The Business of Subtitles

[manicsounds]

Let's not just bash AE for imposed subs. The French labels are more notorious for doing this than any others, as well as some US anime labels.

[Zot!]

Still, consider Svet's point. Respected favorites Criterion, MoC, BFI, etc. all impose region coding to a large degree, or in Criterion's case, always. It's not like they refuse to capitulate, when they are forced to. Forced subs are ridiculous, of course, but it's not like Region locking isn't.

[kidc85]

This has come up before but I'm never precisely sure what it is that makes fixed subtitles such a huge deal breaker. Daines and Hare: are you both multi-lingual, do you both rewatch the same film over and over until you know it word for word, or is there some other reason I've missed?

[TMDaines]

The example Michael has given above is also irrelevant because Second Run has never released a film from the same category Amour, Holy Motors, and A Royal Affair (Metrodome Video/also imposed subs) fall into -- these are very big films, Oscar winners, big festival winners, etc. When you start targeting such content -- which very clearly appeals to a much larger base of consumers as opposed to what a Second Run catalog release would -- and you happen to release in the EU, subtitle restrictions will come into play. This is the market reality. And this is the reason why even the likes of StudioCanal cannot do anything about it.

Metrodome are a third terrible example. They've been forcing subtitles on their releases for an eternity, sadly. I think you're giving far too much credence to the perceived intentions of a label. StudioCanal, Pathe and Metrodome have never shown any consistent desire to ensure that they provide optional subtitles on their releases.

2. I think that you are missing the point. It is not them deciding to have imposed subtitles - which is the reason why I took the time to post here. If such high-profile French films appear first in the UK, it is almost guaranteed that they are required to have them. But lets see and test the discs first instead of speculating.

(Point: If AE owned the rights to the films in the entire EU, then they could decide to do whatever they want. This is why Gaumont, for example, can afford to have English subtitles on many of their Blu-ray releases and at the same time have them coded ABC/Region-Free. And this is why some of their films appear on Blu-ray elsewhere but are locked to Region-B. They can dictate the terms).

I am not trying to debate what is right or wrong. All I am trying to clarify is that the decision to have such imposed subtitles is made elsewhere.

This is absolutely false. Never are AE obliged to sign any contract, whose terms they do not agree with. Labels have been contending with these issues for an eternity. For whatever reason, AE have chosen to capitulate here and have tarnished their standards. As several of us have commented, this will affect our purchasing of their titles. I'm not getting burnt any longer.

This has come up before but I'm never precisely sure what it is that makes fixed subtitles such a huge deal breaker. Daines and Hare: are you both multi-lingual, do you both rewatch the same film over and over until you know it word for word, or is there some other reason I've missed?

There's a couple of reasons. For a start, most people in the world are multilingual. The idea that all people living in Britain in 2013 are monoglot English-speakers is absurd and quite frankly insulting. Others have commented on the fact that people should have the choice to watch a film the way a director intended, and that fixed subtitles compromise this experience.

[MichaelB]

This has come up before but I'm never precisely sure what it is that makes fixed subtitles such a huge deal breaker. Daines and Hare: are you both multi-lingual, do you both rewatch the same film over and over until you know it word for word, or is there some other reason I've missed?

Personally, I'm not bothered if it's a language I don't speak and realistically will never learn - I wouldn't be the least bit fazed about fixed subs on, say, a Satyajit Ray film (which is just as well as a great many of my Ray DVDs are presented just like that!).

On the other hand, if I do understand the language, either reasonably well (French/Italian) or with a better than passing acquaintance (German/Czech/Polish), then being able to switch off the subtitles is a big deal for me*. Films are a qualitatively different experience if watched without subtitles: even if you don't understand every single spoken word, the chances are that you're going to listen to the original dialogue properly in a way that you probably won't do if you're using subtitles as a crutch. And you'll certainly pay far more attention to the actors' faces if your eyes aren't constantly darting down to the bottom of the screen.

(*as is being able to switch them on when needed, which should answer the inevitable "so why don't you buy the French/Italian/German edition, then?" followup question!)

[Tommaso]

For me, fixed subs can be even inacceptable on a film whose language I don't speak. I was terribly annoyed about the fixed subs on the German disc of "Ran" because I definitely wanted to replay the scenes in the burning castle or the old King Lear (whatever he's called in Japanese) and the fool in the green fields without subs, sucking in those stunning images without distraction. Thankfully the CC came to the rescue (now gone again). More or less the same might go for any film that lives from the images, and Ray's films are among them. One reason, apart from the picture quality, why I'll now definitely wait for the Criterion releases of Ray's films.

[vsski]

I never realized how distracting subtitles really can be until I used them on a movie whose language I understood, but where one character spoke in an accent I struggled understanding. The moment I turned the subtitles on, I found myself reading everything even though 80% of the dialogue was clearly understandable to me - it just has this effect of forcing your viewpoint downwards away from what can be great expressions on actors' faces or beautiful visual compositions (at least for me).

[zedz]

Once you're literate, it's not something you can turn off. If there's text in our eyeline, we're obliged to read it, so subtitles will inevitably distract from the intended visual experience of a movie. Usually, there's the important trade-off of comprehension, but when there isn't (i.e. if we're already perfectly fine processing the language we hear, or if we're deliberately trying to focus on purely visual information), it wreaks havoc with the way we mentally process a film.

If you want to really understand how much of the film you're losing when watching with subtitles, just switch on the HoH subs on an English language film and try not to read them. Or, for the worst of all possible worlds, watch an English-language film with subs in a different language that you also understand (or sort-of understand). The viewing experience becomes swamped in cognitive dissonance, and you're spending most of your time evaluating translations and omissions (and, boy, do any discrepancies between the spoken text and the written one become highly irritating) rather than parsing the meaning of what's being said or appreciating the image in visual terms. Our internal language-processing software is designed to override and overwhelm a lot of other mental processes.

[colinr0380]

I've never really had the 'cognitive dissonance' issue with subtitles but I do think that subtitles, unless actually part of the original print (i.e. very short scenes or title cards (which strangely always used to get removed and replaced with player generated ones on MGM discs) that are made in the style of the film with specific fonts i.e. Silence of the Lambs, Traffic) in its original release territory and therefore part of the original film, should be removable.

I agree with Tomasso about the option to remove subtitles to enjoy the film 'clean'. I haven't gotten to that stage with many films yet but with favourites rewatched many, many times (Contempt, The Vanishing, Wages of Fear, Seven Samurai etc) it is great to be able to turn the subtitles off and follow the film without them.

[domino harvey]

I watch everything with subtitles, and when I was a kid I watched TV with Closed Captions. I have no trouble focusing or not focusing as I so desire. The problems zedz describes are completely alien to me

[Gregory]

Sometimes I think you two are just trying to be the opposite of each other!

[zedz]

Well, now I know why we see films in completely different ways!

Maybe the handful of films we both like either don't have HoH subtitles or are in languages neither of us understand!

[kidc85]

I watch everything with subtitles, and when I was a kid I watched TV with Closed Captions. I have no trouble focusing or not focusing as I so desire. The problems zedz describes are completely alien to me

Ditto. My girlfriend insists on having subtitles on, regardless of language, and I just don't notice it anymore. To the point where, as our player remembers the last setting, I will accidentally watch English language films with the subtitles on, even when I'm by myself, just because I don't 'see' them anymore.

I just wanted to make sure that I properly understood all of the issues as, obviously, I have needed to completely be at peace with 'fixed' subtitles for years now. I appreciate everyone's comments and agree with practically everything, keep fighting the good fight.

[Zot!]

I watch everything with subtitles, and when I was a kid I watched TV with Closed Captions. I have no trouble focusing or not focusing as I so desire. The problems zedz describes are completely alien to me

Ditto. My girlfriend insists on having subtitles on, regardless of language, and I just don't notice it anymore. To the point where, as our player remembers the last setting, I will accidentally watch English language films with the subtitles on, even when I'm by myself, just because I don't 'see' them anymore.

I just wanted to make sure that I properly understood all of the issues as, obviously, I have needed to completely be at peace with 'fixed' subtitles for years now. I appreciate everyone's comments and agree with practically everything, keep fighting the good fight.

Is this because you guys are hard of hearing or some kind of obsessive compulsive thing?

[TMDaines]

I always have English subtitles on (for English-language films) when watching with my missus, as she isn't a native English speaker.

[jindianajonz]

My girlfriend does the same thing. She feels that if there's a single word she doesn't understand, it is probably the most important word in the plot, and demands that we rewind and rewatch until she understands what was said. When we started watching The Wire, she demanded subtitles because she couldn't understand the what a lot of the drug dealers were saying, until I pointed out to her that even with subtitles on she didn't really understand their slang.

I'm at the point where it still drives me crazy, though. I find that when subtitles are on for english movies, I pick up on the key words in the sentence but have a much harder time fitting those words together in a comprehensible way. For instance, if somebody says "I'm going to the store to buy a horse horse" I'll know that something was said about a store and a horse, but often miss out on how those words connect to eachother. Is he going to the store on a horse? Is he going to store his horse somewhere? I never have this problem with foreign films, but having english sound and english subs is like trying to listen to two people talk at once.

[MichaelB]

I always have English subtitles on (for English-language films) when watching with my missus, as she isn't a native English speaker.

And for similar reasons I appreciate having subtitles in the spoken language of the film, although in most cases I have to buy them from the country in question and hope they throw in English as well.

In fact, in the case of Ridicule I deliberately favoured the French edition over the English one as I couldn't find a single release with both French and English subtitles (there may have been one since 2000, I don't know), and I thought the French would be more useful given that with this particular film a transcription of its carefully crafted puns is far more valuable to me than a translation that can only ever be approximate.

[Zot!]

having english sound and english subs is like trying to listen to two people talk at once.

Yeah, that's how I process it. And My second language sound + English subs = "No, that wasn't translated right!" Either way, huge distraction. I did once watch Von Trier's Danish language The Idiots in Munich with German subs. I speak neither, but I still somehow followed along.

[zedz]

The only time I managed to see Murotava's The Sentimental Cop, it was in Russian (which I understand a little) with Italian subtitles (which I understand a little more). Fortunately, that film is all about cognitive dissonance, and every line of dialogue is repeated half a dozen times!

Oh, and I guess I ought to buy my wife some flowers on the way home. You poor guys.

[Michael Kerpan]

We first watched ZHANG Yibai's Long Night in Shanghai (mostly half and half, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese) with NO subtitles at all. Since the film is about communicating (or trying to) when one doesn't share a mutual language, the lack of subtitles seemed appropriate somehow.

[TMDaines]

I always have English subtitles on (for English-language films) when watching with my missus, as she isn't a native English speaker.

And for similar reasons I appreciate having subtitles in the spoken language of the film, although in most cases I have to buy them from the country in question and hope they throw in English as well.

I guess, whether this is possible or not, depends upon which areas of cinema you're interested in. French and Italian, sure, as they frequently provide same language subtitles. The Germans seem to hate their deaf and hard-of-hearing community as they hardly ever provide them for some reason.

[GaryC]

I suspect I'm more of an auditory person - I once scored very well on an auditory comprehension test. (Two people read increasingly complex sentences to each other, and the listener has to repeat the sentence word for word from memory. I managed it very easily, but the other person couldn't do it with even the simplest sentences.) On the other hand, I'm crap at the picture round in my local pub quiz.

There's another factor with me: I'm used to watching films and TV with subtitles, even English HOH subtitles, as my mother has lifelong deafness. So when I was living at home or when I visit, TV programmes always have had HOH subtitles on when she's watching. In my DVD and Blu reviews, I always note if HOH subtitles are absent, as I suspect I'm more sensitive to that issue than many people. And with review discs I have subtitles on, to note any issues with them in my review. (For example, a misspelling on one of the BFI's BBC Ghost Stories DVDs - "black shark" for the creature of East Anglian folklore the Black Shuck.)

As for foreign-language films, I don't tend to watch films over and over, though many favourites I have watched many times in my 48 years of existence. I'm more conscious of the films I haven't yet seen, and as a regular reviewer, the review discs have to take priority too. The only language I was fluent enough to be able to hold a conversation in (and to watch a film via French subtitles - that was a print of Gertrud at the NFT, by the way) was French, though I have a smattering of tourist German and Polish, and thanks to a trip to China in 2009 a few words of Mandarin. I suppose I could try to watch a French-language film without subs, though my French is very rusty nowadays.

I don't know what the feeling would be for films that have played with subtitles in their country of origin - such as, in the UK, the Latin-language Sebastiane, Welsh- and Gaelic-language features, Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen (opening reel in cinemas, all the way through on two BBC2 broadcasts due to very heavy Scots accents). Or something like Carlos, which must be the most polyglot film I've seen in recent years, with something like five main languages (French, English, German,Spanish, Arabic) and at least five others spoken in particular scenes. If there is anyone who would not need subtitles for any of that, I would be very impressed! (The Optimum/StudioCanal DVD of Carlos has fixed subtitles for non-English-language dialogue.)

[MichaelB]

The Germans seem to hate their deaf and hard-of-hearing community as they hardly ever provide them for some reason.

The Czechs are more likely to provide subtitles in Czech than English these days, sadly, especially on back-catalogue stuff. Although that's better than nothing at all - I do at least have a modicum of the language (I had formal lessons for over a year about fifteen years ago, and still retain enough to get the gist, although Bohumil Hrabal adaptations are well beyond my comprehension).

[colinr0380]

I know that this probably isn't a big deal for most people, given that apparently nobody else listens to commentary tracks (and commentaries themselves seem to be becoming an endangered species) but the other issue that I would add to this subtitle debate is that I often watch commentaries with the subtitles from the original film running alongside so that I can 'watch/read' the bottom layer of filmic action while 'listening' to the top layer of extra spoken information (what can I say - I like to multitask!) In those situations it really doesn't matter if a film is in a foreign language or English - the DVD era and commentary tracks have made even Hard of Hearing subtitles indispensable to me and, to get back to the original subject, the removability of subtitles has allowed me to set up an audio-visual experience like that in a way which best suits my personal tastes.

(I also often get irritated by those discs that have removable subtitles but force you to go back to the menu screen and choose to turn them on or off there rather than just being able to toggle them with a button on the remote - that makes setting everything up the way I like unnecessarily fiddly!)

[vsski]

Why is it that AE's new found practice of non-removable subtitles has elicited a storm of negative reaction (and imo rightly so), that even led to a separate thread on this forum, yet Olive who does the same thing for all of their non-English titles (at least as far I'm aware of) receives a lot of praise (granted for some of their Republic catalogue titles) and other than mentioning the subtitle issue hasn't caused the same kind of adverse reaction. At least to AE's credit they do publish some decent supplements in many cases while Olive's discs are mostly bare bones.
And for the record, I despise this tactic of non-removable subtitles (unless specifically desired by the filmmaker) and because of it have not bought any AE or Olive titles that have them.
I'm just curious about the difference in reaction - unless I have read the Olive responses incorrectly, but the emotional reaction seems different.