S P EAK ING
IN SUBTIT L ES
R E VA L U I N G S C R E E N T R A N S L AT I O N
TESSA DWYER
Speaking in Subtitles
Revaluing Screen Translation
Tessa Dwyer
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Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1
1
Devaluation and Deconstruction
1. Sub/Dub Wars: Attitudes to Screen Translation
2. Vanishing Subtitles: The Invisible Cinema (1970–4)
3. Dubbing Undone: Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)
Part 2
vi
viii
19
52
79
Errant and Emergent Practices
4. Media Piracy, Censorship and Misuse
5. Fansubbing and Abuse: Anime and Beyond
6. Streaming, Subbing, Sharing: Viki Global TV
109
135
164
Conclusion: Error Screens
186
Bibliography
Index
189
220
CH APTER 2
Vanishing Subtitles:
The Invisible Cinema (1970–4)
Opening on 1 December 1970 to launch the foundation of New York’s
Anthology Film Archives, the Invisible Cinema was utterly unique in
its design, programme and philosophy. In a review for Vogue magazine,
Barbara Rose (1971: 70) described its seating bank as nothing short of
‘revolutionary’. Meanwhile, Anthology declared it the ‘first true Cinema’,
positioning it as the centrepiece of its ‘film museum exclusively devoted
to the film as an art’ (Sitney 1975: vi–viii). The cinema featured ritualised,
cyclic screenings of a handpicked selection of ‘essential’ viewing comprising ‘monuments of cinematic art’ (v). Within this reverential space,
Figure 2.1 Launch of the Invisible Cinema with (left to right) Paul Morrissey, Michel
Auder and Andy Warhol. Photograph by Gretchen Berg. © Gretchen Berg and
Anthology Film Archives.
vanish in g subtitles
53
anything considered extraneous to a formalist avant-garde appreciation of
‘pure’ cinema was eradicated or, at the least, minimised as far as possible
to the point of invisibility – whence its name. Such impurities ranged from
banter between audience members to commercialism of any kind (hence,
largely excluding narrative cinema) to the violations of dubbing and
subtitling. The Invisible Cinema’s blanket rejection of screen translation
methods exceeds the binary logic of the sub versus dub debate canvassed
in Chapter 1. Moreover, the rationale behind this rejection appears far
removed from Bosley Crowther’s anti-subtitle campaign of the previous
decade. Rather than making foreign-language films accessible for a mass
public, Anthology’s uncompromising insistence upon untranslated foreign
‘originals’ seems almost engineered to alienate and exclude a general audience. In an interview with Stanley Eichelbaum (1971), Anthology’s Jonas
Mekas conceded that the Invisible Cinema’s no-subtitles policy had met
with some complaints, retorting: ‘but we’re not concerned with the audience. We’re interested in film.’ By banning both dubbing and subtitling
Anthology instituted a strict division between production and reception,
clearly prioritising the former over the later. Admittedly, the Invisible
Cinema obsessed over the act of reception, even attempting to foster a
suitable ‘posture’ for film contemplation (Sitney 1975: viii). However, this
focus on reception was solely concerned with reducing its impact on the
film itself as hallowed object, curtailing the contamination of film ‘art’ via
extra-filmic elements such as the audience. In a nutshell, the act, context
and agent of reception were to be made ‘invisible’ in order to ensure the
untainted purity of film. Annette Michelson (1998: 5) notes that even the
historically accurate practice of providing musical accompaniment for
silent films was strictly forbidden at the Invisible Cinema, ‘on the grounds
that such accompaniment – including that of specially or originally commissioned scores – had been primarily the response to the demands of
exhibitors, and not necessarily structurally intrinsic to the author’s filmic
project’.
Providing a colourful conclusion to the sub/dub debates of the preceding decade, the Invisible Cinema’s public denouncement of screen
translation as a whole produces a moment of crystallisation, making
it possible to see – almost in petrified form – a number of converging
interests, attitudes, prejudices and practices. The crystal that is formed
in this unique cultural-historical moment points foremost to the productive, transformative power of translation – to its socio-cultural impact
beyond the linguistic, communicative realm. This chapter examines the
Invisible Cinema and its extremist, zero-translation screenings in order
to demonstrate how Anglo-American film culture (whether alternative
54
speakin g in subtitles
or mainstream) deploys the inevitable flaws of dubbing and subtitling to
excuse and defend widespread disengagement from language difference
and translation in general. It proceeds by first detailing the disappearing
act that the Invisible Cinema performed on screen translation, along with
the various effects this disappearance wrought on foreign-language films
and their reception. It then proceeds to consider how Anthology utilised
issues of translation to define and cement its own aesthetic and ideological
position. Ultimately, despite its strategy of differentiation, striking similarities emerge between the Invisible Cinema’s radical rejection of translation and less severe instances of mainstream resistance.
Throughout this discussion, notions of failure continually surface.
Motivated by the supposed inadequacies of both dubbing and subtitling,
Anthology’s no-translation screening policy was largely scrapped following the Invisible Cinema’s demise in 1974, remaining in relic form
only. Today, foreign-language films included in Anthology’s Essential
Cinema repertory tend to be screened both with and without subtitles.
Audiences can pick and choose which format they prefer. Outside the
Essential Cinema collection however, foreign-language films are screened
with English subtitles. In part, the end of the Invisible Cinema and the
unique vision for which it stood signals the gap separating ideas from their
realisation. To its credit, Anthology proactively set out to bridge this gap,
seeking to produce a new mode of ‘practical criticism’ (Sitney 1975: vi).
Conceived as the embodiment or physical manifestation of Anthology’s
critical position, the Invisible Cinema constituted an integral part of this
plan. It was here that formalist film avant-garde concepts could be put to
practical effect. Yet, processes of actualisation necessarily involve transformation and re-routing. While the Invisible Cinema’s ban on screen
translation presented a forceful statement in support of its purist vision,
when put to the test this policy failed on numerous fronts, frustrating
audience members and compromising Anthology’s corollary aim to raise
the visibility and impact of experimental film, growing audiences via the
availability of regular, affordable screenings (see Alfaro 2012b: 45–6).1
Ironically, the Invisible Cinema’s denunciation of both dubbing and
subtitling had a reverse-effect. Instead of demonstrating the inessential
nature of translation for film, this radical, zero-tolerance policy ultimately demonstrated the ongoing indispensability of translation to this
first global, mass medium. If anything, the Invisible Cinema threw the
spotlight on to translation not away from it, while its anti-subtitling stance
proved short-lived and unsustainable. Although translation-free screenings do persist at Anthology, preserved in fossilised form as an optional
mode of viewing some Essential Cinema films only, subtitles have wreaked
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55
their revenge, becoming a mainstay of its feature programming. Hence,
the Invisible Cinema’s failed legacy is that today translation remains the
critical factor in distinguishing ‘essential’ from ‘non-essential’, regular
programming.
Disappearing Act
Setting out to redefine ‘the essentials of the film experience’ (Sitney
1975: vi), the Invisible Cinema constituted a ninety-seat screening space
designed by Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka, also a
founding member of Anthology and part of its selection committee. As its
name suggests, the Invisible Cinema sought to ‘practically not be there’.
According to Kubelka (1974: 32), ‘an ideal cinema should not at all be felt’.
Rather, all feeling or sensation should occur in response to the film and
all attention be devoted exclusively to the screen. Anthology’s manifesto
declared that the ‘viewer should not have any sense of the presence of
walls or the size of the auditorium. He should have only the white screen,
isolated in darkness as his guide to scale and distance’ (Sitney 1971: vii).
To this end, the Invisible Cinema sought to stage its own disappearance
through a range of technical and interior design innovations that aimed to
direct all attention ‘on the filmic image and sound, without distractions’
(vii). ‘In a cinema’, states Kubelka (1974: 32), ‘one shouldn’t be aware of
the architectural space, so that the film can completely dictate the sensation of space’.
To achieve this ideal of non-presence, the Invisible Cinema took
standard blackening procedures to the extreme. Seats, ceilings and walls
were all lined in black velvet, the floor in black carpet and ‘doors and
everything else were painted black’ (Kubelka 1974: 32). On the Cinema
Treasures website, cinemagoer Gerald A. DeLuca (2004) recalls the
‘all-black, side-partitioned seating’, which for Stan Brakhage (quoted in
Sitney 2005: 108) created an effect of ‘drifting in a black space, a black
box, and black ahead of you, nothing visible except the screen’. Inside, a
strong white lamp directed audiences towards this unadorned, illuminated
screen. Kubelka clarifies that the ‘cinema had … no curtains in front of
the screen, as, unlike most film spaces, it was not conceived as an imitation of theatre’ (32). All architectural features were removed apart from
some large cast-iron columns that proved too solid for the sledgehammer
(Sitney 2005: 35), as well as exit signs above the doors that Kubelka (35)
felt compromised the overall design. Finally, by far the most controversial and emblematic aspect of the Invisible Cinema was its seating bank.
Steeply raked to ensure unencumbered sight lines, seating rows comprised
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Figure 2.2 The Invisible Cinema’s emblematic seating pods. Photograph by Michael
Chikiris. © unknown.
head-height side partitions that encased viewers in a wooden surround. As
Rose (1971) reports, these ‘unique viewing facilities … caused as much
controversy as the highly selective group of works assembled as a kind of
canon of pure film art’.
The Invisible Cinema’s partitioned seating pods sought to shield audience members from their neighbours, both visually and aurally, in order
to heighten concentration on the film. For Kubelka (1974: 34), this seating
arrangement fostered the creation of a ‘sympathetic community’ in which
one was aware of others yet not disturbed by them. ‘Isolated visually,’
notes Michelson (1998: 5), ‘the viewer could establish minimal tactile
contact with her neighbor’s hand, but aurally, one was well insulated, with
structure and materials inhibiting conversation and effectively muffling
all sound from sources other than that of the screen’. Complementing its
ritualised, program of Essential Cinema, this seating design was based on
the principle that ‘one responds to the anticipation of art with a different
posture than to the expectation of an entertainment’ (Sitney 1975: viii).
Vogue art critic Rose (1971) expressed her approval: ‘I find the viewing
situation at Anthology the best I have ever experienced … The concentration permitted by such a seating arrangement lends a particular degree
of both intensity and abstraction to the film experience that the selfconscious works shown at Anthology appear to demand.’2
vanish in g subtitles
57
In addition to subduing unwelcome noises from other audience
members, the seating pods were designed to amplify sounds emitted
from the centre of the screen, mimicking hearing devices used during
World War II resembling ‘big ears’ (Kubelka 1974: 32). The wooden
encasings ‘concentrated the sound coming in directly from the screen
and subdued sounds coming from other directions in the room, thereby
creating a maximum of silence within which the sound from the film
would be undiluted’. For Kubelka (qtd in Thompson 1970), the ‘isolated
seat, like a handcupped ear, simply directs and connects the spectator to
the screen, ruling out interferences’. Evidently, Anthology recognised
both image and sound as essential components of film art. The absorbent
coverings used throughout the interior also served an acoustic purpose by
enhancing sound insulation, while state-of-the-art equipment included
‘remote control of focus and sound so that the manager … [could] …
ensure optimal quality from his seat in the house’ (Sitney 1975: viii) which
was equipped with a direct telephone link to the projection booth (Sitney
2005: 35).
As part and parcel of its commitment to purity, this ‘best conditions’
(Sitney 1975: vi) cinema refused to screen films that were either dubbed or
subtitled, denouncing translated prints as ‘defaced’ copies (viii):
One of the essential principles put forward by Anthology Film Archives is the
presentation of film in absolutely original versions, without dubbing or subtitles.
Synopses will be provided for the audience when necessary. At first a few films
will be shown in their titled versions, but these will be replaced as soon as arrangements can be made for the undefaced copies. It is possible to see the subtitled prints
of many of the films in our collection in the commercial theatres throughout the
country. But where else can one see the film exactly as the author made it? There is
a sacrifice involved in the substitution of the purity of the image for the sense of the
words, but it is a necessary one.
Evidently, dubbing and subtitling were understood by Anthology as
strictly post-production devices, completely inessential to the primary
process of filmmaking. Considered extraneous to the essence of film and
destructive of its visual and/or aural purity, they were no more welcomed
in the theatre than the sound of crunching popcorn. As Mekas put it, subtitles ‘destroy the rhythm and form of a film’ (qtd in Eichelbaum 1971: 140).
Although in many ways a spectacle in its own right, the unique design of
the Invisible Cinema – at once both minimal and hyperbolic – ostensibly
sought to eliminate anything that might distract and thus detract from the
film as the filmmaker intended it to be shown. Since ‘the author works
for the eye and the ear of the beholder,’ states Kubelka (1974: 32), ‘it is
evident that no other visual or acoustic signals, other than those planned
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by the film’s author, should reach the beholder’. Dubbing and subtitling
techniques were seen as a concession to the desire of the audience over
and above that of the filmmaker. In contradistinction, Anthology declared
itself a museum to film art and deified the name of the author-auteur above
all else, operating much like a temple of worship (Michelson 1998: 5).
Despite this strict ruling against dubbing and subtitling, translation
of a sort persisted at the Invisible Cinema nevertheless. Translations of
foreign-language dialogue and/or inter-titling were prepared in-house
as typed, print synopses. Reminiscent of silent film days when synopses
might be posted in the cinema lobby in lieu of a lecturer or narrator
(Bowser 1990: 19), this practice sought to effect a form of ‘invisible’ translation, banishing it from the visual and acoustic terrain of screenings and
relegating it instead to the extra-filmic space of the page. Evidently, print
synopses were seen to offer means of translation that did not compete
or otherwise interfere with the audio-visual domain of film itself, as the
printed pages would have surely been illegible in the dramatically darkened conditions of the cinema. In effect, Anthology’s synopses sought to
render subtitles as invisible as the cinema’s blackened co-ordinates, shifting them from the illuminated space of the screen to the dim obscurity of
the page.
As many of the foreign-language films screened at the Invisible Cinema
belonged to the silent era, synopses often constituted translated transcripts of film inter-titles. A number of these transcripts remain on file at
Anthology, including one prepared for Dziga Vertov’s Shagai, Soviet! /
Stride, Soviet! (1926), signed by Matt Sliwowski (n.d.), that announces
itself a ‘translation of the titles as they appear in the film’. In the
‘Translator’s Note’, Sliwowski stresses the effort he has taken ‘to retain
the original graphic design and word order to the maximum’. Fidelity
to the source material is obviously a primary concern, as one would
expect from a translation prepared under the auspices of Anthology.
Sliwowski goes to great lengths to preserve the visual poetry of the intertitles by retaining elements of layout and capitalisation. In this regard,
the transcript faithfully captures the way in which the film’s inter-titles
underscore the graphic and aural materiality of language, experimenting
with textual composition while introducing tonal difference via the mix of
uppercase and lowercase letters. Sliwowski also retains Russian-language
syntax where possible and uses parentheses to indicate words added ‘to
make the English translation more clear’. Caption 13, for instance, reads:
‘and [when] the steam HEATING operates’.
At several points, Sliwowski (n.d.) adds a brace bracket [ } ] by hand to
indicate ‘captions which come in a series without any image in between’.
vanish in g subtitles
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The need for such a strategy and accompanying notation results from the
qualitative difference that exists between the multimodality of the audiovisual and the singular, static entity of the page. Had the translations
appeared on screen in the form of subtitles or intertitles, this cumbersome textual device would not have been necessary. At one point in the
film, a pile of books is being burned. Part of a book title is obscured and
Sliwowski indicates this omission by inserting a question mark in parentheses: ‘(?…) of the Old Testament’. This use of brackets and symbols
repeatedly exposes the means of production, interrupting the translation’s
flow and highlighting the translator’s agency. By preserving the original
word order, the English titles are made to sound unfamiliar, as in captions
22 (‘somewhere / a horse fallen / from hunger’) and 23 (‘somewhere /
dies a camel / covered with / snow’). While some concessions are made
to the norms of the target language, these are clearly marked so that any
alteration to the ‘original’ can be identified. Clearly, this transcript aims
towards a literal, word-for-word fidelity to its source, and seeks to provide
an experience of foreignness over and above familiarity. The alienating
effect of foreign word order combined with highlighting of the translator’s mediating role disrupts the text’s overall fluency. The reader is
continually reminded of the very fact of translation. In this way, although
making translation ‘vanish’ during film screenings, the Invisible Cinema
foregrounded it within these in-house synopses. Sliwowski’s careful,
foreignising translation provides a key for decoding Anthology’s mixed
approach to foreign-language films and film viewing.
Sound/Side Effects
While the exaggerated darkness inside the Invisible Cinema prevented
patrons from reading synopses during screenings, nevertheless Anthology
committee member Ken Kelman identifies ‘rattling papers’ as a characteristic sound within the screening space (Sitney 2005: 34). By making it
a matter of policy to issue audiences with typed translation transcripts, an
unintended rustling noise resulted. The materiality of these translation
transcripts is noted in a New York Times review by Howard Thompson
(1970), who comments on the ‘predominantly young, casually clad and near
capacity’ audience that the cinema attracted for Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s
first sound film Ivan (1932): ‘[c]lutching a synopsis and credits they tested
the unconventional-looking seats a bit tentatively’. Kelman goes so far as
to suggest that rather than subduing the extraneous sounds of rustling
papers, the unique design of the cinema actually ‘made it worse’ as ‘noises
bounced around a little’ (quoted in Sitney 2005: 34). It seems that the act
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of removing translation from the screen to ensure the absolute ‘originality’
of the cinema’s images and sounds produced an unintentional side/sound
effect, with rattling papers compromising Kubelka’s (1974: 32) ideal
‘maximum of silence’. As one impurity is traded for another, we glimpse
the distance separating concept and realisation.
Even in visual terms alone, the Invisible Cinema did not quite live up
to its name. Complaining about the shininess of the black seat hoods,
Kelman (quoted in Sitney 2005: 34) states: ‘That was a little distracting
because right in front of me was this shine that didn’t exactly reflect the
movement of the screen. Anything more or less at eye level, you’re going
to see, and so the Invisible Cinema was not invisible.’ Moreover, Sitney
recalls how the seating pods ‘generated a great deal of heat’ and seemed
to escape the reach of the air-conditioner, creating a ‘soporific problem’
referred to by Kelman as ‘the dozing off phenomenon’ (109). Brazilian
experimental filmmaker Hélio Oiticia also noted this effect. Describing
the Invisible Cinema as ‘a horrible place’, Oiticia (quoted in Small 2008:
86n16) writes in 1971:
the place is completely black, one sits in a way in which you can only see the screen,
as the chairs have ‘ears’, with [flaps], so that you are isolated from your neighbor;
i feel the worst claustrophobia; it seems as if everything has stopped, and i don’t
understand how this could be the best way to see films (it makes you go to sleep).
In addition to introducing acoustic and visual impurities and hindering airflow, both the design and philosophy of the Invisible Cinema
disappointed in yet other ways. Another anticipated effect of transferring
translation from the screen to the page was a consequent lack of comprehension. ‘There is a sacrifice involved,’ announced Anthology, ‘… in the
substitution of the purity of the image for the sense of the words, but it
is a necessary one’ (Sitney 1975: viii). Anthology seems here to concede
that, despite its specially prepared synopses, the language of foreign films
would, to a degree, be lost. As Mekas conceded (quoted in Eichelbaum
1971: 140), the sacrifice was not welcomed by many in the audience.
Indeed, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby (1970: 38) argued that
Anthology’s anti-subtitle stance stifled the sensual possibilities of film
while disrespecting the work of seminal theorists and filmmakers such as
Bazin and Godard who ‘fought to elevate the importance of movie sound
(by which, I think, they must also mean sense) to that of the image’.
For Canby (1970: 38), the Invisible Cinema’s austere translation policy
reflected its general tone of aesthetic militancy and effectively foreclosed
the ‘potential sensual experience’ of film. Declaring its no-translation
stance of ‘debatable value’, he proposed that it perpetuated the ‘esthetic
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61
[sic] domination’ of the image over sound. By publicly sacrificing the
‘sense’ of foreign words, language is reduced to a surface sound-effect.
Presented as yet another aesthetic object, foreign language is appreciated
for its material qualities alone – its grain, pitch, tone, timbre and texture,
rather than its meaning or functionality. Despite recognising sound as an
essential component of film art (as reflected in its high-end sound technology and idiosyncratic seating design), the Invisible Cinema did not accord
language the same respect. Rather, in emphasising materiality over and
above meaning, sense was forsaken for surface.
Through the Cracks
Reporting on the Invisible Cinema for the New York Times, Canby (1970:
38) writes: ‘All films, whenever possible, will be shown in their original versions, meaning, in the case of foreign films, with their original soundtracks
and without subtitles’. Here, Canby collapses the Invisible Cinema’s
translation-free screening policy into one all-encompassing issue: subtitling. To a degree, this response is quite valid. For Canby, dubbing simply
did not fit the profile of the ‘serious’ (Sitney 1975: ix), devotional audience
coveted by Anthology. Nevertheless, Canby’s response both cuts to the
heart of the matter and misses the mark. Certainly, it correctly surmises
that Anthology’s blanket rejection of film translation actually played out in
relation to subtitles alone. In reality, it was subtitles, and, by extension, art
cinema conventions and mores, that were being contested. In neglecting
to mention dubbing at all, Canby suggests that this translation practice
was beneath consideration, understood as so antithetical to Anthology’s
mission as to be largely irrelevant. However, Canby fails to note that in
becoming doubly invisible in this way, dubbing might potentially slip
through the cracks. Indeed, I contend that it is precisely in relation to
dubbing that some of the preconceptions upon which Anthology’s translation policy was based become unstuck.
Films that typically utilise dubbing in their very construction – such
as musicals – have certainly been included in Anthology’s programme
after the Invisible Cinema’s demise, and it is not inconceivable to imagine
that a European co-production – dubbed in its ‘original’ version – could
have made its way into the Essential Cinema collection.3 Including a film
like Rossellini’s La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV / The Rise to Power of
Louis XIV (1966) at least complicates the collection’s claim to linguistic purity and authenticity. Made at a point when Rossellini declared
himself a veritable dubbing enthusiast, La prise contains a polyglot cast
and crew, registering the multilingual hybridity of European filmmaking
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at the time. Moreover, the film was made for television, commissioned
by the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Français (ORTF) (Norman
1974: 11), and consequently courted a mass audience. In fact, for the US
market, Rosssellini specifically preferred that his late-career history films
like La prise be broadcast dubbed on television (see Betz 2009: 298n7).
Evidently, Rossellini never intended that ‘the sense of the words’ in his
films be sacrificed for the ‘purity of the image’ (Sitney 1975: viii). Hence,
in screening La prise untranslated altogether, the Invisible Cinema actually undermined Anthology’s stated objective ‘to respect the filmmaker as
an artist and show the film as it was intended to be shown’ (Mekas quoted
in Eichelbaum 1971: 140).
Concurring with Canby, I agree that the target of Anthology’s notranslation screening policy was in fact quite singularly focused: it was
subtitling that was being rejected, and, along with it, the attitudes and
demands of the international art cinema movement. However, rather than
opposing this method outright, the Invisible Cinema simply attempted to
hide it from view. Dialogue titling persisted, but in a space removed from
the filmic. Here, a destabilising ambiguity emerges. Despite ostensibly
transcending the dualistic sub/dub logic and proposing an alternative,
archaic form of print translation in its wake, the Invisible Cinema’s
screening policy ultimately extends many of the arguments fleshed out by
pro-subtitle advocates, admittedly stretching them to breaking point. In
this way, the Invisible Cinema’s anti-translation measures demonstrate
the circular and self-defeating nature of debates that typically surround
film translation practices. Unlike dubbing, it is argued, subtitling enables
the ‘original’ film to remain intact, thus preserving its integrity. While
some critics concede it is not optimal to obscure a portion of the screen
with this added textual supplement, they argue that such a level of interference is minimal in comparison to dubbing and hence, sufferable (see,
for example, Canby 1983; Kauffmann 1960; Bordwell and Thompson
2004: 388). Anthology agreed with this argument up to a point. The
‘original’ film was to be respected and to remain intact. In contradistinction however, Anthology viewed the interference of subtitles as major
and insufferable. In this way, Anthology’s Invisible Cinema can be seen
to take pro-subtitling arguments regarding authenticity and purity to
their logical conclusion. Ironically, this results in a particularly mixed,
ambiguous message: pro-subtitling arguments redouble, folding back
upon themselves to expose their ultimate unsustainability, mutating into a
denunciation of subtitling itself.
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On the Map
According to Noam Elcott (2008: 18), Anthology’s founding mission
was ‘to promote American avant-garde film and its European predecessors’. Many foreign-language filmmakers are represented in the collection (including Bresson, Buñuel, Clair, Cocteau, Dovzhenko, Duchamp,
Eisenstein, Feuillade, the Lumières, Rossellini and Ozu amongst others),
thereby forcing the issue of translation. Indeed, Anthology recognised the
issues raised by translation as central to its project, identifying translation
as a convenient means of consolidating and concretising its philosophical
and artistic position. In choosing to publicly reject both subtitling and
dubbing, Anthology implicitly recognised the crucial role that translation
plays in culture work, mediating experiences of the foreign, conditioning
modes of reception and defining different genres of audiences in addition
to films. In this way, the Invisible Cinema’s translation policy brought to
light issues generally ignored or trivialised within screen discourse and
culture. Moreover, the extremity of its translation policy attracted attention, coming to function as a kind of position statement differentiating this
fledgling organisation from venues like The Carnegie and Joseph Papp’s
Little Theatre also seeking to stake a claim for ‘the art of film’ (Sitney
1975: vi).4
By prioritising the topic of translation, Anthology utilised this commonly overlooked issue to mark itself on the map, attracting attention by
the extremity of its position and its trend-bucking nature: it was precisely
the association between European art cinema and subtitling that Anthology
set out to attack. In declining to mention dubbing at all, therefore, Canby
correctly identified subtitling as the true target of Anthology’s notranslation policy and, along with it, the predisposition and predilections
of the art house circuit. It was this largely narrative-based, international
art cinema from which Anthology sought to distance itself, denouncing its
commercialism and lack of purity:
the art of cinema surfaces primarily when it divests itself of commercial norms.
The narrative commercial films included in our collection represent radical exceptions, cases where art has emerged despite the conditions of production and popular
expectation. (Sitney 1975: x)
If Anthology aimed foremost to redefine the very notion of film art as
primarily non-narrative, formalist and avant-garde, then subtitling – the
hitherto darling of foreign-language art cinema – had to be taken to task.
The Invisible Cinema’s no-subtitles stance one-upped the elitist aura of
art cinema, proving its more serious, formal and pious credentials whilst
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promising a level of purity and authenticity normally unattainable. So
much more than simply a movie theatre or film club, Anthology established itself as a museum dedicated to ‘furthering serious film viewing’
(Sitney 1975: ix–xi).
On staff at the New York Times during Crowther’s reign, Canby
would have been well aware of Crowther’s position on the topic of film
translation. In fact, it does not seem unlikely that Canby’s very interest
in Anthology could have been piqued by its unusual foregrounding of
screen translation. It is also likely that the founders of Anthology, for their
part, would have been aware of the New York Times sub/dub debate. As
Fausto Pauluzzi (1983: 131) notes, this debate ‘soon became a source of
reference to those who habitually saw and discussed foreign films’. In
reaction to Crowther’s maverick pro-dubbing position, numerous critics
rallied together in defence of the subtitle’s artistic credentials, restating
and reinvigorating the prevailing wisdom that subtitles present a more
authentic and less deleterious form of film translation than dubbing.
When the Invisible Cinema opened and Anthology issued its manifesto,
it deliberately and provocatively challenged this logic. In this way, its
puritan, no-translation screening policy functioned as a kind of position
statement, no less significant than its canon of Essential Cinema and its
controversial seating pods.
Ultimately, the Invisible Cinema’s rejection of screen translation in total
ends up prioritising it as an issue, inadvertently serving to highlight its
role in defining viewing experiences and social hierarchies, and in cultural
gate-keeping. In this way, the Invisible Cinema’s experimental screening
regulations testify to the performative, productive power of translation
and its capacity to produce ‘a new utterance whose primary purpose is
an independent statement about or reference to the subject matter itself’
(Tymoczko 2009: 404). Apart from its utilitarian, interlingual function,
subtitling (and dubbing) was intolerable for Anthology because of the
manner in which it inevitably draws attention to the mutable conditions
of film reception and, by extension, the contingencies of film production.
In this way, subtitling and dubbing directly contravened Anthology’s
conception of film as an ahistorical and transcendental, aesthetic artefact.
As Sitney (1975: v) explains, matters of historical context were considered
inessential and subordinate to ‘formal properties’. Moreover, the subtitle’s
embeddedness within art house cinemagoing signals its particularly active
role in meaning-making processes – how subtitling itself can create a set of
assumptions regarding both films and their audiences. While the Invisible
Cinema’s opposition to both subtitling and dubbing distinguished it from
the broader art cinema movement, at the same time it nevertheless exag-
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gerated the art house desire for foreign authenticity and originality. In this
sense, the Invisible Cinema opposed the prioritised translation method of
the art house circuit while paradoxically reaffirming its underlying philosophy, fighting its means rather than its ends. While Crowther challenged
the art house desire for linguistic authenticity, declaring it illusionistic and
fetishising, the Invisible Cinema merely asserted that such desires were ill
served by the subtitle.
Out of Sync
Michelson (1998: 10–12) interprets Anthology’s idiosyncratic selection,
screening and seating practices as ‘perverse acts of sacralization of the
fetish’, which she describes as ‘oppositional’ and ‘transgressive’. Elcott
(2008) disagrees. Quoting Kubelka who claims that the Invisible Cinema
was a ‘normal cinema… as normal as a camera or a projector’ (1974:
35), Elcott (2008: 20) takes this idea further, suggesting that it was in
fact a ‘classical cinema’, one that ‘shored up the conditions of reception
taken more or less for granted since the 1920s and now threatened by
multimedia and expanded cinema … and by the increasingly dominant
televisual distribution of movies’. Consequently, for Elcott (19) the
Invisible Cinema as an institution was markedly incongruent with its
own exhibition programme and Anthology’s avant-garde vision.5 Elcott
(21–2) views the avant-garde films that constituted the mainstay of the
Essential Cinema collection as experimental and radically self-reflexive,
while he sees the Invisible Cinema’s ‘disappearing’ design as continuing
the illusionary project of classical narrative cinema in which the viewer is
absorbed within a totalising filmic universe and transported away from the
realities of film exhibition and reception. For Elcott, the fetishistic nature
of the Invisible Cinema blocked its avant-garde potential.
According to Jean-Louis Baudry (1974–5 [1970]: 40), whose ‘Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ is attributed with launching Apparatus Theory, traditional cinema viewing is based on the model of
the camera obscura, which reiterates the ‘perspective construction of the
Renaissance’. Kubelka’s (1974: 35) conception of the Invisible Cinema as a
‘machine for viewing’ recalls Baudry’s commentary on cinema ‘as an ideological machine’ where ‘the darkened room and the screen bordered with
black like a letter of condolences already present privileged conditions of
effectiveness – no exchange, no circulation, no communication with any
outside’ (1974–5 [1970]: 44). He continues, ‘projection and reflection take
place in a closed space and those who remain there, whether they know it
or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated’
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(44). For Baudry, cinema’s ideological effects resulted as much through
identification with the camera (the apparatus) as with the world or characters portrayed on screen, leading him to declare, ‘the forms of narrative
adopted, the “contents” of the image, are of little importance so long as an
identification remains possible’ (46). In striving to make itself disappear,
the Invisible Cinema recalls Baudry’s postulation that ‘concealment of the
technical base will also bring about an inevitable ideological effect’ (41).
While many of the experimental films included in Anthology’s collection consciously partake in ‘the revealing of the mechanism, that is of
the inscription of the film work’ (Baudry 1974–5 [1970]: 46), exposing
the means of production and highlighting the materiality of the filmic
medium, the Invisible Cinema itself perpetuated traditional viewing
conditions, and hence produced the ‘transcendental subject’ (43) that
Baudry argues is ‘necessary to the dominant ideology’ (46). While a film
like Brakhage’s Blue Moses (1963), for instance, reveals a preoccupation
with the ‘pure’ materiality of film-as-film, the Invisible Cinema’s design
encouraged absorbed contemplation via a process of self-effacement.
Indeed, for Elcott (2008: 19), ‘the Invisible Cinema was conceived and
implemented as a buffer against the televisualization of movies, not as an
extension of an avant-garde project’. He deems it classical, reactionary
and out-of-sync with the experimental nature of its screening programme
(19–21).
On the other hand, Eric de Bruyn (2004) identifies retrograde elements
as systemic to the entire nature of the formalist film avant-garde. Although
the Invisible Cinema fostered a formalist preoccupation with the filmic,
for de Bruyn (2004: 166) this interest in the apparatus went only so far. Its
‘literal function’ he suggests was downplayed in favour of its ‘transcendent quality’. Here, de Bruyn takes to task the visible/invisible dynamic
deliberately invoked by Anthology’s radical cinema, suggesting that the
‘apparatus of projection was made invisible to make the medium itself
wholly apparent’. Elcott (2008: 21) echoes this sentiment, stating that this
was ‘an invisible cinema for the exhibition of visible film’.
In contrast to Elcott, neither de Bruyn nor Michelson identifies
any incongruity between Anthology’s critical position and the Invisible
Cinema. While Michelson (1998: 10) refers to the sacralising and fetishistic nature of Anthology’s museological mode of cinephilia, the Invisible
Cinema only confirms and concretises this ‘perversity’. Similarly, for
de Bruyn, the films being screened at the Invisible Cinema were not at
odds with their surroundings. Rather, the classically illusionist, transcendental leanings of the Invisible Cinema demonstrate the limitations
of Anthology’s brand of avant-gardism. For de Bruyn (2008: 165),
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Anthology limited itself to a restricted notion of the cinema as a singlescreen, single-source entity and hence achieved only a limited sense of
political consciousness or critique. In contrast, the more materialist strain
of the formalist avant-garde represented by Expanded Cinema exponents
such as Stan VanDerBeek, Malcolm Le Grice and Oiticia sought to step
outside the film frame, engaging with conditions of reception and making
the audience a part of the work.
Taking formalism to a point of ‘extreme “purism” or “essentialism” ’,
for Wollen (1975: 172), the artisanal American avant-garde movement
(mostly centred around New York), ‘ironically … ended up sharing many
preoccupations in common with its worst enemies.’ The ‘anti-illusionist,
anti-realist film,’ for instance, repeats the commitment to ontology and
essence driving advocates of cinematic realism like Bazin (Wollen 1975:
172). Hand in hand with its overt essentialism and fetishisation of quality,
the Invisible Cinema massaged Anthology’s elitist tendencies. Although
affordable, this ‘temple for the ritual celebration of cinema as an artistic
practice’ (Michelson 1998: 5) was designed for a limited and devoted
crowd – those able to withstand the alienating experience of subtitle-free
screenings and isolationist seating. In this way, the Invisible Cinema
limited the scope of Anthology’s vision. Ultimately, its concrete manifestation of Anthology’s critical overhaul proved too rigid and prescriptive,
resulting in a crumbling effect that culminated in the cinema’s abrupt
demise three years after its construction (Sitney 2005: 112–13).
Dream’s End
In 1974, the experiment of the Invisible Cinema came to a resounding
end. Anthology’s patron, filmmaker Jerome Hill, died of cancer, and
funding from his estate was withdrawn. Anthology was forced to relocate
to premises in Soho where it remained until 1979 when its present home
was purchased – a refurbished courthouse on Second Avenue in the
East Village. With the move to Soho, the question of reconstructing the
Invisible Cinema was raised yet, according to Sitney (2005: 112), Mekas
never seriously contemplated reconstruction. ‘Dreams are very difficult
to repeat,’ he states, ‘and that was a dream’ (quoted in Sitney: 113).
Although de Bruyn’s (2008: 165) dismissal of the Invisible Cinema as a
‘financial fiasco’ does not seem entirely fair (as its admission price of US$1
– equivalent to around $6 today – suggests that it was never envisioned as
financially self-sustaining), without the patronage of Hill the experiment
seemed to become untenable. Disappointed, Kubelka (1974: 35) clung to
the hope that the Invisible Cinema’s time was yet to come, seeing it as a
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‘model for the future’. Eventually, over a decade later, it was resurrected
as ‘Das Unsichtbare Kino’ at the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, in 1989
and remains in operation today.
With the Invisible Cinema’s demise, Anthology’s translation policy was
revised. Along with most other independent screening venues declaring
allegiance to cinematic ‘art’, Anthology submitted to the ruling logic of
the subtitle. Foreign-language films that do not form part of the Essential
Cinema collection are today screened in their ‘original’ language versions
with subtitles. Additionally, many Essential Cinema screenings are also
accompanied by subtitles. In May 2016, for instance, Jia Zhangke’s Still
Life (2006) was screened in Mandarin with English subtitles, while three
Jean Cocteau films included in the Essential Cinema collection were also
screened with subtitles. Unsurprisingly, dubbed prints do not appear
in the programme, unless perhaps their presence remains ‘invisible’.
Anthology’s decision to amend its anti-translation (or anti-subtitling)
stance following the Invisible Cinema’s closure suggests the compromised nature of its effort to disrupt the association between subtitling,
art and authenticity. Unlike Crowther, Anthology’s opposition to the
subtitle did not seek to expose the underlying fetishism and essentialism
of pro-subtitling arguments or to debunk any perceived elitism. Neither
did it offer a sustainable alternative. Rather, the ‘sacrifice involved in the
substitution of the purity of the image for the sense of the words’ (Sitney
1975: viii) created an ongoing point of tension between Anthology’s early
vision and that of foreign-language filmmakers and foreign film audiences.
Failure thus inhabits both the means and the message of Anthology’s
zero-translation policy. Although the Invisible Cinema strategically set
out to distinguish itself from other alternative cinemas by declaring both
dubbing and subtitling banned, the shortcomings of these translation
devices were re-evaluated following its own eventual demise.
Non-translation
Another way to frame the Invisible Cinema’s rejection of screen translation is to see it as one iteration of an idea recurrent throughout screen
history, which John Sallis unpacks in relation to Western philosophical
thought: the ‘dream of nontranslation’ (2002: 1). In declaring that foreign-language films were to be viewed without screen translation of any
sort, the Invisible Cinema insisted that the medium of film transcends
translation, existing somehow beyond it. Interestingly, the idea that film
is, should be, or might in the future become, a medium that exists beyond
translation unites screen culture across continents and eras, and relates
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directly to its global aspirations.6 The Invisible Cinema’s translation-free
screenings rehearse this dream or myth of film-as-universal language.
Since the silent era, this myth has played an instrumental role in shaping
film discourse and culture, despite the myriad modes of translation that
accompanied film from its inception.7 During the silent era, film’s ability
to communicate across national and linguistic boundaries was repeatedly
framed in relation to the biblical Tower of Babel story, as Miriam Hansen
(1991: 76–7) has productively explored.8 Hansen declares that the ‘myth
of a visual language overcoming divisions of nationality, culture, and
class, already a topos in the discourse on photography, accompanied the
cinema from the Lumiéres’ first screening through the 1920s’ (78). The
notion of universality was enthusiastically adopted by the US industry to
explain its appeal to diverse immigrant and illiterate audiences and used
as a marketing device to facilitate foreign expansion (Hansen 1991: 78).
Even after the wide-scale adoption of sound in the late 1920s, some still
clung to this ideal of non-translation, advocating for Esperanto to become
the official lingua franca of talkies (Rossholm 2006: 53; Quaresima 2006:
20).
For Sallis (2002: 1), the recurrent, unshakeable ‘dream of nontranslation’ does not efface the importance of translation but rather affirms it.
Without translation there can be no possibility of its transcendence.
Noting how ideas of non-translation often collapse into forms of utopian
idealism or colonising mastery, Sallis (4) argues that this dream persists
‘against mounting odds’ precisely because, without it, translation cannot
occur. The dream endures because it is conditional to translation itself.
For Sallis, non-translation and untranslatability are necessary, foundational aspects of all translation. At the Invisible Cinema, Anthology
sought to realise its dream of non-translation via radical screening protocols. Here, the ‘purity’ of film art was cultivated, largely conceived as
an expression of form over content. Consequently, words were sacrificed
in favour of images, and foreign film viewers were left adrift in a sea of
indecipherable words. In concretising this dream, however, Anthology
inevitably compromised its vision and reduced its force. Translated
synopses were produced that contaminated screenings nevertheless due
to the audible obdurateness (rustling) of the printed page. Audience
members complained. The filmmaker’s intended effect was sacrificed
and, enduringly, the issue of translation was prioritised, not minimised.
Publicly denouncing dubbing and subtitling in its manifesto, the Invisible
Cinema raised the visibility of these mundane techniques and underlined
the significance of translation as a whole by using it to differentiate itself
from other independent and experimental screening spaces, cement its
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formalist agenda and, finally, disturb audience members’ expectations,
making them sit up (quite literally, in seating pods) and take notice.
Today, translation continues to trouble Anthology’s critical position,
long after the Invisible Cinema’s demise, bifurcating its screening programme. Translation synopses are provided for some Essential Cinema
screenings. Yet, most foreign-language films in the Essential Cinema
collection are now accompanied by English subtitles, and English subtitles feature regularly throughout the rest of the programme. In 2016, for
instance, Essential Cinema screenings included Cocteau’s Orpheus (1954)
in French with English subtitles and Vertov’s Three Songs about Lenin
(1934) in Russian with no subtitles and an available English synopsis.
Hence, the early ban against both subtitling and dubbing is inconsistently practised. Translation synopses remain in limited form as a relic
of an earlier era and a signifying characteristic of the Essential Cinema
collection and its ‘purist’ aesthetic. Issues of translation not only differentiate some ‘essential’ films from others but also serve to quarantine the
Essential Collection from the rest of the Anthology programme.
According to Mekas, the dream of non-translation embodied by the
Invisible Cinema never finally converted into the practical (see Sitney
2005: 41). Rather, it was a compromised, failed venture. For Derrida,
translation is also inherently flawed, and this structural failure becomes
a central concern of deconstruction. Indeed, translation is at the crux
of Derrida’s (1984: 123) search via deconstruction ‘for the “other” and
the “other of language”, as it challenges Western metaphysics’ ‘ideal of
perfect self-presence, of the immediate possession of meaning’ (115). In
The Ear of the Other, he states that translation represents the ‘thesis of philosophy’ and that the ‘philosophical operation, if it has an originality and
specificity, defines itself as a project of translation’ (1985b: 119–20). Here,
he echoes Walter Benjamin (1968 [1923]: 77) who states, ‘the language of
truth … whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations’.
Derrida (1985b: 125) goes on to assert, ‘every contract must be a translation contract. There is no contract possible, no social contract possible
without a translation contract, bringing with it … paradox.’ Ultimately,
he is interested in the limit of philosophy as translation, the points where
philosophy ‘finds itself defeated’ – finds that it ‘cannot master a word
meaning two things at the same time and which therefore cannot be translated without an essential loss’ (120). Deconstruction for Derrida exists at
this limit point between translation and untranslatability, transmissibility
and the irreducibly specific (1979: 93).
Derrida describes translation as an arbitrary form of arrest or suspen-
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sion [arrêt] that by putting something ‘in other words’ does not paralyse
so much as set in motion (1979: 114–15). The process of translation can
never ‘put the same thing into other words,’ he writes, or ‘clarify an
ambiguous expression’ (75). Rather, it ‘amasses the powers of indecision
and adds to the foregoing utterance its capacity for skidding’. In choosing
a word, phrase or signified to replace another, the translator necessarily
curtails the free play of signification set in motion by words, yet, at the
same time, she starts new words on new significatory trajectories via her
selection. Translation necessarily involves actualisation. Hence, ‘meaning’
in its pure virtuality or open possibility is made concrete: every decision
the translator makes is an interpretation whereby meaning is captured,
frozen, seized. For Derrida, the loss or failure that inhabits all translation
results from this necessary concretising and arresting of open ‘polysemia’
and ‘dissemination’ (1979: 91). Such loss is nevertheless vital and productive. As Deleuze (1991 [1966]: 103) offers, ‘differentiation is never a negation but a creation, and that difference is never negative but essentially
positive and creative.’
Following Benjamin, Derrida (1985b) proposes that translation
expresses the virtual kinship amongst languages. Consequently, translation is not concerned with representing or communicating any ‘original’.
Rather, it exceeds the ‘original’ by intimating a purely virtual point of
contact that exists between ‘original’ and translation. Benjamin (1968
[1923]: 79–80) describes this point of contact or kinship as ‘pure language’
[reine Sprache]. Glossing Benjamin, Derrida (1985b: 124) states that
translation expresses ‘that there is language, that language is of language,
and that there is a plurality of languages which have that kinship with
each other coming from their being languages’. The ‘impossible’ aim of
translation is to reconstitute a whole ‘in such a way that the whole … will
be greater than the original itself and, of course, than the translation itself’
(123). As Paul de Man (1986: 82) notes, the ‘pure’, linguistic kinship that
Benjamin invokes suggests that translation is ‘a relation from language
to language, not a relation to an extralinguistic meaning’. In this way, it
is metalinguistic and hence, inherently theoretical or philosophical (82).
This metalinguistic kinship equates to a type of virtual unity found within
actual, specific differences, suggesting that languages are unified precisely
by their incommensurable differences from one another.
For Derrida, Benjamin’s concept of ‘pure language’ constitutes an ideal
that cannot be rendered concrete. As Edwin Genztler (2002: 200) notes,
the ‘translator, unlike the deconstructionist, must stop the fertile and
enjoyable play of the signifier between literary systems and take a stand’.
For Derrida (1985b: 123), actual translations are predestined to fail in their
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aim to render concrete virtual potentialities of meaning. Nevertheless, this
failure is itself significant and productive. Moreover, as failure is a conditional component of all translation, it does not preclude success. Although
‘translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the term’, for
Derrida, a ‘good’ translation succeeds in ‘promising success’ by providing
a ‘presentiment’ of the ‘possible reconciliation among languages’ (123).
Translation acts as a meeting point between languages: rendered or actual
language registers the virtual imprint of another. Kinship is expressed in
this relationship between languages, and, additionally, in the incommensurability between the actual and the virtual.
Concrete Impurity
In relation to the Invisible Cinema, how does Derrida’s re-evaluation
of translation as failure challenge Anthology’s denouncement of screen
translation as a form of ‘defacement’? Alternatively, do dubbing and subtitling challenge Derrida’s own qualitative distinctions between ‘good’ and
‘bad’ translations? As detailed in Chapter 1, anti-subtitle advocates argue
that this form of translation is so technically constrained that it cannot
manage even a sense of promise, only destroying (rather than deconstructing) the ‘original’. Certainly, dubbing and subtitling fall outside Derrida’s
purview. However, their concrete limitations do not invalidate his arguments. Derrida never proposes that all translation error or failure should
be celebrated. Rather, both Derrida (1985b: 123) and Benjamin (1968
[1923]: 69) maintain a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translation,
yet they allow these categories to remain abstractly defined. Significantly,
Derrida (1985b: 100) teaches that the identification of translation flaw
or fault (of ‘essential loss’) should neither put an end to discussion nor
provide grounds for dismissal.
Following Derrida, I argue that the impurities of screen translation
cannot ultimately be opposed to the ‘purity’ of film, as the Invisible
Cinema proposed. Rather, the impurities of translation are conditional to
film and other screen media. Indeed, translation ‘disarticulates’ the purity
of film ‘originals’, alerting audiences to the risky, contaminating process of
circulation and translation upon which ‘originals’ depend. For Benjamin
(1968 [1923]: 71), it is the ‘original’ that is indebted to the translation, and
not the other way around, for it is translation that enables the ‘original’
to be marked as such (as an ‘original’), to be canonised, and to live on, in
transformation. According to de Man (1986: 85), translation ‘decanonises’
and ‘desacralises’ the ‘original’; it constitutes ‘a making prosaic of what
appeared to be poetic in the original’ (97). In this way, translation exposes
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that the ‘original’ is also actual and grounded – reliant upon specific contexts, politics and contingencies. Indeed, it is translation that both marks
and produces the ‘original’s’ purity (its connection to ‘pure language’)
and ensures its survival. Similarly, the risks that attend screen translation
processes keep screen culture moving, mutating and ‘living on’.
Today, on its website, Anthology announces itself ‘an international
centre for the preservation, study and exhibition of film and video, with a
particular focus on independent, experimental and avant-garde cinema’.
Its screening programme is ‘innovative and eclectic’, encompassing a
wide range of media and genres beyond the Essential Cinema collection.
As Kristen Alfaro (2012a: 57) reveals, Anthology’s current, expansive
vision now covers ‘lesser known experimental filmmakers and also orphan
films: home movies, unfinished student films, and behind-the-scenes porn
footage’. Additionally, since 2010, Anthology has been increasing online
access to its collection, making selected moving-image content available
through streaming channels (Vimeo and YouTube) and providing free
access to rare documents and specially commissioned publications (56–7).
For Alfaro, its developing online archive is proof of the fact that accessibility has always been high on Anthology’s agenda. Noting how Mekas was
arrested and convicted in 1964 for screening Flaming Creatures (1963) as
part of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque programme, Alfaro claims that
Anthology was partly established in reaction to this form of censorship,
with the aim of providing ongoing access to avant-garde and experimental
film via a permanent, legal home (48–51).
Anthology advocates for access as a strategy of preservation, particularly for digital media. For Mekas, the ‘open and democratic’ nature
of much digital reproduction can enable experimental media to remain
in circulation through ‘fresh copies’ (quoted in Alfaro 2012a: 59). This
transformative afterlife that Anthology seeks to ensure for avant-garde,
experimental and marginalised screen media cannot be disassociated from
translation. Tellingly, in its current configuration, Anthology (mostly)
embraces subtitling along with digital technologies and online accessibility. In contrast to its ‘frozen’, prematurely petrified and preserved
monument to the essentials of cinematic art,9 it is this open, evolving
engagement with experimental screen culture that has enabled Anthology
to endure, becoming more than just a dream.
Muted Voices
Although Anthology sought to distance itself from the international
art cinema movement by repudiating its reverence for the subtitle, it
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nevertheless reiterated with further vehemency the demand for audible
foreignness. In this sense, art house and avant-garde unite in the resolve
that foreignness must be heard to be believed. According to John Mowitt
(2005) a similar demand was espoused by the America’s Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In his institutional history
of AMPAS and the rules governing its Foreign Language Film Award,
Mowitt (2005: 45) interrogates ‘how the relation between language and
foreignness has been forged within the cinematic domain’. Within this
regulatory discourse, he identifies an ideology at work that is similar, I
contend, to that informing the Invisible Cinema’s translation-free screenings. This discourse insists that the authenticity of foreignness lies in
its aural inscription: in its audible non-English (‘original’) dialogue. For
Mowitt, this prescriptive equation serves to severely delimit and impoverish cinematic engagement with both foreignness and language per se.
Mowitt (2005: 47–52; 182n3) charts the historical development of
the Foreign Language Film Award from its beginnings in 1944, when
‘motion pictures from all countries’ became eligible for Special Award
consideration and ‘English subtitling was included among the traits of
foreignness’, through to 1956 when it became an award in its own right.
In 1949, for instance, foreign films were defined as ‘films first made in a
language other than English’, thereby excluding those from Anglophone
countries like Australia and the UK, which the Academy thus intended
to treat as American films (54). Additionally, eligibility was restricted to
foreign films released in commercial theatres. The rules set out in 1956
specify that eligible films needed to be: (1) feature-length; (2) ‘produced
by a foreign company with a non-English soundtrack’; (3) first released
during the award year; and (4) ‘shown in a commercial theatre for the
profit of the producer and the exhibitor’ (52). Neither a US release nor
English subtitles were required. These stipulations were revised in 1958
when the Academy advised that it would be glad to have prints submitted for voting with English subtitles if available, and explicitly stated
that dubbed films, or films not in their ‘original’ language, would not be
accepted (53). In the early 1970s, inclusion of English subtitles became
mandatory (see 183n3).
Mowitt deems the Academy’s insistence upon audible foreignness
fetishistic and objectifying. He argues that it effectively renders cultural
difference into an exotic sound-effect. ‘Once foreignness is reduced to
the speech of foreigners, the vocal sounds delivered as dialogue on the
soundtrack and translated in the subtitles,’ Mowitt (2005: 63) states, ‘language is, as it were, spoken for’. To demand that foreignness be audible
on the sound track ‘in the speech of those “foreigners” recorded there’,
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facilitates its elimination from all other aspects of the film: ‘Once expelled
from the cinema, foreignness echoes, that is, it returns, as sound’ (62–3).
Consequently, foreign speech is not afforded the full signifying force or
status of language and comes to function instead as an aesthetic object
(perhaps resembling the manner in which foreign accents have often
functioned within Hollywood).10
For Mowitt (2005: 63), the AMPAS stipulation that foreign films be
‘in a language other than English’ acts as decoy, drawing attention away
from the fact that, ultimately, to be eligible for an award, they must ‘look
and sound like the sorts of films perceived to be appropriate for commercial distribution and exhibition in the United States’. Mowitt’s (60)
inference is that although dialogue must be non-English, in all other
respects (such as its sound-effects, musical scoring and technology), the
sound track is expected to conform to Hollywood’s ‘standardization of
practices’. Further, by stipulating that foreign-language films be ‘shown
in commercial theatres, and produced for profit’, he writes, ‘AMPAS was
implicitly intervening in the domain of indigenous cultural practices not
only to impose the capitalist logic of standardization, but also, in effect, to
eliminate foreignness from the cinema’ (62). To be eligible for an award,
Mowitt concludes, films could not exhibit foreignness in any regard
other than their language (narrowly interpreted as dialogue). Ultimately,
Mowitt contends that the processes of capitalist consumption so central
to mass culture and globalisation (epitomised by Hollywood) function to
construct foreignness in the image of the same, implicating screen translation modes and preferences in these socio-political machinations.
Despite insisting upon English subtitles, the AMPAS attitude to
foreign-language films is not significantly distinct from that promoted
by the Invisible Cinema, demonstrating that although Anthology utilised
issues of translation to differentiate itself from what it deemed a more
commercial, art house sensibility, it never strayed far from this more
conventional position, effecting more of a sideways step than any major
departure. While Anthology’s practice of screening foreign films in their
‘original’ language aimed to expose audiences to otherness and cultural
difference, providing a distinctly foreign and defamiliarising experience,
this radical strategy ultimately involved inherent forms of domestication.
By refusing to subtitle or dub, the Invisible Cinema reduced language to
sound effect – elevating its acoustic surface over and above any expressive
or communicative depth. In banishing translated text from the screen and
repositioning it on the page, the language of foreign films was rendered
mute. Keeping in mind Mowitt’s analysis of the Academy’s Foreign
Language Film Award, the Invisible Cinema’s rejection of both subtitling
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and dubbing suggests a rejection of language itself, conceived as inessential to film meaning.
Distinctions between sound, language and speech are crucial to the
growing discipline of Sound Studies as well as screen translation. Many
film sound specialists, such as Rick Altman (1980: 63) and Michel Chion
(2009 [2003]: 73), present language as a privileged, dominant subset of
sound. Mowitt offers a different perspective, asserting that language
amounts to more than sound alone, and that neither represents a subset of
the other. To reduce language to dialogue or speech is to compartmentalise and contain its overall significance. In contrast, for Mowitt (2005: 80),
language in cinema is an ‘apparatus of enunciation’ that shapes ‘the way
images, sounds, and events get assembled’ (57). For Mowitt, the reduction of language to sound has enabled Anglo-American film culture to
effectively dodge meaningful engagement with foreign cinematic codes,
actual language difference and, the question of ‘how foreign languages …
have been represented within Western cinemas’ (45).
Dionysis Kapsaskis (2008: 48) reads cultural resistance to subtitling in
‘geopolitical terms’. When dominant cultures and language communities
refuse to read subtitles, he suggests, they exhibit the ‘pathology of national
narcissism… linguistic essentialism, and a mechanism for perpetuating
cultural dominance’. But is it fair to view the Invisible Cinema’s denunciation of subtitling and dubbing in this light, as simply an exaggeration
of mainstream resistance to translation within Anglo-American culture?
In constructing the Invisible Cinema as the physical manifestation of its
‘critical enterprise’ (Sitney 1975: v), Anthology set out to do something
quite oppositional and ‘tentative’ (Sitney quoted in MacDonald 1994: 34).
Nevertheless, in its desire to provide a direct, unmediated experience of
the foreign, Anthology may well have unwittingly put into effect exoticising strategies that effectively reduced the meaning of foreign words to
surface acoustics. Ironically, the Invisible Cinema’s controversial zerotranslation stance took to the extreme the pro-subtitling mindset and its
preoccupation with purity and authenticity. Paradoxically, in the process,
subtitling itself was rejected alongside dubbing.
The Invisible Cinema’s short lifespan signifies its ultimate failure
– further reinforced by the fact that, following its demise, Anthology
renounced its objection to subtitling. If failure and impossibility are preconditions of all translation, as Derrida suggests, it is interesting to plot
how the Invisible Cinema’s fall and fortune developed hand-in-hand with
issues of translation. The cinema’s extreme stance against screen translation effectively denaturalises more conventional approaches towards
foreign film reception and translation. As I have plotted in this chapter,
vanish in g subtitles
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mainstream attitudes towards subtitling and dubbing invest in the same
cultural distinctions operating within more self-conscious cultural institutions belonging to art house and avant-garde circuits. All partake in the
regular elision of foreignness through prescriptive notions of authenticity
and originality. The cultural status of translation methods and practices
points to the significance of such operations beyond a purely functional
realm. For film theory, the challenge remains: how to account for translation’s influential yet largely uncharted role?
Notes
1. According to Kristen Alfaro (2012b: 76), Anthology was not as exclusive as is
often suggested. Referring to the Invisible Cinema’s affordable ticket price,
Alfaro writes: ‘Anthology was less a dictatorship and more of a pedagogical community center for the experimental film; the primary goal remained
access, and through access, Anthology developed goals of preservation and
pedagogy’ (83). While admitting that the Essential Cinema canon and the
Invisible Cinema exuded more than a whiff of ‘avant-garde film hierarchy’
(Alfaro 2012a: 46), she counters that Anthology now prioritises online access
over canons and has ceased to call itself a museum (62n25).
2. In Howard Thompson’s review (1970) he quotes film student Vincent Joliet:
‘Those partitions by your ears, they’re great. To me the very silence was
something like music itself. It made the visual image even stronger.’
3. In June 2011, for instance, a collection of Hollywood musicals from the 1970s
and 1980s were screened – a genre of film notorious for post-synchronised
sound tracks and ghosted singing.
4. As Vincent Canby (1970) notes in his review, the only other organisations
screening translation-free foreign-language films at the time were cultural
institutions like the Alliance Français.
5. Noam Elcott (2008: 19) stresses that Kubelka conceived the Invisible Cinema
in 1958, well before the idea of Anthology had been formed. For more on the
early conception of the Invisible Cinema, see Kubelka (1974: 35).
6. Significantly, John Sallis (2002: 6) links ideals of translation transcendence
to conditions of globalisation, underlining ‘a certain complicity between the
spread of English almost everywhere and the dream of nontranslation’.
7. See also Tessa Dwyer (2005) and Torey Liepa (2008).
8. Notable directors who advocated for ‘film as universal language’ include Carl
Laemmle, D. W. Griffith and Dziga Vertov. See Rossholm (2006: 51).
9. As Adams P. Sitney (1975: vi) explains, the Essential Cinema collection was
never conceived as something ‘finished’ or ‘fixed’ as ‘new films or newly
discovered old films, have the potential of modifying the whole history of
cinema’. Hence, he promises, ‘new films will be added each year as they are
made’ (x).
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10. Writing on the early sound era, Anna Sofia Rossholm (2006: 73) states:
‘For foreign actors in Hollywood, the task was to learn to speak intelligible
“Hollywood English” with a slight accent adding a touch of the exotic’,
which involved an ‘adjustment of differences into “sameness” ’.