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Subtitles

MFS62 Aug 22 2006 08:51 AM

No, its not the name of a movie. But JD's thread about L'Enfant reminded me. Why are the subtitles at the bottom of the screen and not at the top (other than you'd have to call them something like supratitles)? If you're sitting in one of the pre-stadium seating movie houses, they can be obscured by the head of the person sitting in front of you. Why not put them at the top of the screen and make them more visible? Can any of the film mavens here shed some light on this? Thanks in advance. Later

Willets Point Aug 22 2006 09:43 AM

I would think they'd be more likely to end up superimposed over someone's head, unless they leave a black strip at the top of the screen for the subtitles. May just be more natural to read below the picture too, I guess, kind of like captions on a photograph.

RealityChuck Aug 22 2006 10:48 AM

Because They've Always Done It That Way. However, I suspect the reason was that, when subtitles started in B&W, that would put the white titles atop the bright sky in any outdoor scene, making them unreadable. And they wouldn't be subtitles then; they'd be supertitles. If you want them that way, you can always go to the opera.

TheOldMole Sep 05 2006 07:59 AM

Chuck has the right answer. I used to be in this business. When we subtitled "Z," there was a long sequence where Yves Montand is in the hospital, dying, and everything is white -- the walls, the cabinets, the doctor's smocks. The subtitles were white on white, and unreadable. I asked if they couldn't make the titles black, just for those scenes, and was told it would have been expensive, and there was no budget for it. These days, they make a lot of subtitles yellow. The best subtitling job I ever saw was done by my brother Jon, for a film called "The Mother and the Whore" -- a terrific movie, mostly forgotten today, because its director, Jean Eustache, committed suicide at a young age, and didn't build up a body of work. "The Mother and the Whore" was a subtitlists nightmare, because it was immensely long, and all talk, talk, talk. There's one scene in which Jean-Pierre Leaud is sitting in a cafe, talking nonstop, and suddenly he launches a fusillade of untranslatable French puns. Jon agonized over this for a while, and eventually realized that the point of the scene wasn't so much what he was saying, but that he couldn't shut up. So his subtitle read: Here follow a series of untranslatable French puns.