Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film

The Humble Words at the Bottom of Your Screen.

Not unlike the lack of translated works in our bookstores, the dearth of foreign films in our theatres speaks volumes about our cultural isolationism. 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 Italian designer Gilberto 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.

Contributions include a collaborative poem by Anne Carson, an interview with French director Claire Denis, and even a trio of unearthed movie reviews by Jorge Luis Borges – the Argentinean master reveals himself to be an instinctive film critic, lambasting the practice of dubbing and offering mixed praise to Orson Welles' bloated chef d'oeuvre, Citizen Kane. Among theoretical contributions, from such usual suspects as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, are tucked several terrific essays on the history of subtitling and dubbing. One helpfully explains why you hardly ever see a subtitles in a preview: back in the '70s, marketers decided American moviegoers were afraid of them and embarked on a bait-and-switch strategy.

A standout among the visual pieces is Stefana McClure's time-lapsed prints of an entire movie's projection -- the photographic remains of a film turn out to be monolithic (and nearly monochrome) abstract-expressionist blocks, while its subtitles appear as a smear of white at the bottom of the image. Another highlight is a series of publicity stills from Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, on which are printed sentences (from the original novel) describing the person pictured. They offer an eerie lesson in casting and a reminder of the deep bond between books and cinema.

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