I think one reason that the songs are not often translated (with exceptions:
see the song at the end of Rohmer's Autumn Tale; Cantonese opera sequences
in HK movies) is subconsciously philosophical: I think we have a reflex to
think that the music is part of the world of the film and that the words
have a more abstract, external relationship to the empirical facts within
the movie. In this respect, subtitles of songs usually only occur when (as
in the two examples above) the songs *become* the content--that is to say,
when the songs stop being the sort of non-discursive background effect (the
aural equivalent of a certain lens or costume) and become the aural
equivalent of words. I think it would be interesting to develop some kind of
systemization on why how and when we decide songs are non-signifying on the
one hand or content-generative on the other. For example, it seems unlikely
that one would subtitle the pop songs in a typical Hollywood movie because
we assume that the song is only there as pop cultural packaging, but it
would be odd not to subtitle the songs in a Dennis Potter serial since, if
subtitles are suppose to bring us to explicitly uttered content, the songs
in The Singing Detective would be the center of that content.
This issue of explicitness allows me to digress in the direction of this
thread: further away from songs and more, I think, towards the idea of
subtitles. The Spartacus/Frida example reminds me of a more low-brow example
of the same problem: scenes in science fiction movies where aliens speak
English. In Star Trek, for example, you assume the Klingons on their own
ship are speaking what we are told is their own language--but ironically the
moment when they actually speak Klingon, you wonder what they had been
speaking all along. What subtitles seem to do more generally is to make the
more purely literary aspects of a film far more loud--we notice them with
subtitles in a way different than we would without them. I was noting, for
example, that the DVD edition of the BBC Shakespeare set allows
subtitles--but only in English. On another note, I've long thought that,
because subtitles make the actual spoken sound content more abstract and
separated from the words, subtitles seem to make internal
monologues/voiceovers work better in films in a language we don't
understand: in Double Indemnity, the voiceover doesn't seem to have anything
to hang on; but in Chunking Express, for example, the relationship shifts:
the subtitles become the "content" and it is the voice that becomes the much
needed "personality" that grounds the voiceover into believability.
Best,
Ken
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