December. Details below. All welcome. Refreshments after.

Filmic Translation and Transmediation

Professor Karin Littau, University of Essex
Arts Complex, Woodland Road, BS8 1TE
Room G79, Thursday 3 December, 5pm-6.30pm

If film has productively transformed, even invigorated, literary practice, as recent research in film and literature has suggested, might this not also be the case with regard to literary translation? In what ways has film shaped the material and aesthetic practices of translation? What kinds of filmic techniques have been absorbed into poetry translations in book-form or for online e-translations? And, how are we to understand the allusions to film and film culture in translations based on originals that were composed before film was even invented? My aim in exploring these questions, is firstly to demonstrate that media shape minds or “mindsets” and secondly to show, through specific print and digital examples, how translation is affected by what Thomas Elsaesser has called the “cinema in our heads”.

Karin Littau is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Essex. She has published on book and film history, comparative media, translation, and reception studies. Her next book is a history of literature and film for Routledge, others include Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (2006) and most recently the co-edited volume Cinematicity in Media History (2013).

Translating Rome, Open City

I went to a splendid showing of Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Roma, città aperta on Friday night, courtesy of the Italian Department at the University of Bristol and the InsideArts festival. We saw a restored print with English subtitles credited to the festival Il cinema ritrovato, where the restoration was done.

The film is certainly not the version scorned by one denizen of Netflix for its "Operetta germans, heroic priests, magazine-cover kids, forced conversation, bad (frequently missing!) subtitles, video quality low (all the scratches, blotches, and dark areas are here, just like you're watching the old film)" (one does wonder if the subtitles and the print quality had been better, would the viewer have found the Germans operettish, the conversation forced, etc.)

The subtitles on this version were good and often funny, with smart and unobtrusive solutions for many very Italian turns of phrase. It made me wonder about the first English subtitled version of this film in the US, which opened, according to David Forgacs, on 25 February 1946 at the World Theater on 49th St., and ran there for nearly two years. It had subtitles by Pietro di Donato and Herman Weinberg. Herman G. Weinberg worked as a subtitler and film critic from the early 1930s to the early 1970s and pioneered subtitling in the United States; more on him in a future post, perhaps.

Are di Donato and Weinberg guilty of perpetrating the "bad and frequently missing" subtitles mentioned above? Bosley Crowther in the New York Times doesn't comment. I wonder what the local newspaper files of newspapers.com may be able to tell us.

The Winnipeg Tribune of Friday 18 April, 1947 closes a long review by naming and praising the subtitlers:

In a slightly later review on Tuesday 17 June, 1947, the Sandusky Register in Sandusky, Ohio, comments that

We do, however, get a hint in the Winnipeg Tribune review that these subtitles might have been the rather selective subtitles which were typical of the period. And lo, the Gazette and Daily, of York, Pennsylvania, on 11 February 1947 indeed had some reservations about the completeness of the subtitles: 

The subtitles must have really been quite bad to trigger this return to the 'transcending the limitations of language' shtick, so prevalent fifteen years previously. It looks likely that these subtitles may indeed be the ones referred to so bitterly by the disenchanted Netflixer above.

Interestingly, subtitles still seem to have been rather strange to a proportion of the film-going audience, or why does the Daily Times-News of Burlington, NC have to explain, on 12 July 1947, what subtitles are?:

 

But the award for the most comprehensive comment on the film's translation (or at least the most comprehensive that a evening's energetic keyword searching could provide) must go to a columnist on the Daily Tar Heel, student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has this to say on May Day 1947 (I give it in extenso, so that you get the full flavour):

Mr Allen expends much of his creative energies on describing the subtitles:

Setting aside the author's unendearing linguistic shtick, this review gives us a rather clearer picture of how selective Mr Weinberg's and signor di Donato's subtitles really were. It offers an intriguing research line to follow. How much was this viewer exaggerating the selectiveness of the subtitling? To what extent were other reviewers just grinning and bearing it - or, indeed, so riveted by the film's acting and storyline that they did not fully notice the subtitles? Only a close comparison against a copy of this version of the film can begin to tell us.

It becomes clear in the closing paragraphs of the review that Mr Allen's disappointment in Open City stemmed from the mismatch between the advertising and the product:

This seems to have been the kind of advertising that Allen was talking about: 

 From Samuel Wilson's excellent review at http://mondo70.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/open-city-1945-and-foreign-film.html

Tino Balio's informative book The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946-1973 has much to say about the way this film was marketed:

Realizing it would take time to cultivate an audience for foreign films, [the distributor, Joseph] Burstyn used venerable exploitation techniques to attract attention. [...] Although the New York Board of Censors passed the film "with but insignificant scissorings", according to Variety, Mayer-Burstyn decided to bypass the Production Code Administration (PCA) to avoid having to make further cuts. The same article continued: "Its got plenty to make [Hollywood censors] blanch if and when it is shown them. Principal sympathetic femme character speaks openly of her pregnancy, although she's not wed, and the traitoress who leads to the capture and death of the partisans betrays them for a combination of cocaine and the love of a lesbo German spy. That's just a sample of the angles for the PCA to mull, while the handling of the priest will no doubt make the Legion of Decency gulp hard, although the film has been okayed by the Vatican." Unlike the Vatican, the Legion of Decency found much to fault in the film and gave it a condemned rating. Lacking the Production Code seal and the C rating meant that Open City would not be booked by the major theater chains.

The Mayer-Burstyn partnership made the best of circumstances. First, it released Roma, città aperta, the original title of the film, as Open City. The original referred to Rome's protected status during the war as a historical city. Burstyn's title suggests something quite different - a wide-open city where anything goes. In line with this title change, Mayer-Burstyn promoted the film as "Sexier than Hollywood ever dared to be!" and ran ads with fake publicity stills, one showing "two young ladies deeply engrossed in a rapt embrace" and another of "a man being flogged", both of where were "designed to tap the sadist trade", according to Mayer. As Variety explained, two types of audiences existed for foreign films: the "fairly discriminating filmgoers", who were taken with the "raw, unvarnished approach to sex" in the films, and the "transients, the misfits...and the loose-jawed brethren" who normally got their thrills vicariously from exploitation films". At first Open City played in art houses and independent theaters. Mayer-Burstyn later toned down the torture scenes and removed an offending shot of a toddler on a potty to secure a coveted code seal and entrée to mainstream theaters. (pp.41-42)

There's much to mull over here, including the existence of multiple cuts of the film, and the questions that remain over which version of the film a given audience might have seen. I like very much Samuel Wilson's comment, in his review of Balio's book and the film, that the Burstyn-Mayer release is an important version (or, I guess, versions) in its own right, which deserved to be given greater prominence in the Criterion edition. In the same vein, I would argue that di Donato and Weinberg's subtitles, patchy as they were, are also a significant factor in the film's reception in the United States, and deserve to be represented, even in the form of a clip for purposes of comparison, on a future DVD. 

N.B. Post updated after publication to reflect the fact that di Donato and Weinberg's subtitles seem to be available in all their patchiness and elegance of typeface, on the TCM website: 

Post-post-scriptum: Updated once again on finding out from colleague and Italian film scholar Catherine O'Rawe that Pietro di Donato was in fact a somewhat well-known literary figure. There is an essay by Loredana Polezzi about his novel Christ in Concrete here.

The return of the translating dissolve

In my book Translating Popular Film I talked about the device of the 'translating dissolve' which was so common in the 1920s and 1930s. Here's an example from the wonderful Frank Capra film The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), with the wonderful Nils Asther in far-from-wonderful yellowface as the eponymous general:

The translating dissolve is also described by David Cairns on his excellent 'Shadowplay' blog, and at more length by R. John Williams in a very interesting and lavishly illustrated article from 2009, 'Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film'. Cairns uses the example of Daughter of the Dragon (Corrigan, 1931). In my book I argued that the 'translating dissolve' represented a kind of perceptual 'point of view' shot where the viewer gets to see from the point of view of a character who understands the source language:

Odd it may have been, but it was a standard way of making foreign-language written texts 'processable' for American viewers and thus contributed in an important way to linguistic realism in film.

I came across another interesting example this evening leafing through Daisuke Miyao's book Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom, where a translating dissolve from the film The Typhoon (Barker, 1914) proves to be more than it seems (the relevant bit starts at the bottom of page 70):

This underlines how long-lived this particular device was; from the 1910s to the 1930s and beyond. It also made me wonder how early this device was used. I'd be delighted to hear from any readers with earlier examples, or with examples later than the 1930s.

Silent film farmers: a postscript

I thoroughly enjoyed Wednesday evening at the Lansdown pub in Bristol showing a combined Georgian/Irish programme of films about subsistence farming (if you squint) at the very kind invitation of the wonderful Bristol Silents film club. The programme featured two of the 'O'Kalem' films shot in Ireland in the 1910s, and Mikhail Katatozov's Salt for Svanetia which I had seen last year at the seventyseven film club (Bristol is good at film clubs).

The Lad from Old Ireland can be seen here:

It has the distinction of being the first fiction film shot in Ireland, as well as the first American film shot abroad, and it was also a pioneer in location shooting (the Kalem company didn't have its own studio; in pioneering location shooting they were making a virtue of necessity).

A clip from Salt for Svanetia can be seen here

Its director was supposed to be making a piece of agitprop about the building of Soviet infrastructure but mostly forgets this (until the startling final few minutes of the film) in favour of watching the play of light and shade and texture.

A final snippet from this event: while I was watching the O'Kalems it was difficult not to be reminded of later films set in Ireland (like Song o' my Heart (Borzage, 1930), starring John McCormack), as well as of later emigrant narratives like Das Lockende Ziel (Reichmann, 1930). Links are made by some scholars between The Lad from Old Ireland and John Ford's 1952 classic The Quiet Man.

I was particularly struck by the shot in The Lad from Old Ireland where Terry, played by Sidney Olcott, is bidding farewell to his sweetheart Aileene, played by Gene Gauntier. The scene takes place against the backdrop of a cottage, a field, a drystone wall:

Compare this sequence from Song o' my Heart where Fergus, played by John Garrick, bids farewell to Eileen (coincidence?), played by Maureen O'Sullivan. The scene takes place against the backdrop of a cottage, a field, a drystone wall:

In fact they liked this so much they shot it twice! This is one of the films for which an International Sound version exists as well as the domestic release version - perhaps more on that in another post. 

Is this just a really well-worn shot setup? Comments welcome on any other emigrants-bidding-farewell-to-sweethearts-in-front-of-drystone-wall sequences out there...

Translating silent film: 'Kid Speed' (1924)

OK, silent film translation time. I just came across two different language versions of Kid Speed (Semon, 1924), a comedy short featuring one Oliver N. Hardy. One version is in English; the other is in Italian, from an off-air recording from RAI television.

The English version can be found here:

The Italian version, entitled Ridolini e il suo bolide, is here

 

The original YT poster dates this broadcast to the 1970s:

La pellicola è una versione della Rai, probabilmente databile negli anni '70: ad un certo punto si può ascoltare una versione del brano "Il re del piffero", sigla della serie "Le simpatiche canaglie", ovvero i corti delle "Our Gangs" trasmessi dalla Rai nella seconda metà degli anni '70. Altra chicca è il cappello introduttivo del cortometraggio che viene presentato come comica americana presentata da Jean Gaborit e Jaques Durant [sic], due amanti del cinema famosi per le ricostruzioni e le riscoperte di pellicole storiche; loro è infatti la ricostruzione della versione originale del 1939 de "La regola del gioco" di Jean Renoir.
[The film is a RAI version, probably dating from the 70s; at a certain point you can hear a version of the song 'Il re del piffero', the theme song of the series 'Le simpatiche canaglie', which were the Our Gang shorts broadcast by RAI in the second half of the 1970s. Another nugget is the intro to the short which is presented as American funnies presented by Jean Gaborit and Jaques Durant [sic], two film lovers famous for reconstructing and rediscovering old films: it was they who reconstructed the original version of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game from 1939.]

The English version runs slightly over eighteen minutes; the Italian clip less than fourteen, but it's typical of these broadcast versions to be quite cut about. What's interesting is to look at which bits have been maintained and which have been lost. The English-language version has a lot of verbal as well as visual humour. The scene is set in rhyme:

There are some quite marked shifts in register between the titles:

(I can't work out why the two different typefaces and layouts.)
Some of the titles introduce the characters and the actors who play them:

(The writer seems temporarily to have run out of rhymes here.)

 

(I am embarrassed to say that the penny took a few minutes to drop with 'Phil O'Delfya'.)
 

(btw any readers know what the 'million gate' is?)

The Italian credits don't introduce the characters like this, and the full cast list in the opening credits is missing too. Instead they give us an opening credit for Semon, and one for Hardy and a 'Patty Alexander':

This is a bit mystifying, since the only actress in the film is Dorothy Dwan, and on checking, she doesn't seem to have masqueraded at any point as Patty Alexander, though she did start out in life as Dorothy Illgenfritz. There is a Frank Alexander, but...? Mystery unresolved. (For more on mysteriously differing character names in Italian film versions, see old post 'Who is Fred?').

The Italian clip blithely ignores all the scene-setting and verbal dexterity of the original. It has many fewer titles - is, in fact, positively laconic:

[Ridolini, with his help, is fine-tuning the meteor/vehicle he will drive in the Grand Prix.] (I'm not sure who 'suo' refers to here.)

[The philanthropist who organised the race pays a visit with his daughter to the main contestants.]

[The day of the race.] Note that this title corresponds to the following title in English:

The Speed Kid (Semon) and Dan McGraw (Hardy) are rivals for the affections of Avery DuPoys' daughter Lou, played by Dorothy Dwan. Her father promises that whoever wins the race can date her:

Dan McGraw gets very excited about this, and tries to get his goons to sabotage his rival:

But in Italian, he only seems to be interested in the race:

[Get rid of that Ridolini! The Grand Prix will be mine!]

The clips raise lots of questions. Are these two versions in themselves complete, or have they lost other bits along the way? Are these Italian titles the earliest available titles, or were there at any point earlier, perhaps more fully translated titles? Can we in any sensible way consider these two films as original and translation?

It's clear that even if silent film *can* lay claim to being easy to translate because the titles in the target language can just be refilmed and substituted, it doesn't mean that silent film *is* translated in so straightforward a manner. The whole texture of the film has changed. Taking out the wordy English titles changes the nature of the comedy, rebalancing the film in favour of the slapstick. Paratextually, it's reframed as a nostalgic pleasure, rather than for a contemporary audience. And the Italian titles are poorer not just semantically, but aesthetically; the two typefaces used in the original (for reasons which aren't clear to me, since they don't seem to correspond to any distinction between, say, narrative and dialogue titles) are reduced to one very functional one. And that's of course without even considering all the other ways in which the film could have been recut, which is beyond the scope of this little post.

The whole question of what actually constitutes 'part of the film' for the purposes of translation is at issue. But more on the (para)textual status of intertitles in a future post.

Translating silent film: British Silent Film Festival, Leicester, September 2015

I've been blown away by the experience of attending the British Silent Film Festival. It's the first time I've been at the Festival, though it has a long and distinguished history (it's in its eighteenth year). This year's Festival is at the wonderful Phoenix cinema and cultural centre in Leicester (a most sensible place, where you can even buy a flat in the same building for easier cinemagoing). It was lovely to meet up again with some well-known faces from the Splendid Innovations conference too.

Other people more knowledgeable than I am are blogging the Festival (see e.g. Silent London) and so I will concentrate on things translationy (though I would love to rave about the wonderful sailing footage on Windjammer, or the brilliant slapstick of Buston Keaton in Steamboat Bill, or, or....).

A number of films were screened at the Festival in their original languages with a spoken translation. This worked really well and it was interesting how the different film explainers gave the films quite a different tone. Neil Brand did great accents for the Dutch titles on the only available print of The Man from Home (Fitzmaurice, 1922), which helped give an extra touch of entertainment to an otherwise ho-hum film. Bryony Dixon's narration added ironical notes to the very good Swedish film Den Starkaste [The Strongest] (Sjöberg & Lindblom, 1929), a story of romantic rivalry between two ship's marksmen hunting for seal and bear in the Arctic.

A gentleman whose name I unfortunately didn't find out heroically improvised a spoken narration to Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff (1926) - a task made extremely difficult both by the film's titles and inserts (often very wordy, rather cramped, lots of handwriting, varying formatting, and not long enough on screen) and by the sheer length of the film (nearly three hours). It gave a whole new tone to the film and made me very aware of every title and text insert - and nearly distracted from the amazingly beaux yeux of Ivan Mosjoukine:

Image borrowed from this excellent review of Michel Strogoff at Moviessilently, hoping the owner will not mind.

For more on the skill and resourcefulness needed for festival film interpreting, see this article on film festival interpreting in the USSR by Elena Razlogova (subscription only). Props also to John Sweeney for his thrilling accompaniment to the film (though in fairness, all the musicians I heard were marvellous).

Two films were screened for which Alfred Hitchcock designed the titles, way back in the day when he worked for Famous Players-Lasky British. One was The Man from Home; only one print survives, with Dutch titles, mentioned above. The other was Three Live Ghosts (also Fitzmaurice, 1922) which was thought lost, as Charles Barr fascinatingly recounted, until a truncated print was found in Russia. The image on the front of the Festival brochure above is from this film. This was for me the real treasure of the Festival because of the way it had been cut, recut, added to and adapted.

Translation Studies scholars have tended to follow pioneer scholars such as Jan Ivarsson on the relative simplicity of translating silent film: 'the original titles were removed, translated, filmed, and re-inserted'. I imagine that in most cases, this was quite true. But someone working from a more Descriptive-Translation-Studies point of view might ask: OK, it was potentially easy to translate intertitles, but were silent films, in practice, so straightforwardly translated? There's plenty of evidence to suggest that intertitles were subject to the same kinds of 'deforming tendencies' (Berman's phrase) as any other translation. There's also plenty of evidence that silent films were routinely recut as well as retitled (see my previous post on Adrian Brunel's work editing silent films for import to the UK, or those juxtaposed versions of the same Chaplin film in English and Russian that I would look up on Youtube if I wasn't currently on a train...). Intertitles also pose other problems with layout, typeface, production values, etc., and technical/material problems which affect their preservation - see Enno Patalas, for instance, on Nosferatu (paywalled).

I would argue that we shouldn't see this editing work as external to the translation of the film; editing, retitling, adjusting for the target market are surely all part of the same process. Admittedly, Three Live Ghosts seems like a spectacular case, including, as Charles Barr described to us yesterday, the changing of characters' names, backstories and motivations, as well as the likely addition of footage not belonging to the original film. I look forward some day to reading a full account of this particularly intriguing silent film translation.

Austenland in translation

I was watching the guilty pleasure that is Austenland last night, dubbed into Italian. (I'd previously seen it in English). Austenland is a romcom about a group of misfits who sign up for an 'immersive Austen experience'. Much of the broad comedy plays on accent: Jennifer Coolidge perpetrating a series of appalling come-back-Dick-van-Dyke-all-is-forgiven outrages on received pronunciation; Georgia King channelling Miranda Richardson's Queenie; Bret McKenzie not trying particularly hard to disguise his New Zealand accent, presumably on the grounds that his employer's usual clients wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.

How can one badly fake an English accent in Italian? I wish my Italian was good enough to get a real sense of this from the dubbed version. But I could at least see how they manage the moment near the end of the film where Jane discovers that 'Lady Amelia Heartwright', played by Georgia King, is actually American too.

The English script goes more or less:

"Amelia Heartwright": Farewell! [sinking back into her seat in the carriage] God, that was the best time so far. Except for the eye gouging.
Jane: You're not British??
AH: Yeah, I know, right?! Well, that's what two years of private drama tutoring will get you.
(Austenland)

The information that Heartwright is American is only conveyed here through accent. Of course the accent doesn't really come across (sorry, I couldn't find the clip itself online). The Italian script goes:

AH: Alla prossima! Dio, questa è stata la migliore di tutte le volte! Sì, a parte l'occhio, certo...
Jane: Ma tu stavi recitando??
AH: Sì! Sono bravina, vero? Be', due anni di lezioni di recitazione private sono serviti...
(Alla ricerca di Jane)

[AH: Goodbye! God, this was the best time of all! Yes, apart from the eye, of course...
Jane: You were acting??
AH: Yes! I'm pretty good, right? Well, two years of private acting lessons worked...]

The difference is that in English, Jane is astonished that Amelia has turned out not to be British. Since Amelia doesn't do a bad job of channelling Miranda Richardson, and since any British accent at all sounds great beside the efforts of Lady Elizabeth Charming (Jennifer Coolidge), this works OK.

In Italian, Jane is just astonished that Amelia was putting on an act - which is much less plausible. I couldn't find any more suitable footage on Youtube than the gag reel, but to get an idea of Lady Amelia Heartwright's acting style, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s2fGMA69Q#t=2m53s.

Having said that, metalingual comments must be among the most difficult things to translate, and I don't easily see how else the dubber could have done it. How was it done in other languages? All comments from people who've seen the Italian, or any, dubbed version are very welcome... 

Less than a month to go! "Splendid Innovations" conference on film translation history

We're getting very excited that our conference on the history of film translation is only weeks away! (21 and 22 May, to be precise). The conference is very generously funded by the British Academy and features distinguished archivists, film historians and translation scholars from many parts of the world.

Registration is still open via the conference website at http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2015/Splendid_Innovations.cfm. Registration runs via the website until 11 May, and thereafter by email, but places are limited.

Please feel free to download and circulate this e-flier to anyone who may be interested.

"Consultants and doctors for sick films": snippet of film translation history

I have been reading and greatly enjoying Adrian Brunel's autobiography Nice Work, about his early career in silent films and then on into sound films. I'm particularly interested in the editing work he did on silent films, which relates to our forthcoming conference at the British Academy: Splendid Innovations: The Development, Reception and Preservation of Screen Translation.

(Thanks are due to Robert Smith of Adelphi Books, Southsea, for selling me the book some years ago and to Mark Fuller of Bristol Silents for recommending it and galvanising me to go and take the book off the shelf).

In the late 1920s Brunel went into business with Ivor Montagu, co-founder of the Film Society, table-tennis player, filmmaker, conservationist and translator, to edit silent films that weren't quite geared for a British audience. They offered their services, as Brunel put it, 'as consultants and doctors for sick films':

Numbers of foreign films were being imported which failed to appeal to British audiences because of certain remediable 'defects', and after we had very successfully operated on a few of them, Wardour Street began to realise the value of my little unit of editors.
   When the Film Society began importing films, editors were required, and so Ivor used my cutting rooms and my staff. After a time we formed a company, Brunel and Montagu, for editing films - the only one of its kind in the world - and were soon known in the trade as Brunel and Montage. As our business was almost entirely confined to the treatment of completed films with which there was something wrong, we discreetly omitted our names from the credit titles of the majority of those films which passed through our hands; but for this fact, ours would have become a household name in all cinemas, for not only was the volume of our business considerable, but we dealt with many of the most famous films of those days.
   The variety of our work was one of its many attractive qualities. [...] Next week's film might be American, Burmese or Japanese; it might be a spy drama, a village comedy or a medical instructional film. Again, anything might happen in connection with the work; one of us might have to go to Berlin, Rome, or Paris; or F.J. Perry, the tennis champion, might call in for a game of table tennis with Ivor, his coach; or we might have a sudden trade-show job, requiring three or four of us to go down to a film studio and work on the editing of a film for forty-eight hours before going to bed; or an importer of foreign films might call upon us to get passed by the Censor some rather risky and valueless picture, promising us a percentage of his huge (estimated) profits but having no cash to pay us for our work.  (Brunel, Nice Work, pp.117-8)

This business collapsed with the advent of the talkies, because, as Brunel says ruefully, 'it was impossible then to persuade film people that talkies needed any kind of constructive or creative editing or even that editors could do anything to adjust defects in synchronised films - editors were relegated to the position of film joiners, defeatists who accepted what they got and just assembled it' (p.122).

I was interested to see that one of the films he was involved with was G.W. Pabst's Kameradschaft (1931), one of my favourite films, and the first film in England, as far as I know, to be exhibited with superimposed titles:

I remember [the British Board of Film Censors] objecting to a scene in that magnificent film "Kamaradschaft" [sic], a distant shot of a number of naked miners bathing. It was a very pleasing scene from the point of view of composition, and from what one could see, through the steam, the men were fine specimens and were most skilfully manoeuvred so as not to alarm those unfortunate people who have peculiar ideas about the human body; it was interesting and, to me and my colleagues, completely unobjectionable. When I was told by the B.B.F.C that this scene must be cut out of the film I protested and pointed out that it had been shown in every civilised country in Europe. "On the Continent- yes, they would!" said one of the censors. I persisted. The B.B.F.C. officials then professed to be surprised and shocked at my attitude. "Surely you wouldn't wish little boys and girls to see revolting scenes of naked miners?" one of them who had not seen the film asked. They were adamant and so the scene had to come out. [...] However, this was only one scene; it was a pity to lose it, but it didn't ruin the film to cut it out. (Nice Work p.121)

It's interesting that Brunel mentions this, because it was a sound film, and yet apparently it didn't come under the heading of films which could not be improved through editing. The scene to which the eager beavers of the B.B.F.C. objected can be seen at 31:20 in the copy of Kameradschaft available on Youtube:

To go directly to the scene in question, click here.

The viewing copy I've seen at the British Film Institute, which is, as far as I am aware, a copy of the UK release print from 1932, shows that the film had added pictorial credits at the beginning, as well as the innovative subtitles. Were these the work of Brunel and Montagu as well? Can we ever know? And should we consider the absence of footage of naked miners part of the film's 'translation' to the UK? Come along on 21 and 22 May to find out....


Credits: 

The 'Splendid Innovations' conference, co-organised by me and the subtitler, translator and historian Jean-François Cornu will take place on 21 and 22 May, 2015 at the British Academy in London. It will be accompanied by a free public performance by the distinguished Japanese benshi, Kataoka Ichiro, with Japanese film scholar Professor Markus Nornes and with live music by Cyrus Gabrysch.

Bristol Silents is a group of extremely nice and knowledgeable enthusiasts who curate some of the best silent film events in Britain and are a big part of what makes Bristol a great place to be a film nerd.

Adelphi Books is my favourite shop in all the world. It doesn't have a website - it has to be experienced in person. Its owner Robert Smith has introduced me to many of my favourite films of the 1920s and 1930s. 

*****

UPDATE 27 APRIL 2015:

I wonder a bit about this distinction that Brunel draws between silent films which could freely be recut and sound films which didn't lend themselves to editing. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, in their excellent book French Film in Britain, Sex, Art and Cinephilia, quote a 1939 piece by Yvonne Thomas in Sight and Sound as saying that

The only bother with [Continental films] in those days [the silent period] was that from a English audience's point of view, they were far too long. They invariably had to be cut to meet our own requirements, but these cuts could usually be made without detracting from the story.

This certainly supports Brunel's account, but then Brunel also brings in the sound film Kameradschaft. And Joan Hills' obituary of the distinguished subtitler Julia Wolf, who subtitled every foreign film at the Curzon from its opening in 1934 to its closure due to bomb damage during the Second World War (Mazdon & Wheatley pp.27-8), suggests that she recut not only silent, but also sound films - sometimes, as Brunel did, as a way of 'managing' the censorship process. [totters off to do more reading]