Låt den rätte komma in
Jan. 6th, 2010 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysA long time ago, when I was at university, I became quite the film snob. I wouldn't consider a film unless it came from some non-english speaking auteur - probably only available on a grainy 16mm print. I had it bad, but it didn't last long - John Sayles, Robert Altman and Bill Forsyth dragged me back to English. Then a bunch of SF related Hollywood blockbusters with SF themes gave me the realisation that there was validity there too. Time goes on and I find that I don't watch all that much cinema at all these days - for some reason I find most of that side of things comes from TV shows. Go figure.
But all that alternative cinema had one lasting impact - subtitles. As any of you who go to such films know, they are an inevitable part of the scene. Of course they crop up elsewhere - recently Inglorious Basterds had quite a lot. But if you watch a lot of subtitled films, there is a trick you need to learn very quickly. That is the ability to read them automatically - in effect process them as a background task while you are also watching the action and listening to the actors deliver their words. If done properly, it seems like you can understand the words being spoken in whatever language that may be. When watching, say, a Japanese film it totally seems as if I understand Japanese while the subtitles themselves never impinge on conscious thought.
Of course things stop with a jolt when the subtitles don't come up on a scene or even if they get out of sync. You can even get shaken out of the mode if you know a little bit of the language and you realise that what was said wasn't what was in the subtitles.
Which brings me to the point of this post. I cannot watch a film which is in English but has non-English subtitles. It drives me nuts trying to process the subtitles because I cannot turn off that automatic reflex of trying to merge them with the speech. It came up the other day because there was something I wanted to watch but it was only available with hardcoded Norwegian subtitles. I.e. the type you can't just turn off. I just couldn't watch it.
I eventually did get around the problem by cropping the bottom of the picture off, but that seems crude and is annoying in its own right. So what I want to know is, is there some trick for turning off the mental subtitle merging process so that this isn't a problem. Surely somebody out there must have conquered this problem before.
But all that alternative cinema had one lasting impact - subtitles. As any of you who go to such films know, they are an inevitable part of the scene. Of course they crop up elsewhere - recently Inglorious Basterds had quite a lot. But if you watch a lot of subtitled films, there is a trick you need to learn very quickly. That is the ability to read them automatically - in effect process them as a background task while you are also watching the action and listening to the actors deliver their words. If done properly, it seems like you can understand the words being spoken in whatever language that may be. When watching, say, a Japanese film it totally seems as if I understand Japanese while the subtitles themselves never impinge on conscious thought.
Of course things stop with a jolt when the subtitles don't come up on a scene or even if they get out of sync. You can even get shaken out of the mode if you know a little bit of the language and you realise that what was said wasn't what was in the subtitles.
Which brings me to the point of this post. I cannot watch a film which is in English but has non-English subtitles. It drives me nuts trying to process the subtitles because I cannot turn off that automatic reflex of trying to merge them with the speech. It came up the other day because there was something I wanted to watch but it was only available with hardcoded Norwegian subtitles. I.e. the type you can't just turn off. I just couldn't watch it.
I eventually did get around the problem by cropping the bottom of the picture off, but that seems crude and is annoying in its own right. So what I want to know is, is there some trick for turning off the mental subtitle merging process so that this isn't a problem. Surely somebody out there must have conquered this problem before.