Again, video labels are not football teams--it's a global market and they all belong to us. Kino has huge exhibition commitments as a chain theatrical distributor and TV supplier to TCM silents, etc, and if you think that most people--outside of us purists-- prefer to see these brief intertitles in tiny subtitles overlaid over giant alien language words, you're crazy. Lots of common everyday people are interested in Metropolis (it's one of the most, if not THE most, famous German films of all time) . . . just like the hordes of goth kids and horror movie buffs into Nosferatu but couldn't tell you a thing about Murnau or Der Letzte Mann.TMDaines wrote:I'm just so glad we have Eureka over here and not Kino. Watching Metropolis in the cinema on a huge near-IMAX-size screen, with the proper intertitles, was a great experience.
I really would have to debate that there's any such thing as "proper" intertitles for a silent film. UFA films, just like any major studio in the silent era, created (and I've said this a thousand times) these films to travel. I understand your affinity to see the intertitles of the coutnry of origin, and in the native speaker of the title writer . . . but as a rule one has to remember that these titles were written specifically to to travel and be translated . . . to be succinct, easily translated into accessible regional equivalents, etc, so the story would get across regardless of its destintation.
So many of these films didn't ship with intertitles in them, as it was up to the local distributors to come up with their own title design and translation of the cards. These are cards generally to confirm primarily what one is seeing, not provide intense, highly specific text that in and of themselves provide the crux of the cinematic biscuit , and therefore, if mistranslated, would cause the viewer to miss something huge and heave the narrative off the side of a cliff.
This is the nature of what makes silent films-- or at least the best of them-- the purest form of pure cinema. This is a visual medium--by their very nature and function intertitles were never intended by their directors to be fetishized in one form or another. They operate in easily translatable support, written with a clear travelling gist, so to speak, to make the translator's job in all destination markets, easy.
And you guys overseas also have to realize that America is a gigantic country-- the sliver purists who make up places like this board are a fraction of their market for home video, TV and the cinema. Look at the stats of this board:
Total members 2874
Most users ever online was 199 on Tue Jan 15, 2013 8:59 am
Now think about how few of us are actually active posters out of that less-than-3K number. Then think about how very very very few of that tiny number here are actually so hugely concerned--like me, like TMDaines--with silent film presentation that they actually think about the fact that there are German intertitles laying around overseas that could have been inserted.
Do you think it's 100? Not even close. I doubt it's even fifty. I think 25 is even high. Believe me, I've been driving the silent film convo here for years and I know who the regulars are.
And this is a GLOBAL COUNT. It even includes folks like Tag, and Kalat and Bergstrom who pop by to say hello.
Now perhaps you can understand why Kino--whose audience dynamic here in the huge USA is very different vs Eureka/UK--walks the midline when it comes to silent film titles, and don't cater to us twenty silent film maniacs.
And after all, they DO include secondary discs in German when they release on home vid.
