> Why this discrimination against song lyrics - not in any of these films
> themselves, but in the ways they are then exported, represented, depicted
> within film culture?
This seems to invite a sociological answer. Here is a theory.
A custom - like this custom of film distribution/exhibition society -
persists because
it is well adapted to the pressures of that society. Usually many pressures
conspire to make a certain custom relatively persistent. Several responses
have cited pressures, including (with a couple of additions):
1. Songs are thought of as working aesthetically as music rather than
language. (A widespread sentiment - which anyone who likes singing would
have to question.)
2. Songs are non narrative (Similar to the above. Musicals, opera, etc seem
pretty much narrative to me. A lot that people declare to be non narrative
is usually narrative negated in a sort of Hegelian i.e. it is a different
kind of narrative)
3. Lyrics are hard to translate. Not only costly, but verse translations are
usually awful, prose translations unsingable.
5. Difficulty even for native speakers of actually hearing lyrics in order
to translate. I wouldn't mind the odd karaoke line under songs in English.
4. Subtitles, and especially song translations in subtitles, are
aesthetically awkward (However, songs are part of the narrative, and reading
prose translations is no more aesthetically distracting than reading
dialogue subtitles and missing out on image
contemplation)
4. The 'outside of art', market culture of distribution and subtitling. If
filmmakers were doing their own subtitling I suspect that more songs would
be subtitled. As a result, subtitles, when not altogether neglected, are
often dismal - bad
translations, white on white, etc.
6. Incumbency of the custom itself. Once it is the norm it is somewhat
self-perpetuating.
7. Almost no-one speaks or can speak for the audiences who would like
translations. The symptom is scarcely articulated, let alone change
advocated. There are no activists, NGO's, political parties. At best there
is Adrian's philosophical question.
Acting together, these excuses, sentiments, costs, difficulties greatly
reduce the likelihood of song lyric translations.
The result of these sorts of selection processes is that, almost
unconsciously, film society ends up with a cultural form that is quite alien
to (or, as they say, alienated from) the intentions of filmmakers and
audiences (even if not to/from the distributors). In other words, this
unsubtitled song thing is a symptom of a kind of film-culture unconscious.
Ross
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