The uncertain nationality of The Artist
On 26th February, The Artist swept the board at the Academy Awards, winning five of the twelve categories it was nominated for. This included Best Picture, Director (Michel Havanavicius) and Actor (Jean Dujardin).
However, something has bothered me since the release of this picture.
It is a film with French actors in the two leading roles, made by a French director and with the support of several French film studios. Yet it is a ‘silent’ film and any dialogue from the characters – audible or otherwise – is in English. So with this in mind, can The Artist count as a foreign language film?
At first glance, it is easy to assume it cannot. The film features English as the ‘main’ language and the characters appear to speak, albeit muted, English dialogue.
But that’s only to the perspective of English-speaking audiences.
News reports on The Artist’s success at award ceremonies describe it as the most awarded French film in history and, at the 2012 César Awards (their equivalent of the Academy Awards), it won the award for Best Film, yet English-speaking films such as Black Swan and The King’s Speech were seen as foreign language films.
To me, it seems confusing that it can be seen as both an American and French film, but how can you define a film, which can only be surely described as ‘silent’ – a genre that hasn’t been on our screens in over 70 years?
The Artist has been seen as Havanavicius’s homage to silent cinema and as a result, it has revitalised the genre for a new generation. Can silent films make their way in the world, or will language be the key player in a film?
Katie
To dub or not to dub?
As a British-born Chinese citizen, I adore old Hong-Kong martial arts films. By the time Jackie Chan had made his Hollywood debut, I had seen a number of his critically acclaimed films such as Project A, Wheels on Meals (set and filmed in Barcelona) and Armour of God (where he almost died after a stunt went wrong).
One particular film that stood out was City Hunter, where Jackie Chan plays a bumbling detective caught in the middle of a raid on a cruise ship. The film was quite special as it featured Eastern and Western martial artists with speaking parts – something that I had rarely seen at the time.
I first watched it with all the dialogue in English (even that of the Asian actors) when I was around 10 years old and found it hilarious, but I watched it again several years later only to find all the dialogue was in Chinese, and I didn’t find it so funny. There was a time in the 1980s when martial art films became almost ‘cultish’ with TV audiences, particularly in America. The reason? Whenever they were shown on TV – usually on a weekend when kids were home and could mimic the moves – you had a really bad dialogue (loosely translated from the original script) and terrible lip sync.
Animated films are fortunate enough to not be so heavily affected by dubbing, but when you compare a dubbed live-action with one in its original language, you have to wonder if dubbing is really necessary. Sure, the inclusion of English in any media will make it more accessible than leaving it in languages such as Arabic, Chinese or Spanish, but I would like the idea of all the characters speaking in their own language and providing subtitles where necessary. A colleague pointed out that Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino is an example of this and it is this feature that explains why it is one of my current-favourite films. All the characters speak their native language or speak the language relevant to the scene with subtitles appearing only when they’re needed.
Dubbing allows the audience to hear a piece of dialogue in a way that is culturally relevant to them and it’s often seen as an alternative to subtitling because the idea of reading during a film can put people off. But this also robs the film of something that’s significant to the nationality of the speaker, lessening the impact of any colloquial phrase.
Are you pro-dubbing or against it? Do you see the need to read subtitling?
Katie
