Indexing The Past

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INDEXING THE PAST: VISUAL LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATABILITY IN KON SATOSHI'S MILLENNIUM ACTRESS Melek Ortabasi a a Hamilton College, USA Online Publication Date: 24 July 2007

To cite this Article Ortabasi, Melek(2007)'INDEXING THE PAST: VISUAL LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATABILITY IN KON SATOSHI'S

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS',Perspectives,14:4,278 — 291 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09076760708669044 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09076760708669044

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Indexing the past: visual language and translatability in Kon Satoshi’s Millennium Actress Melek Ortabasi, Hamilton College, USA [email protected]

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Abstract

This paper will re-examine current AV translation practices from a film studies perspective through director Kon Satoshi’s full-length animated feature Sennen joyû (Millennium Actress, 2001), a film that employs, and expects, a fairly deep and broad knowledge of Japanese history and culture. In this film, where the protagonist recounts her life in movies in a realistic historical setting, cinematic imagery becomes the primary medium of communication. Narrative action and dialogue, considered the main components of cinema by many viewers, take a back seat. The real “story” is the history of one of Japan’s proudest cultural products: live action cinema, particularly that of the “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s. The aim of this paper is not simply to “translate” for the uninitiated viewer the many components of Millennium Actress that cannot be efficiently communicated through standard subtitles. Instead, this film is an ideal vehicle for demonstrating the shortcomings of current AV translation, which is primarily text-based. As recent studies show, technology-savvy “fansubbers” are using methods that challenge not only how we think about subtitling, but the process of AV translation itself, a practice usually defined by its tendency to truncate and delete. By examining the English subtitled version of Millennium Actress in the context of emerging translation strategies and technologies, this paper will propose a concept of AV translation that rejects this discourse, and more fully incorporates non-verbal methods of exchange and communication. Key words: AV translation; subtitling; fansubbing; anime; intertextuality; visual language; Kon Satoshi; Millennium Actress.

“Every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere.”1 The cultural significance of image in Millennium Actress Sennen joyû (Millennium Actress, dir. Kon Satoshi, 2001) is one of those Japanese anime features that did not export well, at least economically speaking. Despite having garnered its share of awards from the film critics, both at home and abroad,2 foreign anime fans remain respectfully polite. One reason for the puzzling lack of popularity could be the lack of English-language dubbing,3 a death knell for any foreign release in US movie theaters — but this rule does not necessarily hold true for fans of anime, who are more tolerant (and even desirous) of linguistic and cultural unfamiliarity.4 A more likely explanation is the fact that the film does not really fit into either the science fiction or fantasy genres most popular with young foreign fans.5 Yet there is an equally compelling reason the film has not been widely screened, at least in Europe and North America. Though Millennium Actress is an anime feature, it seems to demand more of its viewers than do most other examples of the medium. The following comment from one French anime aficionado, which reflects the generally lukewarm reception of the film by the non-Japanese fan community,6 perhaps best explains the difficulty of the film for many viewers. Perhaps unconsciously, it divides its critique into two categories. 0907-676X/06/04/278-14 $20.00 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

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Here is the gist of it: Chiyoko is a 70-year-old actress who relates her personal and professional life story to two journalists. It so happens that she spends her whole life pursuing a man she ran into during her youth; oddly enough even her movie roles tell the same story. As a consequence, we spend 1 hour and 20 minutes watching a weepy Chiyoko pursuing a man. Certainly, the film allows us to relive some of Japanese history, as well as the history of Japanese film. Certainly, the last few minutes are quite beautiful. But one would expect a more consistent story from the director of Perfect Blue.7

The more important category, at least to this viewer, is the quality of the film’s story. “Ouhman’s” judgment is based on an assumption shared by many film audiences, particularly those raised on the continuity editing favored by Hollywood. That is: narrative films must above all have some sense of development as well as unity. Apparently, Millennium Actress does not satisfy these requirements, probably due to its repetitive plot, which never comes to a denouement: Chiyoko never finds her man, but never stops chasing (which this fan also regards as politically incorrect). Ouhman focuses on Chiyoko’s biography, apparently the main narrative thread, which is driven by the interview process established between Chiyoko and the two men making a “documentary” about her life. As a second, more minor consideration, “Ouhman” concedes there may be some slight value to the film due to the culturally specific information that it communicates (“Japanese history”). He/she clearly considers this other category as being less important than the plot, a fairly typical viewer response.8 To be fair, it is true that “Japanese history,” in this case both history in general and the history of the Japanese film industry, is linked only loosely to the biographical plot. But if one considers Chiyoko’s love story the main plot, then its conclusion is postponed indefinitely through Kon’s fluid editing techniques. As Chiyoko relates her story, it becomes increasingly unclear as to whether she is relating the truth or is simply lost in her memories of the many movie roles she has played. However, it is precisely because Chiyoko’s biography lacks consistency (narratively and structurally speaking) that the non-narrative historical elements of the film come to the fore. Through rapid-fire cutting and montage, the periods of Chiyoko’s long life (from 1923 to somewhere in the late 1990s)9 are represented, as are several periods of Japanese history before and after her birth (through her roles in films). This chronological leap-frogging is not indicated in the dialogue except by very occasional statements by various characters that roughly indicate the period in question. In fact, it sometimes seems that the characters’ statements are purposefully vague, allowing the “story” (i.e., Chiyoko’s never-ending pursuit) to move around in time without constraint. History unfolds as the visual and literal background as Chiyoko and her interviewers don and doff medieval and early modern period costume with lightning speed, watch young Japanese soldiers march off to WWII, star in Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujirô films, and index “real” history in numerous other ways that are all visually described. A certain knowledge of local history and culture is of course helpful when watching any (foreign) film. What is significant about Millennium Actress, and why it makes a good case study for reexamining the practice of audiovisual translation (hereafter AV translation) is how prominently it features this cultural

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information in the visual channel. It is not an overstatement to say that in Millennium Actress, “the image resists being subordinated to the text’s meaning, having instead a logic separate from that of the text” (Hocks and Kendrick 2003: 10). Of course cinema is regarded as a primarily visual medium, but Millennium Actress goes against the trend of most narrative film, where formal techniques (like the establishing shot with voiceover) use the image to reinforce the textual message. Like “Ouhman,” who focuses on the narrative qualities of the film at the expense of its visual richness, audiences of narrative film often perceive images as working “via parataxis as a coordinate, supportive structure to textual information” (Hocks and Kendrick 2003: 7).10 While they constantly deal with the complex relationship between the verbal and visual channels of film, AV translators have generally shared this prejudice by focusing almost exclusively on translating this “textual information.” It is then no wonder that Millennium Actress, which privileges image over narrative, remains mostly “untranslated” and therefore misunderstood. The invisibility of the visual channel in AV translation For this reason, I am fully agreed with Markus Nornes’ assertion that “now is the time to reconsider the mode of translation through which our cinematic experiences of the foreign are mediated” (Nornes 1999: 17). However, while Nornes focuses on overturning the notion of “invisibility” that dominates AV translation, I point instead to a related ideology that is specific to subtitling practice and theory. This is the fact that the literature on AV translation, of which there is quite an amount, automatically assumes that the target of translation is the verbal soundtrack and, possibly, any text that appears onscreen (e.g. a newspaper headline being read by a character). While the complex relationship between the verbal and the visual channels of film has undoubtedly bedeviled many a subtitler, it seems that actually addressing the non-linguistic realm is something of a taboo. Like the general discourse on translation, writings on AV translation are fraught with the language of loss, whether they are prescriptive (“how to subtitle correctly”) or descriptive (e.g. how movie X has been translated into language Y). In one of the few theoretical pieces on the subject, Henrik Gottlieb points out that, unlike the literary translator, the subtitler must reckon with the “non-verbal channels” of the “polysemiotic” cinematic text (Gottlieb 2001: 87). Yet he too focuses on the impossibility of compressing all four channels of film (“music & effects, picture and … writing”) into a new, “additive” channel, the subtitles themselves. Ultimately, he writes, the “semantic load” of what does not make it into the subtitles is left to “the non-verbal semiotic channels – or to deletion” (Gottlieb 2001: 87, 88). From another perspective, however, Gottlieb’s comments also reveal that, despite the limits of linguistic expression, one can rely upon the images in film to transmit semantic meaning. However, he does not elaborate on how much images can “say,” nor how or to what extent the translator should address this aspect of film. To begin examining the current role of subtitles in the basic interplay between the verbal and visual channels, I will discuss a purely narrative segment of Millennium Actress where Genya, the documentarian, and his assistant Ida first arrive at Chiyoko’s house. The subtitling on the US DVD release of Millennium

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Actress does not stray from the common tendency to focus on the linguistic,11 although it must already contend with considerable difficulty. In this scene, there is a play on words, one of the most challenging problems for translators.12 By creating a pun that compensates for the lack of homonyms in English (a dominant feature of Japanese), the translator has tried to preserve the flavor of the nosey banter of Chiyoko’s middle-aged housekeeper. The housekeeper, Ms. Mino, is talking with Genya, the documentarian, just before Chiyoko enters the room for the first time. When Chiyoko overhears part of her remark to Genya, which reveals perhaps a bit too much about her mistress’ reclusivity, Ms. Mino quickly backtracks, claiming to have been saying something else. Japanese:

English translation:

Subtitles:

Ms. Mino: Okusama ga yorokonde hito ni au nante dai ihen dakara…

Ms. Mino: It’s quite a change for Madam to agree to meet someone…

Ms. Mino: Usually before she’ll meet anyone new, the earth has to move.

Chiyoko (entering): Nani ga taihen na no, Mino-san?

Chiyoko: What’s troublesome, Ms. Mino?

Chiyoko: What has to move, Mino?

Ms. Mino: Iie, Okusama. Ihen desu yo. I-he-n! Kesa no jishin.

Ms. Mino: Nothing, Madam. Quite a change, I was saying. This morning’s earthquake.

Ms. Mino: “The earth moves,” Missus. The earthquake... that one this morning.

The similarity in sound of dai ihen (“quite a change”) and taihen (“troublesome”), does not come through in either my translation or in the subtitles, though the subtitler has made an attempt at equivalence by changing Ms. Mino’s first statement to incorporate the image of an earthquake, as well as using an English idiom that Chiyoko can repeat almost verbatim, as she does in the Japanese. Obviously, even a small interchange such as this can raise a number of problems. The reason I cite this example here is not to comment on the quality or type of technique used by the translator, but to point out that this dialogue, difficult as it is to translate, actually has very little to do with what we see onscreen, except for the fact that Chiyoko is offscreen but within earshot as Mrs. Mino makes her first pronouncement. While Ms. Mino and her housekeeper have this conversation, we are actually watching Genya’s nervous reaction as he hears his idol approaching the room. This short sequence, near the beginning of the movie, contributes primarily to plot development: Chiyoko agrees to meet Genya because he claims he has a very important gift for her. It turns out he has the mysterious key that Chiyoko always wore on a ribbon around her neck until she lost it one day on the set. The key is, of course, from the young man she met so many years ago. As we hear the women’s trivial exchange, we see Genya blushing bright red, “visual esperanto” for embarrassment or anxiety (Fig. 1).13 Because the women are not featured, the verbal track becomes the background. We already know that Genya has admired Chiyoko for a long time because we have seen him watching her movies over and over; we also know how personally he takes this documentary project on her life. The blush reveals the depth of his affection for her. In other

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words, there has been sufficient narrative development of Genya’s character for us to understand this sudden reaction, which is rendered visually. However, there is also another kind of visual language at work here.

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Figure 1

Looking at Fig. 1 again, let us focus now on what else the image tells the viewer. Taken in isolation, the frame singles out Genya’s face, which indicates that this is what we should be paying attention to. The momentary disjuncture between dialogue and image resembles what Scott McCloud calls a “parallel construction” in the comics medium, where “words and pictures seem to follow very different courses, without intersecting,” but nevertheless makes sense in context (McCloud 1994: 154). As the image is part of a sequence, we “know” that Genya is sitting in Chiyoko’s front parlor, which has been carefully delineated. We have already had larger establishing shots of the room from several angles, so we also know that the anxious Genya does not have a view of the hallway from which Chiyoko emerges. In short, we have understood a great many things that were not communicated through verbal language. As the visual analysis of the short scene above demonstrates, understanding this sort of visual logic requires a certain kind of “cinematic literacy” that, as film scholar Thomas Levin puts it, “took some time before people began to master,” historically speaking (Levin 1996: 32). Contemporary moviegoing audiences are now “habitualized” to the uses of “the rather extensive repertoire of formal cinematic devices–p.o.v. shot, parallel action, shot-reverse-shot, etc.” (Levin 1996: 32). One might notice that the techniques he describes – some of which are used in the sequence discussed above – are, if not intrinsically intended to be, often used for developing the narrative. If the images in this sequence do not need translation for most viewers, then it is because we already know how this language works to tell a story. They communicate a significant part of the film’s message in their own way, even while they are in a close-knit, “contrapuntal” relationship with other elements.14 Despite the presence of film “language,” however, there are moments in any film when the images are not simply “received information” (McCloud 1994: 49), that is, fully understood without any explanation even to the viewer with “cinematic literacy.” As the extensive literature in art history shows, images have long been used to signify more than the object they represent.15 When Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in the late 1960s, writing that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and

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transformation of another,” she did not limit her definition of “text” only to the written word (Kristeva 1980: 66). While cinematic images index nondiegetic knowledge in a variety of ways not entirely dissimilar to that of linguistic systems, there is one method where the visual can perform with an economy unavailable to written or spoken language. This is when an image “quotes” another visual text, whether by reproducing it in a different context or by transforming it in a way that still resonates with the “source” image. Critically speaking, one might conclude that such intertextual references are becoming increasingly untethered in the random access of the so-called “digital age.” Nevertheless, intertextuality of any kind still has very practical consequences for a translator. AV translators, who have presumably had their hands full just trying to deal with dialogue and on-screen text, have left viewers to their own devices when it comes to this kind of visual intertextuality. Those who do acknowledge that “non-verbal signs” are a significant component in film tend to look at them in relation to the constraints they place on translating the verbal code (Delabastita 1989: 199, 201). Similarly, while there is work on different strategies to translate cultural content of films, it concerns itself only with linguistic aspects (e.g. Ramière 2006; Nedergaard-Larsen 1993). Finally, since cultural references are in any case “traditionally regarded in the literature as being ‘untranslatable’” (Ramière 2006: 153), this holds even more true for visual cultural references, since their mode of transmission itself is regarded as beyond the scope of AV translation practice. The sheer abundance of visual intertextuality in Millennium Actress thus poses a challenge to this AV translation standard, which “pares down the film primarily to narrative movement” (Nornes 1999: 24). Unlike the blushing Genya, whose state of mind would be recognized instantly by a large crosssection of moviegoers almost anywhere, many other visual “quotations” tend to be of a distinctly cultural nature, since it is a film not only about Japanese film history, but the history of Japan as realized in visual media (including film, woodblock prints, print publications, photographs, etc). As mentioned above, these visually charged sequences are largely autonomous vis-à-vis the narrative and the dialogue. The result is a stream of important visual but non-narrative information that, to fully comprehend, requires prior experience of the sources being invoked. Needless to say, standard subtitling practice has no purchase on them. The complexity of the film is reduced to a two-dimensional synopsis; the visual references go unnoted, and probably unnoticed. “Thick translation”16 and cinema: two examples from Millennium Actress To restore the multidimensionality of the film, I have chosen to explicate two visually complex scenes to demonstrate the inability of the current subtitling to “translate” them for the viewer. The first example we might call a homage or a mild parody, but in any case it is a quotation of the 1957 Kurosawa Akira film Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood), which is itself probably the most famous adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Throne of Blood sequence in Millennium Actress begins abruptly when Chiyoko, suddenly dressed in a medieval noble woman’s costume, bursts onto the balcony of a castle, accompanied by Genya and Ida. Anyone who has seen the Kurosawa film will recognize the dramatic setting, but the kinship with the other film is cemented with an almost identical

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reproduction of one of the film’s most famous shots. Ida is pinned against the wall, paralyzed by the terrifying sight of flaming arrows piercing the wall around him (Fig. 2). A quick glance at Fig. 3 reveals that he mimics actor Mifune Toshirô’s pose, shot from exactly the same angle, in the famous death scene.

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Figure 2

Figure 3

Despite the drastic transition between this sequence and the previous one (which is apparently from Chiyoko’s debut film, set in Manchuria), she and Genya seem totally unfazed by their sudden entry into a new setting and historical moment. When Chiyoko says, “What is the meaning of this?” she is referring to the hordes of samurai storming her castle, not the fact that she has jumped back several centuries, and from Manchuria back to Japan. Only Ida is bothered by the disjuncture in time and space and complains, “Where’d Manchuria go?!” His statement is, incidentally, the only verbal clue for viewers as to the current whereabouts of the characters. Like Ida, the uninitiated viewer may feel disoriented because of the rupturing of narrative conventions in this scene, which draws attention away from the characters to the setting itself. Even more significantly, we notice that Genya and Chiyoko, who are “in the know,” are quite aware of the intertextual game they are playing, implying that there must be viewers who share their knowledge. Of course, to be one of those viewers,

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one must have a working knowledge of: medieval Japanese history, dress and architecture; the huge genre of samurai films; and more specifically, Kurosawa Akira’s contribution(s) to it. The other example is also a homage to a film, but one that places the film in its contemporary social setting. Again, in order for the scene to have historical resonance, we are required to have extra-linguistic and non-diegetic knowledge. In a montage sequence that visually describes Chiyoko’s career after WWII, we see her move effortlessly from one static photograph-like scene to another, ending in a romantic pose with a co-star that transforms into a movie poster in the next scene (Fig. 4). While the basic visual punning here is apparent to anyone who has seen an old photograph or a movie poster for a romantic drama, the sequence’s reference to an actual film is privileged information. The poster is another “quotation,” as is revealed by this publicity shot for Kimi no na ha (What Is Your Name?, 1953), in which the costars embrace at exactly the same angle to the camera (Fig. 5). Significantly, the poster does not take up the entire frame. But that there is a dialogue between the poster and its surroundings may be apparent only to the most alert viewer, and probably only one who is aware of the quotation. What someone unfamiliar with the original hit, which had two sequels, cannot know, is that it created a national craze for the so-called “Machiko wrap,” named for the protagonist. Unlike the original publicity shot, Chiyoko sports this famous wrap.17 Several women in the foreground imitate the style, subtly indicating the huge popularity of Chiyoko’s film and thus the pop-cultural importance of its source.

Figure 4

Figure 5

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The film adds yet another historical layer with the protest going on in the background, which at least for the viewer familiar with postwar Japanese history brings to mind the social unrest of this period, such as the 1959-1960 Ampo demonstrations.18 Such viewers would have no difficulty understanding that these two seemingly unrelated visual layers reference roughly the same period of modern Japanese history. One could complain that the subtitler neglected to translate even the onscreen text: the banners proclaim “SOLIDARITY AGAINST” some unknown cause, but remain undecipherable to someone who cannot read Japanese. The movie title on the poster, a thinly veiled reference to the melodramatic plot of the original, is also left untouched (Meguriai = Chance Meeting). However, a literal translation of these words would do very little to help the viewer with no contextual knowledge realize that outside sources are being indexed. Here, a different sort of translation seems necessary, one that probably cannot be supplied by standard subtitles. Rethinking the “V” in AV translation through new technologies Until now, there has been a gap between the two discourses vital to translating film. Though they write in 1985, film scholars Ella Shochat and Robert Stam are still correct that “[w]hile contemporary theoretical work has concerned itself with film as language, little attention has been directed to the role of language and language difference within film” (Shochat and Stam 1985: 35). This is still true of verbal linguistic difference, but one could say that differences in visual language have been neglected even more. Much of classical film theory has assumed that the formal aspects of film are universal, or universally understood.19 However, because the visual techniques unique to film necessarily co-occur with other elements (be they linguistic or cultural or both), they do not necessarily tell all to any viewer. On the other hand, apparently unbeknownst to most film scholars, AV translators have produced a good amount of practicum-based commentary on the necessity and difficulty of translating the verbal aspects of cinema. Unfortunately, by focusing on the linguistic, they have pretty much ignored or given up on translation problems that involve the non-verbal aspects of cinematic form. I have tried to bridge these gaps in understanding through my “thick translations” of the shots or sequences mentioned above. Given that this much translation is sometimes necessary to fully “explain” what is happening in the frame (or larger units of the film), it seems crucial that we rethink the current text-based idea of AV translation, which allows one or two lines of text on screen that remain only long enough for the viewer to read them. Though he does not use the term, Markus Nornes pointed out in 1999 that fansubbers had already adopted some methods of “thick translation” — sometimes by adding so much text onscreen as to completely obscure the image (Nornes 1999: 31). These titles often go far beyond translating dialogue and onscreen text, as does the “gloss” in Fig. 6. This image, from a fansubbed trailer for Miyazaki Hayao’s Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), shows that someone did outside research on the cultural significance of the vaguely folkloric figures floating in the background, since their meaning is not described in the clip by voiceover or any other textual method.20

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Figure 6

While it goes a long way to supplying what has so often gone unstranslated, this technique, like many of the others adopted by fansubbers, is based on much older book technology (footnotes, prefaces etc).21 It certainly suggests “a completely new viewing protocol” (Nornes 1999: 32) where the viewer can stop and start the video at will (now old news, of course), but in practice it does not significantly depart from the linear subtitling model. Ultimately, it also falls short of book technology itself, which has designated space, separate from the main text, for such explicative additions. However, given that we now have the technological ability to manipulate media more than ever before, it has become realistic to imagine methods of translation that can incorporate a wider range of explication by moving beyond the superimposition of text on the frame. As the image-occluding gloss in Fig. 6 demonstrates, a “thick” translation philosophy that takes into account the visual as well as the linguistic should perhaps not always occur in real time, that is, onscreen while the movie is running. In fact, it is not practical in movie theaters, where it may make more sense to stay with the linear model and instead introduce more “abusive subtitling,” as Mark Nornes proposes (Nornes 1999). Interactive, “annotated” movies in the theater are perhaps beyond current technology – but not beyond the digital format. Since now more films are viewed in their digital format (i.e. online or on DVD and other home-use formats) rather than in the analog mode of the movie theater, the film industry, as well as AV translators, would do well to remember that “because so much of the visual culture is digitized, it need not be presented, or viewed, in logical or linear progression. It can be snipped into bytes and juxtaposed with other images” (Marcum 2002: 194). But despite the audience’s increased ability (and desire) to “manage complex text/image relations” (Nornes 1999: 32) and even manipulate those relations, most cinematic productions (and their translations) still assume a passive viewer. Right now, it seems that the film industry has a great opportunity to engage with the “new media” phenomenon by making cinema more interactive. On DVD releases, viewers can already choose what section of the film they wish to see, and in what language. DVD’s often have “extras” including the director’s commentary and “behind-the-scenes” mini-documentaries — even quizzes or games. All of these features make use of hyperlink navigability, familiar to all

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who have surfed the Internet or played a video game. However, besides the basic function of chapter selection, this navigability is rarely extended to the film track itself. Given the ability of hyperlink functionality to “introduc[e] a spatiality beyond that of the two-dimensional page” — or filmstrip, for that matter — most current DVDs are not yet taking full advantage of the technology (Strain & VanHoosier-Carey 2003: 259). However, this is starting to change. Consumers of cinema seem to be driving some of the technological innovation in DVD navigability, and their motivation comes from a desire for access to more film-related information. Anime fans, for example, with their vocal demands for a more “authentic” viewing experience, have already “pushed DVD distributors to make greater use of the format’s capabilities” by demanding thicker translation of their favorite titles (Cubbison 2005: 46). In a sort of technological step beyond the example in Fig. 6, distributors have started to embed (pop-)cultural, linguistic and/or historical information into the film track. The recent DVD edition of Akira allows for a “capsule,” an icon of a drug capsule that appears on the screen, at which time the viewer can press the enter button on the remote and receive additional information, while the series Excel Saga allows for a similar inclusion of cultural references through an optional popup, much like VH1 Network’s 1990s Popup Video series (Cubbison 2005: 51).

The first example bases its strategy on videogame technology, where users frequently choose from several options on screen to gain more information. The second is an enhanced version of older technology in the sense that the user can enable or disable the popups at will. Both examples use basic hyperlink technology to add depth to the viewing experience, offering the viewer more knowledge, and more control over, the visual text.22 Film scholars too have tried to take advantage of user-friendly technologies to encourage a more multimodal way of watching film. In an effort to have D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) taught in more U.S. college classrooms, Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey developed an extensive multimedia project, titled Griffith in Context: A Multimedia Exploration of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.23 The two-CD-ROM set features “a hypermedia filmstrip with temporal annotations or links that provide entrance to scholarly voice-overs… illustrated with archival material and contextualizing images” (Strain and VanHoosier-Carey 2003: 264). The basic idea is to “translate” for students the historical, cultural and social intertextualities of the film, of which they might otherwise not be aware. What is truly innovative, and appropriately cinematic about Griffith in Context is the navigable filmstrip that constitutes the interface. As students scroll along the filmstrip frame by frame, possibilities for further explication appear above and below the strip according to four categories: “Filmic technique,” “Historical Re-creation,” “Racial representation,” and “Literary Origins” (Fig. 7). Setting aside whether these are the best or only categories for analysis, what this project demonstrates is a form of explication that keeps the film itself at center stage (as it were). While the film now occupies less of the screen and must share it with other menu items, viewers can enter into the world of the film itself to find out more, rather than venture into a totally different, analytical space divorced from the film (as is the case if one watches, say, a documentary about a film). It is the

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film itself that serves as interface, not a metatextual “menu” screen.

Figure 7

This innovative “translation” effort also highlights the fact that understanding film is not necessarily a problem of linguistic ability. The standard view of AV (and other) translation often assumes that there are only two negotiating parties, defined by linguistic boundaries: the source and the target. If cinema is composed of (at least) two languages, one verbal and one visual, then translation becomes not only more complex, but a negotiation among more than two sides. For example, we can assume that native speakers of Japanese will understand the verbal channel of Millennium Actress. But are they also the “ideal” audience for the visual text? In an interview on his latest film, Papurika (Paprika), Kon indicates that this is probably not the case. Interviewer: I loved the scene where Konakawa explains to Paprika what “crossing the line” means in filmmaking, and he’s dressed like Akira Kurosawa, with the trademark hat and dark shades. Kon: I’m happy that you picked that up. I think it’ll be the overseas festival audiences who will react to that and not the young anime fans of Japan, who probably won’t recognize him at all (Gray 2006).

The non-Japanese interviewer, who clearly belongs to the more cinematically knowledgeable “overseas festival audiences,” spots the visual intertextual reference to Japan’s most famous director. Granted, he is not representative of a very large group, but the fact is that one does not have to understand Japanese to “get” this reference. Instead, one has to have a different set of knowledge, one that is cultural and historical in nature – as well as visual. In fact, it is a sort of knowledge that the Japanese target audience of the film may well not have, as Kon acknowledges. One could even say that there are two target audiences for

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this film, which may well overlap in some cases, but are nevertheless processing two different sets of information – one visual, one linguistic. While cinema has long had strong traditions in various nations, it is, and always has been, an international medium.24 It is undeniable that “when a text is exported into a different cultural environment composed of a different pool of cultural resources, it might not produce the expected interpretations,” but because of film’s growing internationalism, it is equally true that in “the current era of intense media saturation and intertextuality… texts respond to each other and combine to create a pool of cultural meaning” (Darling-Wolf 2000: 137). Certainly, AV translators won’t be out of a job anytime soon, but the increasing internationalization and proliferation of interactive media means that their traditional role as link between “original” and “copy” is increasingly in flux. With the greater availability of interactive features that explicate the film for the domestic (in this case English-speaking) viewer, an expanded sort of AV translation that takes advantage of the same features may even start to blur the boundary between (interlingual) translation and (intralingual) explication. Indeed, “every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere.” Yet it is not only the linguistic about film that may be foreign, nor is it easy to assume what any given audience will understand simply based on national or linguistic identity. AV translators should begin to think of themselves not only as interlingual mediums, but also as ambassadors of the cinematic medium in all its complexity. Audiences’ movie viewing habits are changing along with advances in digital technology. By making use of the increased navigability of the digital format, AV translators too have the potential to affect how audiences watch movies — and possibly even change their perception of what is “foreign.” Notes 1. Ian Balfour and Atom Egoyan, as quoted in Fenner (2006: 95). 2. Millennium Actress actually made the circuit of international film festivals even before it was released in Japan. The premiere was at Montreal’s Fantasia 2001 festival, where it won “the Best Animation Film category, as well as the Fantasia Ground-breaker Award.” Patten lists this and the impressive list of other festivals attended and awards gained in his review of the film (2004: 366). 3. The English subtitles on the US release are a slightly edited and polished version of those that were on the original region 2 release, which were undoubtedly prepared for the film’s many pre-release foreign film festival screenings. Manga Entertainment Ltd. released an English-dubbed version in the UK in September 2005, but the viewers on amazon.co.uk do not seem impressed with the dubbing. 4. Laurie Cubbison notes that many anime fans actually see their “engagement with anime … as a form of resistance to Western popular culture (Cubbison 2005: 45). 5. Fernando Gil, who has made a very short “fandubbed” clip of the film (available on YouTube, at http://youtube.com/watch?v=h2q2jC_ie1A) commented that the film “didn’t seem like the type of anime that most folks who are into fansubs nowadays would rush to download” (Personal email, December 4, 2006). There are no English fansubs of the film, probably due to the fact that subtitles were already available on the Region 2 release. 6. The 44 reviews of the film on a fan forum, AnimeNfo, gave the film a general rating of 8.6 out of 10. While viewers praised the quality of the animation (average score, 9.2), they did not actually enjoy the overall viewing experience as much (average score, 8.5). They also rated the “story” comparatively low at an average score of 8.3. www.animenfo. com/review.php?id=1185&n=kqzxhd&t=millennium_actr&type=anime. Accessed April 25, 2007. 7. Comment from “Ouhman,” Amazon.fr user (translated from the French). www. amazon.fr/Millennium-Actress-Satoshi-Kon/dp/B0007U1O30/sr=8-1/qid=1165563510/

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ref=sr_1_1/402-1820342-9506508?ie=UTF8&s=dvd Accessed September 1, 2006. 8. Teachers of film such as Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey note that students “expect a story to be visually conveyed to them and are neither aware of nor concerned about 1) the technical means by which film conveys meaning or 2) the film’s meaning in terms of any historical or cultural context outside of their own personal experience” (Strain and VanHoosier-Carey 2003: 265). 9. We can assume these dates since she is born during the Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923, is described as being in her seventies and dies at the end of the film. 10. Though they are describing the interrelationship of text and image on the Web, their summary could be equally well applied to the way images are generally seen in relation to text in most mixed media, including film. 11. It is even rather conservative in its translation of on-screen text. For example, though it translates the rather innocuous content of a billboard obviously advertising a movie starring Chiyoko (“Chiyoko Fujiwara – The Madonna”), it neglects to offer translations of banners proclaiming Japanese Pacific War victories in China. 12. Rachele Antonini discusses the difficulties of subtitling culturally and linguistically specific humor in an English sitcom screened in Italy. Most of her examples involve punning or wordplay (Antonini 2005: 217-221). 13. Robert Stam and Ella Shochat use this term to describe the shared visual language of silent film, which to some extent crossed national and linguistic boundaries (1985: 46). Genya’s “pantomime” here has a similar effect. 14. I use Theodor Adorno and Hans Eisler’s term for describing sound-image relations, described by Levin as “emphasiz[ing] the autonomy of both the acoustic and the visual and their reciprocal enrichment through a logic of montage” (Levin 1996: 35). 15. See, for example, the classic study of visual meaning by Erwin Panofsky: Studies in Iconology; Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. 16. I borrow Kwame Anthony Appiah’s term here, which promotes the detailed description of cultural features of a text (Appiah 2000). 17. While actress Kishi Keiko is not wearing the wrap in this particular photo, there were other publicity shots in which she did. 18. Many citizens protested the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. 19. There are of course exceptions to this rule, such as Noël Burch’s now classic 1979 study of Japanese film, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press). Interestingly, while Burch points to crucial formal differences in the film of, for example, Ozu Yasujirô, he credits the differences to a unique “Japanese” sensibility on the part of the director, thus nationalizing (rather than internationalizing) these techniques. 20. Fansubs by Ian Roberts, Eisuke Ishibashi and Tom Jordaan. The image is taken from Roberts’ site, www.absolutedestiny.org/sen.html. Accessed Dec. 2, 2006. 21. Cintas and Sánchez list a variety of techniques adopted by fansubbers that are not part of the traditional AV translation repertoire (2006: 47). 22. The next stage in DVD interactivity is already available as of 2006. Although it is limited to early adopters of HD DVD technology, there are now several next-generation DVDs that feature “U-Control” or “Blu-Wizard,” competing navigation formats that allow you “to create your own user-selected menu of a supplemental content, and customize how you watch it.” Although the number of DVDs with these features are few, and the supplemental materials still rather limited, this is likely the direction in which DVD interactivity will develop. For more details, see “First Look: Sony’s ‘Blu-Wizard,’” an article from High-Def Digest, from which the above citation was taken. http://bluray. highdefdigest.com/feature_bluwizard_110906.html (accessed January 12, 2007). 23. An online tour of the product, which is published by W. W. Norton and Co., is available at http://griffith-in-context.gatech.edu/giccover.html (accessed November 22, 2006). 24. As Rosalind Galt remarks, “few films dealing with European history treat the history of a country other than the filmmaker’s own.” It is no secret that (and Millennium Actress is no exception) most “film[s] about a nation” are still “national film” in the loose sense that the implied audience is assumed to share the national historical perspective portrayed in the film (Galt 2005: 5).