Dear friends -
Thanks for the fascinating responses to my question about lack of subtitling
for songs!
One other factor that bears mentioning is cultural. My sense (unverified) is
that 'pop culture' songs are subtitled a heck of a lot less frequently than
'classical/high art' music-with-words. For instance, I don't think there
would even have been a question in the subtitler's mind about NOT
translating the lyrics of the song that Isabelle Huppert is teaching in THE
PIANO TEACHER (and thank the god of cinema for that, because it's absolutely
essential to the film's meaning). But if it's some pop song, the 'film
culture unconscious' liberty gets taken perhaps unthinkingly ...
This can sometimes be seen in film criticism, too - where the tenacity and
fanaticism of individuals' musical taste rules the roost as much as it does
everywhere else. (I keep a file on every snob who has ever dismissed a Brian
De Palma film because he/she feels superior to Giorgio Moroder or Joe Cocker
music.) I think, for instance, of two fantastic articles by Robin Wood.
There's his recent piece on THE PIANO TEACHER, which is what taught me about
the full meaning of the song lyrics mentioned above, from Schubert's
"Winterreise", which he calls "one of the essential landmarks of our
cultural history". OK, I'll accept that statement. But in his equally good
piece on Linklater's BEFORE SUNRISE from a few years back, he rightly extols
the brilliance of the scene where the main characters (Hawke and Delpy) are
together in a booth listening to a record - and Wood does not feel it
necessary to even identify the song (it's Kath Bloom's "Come Here"),
referring to it off-handedly as simply "a not-very-distinguished song that
may vaguely suggest what is going on in the characters' minds and seems
sometimes to motivate their 'looks' " (he does quote its lyrics, which is at
least something!). My experience of this Linklater scene - a common one for
me at the movies - is that I came to love this song precisely THROUGH THE
FEELING THAT THE FILM GAVE IT, invested in it, filled it with. "Come Here"
thus became one of the essential landmarks of my cultural history!!
Adrian
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