1. science
2. social science
3. linguistics
4. translation

SHAKESPEARE FILM AND THE MEDIA OF TRANSLATION
By Jeffrey Moro
Submitted to the Department of English of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors
Faculty Advisors: Anston Bosman and Andrew Johnston
April 5th, 2013
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
iii
LIST OF IMAGES
iv
INTRODUCTION: THE TASK OF THE FILM TRANSLATOR
01
CHAPTER 1: SILENT FILM
Section One: Early Shakespeare Film
14
Section Two: Climbing Babel
23
Section Three: Translating the Nielsen Hamlet
31
Section Four: Looking Forward
38
CHAPTER 2: SOUND FILM
Section One: Whose Hamlet?
41
Section Two: Makibefo
54
POSTSCRIPT: “THE WORLD’S PLAYWRIGHT”
67
BIBLIOGRAPHY
74
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While a number of people have helped shepherd this thesis to completion, I owe
my principal thanks to my advisors, Professors Anston Bosman and Andrew Johnston,
without whom I could not have made this happen. This project began in Professor
Bosman’s seminar on transnational Shakespeares and I thank him tremendously for his
mentorship, guidance, and the intellectual rigor with which he helped me explore this
project’s theoretical ground. My thanks go out to Professor Johnston for encouraging the
film studies spark in me and for unerringly guiding this thesis through the toughest part
of all: actually writing it. Thanks to the English Department as a whole for continuing to
support undergraduate work to the fullest.
Much of my research would not have been possible without a generous grant from
the Dean of Faculty’s Office at Amherst College that supported my work at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. At the Folger, I extend my gratitude to
Georgianna Ziegler, Heather Wolfe, and Erin Blake, among others, for their guidance,
advice, and the time spent futzing with the 16 mm reel-to-reel machine.
And of course, a tremendous debt to my family and to Skye Landgraf, who might
claim not to know what I’m talking about half the time, but have always been endlessly
and wonderfully supportive.
iv
LIST OF IMAGES
Figures
1. German intertitle from Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet (1920).
5
2. English subtitles in Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet (1964).
06
3. Herbert Beerbohm Tree mugs to the camera in King John (1899).
16
4. German and American version comparison of the Nielsen Hamlet.
33
5. Four shots from Kozintsev’s Hamlet.
51
6. Laumord’s narrator on the beach in Abela’s Makibefo (1999).
61
7. The Shakespearean subtitle in Abela’s Makibefo.
65
8. Screenshot of digital subtitle manipulation.
71
1
INTRODUCTION
THE TASK OF THE FILM TRANSLATOR
Of the sixteen times “to translate” appears in any of its forms in Shakespeare’s
collected works, only twice does it refer to translation as the rendering of text from a
source language into a target language.1 Rather, Shakespeare uses the verb to mean “to
change,” “to alter,” or “to transform,” as when Touchstone bids William to “translate thy
life into death,” when the scorned Helena begs to “translate” herself into the virtuous
Hermia, or when Junius Brutus admonishes the citizens of Rome for thinking Coriolanus
would ever “translate his malice towards [them] into love.”2 Translation in the modern
sense, as the movement between languages, does appear occasionally, as when Claudius
bids Gertrude to translate Hamlet’s “sighs” and “profound heaves” so that he may
“understand them.”3 For Shakespeare, the word is fluid and contains all these
aforementioned meanings at once. He stages linguistic translation memorably in plays
such as Henry V, which not only portrays for comic effect the perceived naïveté and
femininity of the French’s attempts to speak English, but also the political fragmentation
present in the British Isles between the dialects of the recently-unified English, Welsh,
and Scots nations.4 The twenty-first century’s ever-increasing globalization certainly did
not invent the transnational and multilingual Shakespeare play, but it has certainly aided
its dissemination. The British Museum’s and Royal Shakespeare Company’s joint “World
1
Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 12.
2
As You Like It, V.i.51-2, A Midsummer Night’s Dream I.i.190-1, Coriolanus II.iii.188-9.
3
Hamlet, IV.i.1-3.
4
Henry V, III.ii and III.v
2
Shakespeare Festival 2012,” held in conjunction with the London Summer Olympics the
same year prominently heralded Shakespeare as “the world’s playwright,” whose work
proves inspirational and mutable for artists across a variety of stage, page, and screen
works.5 However, for all the Festival’s emphasis on polyglot theatrical productions, there
was little in the way of global and non-English Shakespeare on film, even as there were
limited screenings of films made in conjunction with the festival, and numerous
productions using video work. As Mark Thornton Burnett observes, the early twenty-first
century has seen a marked revival in scholarship of Shakespeare film and Shakespeare as
a multilingual, multinational playwright, but little work that combines the two to discuss
international Shakespeare film. 6 In part, the exclusion of non-English Shakespeare film
from the Anglophone “canon” reflects a gap in scholarship on film translation in general,
on how film moves across borders, and what kinds of technological processes aid and
abet the translation of a multimedia object. It is the project of this thesis to map the
growing fields of translation studies and Shakespeare film studies onto each other, and in
doing so, develop a theoretical and formal language with which to discuss film in
translation.
Translation studies has emerged as a critical field over the past thirty years in
response to the “growing acceptance of the study of linguistics and stylistics within
literary criticism” as well as increased interest in the crossroads between languages and
5
“World Shakespeare Festival 2012,” http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/history/worldshakespeare-festival-2012/ (accessed 24 March 2012).
6
Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (London: Cambridge UP, 2013), 1-3.
3
cultures.7 Foundational critics such as Susan Bassnett, Lawrence Venuti, and André
Lefevere forcefully argue for a view of translation that focuses on openness, fluidity, and
hybridity not only within established canons of literature, but vitally within the ontology
of the text itself. As such, the field has had a predominantly theoretical focus and has
concerned itself over the past three decades with developing languages with which
scholars and critics can discuss different processes of translation and situate their analysis
within larger, hitherto unseen histories of translation theory. Much of the work within the
field, as Rui Carvalho Homem notes, has been restorative, focused on eliminating
hierarchies that position translation as a derivative practice and challenging the perceived
originality of the source text, all of which are pursuits that prove useful when discussing
the translation and adaptation processes inherent in the filming of a Shakespeare text. 8
Indeed, scholars such as Margaret Jane Kidnie and Randall MacLeod have demonstrated
that the original Shakespeare text itself is far from stable, as readers of the Stanley Wellsedited Oxford Press Complete Works can attest when comparing The Tragedy of King
Lear with The History of King Lear, reading the multiple extant texts of Hamlet, or
noting the editorial choices that radically transform names in the Henry plays.9 Recent
work in Shakespeare studies mirrors translation studies’ call towards a decentered and
polysemous understanding of the text, especially when the necessary textual
7
Bassnett, Translation Studies, 16.
8
Rui Carvalho Homem, “Introduction,” in Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First
Century, Rui Carvalho Homem and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.,
2004), 3.
9
Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge,
2009). Randall McLeod, “Un ‘Editing’ Shak-speare,” SubStance 10.4 (1981), 22-55. Stanley
Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London: Oxford
UP, 1988).
4
transformations of adaptation come into focus.10 One must then note the extent to which
communities of textual “users,” whether they be performers, directors, editors, readers, or
filmmakers, define what constitutes the fluid Shakespeare “text.” The same is true for
translation studies, which, even as it takes textual fidelity as an ostensible goal,
recognizes the problems posed by the needs of particular readers.11 The issues that crosspollinate the two disciplines deal with the role of text across languages and cultures and
how a mutable, living textuality responds to the rules and conventions of particular
linguistic systems. These are precepts that have numerous applications to conventional
approaches to film studies, even if the question of verbal textuality may seem in flux.
From its inception, film has been positioned as an international medium as well as
one that resists traditional avenues of verbal and literary translation. In its earliest forms,
the material properties of film arguably obviated the need for translation as, like paintings
or photographs, there were ostensibly no words to translate. In the absence of
synchronized sound, actors communicated primarily with gestures and facial expressions
rather than dialogue. Filmmakers sought to communicate through the image instead of
through verbal language. However, the written word soon asserted itself within
filmmaking through the emergence, in the early years of the twentieth century, of textual
title cards, later called intertitles but in the 1900s and 1910s variously called “titles” or
“leaders” (Fig. 1). Intertitles allowed silent filmmakers to insert setting, commentary, and
dialogue that could help contextualize the image, which in turn allowed film to progress
10
Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 29-31.
11
Bassnett, Translation Studies, 22-3.
5
Figure 1. German intertitle from Asta Nielsen’s and Sven Gade’s Hamlet (1920). Tinted orange in
the original print.
towards a wider variety of narrative strategies.12 The industrial rise of synchronized
sound in the late 1920s dispensed with the need for intertitles but presented a larger
challenge for film exporters and translators. Whereas intertitles were easily cut out of the
celluloid on export and new cards re-edited in upon import, dialogue tracks were not so
easily transformed. Filmmakers devised two solutions in dubbing, which layers a new
dialogue track in the target language over the source language, essentially erasing the
original sound, and subtitling, which layers over the image verbal text synchronized in
time with the original dialogue, so that a viewer simultaneously listens to the original and
reads the translation (Fig. 2). The variety of translation practices over the history of film
evinces a hidden textuality, one present in images, sound, and performances rather than
12
Brad Chisholm, “Reading Intertitles,” The Journal of Popular Film and Television 15.3
(1987), 137-42.
6
Figure 2. English subtitles in Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian-language Hamlet (1964).
solely in written language. Intertitles introduced new elements of textuality into
filmmaking practices that had already begun to concern themselves with the imagined
capacity of sequences of images in time to function as a kind of universal grammar, able
to speak to all people regardless of language. Dubbing and subtitles transform the aural
textuality of a film's spoken dialogue into, variously, new sounds in new languages or
verbal text keyed up with the image and sound in a new kind of information matrix.
Of the critical inquiry surrounding the ways that films move across borders and
how film translation affects and challenges notions of a film’s textuality, comparatively
little has focused on intertitles, subtitles, dubbing, or any other processes of film
translation. While intertitles do receive sustained attention in literature surrounding silent
film, both popular and academic criticism of subtitles and dubbing regard them at best as
nuisances and at worst acts of violence upon the original film. Translation studies since
7
2000 has taken a slightly more charitable view towards subtitles and dubbing, but within
the recent surge in critical interest over the past fifteen years writers have “almost
exclusively concentrated on practical issues for translators, linguistic analysis, or the
physiology of the peculiar brand of speed-reading demanded by subtitles.”13 While this
sociological and reception-oriented approach will prove useful for my discussion, it is a
far cry from a study of these processes that regards them as more than marginalia.
Thankfully a number of voices have arisen over the past ten years arguing for an
approach towards textual titles as media in their own right rather than as mechanical
tools. Critical anthologies such as Atom Egoyan’s and Ian Balfour’s Subtitles: On the
Foreignness of Film and studies such as Abé Mark Nornes’ Cinema Babel have begun the
recuperative work of placing intertitles, subtitles, and dubbing within larger discussions
of film style and form, rather than simply within evaluative studies of information
reception. It is in the spirit of these authors that I propose throughout this thesis to
examine the conventional tools of film translation as media in and of their own right, as
media of translation, and what the particular project of these media can be. The phrase
“media of translation” is hopelessly broad, and can potentially include not only intertitles
and subtitles, but also dubbing and live simultaneous translation, and the phrase of course
has ramifications beyond film studies, and could include the translator herself, prerecorded translation devices in museums, or even internet services such as Google
Translate. I do not propose an exhaustive study of the potential affordances of each of
these media, or even of all the media commonly used in filmmaking. Rather, I will
13 Abé
Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.
8
narrow my sights on intertitles and subtitles, and use their characteristics, advantages, and
weaknesses to discuss the ways film in translation stages tensions between words and
images.
Even though their etymology may suggest otherwise, intertitles and subtitles have
few links in the genealogy of film translation, since intertitles are rarely considered
markers of translation between languages or foreignness as such. Rather, any critical link
between the two must arise from their formal and material position as text in relationship
to the film image, in that both, as Amresh Sinha notes, “come from the outside to make
sense of the inside.”14 In both cases, verbal text has a supplementary or ancillary
relationship to the image, and through that relationship seeks to alter the image’s meaning
for an audience. The intertitle can identify characters, clarify place, or drive forward
narrative with dialogue in ways that, ostensibly, images cannot (although as I shall
discuss, many filmmakers rebelled against intertitles and sought to make films and tell
stories solely with a grammar of image). The subtitle explicates foreign dialogue to a
viewer that cannot understand the original language. But how do we make critical sense
of the disjunctures between the various channels of encoded information present in an
intertitled or subtitled film? And how can we reckon with the various material substrates
present in a film that layers and sequences verbal text with image? Marvin Carlson’s
treatment of multilingual theater performance offers a possible model in his idea of the
“side text.”15 These theatrical side texts, in Carlson’s definition, are examples of
14 Amresh
Sinha, “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles,” in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film,
Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 173.
15
Marvin Carlson, “The Heteroglossia of Side Texts,” in Speaking in Tongues: Languages at
Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 180-214.
9
languages onstage that operate visually rather than aurally, and can operate not only as
translation aids, but also as aesthetic forms in and of their own right. 16 The archetypal
theatrical side text is the supertitle, which in its attempts to visually translate live
performance exemplifies Carlson’s definition of the side text as a “supplementary
language text” that is “literally produced alongside and simultaneously with the
performance itself.”17 Carlson substantially expands the term from theater semiotician
Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art (1973), which pits the “side text” (Nebentext)
of stage directions against the “main text” (Hauptext) of spoken dialogue. 18 Ingarden’s
original formulation divides text against text, but Carlson’s expansion opens the door on
considering side texts as materially differentiated from a particular “main text.” In film,
this material differentiation may be obvious, as in the ways that subtitles are clear
additions to the celluloid itself, or more abstract, as in the ways that intertitles presume a
dialectical relationship between word and image that gets transgressed in different ways
over silent film’s history. In both cases, I argue that the category of filmic side text is a
useful, though certainly not all-encompassing, definition of my area of inquiry within the
media of translation.
By positioning intertitles and subtitles at the point of intersection between the
media of translation and the side text, I am raising questions that traverse the boundaries
of media and materiality as well as language. However, these are pertinent questions
16
Ibid., 181.
17
Ibid., 190.
18
Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1973), 208.
10
when considering the Shakespearean dimension of translation, for as Susan Bassnett
notes, “to translate” had one more meaning in the Elizabethan era: the act of producing a
play, of moving from the page to the stage.19 The history of the side text has been one of
the intersections between literature, theater, and film, as Carlson elucidates when he
observes that “the filmic subtitle in fact doubtless provided the model for the theatrical
subtitle and more common supertitle,” although he states in an endnote that this is
theoretical speculation on his part, since as of 2007 there had been no critical study of the
relationship between theatrical supertitles and film subtitles.20 However, since he
pinpoints the supertitle’s genesis in opera companies in the mid-1980s, it is historically
likely that it emerged from the cross-pollination of media, just as the intertitle had its
roots in signs and banners on the eighteenth and nineteenth century stage.21 By working
in part to begin writing the oft-ignored cultural and material histories of these filmic side
texts, I will interrogate the relationship that film translation develops between cultural
and material hybridity—between translation and transmediation. This relationship will in
turn provide a context through which to work against dominant discourses of intertitles
and subtitles as purely supplementary or destructive. Rather than reinforcing the myth
that filmic side texts disrupt, subsume, or overwhelm the image, I will work to revitalize
the productive relationship between word and image on the translated screen.
19
Susan Bassnett, “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and
Theatre,” in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary
Translation (London: Routledge, 1998), 94. Found in Carvalho Homem, “Introduction,” 9.
20
Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 191.
21
Ibid., 189-91.
11
These dramas of hybridity, remediation, and textuality take on a deeper
complexity when acted out against the backdrop of Shakespeare’s plays, which are
arguably some of the most well-known and quoted texts across any language. Because of
this, Shakespeare film offers a rich field of inquiry for the analytical work of restoring
filmic side texts as important historical and aesthetic components of cinematic
experiences. Additionally, by addressing Shakespeare film in translation, I draw attention
to the central dialectic of translation studies: between fidelity to a perceived “original”
and artistic expressiveness. The “source text” of a Shakespeare film adaptation is always
known, and the text is always accessible in the form of the original play. When these
plays become non-English films and then move back into English, how do media of
translation handle that disjunction, or disjunctions found in other translations further
degrees removed from the source? The presence of Shakespeare’s always-iconic text
lurking in the background of these films, whether explicitly acknowledged or consciously
avoided, raises larger formal questions of the relationship between the text of the intertitle
and subtitle to other texts within the film. I propose that the filmic side text be considered
as an index, as a text that always exists within a matrix of larger texts, and refers to
written, sonic, and imagistic languages in different ways. Moreover, the Shakespearean
side text always, intentionally or not, exists in relationship to Shakespeare’s words, which
in turn creates a doubled web of indexicality. This theme of doubling—the doubled
genealogies of side texts, stage doubling screen and vice versa, doubled versions of films
for different language audiences—runs throughout this thesis.
12
In the pages that follow, I analyze the relationship between verbal side texts,
image, and speech in silent and sound film adaptations of Shakespeare in order to
examine the ways that film in translation stages cultural and media exchange through its
history. My emphasis on textuality allows me to devote sustained attention to the
intersections between film style and national cinemas, as well as to interrogate the ways
that film translation conventions can uphold or dismantle historical power structures
surrounding who can speak, and in what language they can speak. I will structure my
analysis throughout around a series of case studies of particular films. In the first chapter,
I take a historical approach to Shakespeare on silent film in order to investigate the ways
that a cinema that seemed to lack speech attempted to translate itself across borders. By
moving from the earliest Shakespeare films emerging from England in the last years of
the nineteenth century through emerging avant-garde and industrial aesthetics in the
1910s and 1920s, I seek to explore the ways that emerging grammars of film style were
in fact nation-specific, and required the translation of image as much as word. My main
case study will be the 1920 German-language film of Hamlet starring Asta Nielsen,
which is famous for challenging the extremes of what constitutes a “Shakespeare film.”
From there I set my sights in the second chapter on the conventions of sound film
translation and the relationship between subtitles, spoken dialogue, and image in two
widely disparate Shakespeare films, one from the 1960s and another from the turn of the
twenty-first century. Whereas my approach in the first chapter will be mainly historical
and illustrative, I turn in the second chapter to a more theoretical, aesthetic, and
experiential reading of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 Russian-language Hamlet (Gamlet) and
13
Alexander Abela’s multilingual 1999 Madagascan adaptation of Macbeth, Makibefo. I
end the thesis with a brief postscript that projects the issues of celluloid into digital
spheres to consider the ways that Shakespeare and side texts on DVD, computer
programs, and the Internet maintain and challenge many of the precepts I will have
discussed in earlier chapters. My goal throughout is to continue the rehabilitative work
begun by scholars of filmic side texts, provide a historical, aesthetic, and material context
through which to consider intertitles and subtitles as fully-operative languages of film,
and to assist critical projects of expanding viewers’ understandings of what can constitute
Shakespeare on film. The intertitle and subtitle may appear at first clumsy, destructive, or
distracting, but by toying with and interrogating their conventions, Shakespeare film can
continue the work of dismantling traditional categories of one-to-one translation to open
the door for a broader understanding of cultural and linguistic exchange.
14
CHAPTER 1
SILENT FILM
SECTION ONE: Early Shakespeare Film
Only about a minute of footage survives from King John (Biograph, 1899), the
earliest Shakespeare performance committed to celluloid. The film was the product of a
shrewd business partnership between the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company and
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, “the spectacular actor-manager of Her Majesty’s Theater,
London,” and in its original length reproduced three scenes from Tree’s wildly popular
stage production.22 The surviving minute depicts King John’s (Tree) death by poison, and
plays out in a static long shot on a shallow stage decorated with an ornate, painted
theatrical backdrop. Courtiers clad in black look towards the King in the center of the
frame who, in a flowing white robe, sits on a throne, quivering and moaning in pain,
before he reaches out to a courtier in agony and speaks inaudible words to the sky. He
then tenses, rejects his courtier’s aid and looks straight out at the camera while speaking
directly to it. Finally, clutching his robe, he falls back into his throne before reaching
back out to the camera to speak once more while collapsing in death. This earliest of
Shakespeare films unsurprisingly borrows wholesale from theatrical staging conventions
and exists primarily as a commercial tie-in to Tree’s aforementioned production. Indeed,
the entirety of the film’s mise-en-scène suggests an emphasis on Tree as a performer,
from his central position in the frame to his contrasting white costume. The film’s
22
Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (London:
Cambridge UP, 2009), 60-1.
15
spectacle doubles back on itself as it offers not only an opportunity to see Shakespeare on
film for the first time, but also (and perhaps more thrillingly for a nineteenth century
audience) to see the celebrated Tree. While, as Judith Buchanan notes, “it is not known
precisely what adjustments, if any, Tree may have made to his [stage] performance” for
the camera, she confirms that “since Tree was known for the expressiveness and
uninhibited dimensions of his acting, it is possible that the [film’s] extravagance”
accurately reflects the original style and staging.23 Furthermore, Robert Hamilton Ball
cites contemporary reviews of the theatrical production to note that Tree’s staged King
John was an adaptation rather than a faithful reproduction of Shakespeare’s text. Tree
radically cut and reordered scenes and introduced a number of silent tableaux that
represented, rather than enacted, moments from the play.24 Even before the development
of feature-length narrative film, or even classical Hollywood style storytelling,
Shakespeare on stage in the nineteenth century deployed cinematic storytelling
techniques such as adaptation, elision, and an exploitation of the relationship between
word and image—hinging, in the tableau, on the relationship between voice and silent
gesture.
Even as Tree’s stage production and its filmic record substitute word with gesture,
the viewer can see that King John is not by any means a wordless Shakespeare film.
About forty seconds in, when Tree lunges towards the camera, the viewer can also see
him mouthing silenced words to the courtiers and out towards the “audience” (Fig. 3). It
23
Ibid., 63.
24
Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film (New York: Theater Arts Books, 1968),
22.
16
Figure 3. Herbert Beerbohm Tree mugs to the camera in King John (1899).
goes without saying that words, rhetoric, and oration were vital to staged Shakespeare,
and this moment betrays the then-unknown life of words on screen. To study silent
Shakespeare is then to examine a necessarily intermedial relationship between stage,
screen, and textual practices—all of which themselves are constantly in flux and mutable
given location, culture, and even decade. Tree’s silenced “mugging” in this moment
shows that given the silencing nature of film, the spoken word naturally emerges as the
battleground for this flux. Barbara Freedman points to a number of prominent stage
actors, such as Tree, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Frederick Warde, who found
enormous discomfort and tension with acting before a camera. She cites ForbesRobertson’s director on the 1913 Gaumont-Hepworth Hamlet who says that ForbesRobertson “invariably greeted…[his] own appearance in black and white with shrieks of
17
laughter.”25 These moments of “mugging”—silenced speech—show an actor railing
against the constraints of a new medium, insisting on words even when silenced. The
stylistic treatment of speech in early film underscores a number of conventions and
practices not only surrounding silent film and nineteenth century stage acting, but also the
relationship that the filmic medium creates between verbal and visual languages. For
Tree’s mugging is a purely visual language that operates indexically to point towards the
speech that the medium silences. Tree was keenly aware of the perceived lacks and
absences of silent Shakespeare film, and in 1916 “was to say these very early
Shakespeare films could only possibly be meaningful to those who were perfectly
familiar with the play, and could recall the lines appropriate to the action.”26 Buchanan
goes so far as to indicate a visual match between Shakespeare’s language and Tree’s
gesture in King John, noting that “the progress of [Act V, scene vii of Shakespeare’s play]
is precisely detectable in the surviving film….[Tree] expresses, through gesture, the
various stages of burning, shrinking up, [and] urgent desire for cool relief” charted in the
text.27 In the absence of synchronized sound or title cards, the spoken word survives in
Tree’s body and performance.
Of course, it is common mythology that silent film was at all silent. Rather, as
Miriam Hansen observes in Babel and Babylon, silent film—especially the early films
such as King John—was one component of many in a web of intermedial performance
25
Barbara Freedman, “Critical Junctures in Shakespeare Screen History: The Case of Richard
III,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Russell Jackson ed., 2nd ed.
(London: Cambridge UP, 2007), 49.
26
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 63.
27
Ibid., 63.
18
events. Hansen opens her book with a spectatorship analysis of the 1897 film The
Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, a record of a recent boxing match that was part of one of “the
first full-length programs centering on motion pictures,” and which was “usually
accompanied by an expert’s running commentary and occasionally interrupted by
vaudeville acts.”28 Early film was almost always accompanied by some kind of sonic and
performed component, whether a full orchestra, tinny sideshow organ, academic lecturer,
or dramatic interpreter. Hansen delineates two types of these sonic performances:
“activities relating to the projected films more or less simultaneously,” such as the
aforementioned “lectures, sound effects, and music”; and “nonfilmic attractions” and
performances that alternated billing with the film.29 Both of these sonic elements attempt
to contextualize the moving image within a broader context, whether as part of a larger
program of entertainment to add to and clarify the content of the image itself. Without a
doubt, these “contextualizations” proved attractive to Shakespearean filmmakers
yearning to re-integrate lost sonic, verbal, or even academic components to the
Shakespearean performance. And in the annals of Shakespeare film history, the 1912
Film d’Art production The Life and Death of King Richard III, starring Frederick Warde,
stands tall as a prominent example of the double performance life enabled in these live
“contextualizations.”
Richard III, the “earliest extant American full feature,” was not unearthed until
1996, although, as Freedman observes, even though archivists have secured the celluloid,
28
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1991), 1.
29
Ibid., 43.
19
“Warde’s performance of Richard III has not, in fact, been fully recovered.”30 In 1913,
Warde himself assumed the role of a silent film lecturer for a “high-profile promotion for
[the film]” and traveled alongside it “not only in New York but through a host of
Southern cities,” lecturing and performing alongside his own projected image. 31 Warde’s
lecture combined stage performance and academia in a series of speeches prior to the
film, in between reel changes, and even during the film itself. The focus, as a
contemporary review in the Charleston, South Carolina News and Courier notes, was
always on “elucidating” famous passages for the audience and “explaining the
situations.”32 Warde’s accompanying performance not only further situates silent film as
only partially celluloid, but also points toward the uneasiness with which early silent
Shakespeare film positioned itself within contemporary understandings of Shakespearean
performance. As Freedman notes, the anxiety of film performance comes not just from
the substitution of silence in place of language, but also in the filming process with the
substitution of a mechanical apparatus for a live audience. Warde’s lecturing, she argues,
“betrayed his hope that the public still needed and wanted the body of the actor, much as
Warde, the actor, still wanted and needed a live audience.”33 From the perspective of a
nineteenth century stage actor, the camera not only cuts off the audience from words, but
also severs the connection between audience and actor. Warde’s lecture tour goes one step
beyond Tree’s mugging not only to indicate the film’s absence of language, but also the
30
Freedman, “Critical Junctures,” 48.
31
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 13; Freedman, “Critical Junctures,” 49.
32
Charleston News and Courier, January 12, 1913, found in Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film,
159.
33
Freedman, “Critical Junctures,” 48.
20
perceived absence of the actor’s body. The tour conceives of the film itself as indexical of
Warde’s original performance, and by extension, Warde’s physical presence as an actor in
relationship to the audience. His simultaneous performance with his onscreen image is
then an attempt to “reclaim or control” his ghostly “screen double.”34 Furthermore, as one
sees in the News and Courier’s review, this performance operates as a kind of
Shakespearean pedagogy, in which Warde ensures that the audiences knows exactly what
it is missing. The uneasiness of silent film Shakespeare thus not only arises in the shock
of filmed performance, but from the absences, distortions, and elisions that film
inevitably produces in the movement from stage to screen, and the techniques by which
performers, distributors, and audiences attempt to re-integrate these lost aspects.
Enter intertitles. Textual title cards appeared in film around 1902, soon after King
John, and offered verbal contextualizations for moving images, gradually becoming more
commonplace as films grew in narrative scope and complexity. In his essay “Reading
Intertitles,” Brad Chisholm offers seven categories for the title card: identifications,
temporal markers, narrative summary, characterization, mediated thoughts and
paraphrased dialogue, commentary on the story, and commentary on discourse.35 One can
then broadly situate these seven categories within three tropes of intertitle use: title cards
that function as exposition and summary, situating the viewer within the narrative with
brief sentences or phrases; cards that convey speech and thoughts with quoted or
summarized dialogue; and cards that provide commentary on the film much as a narrator
34
35
Ibid., 49.
Brad Chisholm, “Reading Intertitles,” The Journal of Popular Film and Television 15.3
(1987), 137-42.
21
would in a novel. Indeed, the intertitle appears to make many moves to ally film with
verbal and textual media by, for example, employing temporal markers (Chisholm cites
“the next day, “later,” or “then—” as all common intertitle conventions) that divulge an
ordered, literary understanding of events.36 In his analysis of D. W. Griffith’s Broken
Blossoms (1919), he also notes that the intertitles often mark dialogue with quotation
marks, separating speech from narration. In the case of speech, the intertitle, as Buchanan
writes, desynchronizes dialogue from action, “offer[ing] word and image as proximate
rather than collaborative communicators.”37 And in the case of silent Shakespeare film,
intertitles provided an opportunity to integrate the textuality that film and, arguably, even
performance, eliminated from Shakespeare’s plays. The intertitles in films such as
Richard III or the Forbes-Robertson Hamlet generally either provided “a few lines of plot
summary” in contemporary English or “a sprinkling of Shakespearean quotations…to
help orient the audience about the progress of the play and/or flag the
‘Shakespeareanness’ of the production with a little authentically imported language.”38
Indeed, the 1913 Hamlet uses intertitles as an opportunity to “proclaim the film’s
allegiance to the Shakespearean text,” quoting the Bard at unnecessary length and
studiously demarcating omissions from the original with long rows of ellipses, to
wit:
Alas, my lord I have been so affrighted!
……….. As I was sewing in my chamber,
Lord Hamlet, ………. with a look so piteous in purport,
36
Ibid., 138.
37
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 46.
38
Ibid., 12-4.
22
………. comes before me” [sic]. 39
The intertitle here becomes a medium-specific commentary on the larger discourses
surrounding the film itself. The long rows of ellipses gesture towards the perceived
absences of silent film, and mirror in the textual languages of film the relationship
between speech and sound.
Silent Shakespeare film engages in numerous processes of translation between
textual, visual, and sonic languages, and the affordances and constraints of the medium
push filmmakers and actors to propose a certain level of congruence between all three—
to say that there are gestures that can stand for speech, and words on intertitles that can
stand for image, and so forth. However, as Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs write in Theatre
to Cinema, cinema inherited a system of codified and stereotyped gesture in acting styles
that in turn drew from seventeenth and eighteenth century painting traditions. 40 The
reliance on codified visual gesture, the absence of a particular spoken language, and the
ease with which distributors could excise and replace intertitles all aided early cinema’s
stature as a global medium—one that crossed boundaries of culture and language with
ease. Greg Colón Semenza observes in his essay “The Globalist Dimensions of Silent
Shakespeare Cinema” that “by the time of the feature-length film, all the big production
companies…targeted foreign markets as aggressively as they did domestic ones,” and
that the supposed “irrelevance of sound made equally irrelevant the fact that foreign
accents were present in national cinema, one of the many reasons why it was more
39
40
Hamlet (1912; Hepworth/Gaumont, 2003 DVD).
Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature
Film (London: Oxford UP, 1997), 79-81.
23
common for non-Anglophone actors to star regularly in Anglophone films and vice
versa.”41 However, the ease with which film crossed borders and the universality of the
image are all points of contention, especially in the field of silent Shakespeares. For until
now, I have exclusively considered Anglophone productions with the minor exception of
the case of the French/American co-production of Richard III, and limited my scope to
silent Shakespeare films emerging from a tradition of interacting with Shakespeare in the
original English. I will turn my attention now to Asta Nielsen’s 1920 German Hamlet to
examine the ways that translating silent film was not simply a matter of cutting away
intertitles, but was in fact a complex process of transcultural exchange and competing
images of modernity in the 1910’s and 1920’s.
SECTION TWO: Climbing Babel
Asta Nielsen’s 1920 German-language Hamlet stands out in the history of
Shakespeare films for the boldness with which it re-wrote the Bard. The film, co-directed
by Svend Gade and Heinz Schall, though produced by Nielsen’s own Art-Film Company,
recasts Hamlet as a woman who, to protect the line of succession, is declared a man at
birth. Her gender is concealed from all those outside the royal family, and this inner
turmoil drives much of the character’s action throughout the film. Hamlet was only
available in a black-and-white American English-language export print until the 2005
discovery of an original two-strip colored German-language print, which subsequently
41
Greg Colón Semenza, “The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema,” Journal of
Narrative Theory 41.3 (2011), 325-6.
24
premiered at the 2007 Berlinale Film Festival. 42 The film thus exists in two extant
versions in two different languages, and I will work through both of these in my analysis.
Both the English and German opening intertitles defend its extravagant premise as drawn
from the original Danish twelfth century histories recorded by Saxo-Grammaticus that
inspired the Ur-Hamlet, the 1704 German play Fratricide Punished which similarly repositioned Hamlet in light of purported earlier records, and the work of nineteenth
century American academic Edward P. Vining. Vining’s 1881 book The Mystery of
Hamlet suggested, in order to make psychological sense of Hamlet’s actions, that
“Hamlet is a woman, that Hamlet is in love with Horatio, and that Gertrude, to avoid the
problem of succession had passed off a daughter as a son.”43 Ball notes that Vining’s
proposal was by no means a popular nineteenth century view, and that the book itself
went “largely unnoticed and forgotten,” but “somehow or other, Erwin Gerpard, who
wrote the script…had found a copy,” and integrated its conclusions into his screenplay.44
It should be noted that contemporary audiences would not have been unfamiliar with the
idea of a woman paying Hamlet. In fact, American actor Sarah Bernhardt had released a
popular film of The Duel Scene From Hamlet in 1900, just one year after King John.
However, Hamlet’s integration of Vining’s self-admittedly specious academic theories
allowed Nielsen to play Hamlet as a woman, rather than to follow in Bernhardt’s
footsteps and play Hamlet as still a man. The move also underscores the extent to which
Hamlet operated as a vehicle for Nielsen’s own stardom, for just as with Tree’s King John
42
Asta Nielsen: Hamlet & Die Filmprimadonna (1920; Edition Filmmuseum 2009 DVD).
43
Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 273.
44
Ibid., 272.
25
or Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Nielsen’s Hamlet, in its bold reconfiguration, was as
much a spectacle of seeing the actor as it was seeing Shakespeare. This 1920 Hamlet
represents a significant departure from the staid faithfulness to stage conventions of
previous filmed Shakespeares. Rather, by juxtaposing Nielsen’s expressive performance
with unorthodox textual conventions, the film stages the growing tension between
faithfulness and artistic license in filmed Shakespeare adaptations.
This doubled tension—between past and present, Shakespeare and Nielsen, and
English and German languages—permeates all aspects of the film. The actors’
interpretive styles run the gamut of silent film acting approaches, from Nielsen’s famous
understated subtlety and emotional depth to other actors’ traditionally gestural and
pictorial styles. Iris Barry, in a Museum of Modern Art Film Library program on “The
Film in Germany and the Film in France” notes that “the direction…is curiously mixed in
style: the scenes in natural outdoor settings and outside a real castle are romantic in
feeling and free in treatment. The interior scenes, in the general tradition of German
studio architecture, are more stiffly composed.”45 Barry situates the film within a “postwar school of German costume-films among which Passion (Dubarry) is perhaps the best
known,” and the film’s reliance on static deep staging as well as frequent expressionistic
close-ups allies Hamlet closer to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr.
Caligari) than the 1913 Richard III.46 The German-language intertitles dispense with any
glimpse of Shakespearean language, and in fact barely follow the original play’s narrative
45
Iris Barry, “The Film in Germany and the Film in France,” published by the Museum of
Modern Art Film Library, Series III, Program 2, 1949. The program was found in the Robert
Hamilton Ball Collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
46
Ibid., n.p.
26
in any recognizable way. Rather than unfolding in five acts, the film unfolds in six with a
prologue, and the film announces each act with an intricately designed intertitle and
Caligari-esque angular drawings. Much of the film concerns itself with action that is
“offstage” in Shakespeare’s play, as the narrative spends long stretches of time during
Hamlet’s birth, his/her education at Wittenberg, and his/her exile (now in Norway, rather
than England). English and American criticisms of the film were frequently leveled at its
un-Shakespeareanness, and took special aim at the English-language intertitles of the
American export print, which infrequently deploy Shakespeare’s original language,
potentially as a move to rehabilitate Shakespeare in a film that seems content to ignore
him. Furthermore, a side-by-side inspection of the American export and German original
print reveals that the films themselves not only have completely different intertitles, but
employ different shot sequences, edits, and camera angles—all in order to provide a print
suitable for American audiences. However, before I move into an analysis of these two
Hamlets, I will spend some time examining the theoretical principles underlying film’s
aspiration to a universal language that emerges in the 1910s and 1920s, and how Hamlet
stages a number of the issues that surround the transcultural exchange of styles in this
time period.
As Semenza observes, silent film’s globalizing tendencies and aspirations
emerged simultaneously in film style as well as in production and export. The apparent
ease with which distributors could export and import silent films across international
boundaries makes a firm case for film not only as an international medium but as an
imagistic form employing bodily language that could potentially speak where words
27
failed. One sees this aspiration perhaps nowhere stronger than in the writings and films of
Soviet avant-garde artist and political agitator Dziga Vertov, whose influential 1929 film
Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) proclaims itself in its opening
frames a “film experiment” made “without the use of intertitles” and “scenario,” and as
such positions itself as a purely filmic—that is to say, imagistic—experience. Indeed, the
Russian film style of the late 1910s and 1920s, which in turn has resonances with the
emergence of German Expressionism over the same period, collapses film and image into
the same register, and argues for the sensual experience of an imagistic response over the
“intellectual” experience of verbal language. Through this sensual response, filmmakers
such as Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein attempt to articulate particular grammars of image
relationships that, in theory, speak to all humanity at a primal or atavistic level—the
universal language. Hence Eisenstein’s fascination with Chinese and Japanese ideograms,
which he argues “prove a means for the laconic imprinting of an abstract concept”
immediately within the image. 47 The ideogram becomes an immediate montage, a
collapsed juxtaposition within a single image. Eisenstein characterizes montage’s power
as simultaneously intellectual and physical, and that “the juxtaposition of two separate
shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus
another shot—as it does a creation.”48 This move positions montage as a solution to the
“task of presenting not only a narrative that is logically connected, but one that contains a
maximum of emotion and stimulating power,” which in the Eisensteinian or Vertovian
47
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” in Film Form (New
York: Harcourt, Inc., 1969), 30-1.
48
Italics in this and the subsequent quote in the original.
28
model exists separately from the dictates of verbal language and instead operates on base
levels of feeling and emotion.49 One can read Eisenstein’s deployment of the Japanese
ideogram then as essentially a-cultural, or as a move to speak to the primal levels of
human perception and experience, a move that threatens to essentialize the specific
cultural history and use of the kanji to a general “worldwide” culture. However,
Eisenstein does observe in the opening sentences of his essay on the ideogram that while
“the Japanese cinema is completely unaware of montage[,]…the principle of montage can
be identified as the basic element of Japanese representational culture.”50 Eisenstein’s
gesture towards the connections between cultures, verbal languages, and traditions of
visual representation calls into question any particular systematic and universal film
“language,” at least on the level of textual or visual grammars.
To an extent, I have introduced and built up Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s theories of
montage expressly so that I can challenge them with alternative “universal languages”
that emerged simultaneously in the 1910s and 1920s. These decades marked the
emergence of established filmmaking industries and communities across an
industrializing Europe and United States who developed specific, localized filmmaking
styles that, as I shall discuss, required no small amount of “translation” when these styles
crossed borders. The irony this move presents is that each local “universal language” then
must get “translated” into another local universal language. Silent Shakespeare film
translation then is not simply a matter of cutting out the words from the celluloid, but
often a process of “re-editing,” adapting, and transforming images in sequence. Yuri
49
Sergei Eisenstein, “Word and Image,” in Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 1970), 4, 7-8.
50
Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle…,” 28.
29
Tsivian breaks down the term “re-editing” (in Russian, peremontazh) in depth in his essay
on Soviet film culture of the 1920s, and glosses the term as “the reworking of a film to
suit it to a country other than that of its origin.”51 The term and Tsivian’s attendant
definition appear remarkably more elastic than traditional categories of literary
translation—translation that, as Susan Bassnett’s and Lawrence Venuti’s works
continually bring to the center, stages the tension between textual fidelity and artistic
expressiveness.52 Re-editing, in Tsivian’s terms, collapses categories of translation and
adaptation into one act that emphasizes an engagement with the material form of the film
itself. However, the historical re-editing process in Soviet film culture was controlled and
dictated by the needs of the larger film industry, rather than by individual “translators” or
the filmmakers themselves. Soviet film translation sought not only to bring foreign films
in line with domestic “sensibilities,” but also to maximize the appeal of domestic films
for “Western” audiences.53 Re-editing thus went beyond simply changing titles for
foreign audiences or preemptively censoring sequences (both of which are film
“translation” tactics still prevalent today) but also reorganizing the film’s editing, style,
and montage. In particular, Tsivian notes a 1924 Soviet film, Palace and Fortress
(Dvorets I Krepost), which in its opening sequence deployed distinctly “American” style
crosscutting between the titular locations and was subject to re-editing to bring the
sequence more in line with supposed “European” sensibilities that demanded that images
51
Yuri Tsivian, “The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-Editing and Soviet Film Culture of the
1920s,” Film History 8 (1996), 327.
52
See Susan Bassett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1980) and Lawrence Venuti,
The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995).
53
Tsivian, “The Wise and Wicked Game,” 330.
30
be grouped together by content. (Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera was of course five
years off when Palace and Fortress was released.) One must wonder, as Tsivian does
throughout his essay, who sets these trends? Who decides the national character and film
style? The difficulty with which film historians have answering these questions in the
case of re-editing inevitably points to the hidden and forgotten role of the re-editors
themselves, much less the specific criteria they applied to their work.
To approach the movement of the Nielsen Hamlet across the Atlantic then not
only involves analyzing the relationship between the intertitle texts, but also the film
grammars developed in each version. Tsivian provides some guidance in his
characterization of the “anxieties” that surrounded German film exporting in the 1910s
and 1920’s vis-à-vis the films’ tempo in that “[German] producers feared that German
films might look too slow” compared to cross-cut American features.54 The German
“primacy” of the static shot over the movement of montage helps contextualize Hamlet’s
reliance on deep staging and lingering close-ups as part of a broader national style. The
“language” of the Nielsen Hamlet is not just verbally German: it is, on some level,
visually German. However, I do not propose that disparate film styles are easily reduced
to nationalist or cultural products. Hamlet’s style is inextricably linked up with its
German-ness, but not solely reliant on its cultural heritage. Rather, Hamlet arrives at a
larger crossroads in the evolution of silent film style from a stage- and painting-bound
pictorialism into different varieties of “cinematic” languages—multiple versions of which
develop across the filmmaking world throughout the 1920s. These languages, as I have
54
Ibid., 331-2.
31
discussed, include Eisensteinian and Vertovian montage as much as they include the
mise-en-scène stylization of German Expressionism, or even the “happy ending” of
Hollywood-style storytelling. Moreover, these new styles (as well as, in the case of
Hamlet, the “middle” styles that emerge at the transitional point between decades) each
deal with the relationship between word and image in distinct ways. For the Russian
avant-garde and German filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Béla Bálazs, words were
irrelevant and superfluous, and actively damaged the project of film as a universal
language, hence films such as Murnau’s 1924 The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) or
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera that (implicitly for the former and explicitly for the
latter) eschewed intertitles entirely. Bálazs in particular takes up arguments for the “facial
expression and physical gestures” of film as “the first international language,” which has
particular resonance when considering the richly expressionistic and bodily performances
for which Asta Nielsen grew famous. 55 The problem of language across both versions of
Hamlet is then, much like with Tree or Warde, a problem of the gestural language-of-thebody in relationship to the languages of image and text.
SECTION THREE: Translating the Nielsen Hamlet
Prior to the 2009 release on DVD of the original German-language Hamlet,
viewers were only able to see the American print at curated film festivals and archives. A
side-by-side comparison of the two was impossible, and indeed, both Ball’s and
Buchanan’s books make only passing reference to the German-language originals and
55
Cited in Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 188.
32
instead devote their critical attention to the English-language import print. However, not
only has the DVD release made a close reading of the two versions possible, the DVD
itself includes a side-by-side version comparison of selected scenes as a special feature.
Titles cards that precede the feature illuminate some of the stranger aspects of the version
comparison. For example, the viewer learns that Art-Film “shot Hamlet with 2 cameras
simultaneously in order to generate sufficient quantities of camera negative for their
ambitious international sales plans,” which in turn explains why almost all of the shots in
both versions have different camera angles and distances. Asta Films Inc. of New York
served as the American distributor, and hired Francis Trevelyan Miller, a historian and
playwright who dabbled in screenwriting, to adapt Hamlet for American audiences.
However, lest the American Hamlet prove, unlike so many other foreign re-editings, to
have too easy a lineage to trace, the DVD throws the viewer yet another curveball with
the intertitles. The version comparison proclaims that the “source material for the
American version as presented in this video comparison was the German TV broadcast
from 1987, featuring a re-translation of the American version intertitles back into
German,” multiplying the translation to impressive degrees.56 The version comparison
thus only allows the viewer to juxtapose the original German-language print with a retranslated German-from-English print. Thankfully, I was able to view the original
English-language intertitles on a 16 mm print at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and will
work between the DVD and the print in my analysis.
56
Asta Nielsen: Hamlet & Die Filmprimadonna (1920: Edition Filmmuseum 2009 DVD).
33
Take, for example, Asta Nielsen’s first sequence on screen. The American print
does away with all of the prologue and act divisions of the German original, and with
them the harsh Caligari-style angles that adorn those intertitles. Instead, the American
print provides drawn pictures of landscapes and castles as backdrop to the intertitles in
“transitional” moments (Fig. 4). The American intertitles take a novelistic tone unseen in
the German originals, which prefer short, declarative phrases to the American descriptive
sentences and abundant dialogue. Compare the German “Prinz Hamlets
Jünglingsjahre” [“Prince Hamlet’s youth”] to “And so Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, grew
into a goodly youth” [“Und so wuchs Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, zum Jüngling heran”
in the retranslation]. The camera then fades in on Elsinore—but two distinctly different
views depending on the version. The German original opens on a yellow-tinted image of
Figure 4. A still from the German and American version comparison available on the 2009
Edition Filmmuseum DVD of the Nielsen Hamlet.
34
Gertrude and King Hamlet on a round balcony at the top of a striking flight of stairs,
whereas the American edit opens with a shot of Hamlet in the garden resting against a
stone statue and facing away from the camera. The German version then cuts to a
medium shot of the King and Queen, who, after a moment of cavorting, immediately shift
their attention to a spot below them in the lower-right-hand corner of the frame. Only
then does the German version reveal Asta Nielsen lounging in the garden, her entire
reclining body seen straight-on and framed in a static iris. The American version reverses
the moment, revealing Gertrude and the King only when Hamlet directs his/her attention
to the unseen balcony to the left of the frame. After this initial reversal, the scenes settle
down into more-or-less agreement, although the changed camera angles in the American
edit drastically alter the deep staging and tenor of the close-ups of the German original.
However, the American version appears to have much less patience for lingering shots on
silenced speech, preferring instead to intercut dialogic intertitles throughout
conversations. Moreover, these English intertitles go out of their way to provide vital plot
points as soon as possible in an effort to clarify the German original’s fast-and-loose
approach to Shakespeare’s original. Hence intertitles that introduce “Claudius, brother of
the King” and “Laertes, Impetuous son of Polonius Court Chamberlain of Denmark
[sic],” and expressive expansions such as “Compelled to act a man—but in lonely wistful
moments still a woman,” which substitutes the German version’s brief “Gehemmte
Schwingen” [“Clipped wings”] preceding a lengthy medium shot of Asta Nielsen’s
impressively non-verbal emoting after seeing men and women running off together in a
square below.
35
Asta Nielsen’s non-verbal, expressionistic acting seems to obviate the need for
language in silent film. Language that, in turn, the American intertitles appear obsessed
with asserting and reinstating. Not only do the American intertitles occur with more
frequency than in the German version, they deploy Shakespearean languages in ways
unseen in the original. Not a single word of translated Shakespeare, whether in August
von Schlegel’s and Ludwig Tieck’s celebrated canonical or any other translation, appears
in the German original, which instead relies entirely on invented text to tell its version of
the Hamlet story. The effect of all the new German text and the distance that the Nielsen
Hamlet puts between itself and Shakespeare’s play is to heighten not only the adaptive
work done to the original, but also to highlight all the other, more explicitly German
sources deployed in the film. As Buchanan notes, this film is “almost distractingly
cluttered with events, not all of which are Shakespearean,” and those that are not come
from Medieval Danish and German, rather than English, sources.57 In the film’s English
incarnation, however, “the film is equally insistent that it should not be cut loose entirely
from a Shakespearean frame of reference…[and as such] intermittently asserts a
superficial attachment to its genealogy through the use of direct quotation.”58 Iconic
phrases from Shakespeare such as “to sleep perchance to dream” and “Get thee to a
nunnery” jostle up against less-known lines such as “I like him not! Nor stands it safe
with us to let his madness range,” all generally divorced from their original contexts
within the play. The film transforms the latter line, for instance, from a direct order from
Claudius to Rosencrantz and Guildensten (the latter who are absent from the film
57
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 238.
58
Ibid., 238.
36
entirely) to an sotto voce remark from Claudius to Gertrude. Nor do these lines operate in
dramatic conflict with the image. Instead, as in the case of “to sleep perchance to dream,”
which accompanies Hamlet waking from a dream, rather than any contemplation of
mortality, they are frequently illustrative of or contextualize screen action. Shakespearean
language in the export print functions less as translation and more as a marker of a
lineage for which the German-language print appears to care little. As with Tsivian’s
examples of altered montage styles in Soviet film, the differences between these two
extant versions result from aesthetic and political priorities.
The nexus of these issues of language and performance condense around Nielsen
herself. Her acting style is perhaps the epitome of Bálazs’ “primordial language,” as
Hansen terms it, given how Nielsen counterbalances “the spontaneously expressive
movement (Ausdrucksbewegung) of the whole body” with a clearly-felt and richly
internal emotional landscape.59 In the “Clipped wings” sequence, Nielsen’s expressivity
arises from deep within her body’s core rather than her head, mind, or even her mouth.
The internal feeling has its expression then in her face—in eyes that roll upward and
close—as well as her undulating torso. That expressiveness, so the film might have us
believe, renders intertitles unnecessary and makes Hamlet’s project one of documenting
human emotion rather than simply a narrative of events. Given Nielsen’s star power and
historical significance to the German film industry, to say nothing of the fact that her own
production company financed Hamlet, it is unsurprising then that the film’s style and
grammar privileges and permits lingering shots on Nielsen in moments of silent
59
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 188-9.
37
expression. In the face of the emotional capacity of the human body, words—
Shakespeare’s or anyone’s—become, as Nielsen suggests in her own autobiography,
“superfluous.”60 However, neither the German-language nor the English-language
versions appear to necessarily strive for a non-verbal film language, given how each
film’s acting style careens wildly from Nielsen’s nuance to gestural and pantomimic
clowning, often in the course of one scene. Nielsen herself seems more than comfortable
mugging for the camera in scenes such as Hamlet’s first “mad scene” with Polonius and a
phrenologist. Close-ups on Nielsen and Hans Junkermann (Polonius) give them each
opportunity to make sly or “knowing” faces communicating their feelings and intents to
the viewing audience. Rather than position these scenes in any particular kind of
relationship to scenes with Nielsen alone, the film prefers, like in its treatment of its
collective source materials, to throw everything up against the wall to see what sticks, so
to speak. Only in the English-language version is there any effort to impose a unifying
textual thread upon the image. As Buchanan notes, these textual moves serve only to
“highlight how vibrantly and interestingly un-Shakespearean most of the production is,”
rather than to actually ally the film with Shakespeare in any substantive way.61
Furthermore, the film’s formal transformation as it moves across borders emphasizes the
uneasiness with which English-speaking audiences were willing to divorce
Shakespearean action from Shakespearean language, and that the translation-cum-reediting process only further occludes the extent to which the German original placed no
emphasis on Shakespeare’s words. The key difference between the two intertitles comes
60 Asta
61
Nielsen, Die Schweigende Muse (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1979), 68.
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 239.
38
down to an issue of use. Both German and English intertitles deploy something
Shakespearean, whether it be heavily adapted plot points or literal quotation. However,
while the English subtitles strategically deploy Shakespearean text to enforce a particular
relationship to the Bard that rests on the pre-eminence of his written language, the
German titles transform and transfigure the original, writing over it, in order to produce
the textual document suitable for the film’s project.
SECTION FOUR: Looking Forward
Filmmakers employ intertitles strategically to purportedly offer understanding
unavailable through image alone. While making a film without intertitles such as The
Last Laugh was a point of honor and pride, the same could not be said for an imaginary
film composed entirely of intertitles, for the intertitle is not the film’s subject but simply a
means to the subject’s end. Hence the emphasis in Chisholm’s rhetoric and in silent era
pedagogical discourses surrounding film writing on using intertitles strictly as points of
clarification, contextualization, and criticism, as texts supplementary to the main “text” of
the image itself. In this way, as Tsivian theorizes, films of the 1910s and 1920s sought to
distinguish themselves from literary traditions by allying with pictorial and imagistic art
forms.62 The resulting emphasis on the image at the expense of the word, or lieu of the
word, sat uneasily for many Shakespearean actors and filmmakers who emerged from a
stage tradition that, while deploying silent tableaux and gestural action, still located the
enormity of Shakespeare’s imagined “power” in the spoken utterance. Hence early
62
Yuri Tsivian, “Two ‘Stylists of the Teens’: Franz Hofer and Yevgenii Bauer,” in A Second
Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, Thomas Elsässer, ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996),
264-76.
39
attempts such as Warde’s lecture tour or the 1913 Gaumont-Hepworth Hamlet’s
exhaustively documented intertitles to restore some missing aspect of Shakespeare on
screen, whether it be at first the sound of the actor’s voice and the presence of his body,
to later simply the original language itself. In particular, English-speaking filmmakers
seem particularly invested in this kind of rehabilitative work that attempts to restore lost
Shakespeareanness to the ghostly image. The Nielsen Hamlet distinguishes itself as a
Shakespearean adaptation unconcerned with the Bard beyond the jumping-off-point his
play provides for its own dramatic machinations. In its strict avoidance in the original
German for anything resembling Shakespeare’s text, either in English or its canonical
German translation, the Nielsen Hamlet draws further attention to the gaps between its
version of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s. Rather than advertising that which is missing from
the Shakespeare film, as prior films obsessed, this Hamlet fills the gaps with events, text,
and performance of its own invention, conceiving of Shakespeare as a fruitful base rather
than a be-all-and-end-all. The result is still arguably a translation of Shakespeare’s
English-language play, but one that errs completely on the side of adaptation rather than
one-to-one correspondence. In turn, its English-language translation demonstrates another
paradigm of Shakespearean use in that it deploys the Bard’s texts as a cultural and
linguistic sign towards its perceived origins.
The one aspect of Shakespearean stage performance that intertitles can never hope
to rehabilitate, however, is the sound of the actor’s voice. Naturally with the industrial
rise of sound film in the mid- to late 1920’s the intertitle found itself discarded, employed
sometimes to introduce a film’s temporal and physical setting, but never again achieving
40
the prominence it had in the silent era. The shift towards sound film produced welldocumented anxiety throughout the film industry, particularly in the realm of film
translation.63 Production studios could no longer quickly re-cut films for international
distribution since synchronized sound coded the celluloid itself with a particular
language. Hence attempts to film multiple language versions of the same film, such as the
famous case of the the dual German and English versions of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930
The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel). This approach still survives in an altered form to this
day with film dubbing, which replaces speech in the source language with speech in the
target, usually performed by an entirely separate set of actors. However, the textualizing
approach of the intertitle has an heir of sorts in the subtitle, which offers simultaneous
text translations of spoken dialogue in a purportedly unobtrusive manner. With the
emergence of the subtitle, film in translation no longer has even the illusion of fully
grafting to the target language and culture, as the juxtaposition of speech in one language
and text in another ostensibly creates a cacophony that disavows film’s ability to “speak”
across languages, cultures, and borders. In the following chapter, I will take the concepts
of provisionality, hybridity, and use that I have developed in my analysis of the intertitle
and apply it to the Shakespearean subtitle in order to critique this slippage into
cacophony. By breaking down the subtitle’s translating conventions, I hope to develop a
language through which I can discuss the tricky relationship sound film positions
between word, image, and text, particularly when that text comes, in some way, from as
recognizable a source as William Shakespeare.
63 Anton
Kaes, “Silent Cinema,” Monatshefte 82.3 (1990), 246-56.
41
CHAPTER 2
SOUND FILM
SECTION ONE: Whose Hamlet?
If Nielsen’s 1920 silent Hamlet represents a particular genre of freely adaptive
Shakespeare films that rewrite the Bard’s language, plot, setting, or characters, then
Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 Russian language Hamlet appears in its faithfulness to
Shakespeare’s play to offer the opposite.64 Even though Kozintsev cuts nearly half the
text from Boris Pasternak’s 1941 translation, the film still hits many of the marks one
might expect from a Hamlet film, not only in textual structure but also mise-en-scène and
direction. The bulk of Hamlet’s soliloquies survive intact, the setting and costumes
appear suitably Medieval (though not strictly Elizabethan), the plot follows
Shakespeare’s original, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s orchestral score offers an appropriate
mix of bombast and solemnity to the proceedings. Indeed, contemporary newspaper
reviews such as Bosley Crowther’s for the New York Times praise Kozintsev’s film for its
“large, mobile, realistic rending of the melodramatic action of the play” as well as its
“striking scenery, the physical sweep of its performance and the grand effects that the
camera achieves.”65 Crowther finds fault in the film’s obvious absence of English poetry,
writing that without Shakespeare’s poetic text, the dialogue “doesn’t even have a
64
For a wider discussion on the dialectic in Shakespeare film adaptation between “free” and
“faithful,” see Tony Howard, “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Russell Jackson, ed. 2nd ed. (London: Cambridge UP, 2007)
303-27.
65
Bosley Crowther, “Film Festival: Regal Soviet ‘Hamlet.’” The New York Times. September
15, 1964.
42
noticeable cadence to rouse the emotions through the ear.” Although Crowther’s critique
is noticeably Anglocentric and denies any innate poetry in the Russian language, his
observation does uncover the curious experience a native English speaker has watching
Kozintsev’s film. For the subtitles, both in the celluloid print screened in 1964 and its
2006 DVD incarnation, use Shakespeare’s actual words rather than re-translations from
the Russian. At first, this move seems to brilliantly sidestep issues of fidelity, poetry, and
loss in the translation from Russian to English, since English-speaking viewers can
simply view the “source” text rather than its re-translation. However, this decision
produces a number of instances in which subtitle and spoken dialogue clash more
obviously than they would otherwise. For example, the subtitles memorably translate
Gertrude’s (Elza Radzina) one-word line “Da” with the Shakespearean “It may be,”
epitomizing Judith Crist’s lamentation in a 1964 film review that Hamlet “presents the
American audience with the almost impossible task of watching a film in which speech is
the essence while listening to Russian dialogue and reading the excerpted, brokenphrased and frequently elliptic but always concentration-demanding Shakespearean
text.”66 Crist, like Crowther, locates the primary power of the Shakespearean
performance on screen in the sound of the poetry rather than simply the sights of the
images. The Shakespearean subtitles attempt to move between languages while
simultaneously bridging the gap between aural and visual communication, and in doing
so, fall prey, as they must, to the new Babel of sound film.
66
Judith Crist, “Two from ’64 Film Festival.” The New York Herald Tribune. March 16, 1966.
43
There is a strange moment early in Hamlet in which Kozintsev openly stages the
cacophony of interlingual exchange. After a wordless prologue locating this film’s
Elsinore amidst waves crashing against cliffs and wide, grassy plains, and during which
Hamlet bears witness to his father’s funeral, an armor-clad courtier delivers Claudius’
opening speech from Act I, Scene II as a proclamation to a thronging crowd. In
“translation,” the speech ends on the line “In equal scale weighing delight and dole—, /
Taken to wife.” The camera then cuts to the interior of Elsinore, where the crowd of
peasants outside is turned to a crowd of nobility. Two elderly gentlemen walk down a
flight of stairs and repeat, in Russian, the line subtitled “in equal scale weighing delight
and dole” as they cross off the bottom of the frame. The camera tracks inward through the
crowd and picks up two similarly-attired men speaking in German—and here the subtitles
fail and offer no translation. It is perhaps only when these German-speaking men cross
off diagonally left as the camera tracks further in and picks up two men crossing from left
to right speaking in French that the viewer realizes that she has heard the same line three
times in three different languages all within the same shot. Throughout this short
sequence, the camera presses on inward as the dignitaries move across the frame in
contrasting diagonals, heightening the sense of isolation between the languages, in turn
compounded by the fact that each “language” moves in a pair forming a microcosmic
community. Immediately, Kozintsev has staged Elsinore itself as linguistically
fragmented, which in turn emphasizes within the film the kinds of cultural exchanges
occurring in the film’s material instantiation. That the subtitles cut out in this moment
nods toward these titles’ priorities and the kind of translation (Russian to English
44
exclusively) they are trying to achieve. Even though the subtitlers themselves remain
anonymous, their work conditions the viewer’s reception of the film, and moreover has a
profound impact on the ways that the resultant film can display and stage intercultural
exchange.
The subtitle, like its subtitler, has a history of anonymity, obscurity, and
(paradoxically) silence. Whereas the intertitle receives passing attention in histories of
silent film, given that it is one of the clearest markers of a particular space and time of
film production, as well as in studies of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard who deploy
intertitles to formalist and political ends, the subtitle often goes ignored or forgotten in
analyses of film in translation. When the subtitle does receive attention, it is often—as is
the case in Crowther’s and Crist’s reviews of Hamlet—to denigrate and belittle its work
as insufficient or downright destructive. This paradigm of deficiency only gets magnified
when the subtitle deploys Shakespearean language, as the distance between the complete
poetry available on the page and the fragmented quotation of the subtitle grows and
sharpens. The limited critical discourse that has emerged in the past twenty years
surrounding subtitling thus situates it within the realms of violence and erasure. The word
“abuse” crops up frequently in essays on subtitling: Abé Mark Nornes’ “For an Abusive
Subtitling” and Amresh Sinha’s “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles” both argue
persuasively for acknowledging the unspoken dimensions of subtitles’ destructive power
beyond simply distracting from the image.67 Sinha locates the initial frustration within a
dialectic between seeing and reading, in that the subtitle “takes away the pleasure of
67 Abé
Mark Nornes, “For an Abusive Subtitling,” Film Quarterly 52.3 (1999), 17-34.
Amresh Sinha, “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles,” in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Atom
Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 171-92.
45
visual consumption and replaces it with the tedious task of reading,” which further
situates film in translation within popular American discourses as a bastion of a “liberal,
elitist culture.”68 Given that Hamlet’s subtitles render ostensibly familiar text in such a
strange way, it is no wonder that responses to the film epitomize this dialectic.
It is interesting, then, that much of the mechanics of subtitle production plays off
the text’s relationship to sound rather than image or shooting script. The paradigms of
subtitle reception that Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour highlight throughout their edited
essay collection Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (one of the only sustained critical
analyses of the subtitle) of course mention a film’s original spoken language, but more
often than not the relationship of the subtitle to the image takes center stage. However, as
Nornes details in Cinema Babel, the technical processes by which subtitles are added to
film stock challenge the centricity of the image within subtitle reception and
reincorporate sound into the critical landscape. 69 Subtitling as a “mode of translation”
requires a three-step process that frequently involves more than one person: first, a
“spotter” divvies up the film’s spoken dialogue by time so that a later technician knows to
which frames to append the titles; second, a translator renders the spoken dialogue
textually in the target language; and third, a technician mechanically inserts the subtitles
onto the film stock. There are three major technical procedures by which this graft is
achieved in the case of celluloid. The first is a process of layering, through which the
specialist uses optical printing to produce a new piece of film stock from the original
68
Sinha, “The Use and Abuse of Subtitling,” 171.
69 Abé
Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
158-66. I have drawn the following discussion of mechanical subtitling processes from this book.
46
image and a film strip with subtitles. The subtitled film strip then exists as an
independent, hybridized media object that is a product of the processes of photography as
much as translation. The second procedure is a process of burning: in this more highquality and expensive procedure, technicians burn off the original celluloid’s emulsion
and then apply a small “printing press-like cliché” for each subtitle to the image. After
that application, the celluloid is then dipped in an acid bath that “eat[s] the subtitle out of
the very tissue of the image.” The third method is a contemporary update of the second,
through which technicians achieve the initial burning with computer-driven lasers rather
than miniature brands. In the latter two methods, the technical apparatus of the translation
process quite literally destroys part of the original media object. In all cases, these
technicians work for the production company directly and often have no contact with the
original filmmaker, which in turn subsumes translation in the industrial aesthetics of
mechanical reproducibility. While there are cases of famous individual subtitlers such as
Herman Weinberg, who Nornes identifies as the inventor of subtitles in 1930, or the cults
of personality surrounding particular Japanese subtitlers, the bulk of these translators
labor in anonymity. 70
Having offered a brief formal history of the subtitle in general, I would like now
to trace the textual history of the spoken language in Kozintsev’s Hamlet and its
relationship to its Shakespearean subtitles. Hamlet was the first of two Shakespeare films
Kozintsev directed near the end of his career (the second, King Lear [Korol Lir], was
released in 1971 just two years before he died). Kozintsev was no stranger to the play,
70
Ibid., 149.
47
having spent the early years of his career as a theater director and Shakespearean critic.
His 1954 staging of the play at the Pushkin Theater was one of the first times
Shakespeare had appeared on a Soviet stage after Stalin’s death.71 In 1966, two years
after he filmed Hamlet, Kozintsev published Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, a booklength scholarly and artistic meditation on the Bard, with a special emphasis on Hamlet
and King Lear as plays, rather than as films.72 His scholarly work reveals a reverence for
Shakespeare as text, rather than simply as plot, character, or image. Shakespeare: Time
and Conscience opens with an extended meditation on Kozintsev’s encounter with a First
Folio at the British Museum in London, and he writes movingly of the dimensions,
weight, and materiality of the leather-bound antique, noting that “life and movement can
come to art only in terms of the invisible dimensions of the artistic. Life and movement
are breathed forth from the very book I hold.”73 Kozintsev’s engagement with
Shakespeare’s language is thus complicated by his linguistic distance from English, and
while he evidently read and spoke enough English to expound on the poetic devices and
performance history of Shakespeare’s original, no small part of his essay on the play is
concerned with evaluating various translations that had fallen in and out of style in Russia
over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. While Shakespeare’s popularity
71
Mark Sokolyansky, “Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare on Film. 2nd ed. Russell Jackson, ed. (London: Cambridge UP, 2007),
203-15, 203.
72
The book’s Russian title Nash Sovremennik Viliam Shekspir translates into English as Our
Contemporary: William Shakespeare, an obvious allusion to Jan Kott’s 1964 Shakespeare Our
Contemporary. Ostensibly Joyce Vining, the English translator, changed the title to avoid
confusion, and in doing so fell into the same formalist translating practices employed by Soviet
re-editors in the silent film era.
73
Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1966), 3-6.
48
in Russia is perhaps only exceeded by his appropriation by Germany, no one Russian
translation emerged as dominant and canonical as the Schlegel-Tieck translation was in
German.74 Though Kozintsev’s decision to employ a translation by then-recentlydeceased Nobel laureate Pasternak may appear traditionalist from an Anglocentric view,
this is perhaps more a conflation between English subtitle and Russian speech on the part
of the English-speaking viewer. In fact, Pasternak’s translations, though popular and
influential, are alternately praised and criticized in Russian literary circles for the poetic
liberties they take with Shakespeare’s texts.75
English-language critics familiar with Russian frequently describe Pasternak’s
translations as true to the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of Shakespeare’s words.
Mark Sokolyansky writes that Kozintsev’s choice to deploy the Pasternak translation
represents the filmmaker’s desire to “concentrate the audience’s attention on the main
elements—the contrasts in the represented reality, the evolution of the characters,
Shakespeare’s poetry,” and for this reason he chose a translation that is not “literal but is
in tune with Shakespeare’s poetry, dramatic spirit, and topicality.”76 However, even
though Pasternak’s translation may be playing in the same poetic key as Shakespeare’s
text, that does not mean that his translation is without revisions, omissions, and
alterations. Pasternak’s translations remake Elizabethan English into colloquial Russian,
and one of the common contemporary complaints of his work that Anna Kay France
74 Anna
Kay France, Boris Pasternak’s Translations of Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), 9.
75
Ibid., 11.
76
Sokolyansky, “Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear,” 205.
49
relates in her study of these translations’ divergences is that “the translations sound too
little like Shakespeare, and too much like Pasternak, and that certain stylistic
characteristics have carried over from his own work into his translations.”77 Pasternak’s
Hamlet, she observes, tends to assert the protagonist’s moral clarity and superiority in the
face of evil, and offers Ophelia as a critical lynchpin whose character becomes
representative of a pastoral innocence tarnished by unmitigated force.78 Moreover, while
Kozintsev excised more than half of Pasternak’s translation in his screenplay, the decision
to deploy the famed poet carries no small political weight. Pasternak butted heads with
the Communist establishment throughout the Stalinist era, and it was under pressure from
the Soviet regime that Pasternak declined his 1958 Nobel Prize. His translation work
operates within a broader context of blacklisted poets who turned to translation as a
means to continue working after the Party banned them.79 The subtitles in Kozintsev’s
Hamlet sidestep these critical, editorial, and political concerns completely by turning
instead to Shakespeare’s language. Much like the English-language intertitles in the
American export print of Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet, these English-language subtitles deny
the English-speaking audience the opportunity to engage with the changes the nonEnglish-speaking artists made to Shakespeare’s texts. However, unlike the intertitles,
which operate independently of the film’s soundtrack, these subtitles exist in
77
France, Boris Pasternak’s Translations of Shakespeare, 9.
78
Ibid., 27-9, 46.
79
Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore, Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in
Hamlet and King Lear (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2012), 10. Anna Akhmatova is another
prominent example of this trope.
50
juxtaposition with spoken dialogue in a way that brings more directly to bear issues of the
politics of Shakespearean translation.
Crowther’s and Crist’s argument that the Shakespearean subtitles only serve to
distract the viewer from the onscreen action finds its apex in scenes of monumental visual
and sonic splendor—as in, for example, the scene in which Hamlet meets the Ghost on
the outer walls of Elsinore. The scene opens on an tight establishing shot on Elsinore’s
high clock tower as the bells chime midnight, at which point Shostakovich’s dissonant
score picks up as the camera cuts first to a hooded Hamlet and Horatio (Innokentiy
Smoktunovsky and Vladimir Erenberg, respectively) headed off to the castle walls, and
then to Claudius (Mikhail Nazvanov) and Gertrude inside at a bacchanalia for their
wedding. There are no words spoken as the newly-minted King and Queen pass through
courtiers dressed as nymphs and satyrs and then into a small side room where Kozintsev
implies that the two have sex. Neither are there words spoken as the camera cuts back to
Hamlet and his men crossing the long way to the castle walls outside in the darkness, fog,
and wind. In fact, the camera spends the bulk of the sequence building tension with
accelerating shots of Elsinore’s increasingly-disturbed horses. Whereas earlier sequences
in private, domestic interiors allowed Pasternak’s language space, the first utterance in
this scene (the first line of Horatio’s “Look, my lord, it comes!” speech) gets quickly
subsumed by an enormous gust of wind buffeting Hamlet and company against the castle
walls, the roar of Shostakovich’s score, and a towering image of the iron-clad Ghost
standing on the parapet (Fig. 5). The courtiers deliver the dialogue that follows with
urgency and terror, shouting the words out over the roaring wind in a desperate attempt to
51
Figure 5. Words fail in the face of the Ghost’s looming spectacle in Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964).
dissuade Hamlet from following the Ghost. Paradoxically, even though the subtitles flash
on the scene for comparatively brief periods of time, they are still easier to discern than
the rushing dialogue drowned out underneath wind and orchestra. In this particular
moment, the inflexible subtitling conventions (always white, a certain font, a certain size,
located at the bottom of the screen, relating a line in full rather than in fragments)
override the text’s sonic nuance.80 These visual conventions make linear, explicable order
out of verbal language that, in this moment, attempts to become a kind of fruitful
80 Atom
Egoyan’s conversation with Claire Denis about a similar moment in her 2002 film
Friday Night (Vendredi soir) further reflects the inflexibility of contemporary subtitling
conventions. The subtitles in a particular scene rendered readable intentionally inaudible
dialogue, and Denis says that she “asked the guy who did the subtitles if [they] could perhaps
print them with one letter missing or one word missing….And he said that that doesn’t exist in
subtitles. Either we have subtitles or we don’t have subtitles.” See “Outside Myself,” in Subtitles:
On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2004), 75.
52
cacophony. Instead, the subtitles substitute a new kind of cacophony—the piling up of
visual, verbal, and sonic discourses into fragmentation.
To continue, the subtitle then attempts to function much like the silent film
intertitle as an orientation tool for those who do not speak the film’s original language,
rather than as object of critical inquiry itself. By employing key lines of Shakespeare
such as “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” and “Something is rotten in the state
of Denmark,” Kozintsev’s screenplay in this scene, in Russian as much as in its English
incarnation, orients the viewer in the film’s visual and sonic world rather than functioning
as the main carrier of encoded meaning. The work these subtitles do would appear to go
beyond traditional understandings of translation as a mode that attempts to reproduce the
art of one language in another. Rather, these Shakespearean subtitles operate as signposts
or pointers that position the English-speaking viewer within multiple channels of
information. It is useful to read the subtitle as an index, rather than simply as a text of its
own right, which is a view consummate with Nornes’ observation that “the unlucky
translator is an author but not The Author, that her translation is a work but not The
Work.”81 Moreover, the subtitle presents translation as simultaneous rather than, in the
case of the intertitle or literary translation, sequential. Provided the spotter does her work
well (and even in the case of Hamlet there are slips, lags, overlaps, and elisions), the
spoken Russian and textualized English occur on screen simultaneously, which only
serves to draw further attention to the inadequacies and gaps of this particular mode of
translation. Shakespeare’s iconicity and his language’s memetic quality further
81
Nornes, Cinema Babel, 159.
53
compounds this attention, and thus Hamlet’s Shakespearean subtitle, perhaps unique
among subtitles, indexes multiple referents simultaneously: the aural channels of
information in the film as well as the original Shakespearean text.
Michael Chion writes in Audio-Vision that “sound in the cinema is primarily
vococentric,” in that sound recording “almost always privileges the voice, highlighting it
and setting [it] off from other sounds.”82 He argues that “the historical development of
synch sound recording technology…has concentrated essentially on speech,” which then
collapses a vococentric cinema with verbocentricity, often to the detriment of sound
effects and film music.83 Crowther’s and Crist’s reviews play out a verbocentric view of
Shakespeare film, locating the site of the play’s power within the words themselves and
their poetic capabilities as mediated through an actor. Notably in both of their reviews,
Shostakovich’s deeply dramatic score warrants only a passing mention, and never in its
relationship to Shakespeare’s poetry. Rather Shakespeare’s language takes on a sacred
quality that can, so the argument goes, only exist in the poetics of the English language.
Nornes writes that the task of subtitling Shakespeare “naturally raise[s] the issue of the
authority of the original text,” and that for any translator, “Shakespeare’s words provide
[his or her] most daunting task, a test case for the most basic, pressing theoretical issues
in translation.”84 However, he relates the case of Toda Natsuko’s (“the most popular
subtitler in Japan” in the 1960s and 1970s) translation of Kozintsev’s Hamlet into
Japanese, in which she “uses the film only to suggest what a pity it would have been if
82
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, trans. Claudio Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 5.
83
Ibid., 6.
84
Nornes, Cinema Babel, 163-4.
54
dubbing had erased the main actor’s [Innokenti Smoktunoski] beautiful, velvety voice.”85
Hamlet’s subtitles, in their desire to avoid engaging with the weight not only of
Pasternak’s and Kozintsev’s interventions, but also solely with the verbal aspects of the
soundtrack betray the immense density of the work a Shakespearean subtitle must
perform. Naturally the subtitle, like any translation mode, will leave information and
content out. However, the example of Hamlet highlights the ways that Shakespearean
subtitles continue to operate within discourses that privilege the particular languages,
dialects, and modes of speaking over others, as Jacques Rancière notes of the “long and
contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the ‘good orator,’” whose “excellence
in speaking…established [itself] as the imaginary attribute of the supreme power.”86
SECTION TWO: Makibefo
In order to interrogate the relationship between modes of Shakespeare film
translation and those modes’ technological, mechanical, and formal articulations, I have
hitherto confined the bulk of my analysis to non-English Shakespeare films crossing
borders back into the English language. Films such as the Kozintsev or Nielsen Hamlets,
while undoubtedly made with an eye towards international distribution, concern
themselves first and foremost with a specific cultural or linguistic group. Their
subsequent translations come from beyond the films’ initial media instantiations to
assimilate their content into the language of another culture. Subtitles in particular reflect
85
86
Ibid., 163.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. (New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2005), 18.
55
this approach, as Sinha writes that they exist as a “phenomenon that is both internal and
external, on the borderline between image and voice—an addition, the third dimension, to
the film itself.”87 While this approach proves fruitful when considering larger formal and
technical issues directly related to Shakespeare’s text, it has the potential to define
“Shakespeare” exclusively in Anglocentric terms. Moreover, it produces an imagined
paradigm of filmmaking wherein a film is the province of one particular culture or
language at a time, and translation serves to move the film fully from one language to the
next in sequence. The formal conventions of subtitling help reinforce this imaginary
vision by superimposing one “complete” language system over the audiovisual image of
the original film, which in turn renders the original as an Other. Subtitles force
intercultural exchange into a binary of source and target languages that does not
necessarily reflect the nature of the film’s language or cultural providence. This issue gets
compounded with a non-English Shakespeare film, which is always necessarily the
product of at least two languages and cultures working with and through each other, even
if no English makes it on screen. Shakespeare on screen, as critics like Mark Thornton
Burnett note, has in the past two decades, “been confirmed as a cultural property of
global proportion,” and it would be remiss not to consider Shakespeare film that stages its
own translation and grapples with the difficulties of moving Shakespeare across
continents and cultures. 88 As such, I will now turn my attention to British oceanographerturned-filmmaker Alexander Abela’s 1999 film Makibefo, which transports Shakespeare’s
87
88
Sinha, “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles,” 173.
Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 47.
56
Macbeth to a remote village in Madagascar and stages the tensions between
globalization, ethnographic filmmaking, and the role of text in Shakespeare film.
The story surrounding Makibefo’s production threatens to overwhelm the film
itself. The DVD booklet that accompanies the film’s 2008 DVD release breathlessly
recounts (in English, French, and German) how “after months of trying in vain to
convince television editors to commission one of his projects, Alexander Abela together
with sound designer Jeppe Jungersen finally arrived in Madagascar in October 1998 to
shoot Abela’s first feature film, Makibefo.”89 The booklet continues to detail how Abela
traveled to the remote southern village of Faux-Cap and cooperated with a community of
Antandroy fishermen to “devise” a film based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Abela, the
booklet argues, used his “limited technical resources” as an opportunity to “break away
from the conventions contemporary filmmakers took for granted” and to “work under
similar conditions as those of the early silent film period and concentrate entirely on the
language of pictures.”90 While Makibefo deploys a spare, lyrical, and imagistic style with
striking black-and-white visual contrast, it does not dispense entirely with spoken
language to the extent that the booklet seems to suggest was Abela’s original plan. The
bulk of the film’s scenes feature silent, gestural movement, but there are infrequent
utterances in the Antandroy’s Malagasy dialect. The film juxtaposes these scenes with
English-language “commentary” in the form of fragments from Shakespeare’s Macbeth
delivered by a French-accented narrator, “who sits on a beach beside four thin totem
89
Booklet accompanying Makibefo (1999; Scoville Films 2008 DVD), n.p.
90
Ibid., n.p.
57
poles and also delivers an English-language Prologue summarising the story.”91 Finally,
the film features numerous songs and ceremonies that thematize and recount
Shakespeare’s story in traditional Antandroy modes. The film’s subtitles, then, must
navigate multiple registers of aural and linguistic information if they are to assist a nonMalagasy—or even non-English—speaker in following the film. While Abela’s
ostensible focus on “the language of pictures” indicates that the myth of film as a global
language has survived into the twenty-first century, Makibefo’s hybridized approach to
film translation suggests potential alternatives to the totalizing textuality of modern
subtitling conventions.
Alexander Abela by his own admission does not speak Malagasy, and neither did
the Antandroy people speak English. To speak of Makibefo’s language is then to speak of
the spaces in between English and Malagasy, which Abela attempts to mediate not only
through image, but through the translating figure of a narrator, played by Gilbert
Laumord.92 Laumord hails from Guadeloupe, not Madagascar, and his presence injects a
third linguistic and cultural force into the film in the accents of the French language and
French histories of colonial rule over Madagascar. Except for his prologue, Laumord
speaks exclusively in excerpts from Macbeth, each read in voiceover or from a large,
weather-beaten and leather-bound volume that the film clearly positions as the script of
Shakespeare’s play. Through Laumord’s “glosses” or commentaries, Shakespeare’s
91
92
Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Shakespeare Films (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 114.
Mark Thornton Burnett’s Shakespeare and World Cinema represents one of the only
sustained analyses of Abela’s film. In it, he notes that Abela relied on the image to mediate
between two mutually unfamiliar languages even in the production process, as he used “a comic
strip…and photographs” to initially “encourage local explanations of the Bardic narrative.” From:
Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (London: Cambridge UP, 2013), 26.
58
English constantly presses up against or over the Malagasy language. Moreover, these
utterances also help clarify—or complicate—non-verbal actions. These non-verbal
moments take two forms: first, stretches of silent, gestural action, such as the lengthy
sequence of Makibefo (Martin Zia) killing King Danikany (Jean-Félix), in which
Laumord’s speech operates much like a silent film intertitle by offering commentary on
an action or an overall discourse; and second, ceremonial action, such as the sacrifice of a
zebu ox that accompanies Makibefo’s coronation. The film enters ethnography when it
codes these second, ceremonial actions as explicitly Antandroy, as the particular province
of the film’s native culture. Laumord’s commentary thus operates not only as a loose
translation process from spoken Malagasy to spoken English (as the subtitles do
throughout), but also from Malagasy action into English speech. In this way, the film
offers a kind of live, internal translation from Malagasy into Jacobean English, although
unlike the DVD’s numerous subtitling options (available in English, English for the
hearing impaired, Deutsch, Français, Español, and Português—an uncommonly long list
of potential target languages), these diegetic “translations” occur sequential to, rather than
simultaneous with, speech and action. Viewing Makibefo with subtitles then offers a
bifurcated translation experience in which translation occurs from both within and
outside the audio-visual image.
One scene in particular stages the tensions between the textualizing translation
offered in the subtitles and Laumord’s aural and performance-driven commentary: when
Makibefo’s wife (Noeliny) and Makibefo decide to kill King Danikany. Much of the
scene consists of Makibefo’s wife anointing him with a white paste in an image of the
59
shell King Danikany wears as a symbol of his power. At first, Makibefo brushes her hand
away, but he soon relents and lets her draw the circle with a single dot inside on his
forehead. The camera draws closer and closer to both of them with each successive cut.
When the shell image is complete, Makibefo looks up at his wife and speaks to her. Two
successive subtitles translate his utterance as, “Know that if we commit this horrid
crime, / there will be no turning back.” The camera then cuts to a medium shot of
Laumord on the beach looking down at the book. After a moment, he looks up at the
camera and speaks. If the viewer selected the English for the hearing impaired (EHI)
subtitles from the DVD menu, the film presents the following text alongside his speech. It
is italicized in the original and dashes indicate separate subtitles:
If it were done when ‘tis done,
then ‘twere well /
It were done quickly. If the assassination /
Could trammel up
the consequence, and catch, /
With his surcease,
success: that but this blow /
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here, /
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, /
We’ld jump the life to come.
At first glance, it appears that this scene offers two mutually reciprocal moments and that
the translated Malagasy easily substitutes the Jacobean English. The Malagasy-in-English
subtitles function as a case study for what Zoé de Linde and Neil Kay describe as the
“necessary reduction in the amount of dialogue” in the movement from speech to
subtitle.93 Both the Malagasy and English texts seem to “contain roughly the same
93
Zoé de Linde and Neil Kay, The Semiotics of Subtitling (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing,
1999), 26.
60
information,” to use de Linde’s and Kay’s phrase, but upon closer examination there is
much in the Shakespeare that seems unnecessary, obscure, or willfully obtuse when
deployed in Makibefo. Indeed, Abela’s chosen Shakespeare text seems strangely jarring
against the carefully articulated minimalism not only of the Malagasy speech, but also the
film’s visual style. One could easily imagine a sequence in which Laumord’s monologue
ends as “then ‘twere well it were done quickly,” which adequately re-states Zia’s speech
and marks it with a well-known line from Macbeth. However, he continues on through a
far larger section that sits uneasily against the Malagasy line. The marked contrast
between Zia’s and Laumord’s acting styles reinforces this curious juxtaposition, as
Laumord’s performative style sonically demarcates his extradiegetic narration from Zia’s
and Noeliny’s diegetic action. The length of Laumord’s performance coupled with his
oratorical quality potentially overrides the Shakespearean text’s nuance, and presents the
viewer with a performance-of-text rather than text itself. This is why when the camera
first cuts to Laumord, the viewer sees him looking down at the book as if to find the story
and bodies of the “characters” in the previous shot within the physical text (Fig. 6). The
film’s interest shifts from Shakespeare to the people staging Shakespeare, from the words
to the performance of the words, from the original to its refraction. In this moment,
Makibefo positions Shakespeare as a text to be used, rather than slavishly followed, and
then stages this use.
In reality, the subtitles in this scene are in fact working through multiple
definitions and spaces of “translation.” For Zia’s line and other Malagasy utterances, the
subtitles operate interlingually, moving from one language to another, whereas for
61
Figure 6. Laumord’s narrator on the beach in Abela’s Makibefo (1999).
Laumord’s English utterances they operate intralingually, moving from speech in one
language to text in the same.94 Makibefo’s standard English subtitling options offer only
interlingual subtitling and translate only Malagasy utterances into English text. However,
the EHI subtitles collapse both inter- and intralingual titles into one DVD menu option.
The EHI subtitles with which I read the preceding scene challenge subtitles and film
translation as a purely linguistic affair. Crucially, the EHI option collapses the multiple
forms of understanding purportedly unavailable to various audiences (non-Malagasyspeaking viewers and hard-of-hearing viewers) into one running stream of subtitling.
Remember that the EHI subtitles render Laumord’s lines in italics. The audio-visual
image of Laumord looking down at the book and then performing, though one could
perhaps just as easily say “reading” or “quoting,” Shakespearean English contains a
94
de Linde and Kay, The Semiotics of Subtitling, 1.
62
number of visual and aural cues revealing to the viewer that Laumord consciously
gestures towards an external text. The film explicitly positions Laumord’s lines as
Shakespearean quotation, and the density of his oratorical inflection and the onscreen
presence of the book show the quoted lineage of the spoken text. The film’s intralingual
subtitles proceed from the assumption that, due to the viewer’s disability, a facet of the
audio-visual image is missing, and that there is just image and none of the signifiers of
speech besides a moving human mouth. The subtitles attempt to render textually an
acknowledgement that Makibefo’s dialogue exists not simply as signs transmitting
information, but rather within a matrix of sound, image, and text. Hence the attempt,
however crude, to mark the quotation in italics.95 In Laumord, Makibefo has deduced a
way to stage its own intertextuality, rather than to occlude it beneath the veneer of pure
Shakespeare—a Shakespeare already changed through the subtitles’ concomitant cuts and
altered punctuation for maximum speed reading.
Abela’s film repeatedly challenges the anonymity assumed and enforced by
subtitling conventions, not only by incorporating a culturally-mediating narrator within
the film’s diegesis, but also in the film’s production. While the technicians responsible for
mechanically burning in the subtitles (both in the film’s celluloid and digital
instantiations) remain unknown, the DVD booklet prominently credits the three
95
The intralingual subtitle’s drive to textualize can go far beyond speech, and can potentially
subsume any kind of aural phenomenon. Take, for example, the 2011 “silent film” The Artist
(directed by Michel Hazanavicius), which, despite having no spoken dialogue until the film’s end,
still has subtitling options in its DVD menu. The subtitles in Spanish appear reasonable and offer
translations of the English intertitles (although one must wonder why not simply replace the
intertitles as filmmakers would have in the silent era!). The EHI subtitles, however, attempt to
textualize the orchestral music that accompanies the film. Once the music strikes up and Jean
Dujardin’s name appears on the screen, subtitles appear that say “[orchestra playing lively
overture].”
63
individuals responsible for the film’s Spanish, German, and Portuguese titles. Abela
himself has taken responsibility for the English-language titles in interviews; however, he
admits that the English “subtitles are not the exact words they say in Malagasy….It’s
closer to what I was asking them to say. It’s in between.”96 Here Abela complicates the
indexicality of the subtitle, linking them not only to the utterances onscreen, but also to
the director’s desired outcome. The subtitle functions as a kind of corrective for the
meanings lost through translation, much as the subtitles in Hamlet ostensibly return
Shakespeare’s text to its original incarnation after Pasternak’s interventions. Furthermore,
Abela’s admission openly positions the subtitle as a culturally hybrid text, as one that
operates provisionally in the spaces between languages rather than firmly in one tongue
or another. As Burnett argues, the film “resist[s] the distancing effects of translation”
through moments in which Malagasy does not get translated, regardless of which
subtitling options the viewer selects. Neither the songs that open and close the film nor
the “chant at the meal to welcome Danikany/Duncan and the song that accompanies the
wrestling competition” receive subtitles.97 In fact, given that opening song follows
Laumord’s prologue and precedes the first piece of Malagasy dialogue, the nonMalagasy-speaking viewer (assuming she is not viewing the film with EHI subtitles)
encounters unsubtitled Malagasy well before subtitled language. In this way, Abela resists
the subtitle’s “totalizing” tendencies by limiting its scope, bringing it more in line with
the model of performative, oral (and aural) translation that Laumord’s narrator
96
Interviews between Alexander Abela and Mark Thornton Burnett, 15 August 2006 and 24
November 2007, cited in Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema, 42.
97
Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema, 42.
64
exemplifies. By developing a paradigm of the Shakespearean subtitle as a provisional,
hybridized text rather than as a space in which the subtitler can reiterate the cultural
cachet and authority of Shakespeare’s theoretical original, Abela opens up the necessary
space to stage and image intercultural exchange rather than erasing or ignoring it.
Makibefo thus represents a paradox of filmmaking, a film simultaneously invested
in perpetuating the idea of film as a self-contained language system that can speak across
borders as well as embracing the cacophony of interlingual exchange both within and
outside the audio-visual image. No small wonder then that Abela offers the first
translating subtitle in the title card itself, which reads Makibefo in large letters and
(Macbeth) underneath. He has chosen a bifurcated title for a film that seems to epitomize
Roland Barthes’ assertion that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centers of culture.”98 Abela’s self-conscious quasi-ethnography not only
marks Shakespearean quotation, but those cultural and linguistic quotations taken from
the Antandroy culture. The rituals, ceremonies, clothing, songs, icons, totem poles: these
are all, in Barthes’ formulation, quotable “texts” that a viewer can “read.” The subtitle
works to distribute (to borrow a verb from Rancière) legibility throughout the various
communicative channels that constitute a film. Generally the subtitle operates
vococentrically, which, as Chion argues, necessarily implies verbocentrically, and
translates spoken utterances into snatches of text that flash on the screen and then vanish
as quickly as they appeared. The only other “system” of meaning besides sound with
which a subtitle generally concerns itself is onscreen text in the form of signs, letters,
98
151.
Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977),
65
messages, or as in the case of Makibefo’s first subtitle, the title itself. Subtitles distribute
significant meaning, or meaning worthy or capable of translation, to purely verbal
phenomena, and as such leave out far more than they transmit. Makibefo emphasizes this
absence by leaving subtitles out and by openly positioning some utterances as
untranslatable. It is telling, then, that these utterances are always subsumed in larger
systems of cultural signification, whether the text be a part of song or chanted ceremony.
Furthermore, by deploying Shakespearean text as a performed commentary, rather than
suggesting simply one-to-one correspondence between the imagined “source” and its
filmic adaptation, Makibefo stages as its primary subject the cultural exchange
surrounding a non-English Shakespeare film rather than Shakespeare himself (Fig. 7).
The film’s interest lies in the ways Abela and the Antandroy people use Shakespeare
Figure 7. The Shakespearean subtitle as “commentary on discourse” in Abela’s Makibefo (1999).
66
rather than (to state it provocatively) the other way around. Perhaps if one were to
translate Pasternak’s translation back to English without relying on Shakespeare’s text
and then use those words as the subtitles for Kozintsev’s Hamlet, one would begin to see
this same operation. Unfortunately, Kozintsev’s subtitlers remain anonymous, and the
roots of the decision to subtitle his film with Shakespeare’s words remains a mystery. I
offer Makibefo not to call for the subtitle’s erasure, for, as B. Ruby Rich observes, the
subtitle provides the vital service of “acknowledg[ing] that our language, the language of
this place in which we are watching this film, is only one of many languages in the
world.”99 Makibefo invigorates Rich’s observation and proposes an alternate subtitling
discourse that stages the liminal spaces between cultures and languages instead of relying
on Shakespeare to occlude them.
99
B. Ruby Rich, “To Read or Not to Read: Subtitles, Trailers, and Monolingualism,” in
Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2004), 168.
67
POSTSCRIPT
“THE WORLD’S PLAYWRIGHT”
B. Ruby Rich reads the subtitle as “a token of peace” that can potentially
counteract what she identifies as a decades-long shift toward American monolingualism
and cultural isolationism.100 She argues that by pluralizing a film’s language with text
rather than sound, the subtitle permits a viewer to hear a foreign language not as foreign,
but as a language. Rather than overriding the original speech, the subtitle allows aspects
of the voice to survive, and in doing so encourages the viewer to come to a better
empathetic understanding of cultures and languages beyond her own. As the previous two
chapters have argued, intertitles and subtitles offer a space in which to stage the cultural,
linguistic, and material exchange present in a film in translation. These side texts operate
as indices that point towards vast, matrixed arrays of prior written, sonic, and visual
channels of information distributed through multiple cultures and languages, which are in
turn necessarily pluralized, polysemous, and transnational. In the previous pages I have
taken a historical and medium-specific approach to the Shakespearean intertitle and
subtitle in order to examine the relationships textual media of translation encourage
within global and multilingual Shakespeare film. Rather than decry the intertitle or
subtitle as inelegant, unnecessary, or destructive, I side with Rich’s position that the
filmic side text opens the doors towards transnational mobility. However, as I have
argued, film translation since the silent era has always involved transforming the film
100
B. Ruby Rich, “To Read or Not to Read: Subtitles, Trailers, and Monolingualism,” in
Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2004), 168.
68
object’s materiality in ways that not only can alter style, as with silent film, but also by
demarcating particular distributions of speech and language systems, as in sound film
subtitles. These material poetics of cinematic translation grow even more complex when
one considers the pluralized ways that viewers engage with intertitles and subtitles since
the industrial rise of digital video and new media technologies such as the DVD and the
Internet. While the subtitle, as Rich traces, may have gained traction in cinemas over the
past few decades,101 it has definitively gained a new lease on life in viewers’ homes in the
form of subtitling options on DVDs, as well as new forms of user engagement with
digital video through computers. I have confined my analysis to side texts on celluloid in
order to trace specific claims about the relationship between image, sound, and text
within key moments in the history of film translation. While many of these relationships
get transferred fluidly to digital video and new media, the shift to digital cinema over the
past two decades has introduced new, divergent, and dispersed methods of engagement
with the film translation. In these last few pages, I will gesture towards larger work of
projecting these issues of media and accessibility into digital spheres, and in turn raise
questions for how global Shakespeare film responds to these new side texts.
Throughout my work researching and writing this essay I have relied on DVD and
digital video copies of the various films I discuss. Often, as is the case for less-wellknown films such as the Nielsen Hamlet and Makibefo, DVDs were the most accessible
way to view these films for this kind of analysis. It follows then that the specific
properties of digital media have subtly influenced my own engagement with the films.
101
Ibid., 162-6.
69
Each of the films I have discussed was originally shot on celluloid and then only later
converted to digital video for DVD distribution, and in that transfer process certain
stylistic and material aspects of the intertitles and subtitles were preserved and certain
ones were transformed. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify this movement
between media as “remediation,” which they define as “the formal logic by which new
media refashion prior media forms.”102 While Bolter and Grusin trace remediation as a
practice throughout much of the history of Western art, they ascribe it principally as a
characteristic of new media technologies and link it up to a larger rhetoric of absorption
and sublation that runs throughout critical rhetoric surrounding digital and new media in
the 1980s and 1990s.103 Shakespeare in particular is no stranger to remediation, for every
single film adaptation (or, arguably, every theatrical staging) refashions the Bard’s words
into image, sound, and performance. The overall stylistic conventions of subtitles have
remained the same in the remediation from celluloid to new media, as subtitles still take
the form of white or yellow text superimposed over the lower part of the image.
However, the now-common DVD subtitling menu allows the viewer unprecedented
control over the film’s side texts. Menus permits the viewer to turn the subtitles on or off
as she pleases, switch between multiple different language tracks with the push of a
button, and even mix subtitles with dubbing audio tracks in various languages. W. B.
Worthen makes the provocative claim that while DVD Shakespeare attempts to position
itself as “text” by remediating theatrical and novelistic characteristics such as “chapter”
102
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 273.
103
Ibid., 44-50.
70
menus and iterative “special edition” versions, the act of inserting a DVD into a
specialized player or computer and running the programs that transform data inscriptions
into image in fact has more to do with performing than reading or writing.104 Indeed, the
ease with which a DVD allows the viewer to switch between subtitling options raises
radical questions of the ways that digital media of translation can further fragment a film,
creating multiplex channels of information, language, and textuality.
However, even though some DVD editions like Makibefo offer a wide array of
potential target languages, many DVDs often lack a variety of subtitling options. The
Nielsen Hamlet offers only English subtitles for the German intertitles, while the
Kozintsev Hamlet offers English, Russian, French, and Spanish dubs and subtitles but
nothing more. While these languages are arguably lingua franca across the globe, the
condensed array of target languages also bespeaks a particularly Eurocentric view of
these films’ intended audiences: it is a potentially revealing omission that Malagasy does
not number among Makibefo’s subtitles. The DVD is an essentially un-editable document
that, as a commercial object, is subject to the same kinds of market forces that Nornes
notes influence the neglected place of translation in the broader film industry.105
However, just as the Internet has proved a fruitful space for the development of wider
104
W. B. Worthen, “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (London: Cambridge
UP, 2007), 231-44.
105
Nornes, Cinema Babel, 229-30.
71
conceptions of Shakespearean performance, archival work, and mediations, 106 it has also
opened the doors for numerous communities devoted to the production and exchange of
digital subtitles. A cursory search reveals numerous websites such as opensubtitles.org or
subscene.com that provide download links for subtitling files that users can easily append
to digital video. While one cannot graft these files to a pre-existing DVD, one can, with a
few freely-available programs, produce a compressed, manipulable (though of course
questionably legal) video copy of the DVD file to which one can add subtitles (Fig. 8).
Examining these sites reveals that the most popular downloads are precisely the
Figure 8. Adding Italian subtitles to Kozintsev’s Hamlet by manipulating video and text with
computer programs. Screenshot taken from the author’s computer.
106 Anston
Bosman, “Shakespeare and Globalization,” in The New Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (London: Cambridge UP, 2010), 288-9.
For a broader picture of Shakespearean performance and further remediation on the Internet, see
Katherine Rowe, “Shakespeare and Media History,” in The New Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (London: Cambridge UP, 2010), 303-25.
72
languages unseen in most DVD menus: Arabic, Hindi, and Farsi subtitles all regularly top
the charts. These websites and the digital practices of ripping, encoding, and layering
video and subtitle files point towards new, unstudied spaces of subtitle authorship and
filmic translation. The little existing critical attention paid to these community-driven,
anonymous translation practices comes from legal studies, such as Jordan Hatcher’s
analysis of the copyright tensions between Japanese anime companies and the devoted
fans who craft subtitles and dubbing tracks at home and then distribute them across the
Internet.107 Now that crafting and appending a subtitle is as simple as writing a text file,
the decentralized practice of translation can reach larger numbers of languages, even as
the viewing audience shrinks down to one user alone at her computer. However, these
enormous, anonymous subtitling databases potentially reinforce discourses of translation
as a mechanical, industrialized act rather than a valid art practice. Emerging digital
subtitling practices may then end up holding up many of the precepts they appear to
challenge.
The decentralized, non-hierarchical, and globally-oriented practices of these
digitally subtitling communities potentially throw into relief how inflexible, inadequate,
and poorly-managed current film translation conventions often are. In the realm of
Shakespeare film alone, scholars such as Burnett and Buchanan have catalogued dozens
of non-English films that have appeared in the predominately English-language
Shakespeare scholarship only as footnotes or tables in appendices. Indeed, the bulk of
this essay would have been more difficult to write a mere five years ago, before which
107
Jordan Hatcher, “Of Otakus and Fansubs: A Critical Look at Anime Online in Light of
Current Issues in Copyright Law,” SCRIPTed 2.5 (2005). http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/
vol2-4/hatcher.asp#sdendnote175anc.
73
neither the Nielsen Hamlet nor Makibefo were available on DVD, but were limited only
to archival prints or the rare film festival screening. While digital subtitling communities
may appear at first glance potential translation utopias, they are in fact subject to many of
the same formal, stylistic, and material conventions that have simultaneously plagued and
invigorated filmic side texts over the past hundred years. Even as films such as Makibefo
exhibit an increased awareness of the ways that media of translation circumscribe
particular political distributions of speech, language, and power, the bulk of films in
translation and the scholarship surrounding them continue to uphold potentially damaging
dialectics of original and copy, pure and derivative, valid and imitation. I have argued
throughout this essay for a broader view on film translation that invigorates
understandings of translation as a creative act, and that searches for ways to translate film
that can challenge these rigid notions. Shakespeare studies, as Burnett argues, requires
more thorough and sustained attention to the vast numbers of global film adaptations of
Shakespeare’s work, for these films invite viewers to consider the new and radical ways
that Shakespeare—the “world’s playwright,” after all—can speak to ever-widening
international audiences. A more nuanced understanding of intertitles and subtitles allows
viewers to traverse the gaps between languages with an awareness of not only that which
is lost, but that which is gained, as well as to grapple productively with the particular
methods cinema has developed to translate itself.
74
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asta Nielsen: Hamlet & Die Filmprimadonna, DVD. Dir. Sven Gade. Munich: Edition
Filmmuseum, 2009.
Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1986.
Barry, Iris. “The Film in Germany and the Film in France.” Museum of Modern Art Film
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Barthes, Roland. Image - Music - Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana
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Bassnett, “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and
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on Literary Translation, 90-108. London: Routledge, 1998.
———. Translation Studies, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Brewster, Ben and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early
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Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
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Bosman, Anston. “Shakespeare and Globalization.” In The New Cambridge Companion
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Buchanan, Judith. Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse. London:
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Burnett, Mark Thornton. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. London:
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———. Shakespeare and World Cinema. London: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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