When Egyptians speak their own languages in the 1999 Mummy starring Brendan Fraser, the subtitles appear to be in the Papyrus font. It's more expensive, sure, and requires more creativity, but it helped Night Watch and its sequel earn millions in the U.S.Įven American filmmakers sometimes get to play with fancy subtitles in their own, primarily English-language movies. It's a fun movie, and for once, the subtitles are almost as much fun to watch as the action.
They might be revealed in a wipe as a vampire slides across the screen. Instead, they might be red letters that dissolve like blood underwater. They're not just consistent sentences at the bottom of the screen.
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Its international cut not only subtitles the movie in readable English, it even plays with the layout of those titles to reflect what's happening on screen. Hopefully by now you've seen the Russian vampire thriller Night Watch (2004), but if you haven't, get on that. I'd love to be able to watch foreign movies on Netflix without having to scrabble around for my glasses.īetter yet, a few recent filmmakers and distributors have gotten truly creative with the banal art of subtitling their movies. Titles that read perfectly well on a movie screen are almost impossible for most of us to make out on even an HDTV across the room. I know, I know, the middle-aged guy is griping the letters are too small, but hear me out. And by the way, subtitles need to be bigger. Hey, movie studios: Any chance you could give those plain, white titles a rest for, like, ever? I think many of us would appreciate that. Yet for some reason producers' fondness for white lettering persists, albeit sometimes with thin, black borders or wider, black boxes around the white letters. Keyed in bright yellow rather than the standard white, they're easy for even young moviegoers to take in. Maybe that's one reason the subtitles in Star Wars (1977) are so effective. Ideally, one should come away from a film viewing knowing more than what he could've gathered from the name of the movie.
I gather it's a masterpiece but, thanks to the ghostly subtitles on black-and-white backgrounds, I still have little idea what that movie is about other than, apparently, some kid gets his bicycle stolen. I still remember watching The Bicycle Thief in a grad-school film history class.
But until fairly recently, the technology used to inscribe subtitles onto moving images made them hard to read, hampering American's interest in and enjoyment of foreign films. They evolved organically from the intertitles used to display dialogue between the live-action clips in silent movies. Subtitles in movies are almost as old as movies themselves. That's a triumph, yet one that all too often goes unsung.īut what about those words that can't be shaped into cinematic or televised images? What about movies imported from countries where English isn't the primary language? What about languages spoken by non-English-speaking characters in American movies? Today we're going to talk about the subtle art of turning non-English words into video communication.
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They've succeeded at something I was never able to do, which is break out as a professional screenwriter. I follow a huge stack of beloved novelists, but I also track the work of such reliable screenwriters as Frank Darabont, Lawrence Kasdan and Steve Kloves. As a writer, I'm fascinated by the various methods of transition from words on a page, whether from a bestselling book or that hot new screenplay some Hollywood upstart typed into Final Draft on his laptop in Starbucks, to thousands of video screens all over the world. Let's take a break from politics to talk about one of my favorite subjects, the movies.
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