Mas y Mas July 2010

mรกs ymรกs

monthly newsletter of NISI MASA

JULY10

DUBBING vs SUBTITLING spotlight:

Malmรถ Doc Workshop

interview:

Prof . Yves Gambier opinion:

You have NOT seen Pulp Fiction then

16 JULY

Deadline Applications Istanbul Express

18 JULY

31 JULY

24-26 JULY

31 JULY

Deadline Applications Visions of Prague

Deadline Applications Nisimazine Abu Dhabi

Deadline Applications European Short Pitch

Board Meeting Paris

editorial I was adolescent when I said “I would ban dubbing on TVs and put subtitling instead of it, if I had the chance”. My friends said “This is dictatorship! What about illiterate people?” I was sorry: I never want to ban something and believe in extreme equality in sharing rights; but for dubbing though, I was sure. It simply destroys the impression of a film on the audience! Don’t you think so?

The satisfaction of the audience is one side of the story. The other side is more political and economic reasons. Although dubbing is more expensive than subtitling; governments prefer dubbing since it can connect to a certain national ideology.

Marta talks about this in her article “Caption V Dubbing”. She mentions that translating a film closes the country to the rest of the world; making it deaf and ignorant. And, Professor Yves Gambier, in his interesting interview by Jass, supports this idea saying that dubbing is an ideological decision and the authorities have some kind of target audience in mind. Simone, in his article about Lost, looks at another dimension of the political reason: the access of a new generation to information; and diversity through new media and internet.

On the other hand, Adrien digs the visual joy out of a film -with the example of subtitling tricks in Godard’s Film Socialisme- and thinks that not the dialogues, but the images fix the film within the audience.

This month, the spotlight page is dedicated to the “Portraits from Malmö” filmmaking project. I did not have the chance to see the films yet; but, as it is about immigrants in Malmö, probably there is lots of subtitling.

In Turkey, films and series on national TV are dubbed; in Italy, dubbing is even in theatres; in the Netherlands, there was never any dubbing at all. As a result of a certain ideology; choosing or dictating dubbing vs. subtitles changes the approach of generations to foreign languages.

I strongly believe that voices, sound effects and dialogues are most important as images in a film. Don’t you ruin them, please!

by Esra Demirkıran

credits.

Mas y Mas is a monthly newsletter published by the association NISI MASA. EDITORIAL STAFF Coordination Simone Fenoil Adrien Lenoir Design Maartje Alders

Contributors to this issue: Pablo Carrera, Esra Demirkıran Simone Fenoil, Mara Klein, Adrien Lenoir Marta Musso, Jass Seljamaa

NISI MASA (European Office) 99 Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis 75010, Paris, France Tel/Fax: +33 (0)9 60 39 63 38 + 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 Email europe@nisimasa.com Website www.nisimasa.com

3

Dubbing vs subtitling

Don't Read subtitles, READ the visuals

by Adrien Lenoir

“The revolutioniary world of the funsub” 23 may 2010. In the USA milions of viewers enjoyed the final episode of Lost. In Italy FOX television had set the transmission of the Italian dubbed version for the 31st of May, a week later. A real revolution is that they also decided to broadcast the same episode in the original version with Italian subtitles only 24 hours later than the American premiere, before the dubbed version.

the TV series in the original version, looking for the subtitles in their own language.

This is a first in the history of Italian TV, and it represents a revolution of mentality: the audience is not used to “read” subtitles, as everything is always dubbed.

Several internet communities have risen up to create Italian, Spanish, French subtitles for the American TV series, in order to enjoy the new episodes immediately - in Italy www.Italiansubs.net reaches more than 160.000 users, translating more than 350 tv series, without breaking the law (downloading is illegal, but these communities provide only subtitle files). And from TV series to the cinema, the step is not a very big one.

The message now is: if you desire it, you can watch it NOW with subtitles, without waiting the dubbed “normal” version. What happened? Why FOX television decided to break this taboo?

So, in some European countries habits are changing. After ages of dubbed dictatorship, a new generation is growing up with another concept of audiovisual bloom.

Welcome to the new subtitle age!

New technologies are completely modifying the meaning of broadcasting and the usual concept of audience. In the US it’s possible to watch the episodes of your favourite TV serie by streaming, and you can even download them in 2 to 3 hours after their TV premiere.

by Simone Fenoil

In a globally connected world, what happened one hour ago in another part of the world has an immediate consequence for the rest of it: this kind of mentality has a direct impact on the media sphere as well.

The 'audience' is becoming global instead of local. It is complete non-sense, for a young European audience, to wait more than one week to watch something that in the other part of the world, people can enjoy NOW. So, TV broadcasters in Europe are reducing the time difference with the USA to not loose the potential audience because a wide number of fans are downloading

As the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard was shown at the Festival de Cannes, everybody in the audience who didn’t understand French was baffled. JLG had indeed decided to create a new kind of subtitles, which he defined as Navajo English. Basically, instead of Hand me the salt please, you get Salt, me.

This is yet another provocation by Godard, who, as everybody knows, didn’t show up in Cannes on account of “Greek issues”. And for some, it was one too many.

Godard is indeed a master in Marketing, knowing how to make people fuss about his so called “rude” or “stupid” attitude, and his “incomprehensible” movies.

Thus, it’s no surprise if the international press chose not to talk too much about Film Socialisme and to focus more on the 50th anniversary of A Bout de Souffle.

As for me, French is my mother tongue and I saw Film Socialisme in a regular Parisian theatre (with my right neighbour writing notes about the film, and my left neighbour snoring, something you can only witness when watching a film by Godard I guess). And, well, I have to say speaking French didn’t really help me understand the movie (half the characters in Film Socialisme speak Russian or German anyway). But that didn’t prevent me from enjoying it, because the whole language issue is part of the point. Europe is described in the film as a new tower of Babel: Ulysses’ boat (the cruise ship in the first movement) is now filled with elderly people travelling around Europe with no sense of what “Europe” means, as a concept or as a culture.

What one can understand of the film does not come from the dialogues, but from Godard’s editing. In the dialectic form he always used since the late 60’s, he puts together images or sounds and leaves it to the spectator to create meaning from these associations.

A hand on a window, a tree going adrift, these are the images the movie fixed within me, and not dialogues, whether they were subtitled or not.

Dubbing vs Subtitling

4

"You have NOT seen Pulp Fiction then."

-You saw “Pulp Fiction” in Italian-Yes-Dubbed-Yes-Into Italian. The characters were speaking Italian-Yes-All of them-Yes. Is that so complicated to understand?-No. But you have NOT seen “Pulp Fiction” thenThis is the typical example of a discussion between someone coming from a “subtitle” country and a “dub” citizen. Here, I must admit, there is not much space for cultural relativism: subtitle countries are simply superior.

I come from Italy, which is the quintessence of the dubbing country. But I also live in the UK, an extreme subtitle country. I go to the cinema with people from all around the world and I have heard of the most absurd practices about dubbing, like the “live translation”, in which an actor with a mic inside the cinema does the voice over of all the dialogues - the cultural equivalent of coprophagy, basically.

„Lebendkontrolle“

by Florian Schewe

Anyway, I am in a privileged position to observe this subject matter – and I came to the conclusion that dubbing is not only stupid and evil, but also wrong and economically counterproductive.

There are three reasons for this.

First of all, it unavoidably changes a film: my friends who mock me about Pulp Fiction are right, I did see a different movie. All the sounds, the intonation, the richness in the communication are inevitably lost, the dialogue adapted to another rhythm, to another culture. And I can only dare to imagine how bad Le cheeseburger conversation sounds in French.

The second point is that dubbing penalises local markets in favour of imported blockbusters. In a dubbing country, a local film has a much harder time in the fight for the box office against an American colossus, because everything is translated and digested for a local audience. If Transformers was subtitled, it would still do well of course; but many people would rather watch something more “national”, without having to read the captions. So why should we promote the vision of Transformers instead of the national crap, which at least contributes in supporting the local industry?

The third and most important problem is more widely cultural though: dubbing films is a bad sign of provincialism and it provokes cultural damages, much more than it seems. In nondubbing countries,

English is not even an issue after 6th grade. By the time a kid has learned to read and watches TV with mom and dad, he will learn any language much faster than someone who never listens to other sounds than his mother tongue.

It’s not just English of course: people learn to follow a conversation with other words, they get used to other pronunciations, other syntaxes: in short, to other cultures. Translating a film contributes in wrapping up a country in itself, making it deaf and ignorant.

A silly but significant example: in the Italian version of Night at the Museum 2, Napoleon makes a joke about Berlusconi being his heir.

But Americans don’t even know who Berlusconi is! Why should they? Italy is not the centre of the universe.

Apparently thought, Italian is the funniest language in which a film can be dubbed. The person with which I had the conversation about Pulp Fiction spread throughout Facebook bites of the scenes from the Italian version; now everyone greets me with a “Sono il signor Wolf.

Risolvo i problemi” And they laugh. After all, they all learned English watching Pulp Fiction – English people included…

by Marta Musso

5

Dubbing vs Subtitling

Interview: Prof. Yves Gambier, University of Turku.

Yves Gambier is a translation professor at Turku University, specializing in media language.

Being a polyglot and having published books on screen translation and audiovisual communication, he is a living encyclopedia on this month’s topic.

Why do you think some countries are more fond of dubbing than others?

This is a very old story, from the beginning of cinema. There has always been this dilemma between dubbing and subtitling. I think there are different factors – ideological factors and economic factors. Dictatorships in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 1930s chose dubbing not only for ideological reasons, but also partly be-

and movie translators are very conscious about the issue of reception. You subtitle because you have some kind of target audience in mind, and it’s the same with interpreting: you know about and share knowledge or expectations with the audience. That is in both cases very strong, much stronger than any other translation, in my opinion.

How do technological developments affect audiovisual (AV) translation?

Thanks to technology we have different ways of AV translation, which did not exist 10 years ago.

For instance audio description – this allows to translate a film for the blind. Or for example there are attempts to automate subtitling and even dubbing. I suppose subtitling can be automatized completely within ten years.

Technology has also changed production nowadays, producers and importers want to use more and more dialogue lists or formats with English, which is used as an intermediary for other languages. It’s not the best solution.

cause of illiteracy. In Italy and Spain there was a significant illiterate audience. At the same time movies were a very popular form of entertainment. There’s also the economic reason: dub-

bing is simply more expensive than subtitling.

One more factor is the linguistic one - nations that subtitle have a less-used language and a small market.

Are subtitling and dubbing closer to interpretation than translation?

Yes, I would say that subtitling is a kind of written simultaneous interpreting, actually in both cases you have strong constraints - time and density of information is quite important. In movies you have picture, sound, language and speakers say a lot in a short time. Interpreters

What is the potential of AV subtitling for language learning?

We have to make a difference between motivations - subtitles as additional help and subtitling being used as a tool to teach language.

People usually say that subtitling can help in learning a language, but in most cases they only think of English. I have never heard of somebody learning Chinese by watching [Chinese] films subtitled into Finnish.

By Jass Seljamaa

news & screen Nisimazine Abu Dhabi !

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS The 1st edition of the Nisimazine Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) film journalism workshop will take place from 14th - 22nd October 2010. 8 participants, 4 from Europe and 4 from Arab countries, will be invited to form an editorial team and create daily issues of Nisimazine Abu Dhabi.

to offer. The main focus is the region of Southeast Europe (Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, FYR Macedonia, Malta, Monte Negro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, UNMI Kosova) and its filmmakers which compete in Feature, Short and Documentary film section. The festival aims to present important and innovative films of high artistic value made throught the world.

Stanka Goes Home, by Maya Vitkova will be competing in Sarajevo shorts competition.

4 short films Valentina Oresic made as a Talent Campus producer in Sarajevo City of Film will be screened in the Sarajevo Film festival this year: Smart Girls, Reverse, Ticket Collector and Frigidance.

Sarajevo Talent Campus: Formerly the "Middle East International Film Festival", ADFF was established in 2007, with the aim of helping to create a vibrant film culture throughout the region. The event is committed to curating exceptional programs to engage and educate the local community, inspire filmmakers and nurture the growth of the regional film industry.

Alongside work from establised Middle Eastern filmmakers and the major talents of world cinema, there is a strong focus on the bold new voices of Arab cinema, which connects with Abu Dhabi’s role as a burgeoning cultural capital in the region and marks the festival as a place for the world to discover and gauge the pulse of recent Arab filmmaking.

Deadline: 31st July For more information, please visit: http://www.nisimasa.com/?q=node/370

NISI MASA presence at Sarajevo film festival The Sarajevo Film Festival represents the main meeting place for all regional producers and authors and is recognized by film professionals from all over the world as the pinnacle point for networking for all wishing to learn more about the possibilities the region has

A member of Palunko, the Croatian winner of the NISI MASA script contest of last year will attend the 2010 Sarajevo Talent Campus as a participant.

Les Ateliers d'Angers (4-11 July 2010) Created by Jeanne Moreau, the Ateliers d’Angers is meant to help young directors make their first feature film. The festival is designed to prepare the gap young filmmakers will have to overcome between directing a short film and a feature film.

The Ateliers proposes to : - watch and analyse some great classic movies.

- attend lectures by major filmmakers and technicians who will share their precious experiences.

- work on the directors’ own projects by working with the directing, lighting, editing professionals who will attend the festival.

Three former Nisi Masa workshops participants are selected for Les Ateliers d'Angers organised by the Premiers Plans festival:

Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia (Script&Pitch and European Short Pitch, directors of Rita) Martin Turk (Script&Pitch) For more information, please visit: http://www.premiersplans.org/ateliers/

Visions of Prague CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS “Visions of Prague – The Invaders” Filmmaking Workshop.

After filmmaking explorations of Paris, Istanbul, Kars and Budapest, the NISI MASA Visions Of workshop is back... this time in Prague, taking place from 22nd to 29th of August 2010.

Call for participants aged 18-26, from France, Italy, Spain, Austria and the Czech Republic. The concept of the workshop is to invite young filmmakers from five different countries to investigate the city of Prague and attend some general presentations. There will be 4 people in each group. After having selected the content and the story together, the groups will shoot and edit their short movies. They will be supported by 2 professional tutors.

Deadline : 18th July For more information, please visit : http://www.nisimasa.com/?q=node/371

Sterling Short competition Another win for Between dreams!

Between Dreams won the Special Jury Award in the Stretling short film competition at Silverdocs in Washington DC. The Jury noted: “Between Dreams is a stunning visual passage through the dreams, harsh realities and transitory existence of strangers on a train.”

BETWEEN DREAMS / Finland/France/Russian Federation, 2009, 11 minutes Director: Iris Olsson

FINLAND Video contest: POLYGLOT – On the Way to Turku July 2010 - December 2010

Young Europeans (including non-EU) aged 18-35 have the chance to express themselves on the topic of multilingualism. The POLYGLOT web platform is open, where they can submit their short (5 minutes max.) videos for the world to watch, comment and vote on. The public, alongside a professional jury, will select the 18 best works.

The makers of the winning videos will be invited to participate in a “Cine-Boat” filmmaking workshop in Turku (Finland), taking place in June 2011. Participants are to travel across the beautiful archipelago by boat, visiting the islands and shooting 6 films in groups about local multilingualism, guided by professional tutors. The region is home to communities of Swedish-speaking Finns, who have their own distinct cultural identity. June is high tourist season in the islands and also the time of Midsummer celebrations, with the hours of sunlight!

Submissions now open on www.polyglot-turku.eu. Deadline 15th of December.

Entries must be in one of two categories: • •

Video portraits (documentary) – My multilingualism Video poems (fiction) – The language I dream in

Multilingualism and travelling – two of the defining elements of the young “Euro-generation” – are the main themes of 2010-11 for NISI MASA. Another big project - Istanbul Express - is accepting applications until 16th July. More information can be found on www.nisimasa.com.

Portraits from Malmö Workshop

spotlight

8

Sweden, the only country with "Eden" in it... Malmö, one of its major cities counts 30% of his population born abroad. How do they identify with their new home, how far are their roots reaching back to their home country and what does it mean to identify with a nationality were the questions that Nisi Masa Sverige asked the invited participants from all over the world to investigate, by organising last month its biggest filmmaking workshop to date.

Each filmmaker team, Germans, Peruvians, Hungarians or Iranians shed their own singular light on the topic, creating 10 investigating, funny, sharp and singular short documentaries about an immigrant of their own country, under the tutorship of the renowned Råfilm collective. Here are the experiences of two of them:

Mara Klein - Germany The definition of identity is a tricky one, especially when the word "national" is scooped on top of it. The Malmo documentary workshop thus became the experimental lab of a collision of directors, DoPs and editors from all over the world.

Day one: Ignacio from Chile points out that the wine we are drinking is from his country. The globalisation of goods is what we are used to; the globalisation of people seems to be the logical consequence. All of the participants are part of the fastpaced, fartravelled generation, where English is the linguistic currency and the question "where are you from" finds complex answers. We have two days to portray our German subject, Leo. It turns out to be quite a challenge to grasp a person's essence in the hazy waters of national identity.

In the editing room, our desk is labelled "German Team". We notice that none of us actually lives in Germany any more. Later that night, the Polish team tells us that every time they open Final Cut, clips have disappeared. I ask them what they plan to do about it, they reply, "We'll just go with the flow." I wonder if stoicism is a Polish thing.

Final editing day: We notice how dense the German language can be as our English subtitles spill over the edges of the screen, hurrying to keep up with Leo's words. At midnight, no film is finished, all cigarettes are, and editing continues to the early morning hours, when all non-Swedes confusedly blink at the unusual 4 am brightness.

The night of the screening, the portraits reveal much more than our subject.

Each with a different style, a personal touch rather than a national one, the 10 films prove to portray what filmmaking can be: a meeting point of individuals.

For in the end, we cannot choose where we are born, but we can choose where we are going. It is in our interests and passions that we find our individuality, an individuality that enables us to cross our mental and geographical borders, and meet people all over the world that share our cinephilia.

Pablo Carrera - Chile My first time in Sweden I was visiting a friend in Stockholm.

It filled me with surprise to experience the freezing dark days -or were these nights?- while watching pedestrians walking peacefully and quietly in the streets. “That’s the ‘lagom’ style”, my friend told me, “the traditional Swedish motto of life: being moderate, respectful and balanced.“ This fitted perfectly with my image of Sweden: a remote snowy kingdom with castles and nobility, skinny youngsters always fresh on trends and design, H&M, IKEA, cheap caviar, indie rock and Ingmar Bergman.

Though after this I kept keen on Swedish culture, I didn’t expect to travel this far up North ever again. But within 6 months after my first trip, I heard about NISI MASA’s documentary project in Sweden: identity in the city of Malmö. Some weeks later I was standing at the airport waiting for a new adventure in the land of elves.

Still in my mind the images of the endless nights, Sweden surprised me again. Nights seemed to have vanished with the cold. Instead I found some never ending days. While IKEA, caviar and Bergman were still there, this time, the feeling wasn’t lagom at all. The tempo was up, and so was the spirit. During the 7 days I spent in Malmö, I met different filmmakers from all over the world and together we made 8 short documentaries about the city. It was intense but liberating. Usually documentaries demand time for research and editing, but these ones were planned as a snapshot, a sketch, keeping alive our first thoughts and impressions. Working like this, we were also able to compare the different views from us -strangers- on one and the same multicultural society.

We ended the week as we started it: fully excited, but now fully exhausted as well. After spending so much time in the streets of Malmö, we felt we somehow became part of this city. We gained our own place and people saluted us in the street. We were no longer strangers, we were filmmakers.

SEE THE JINGLE on:

The NISI MASA Sverige girls. f.l.t.r.: Frida, Anna, Jenny, Lina.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCFUt8ijj4