"Every film is a foreign film," Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour tell us in their introduction to Subtitles. How, then, to translate the experience of film — which, as Egoyan says, makes us "feel outside and inside at the same time"? Taking subtitles as their point of departure, the thirty-two contributors to this unique collection consider translation, foreignness, and otherness in film culture. Their discussions range from the mechanics and aesthetics of subtitles themselves to the xenophobic reaction to translation to subtitles as a metaphor for the distance and intimacy of film.

The essays, interviews, and visuals include a collaboration by Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan, which uses quotations from Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter as subtitles for publicity stills from Egoyan's film of the book; three early film reviews by Jorge Luis Borges; an interview with filmmaker Claire Denis about a scene in her film Friday Night that should not have been subtitled; and Eric Cazdyn's reading of the running subtitles on CNN's post-9/11 newscasts as a representation of new global realities. Several writers deal with translating cultural experience for an international audience, including Frederic Jameson on Balkan cinema, John Mowitt on the history of the "foreign film" category in the Academy Awards, and Ruby Rich on the marketing of foreign films and their foreign languages — "Somehow, I'd like to think it's harder to kill people when you hear their voices," she writes. And Slavoj Zizek considers the "foreign gaze" (seen in films by Hitchcock, Lynch, and others), the misperception that sees too much.

Designed by Egoyan and award-winning graphic designer Gilbert Li, the book includes many color images and ten visual projects by artists and filmmakers. The pages are horizontal, suggesting a movie screen; they use the cinematic horizontal aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Subtitles gives us not only a new way to think about film but also a singular design object.

Subtitles is being copublished by The MIT Press and Alphabet City Media (John Knechtel, Director). Subtitles has been funded in part by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Henry N. R. Jackman Foundation, and the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council.

andquot;With this lovingly edited and designed collection, filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat) and literature professor Ian Balfour celebrate the much-maligned middlemen of world cinema: subtitles. While definitely a high-brow gift-tome, it's an approachable one, thanks in large part to its exceptional attention to design. The book's gorgeous layout was created by Egoyan with designer Gilbert Li, and they've simply outdone themselves. It's the little things that matter: the book's wide-format layout mimics a silver screen, right down to an insanely anal use of the cinematic 1.66:1 ratio.andquot;
andmdash; Boldtype

"A big treat of Subtitles is the 'art object' graphic design...and the book's unusual Cinemascope shape." Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix

Translating the experience of film: filmmakers, writers, and artists explore the elements of film that make us feel andquot;outside and inside at the same time.andquot;

Atom Egoyan is an internationally acclaimed film director whose works include The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat, Exotica, and Calendar.

Ian Balfour is Associate Professor of English and Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto and the author of The Rhetoric of English Poetry.

Introduction
Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour 21
The Sweet Hereafter
Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan 33
Little Life Lines in Desperanto
Patricia Rozema 65
Outside Myself
Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan 69
Cultural Ventriloquism
Henri Béhar 79
The Birth of Cinema
Kent U. Enns 89
Soundtrack
Stephen Andrews and Anne Carson 93
Borges Night at the Movies
Jorge Luis Borges 111
Word Images
Raymond Bellour 123
Epistolarity and Textuality in Accented Films
Hamid Naficy 131
To Read or Not to Read: Subtitles, Trailers, and Monolingualism
B. Ruby Rich 153
The Use and Abuse of Subtitles
Amresh Sinha 171
Altérité: The D-Image Effect
Trinh T. Minh-Ha 193
Filmic Foreigness, Filmic Homecoming: On Gariné Torossian's Girl from Moush
Marie-Aude Baronian 211
Thoughts on Balkan Cinema
Fredric Jameson 231
(De)realizing Cinematic Time
Mary Ann Doane 259
The Foreign Gaze Which Sees Too Much
Slavoj Zizek 285
Where Are Kiarostami's Women?
Negar Mottahedeh 309
The Great Dance: Translating the Foreign in Ethnographic Film
Brenda Longfellow 335
In Limbo: Creolisation and Untranslatability
Isaac Julien and Kass Banning 355
The Hollywood Sound Tract
John Mowitt 381
A New Line in the Geometry
Eric Cazdyn 403
My Last Interview with Ulrike Ottinger: On Southeast Passage and Beyond
Laurence A. Rickels 421
The Foreignness of the Intimate, or the Violence and Charity of Perception
R. Bruce Elder 439
A Name on a Page
Jack Lewis and John Greyson 489
Blue: Archive of Devastation
Deborah Esch 507
Afterword
Ian Balfour 531