The Subtitle Is a Performance

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Cinepuuulse is a magazine, a radar and a diary about Asian cinema — Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand — read from Tokyo.

Our mark is 銀幕, ginmaku, the old word for the silver screen; it is the same two characters in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A magazine, because every week one film is worth reading about slowly. A radar, because we count what the region's screens are talking about — box office, festivals, directors, anime, streaming — and show it as it moves. A diary, because a seal is set each day in that day's colour, and the days add up.

We read the local press in its own languages and bring it over in English: the Japanese film sites, the Korean trade papers, the Chinese culture desks, the Vietnamese and Thai entertainment pages. Everything here links back to the people who made it; the images belong to their authors.

Cinepuuulse will keep changing. New sources, new signals, new ways of looking — a little better each week, never finished. If a film here made you want to buy a ticket, that is enough.

Thank you for reading. ありがとうございます。

The Subtitle Is a Performance

At the 9:40 screening of a new Hong Kong noir last Tuesday, a woman two rows ahead of me laughed half a second before the rest of the room. She was reading Cantonese. The rest of us were reading a translator. The gap between her laugh and ours was the whole argument I want to make tonight.

Subtitles are treated in most conversations as a utility, like a fire exit or a cupholder — necessary, invisible, faintly embarrassing when noticed. This is wrong. A subtitle is a piece of writing that appears, in rhythm, over a face. It has timing, it has breath, it has taste. When it is good you feel the film's pulse in your own reading speed. When it is bad you feel the translator arguing with the director in front of you, and the film loses.

The best subtitler I know in Tokyo works from a small office in Kanda and refuses to name her clients. She told me once that her rule is never more than twelve characters for a beat of silence. She counts frames. She reads the line out loud in her own voice before she commits it, to hear whether it lands where the actor lands. This is not utility. This is performance, done in a font, at twenty-four frames a second, for an audience that will thank her by not noticing her at all.

The Cantonese woman two rows ahead had, for that one joke, a private film. The rest of us had a translation of a film. Both are real. Neither is lesser. But the pretence that they are the same screening is what I want to retire. When a festival programme says "with English subtitles" it is describing a second script, written after the fact, by someone whose name is usually not in the credits, for an audience the director never met.

There is a small movement of Asian festivals now — Busan started it, Taipei picked it up, and a Shibuya mini-theatre I will not name has quietly followed — of crediting the subtitler on the same card as the cinematographer. Not in the closing crawl. On the opening card. It looks strange the first time you see it. It looks correct the second time.

I am not asking anyone to learn Cantonese, or Korean, or Thai, or the specific Kansai that a certain new film insists on and which the Tokyo subtitles smooth into standard Japanese and lose half the joke doing it. I am asking that we notice the second author in the room. Read the line. Ask who wrote it in your language. If you loved the film, you loved two people's work, and one of them is walking home tonight without applause.

The woman two rows ahead stayed for the credits. She was the only one. When the lights came up she was still reading — the Cantonese names, slowly, the way you read a guest list at a wedding you were almost invited to. Then she put on her coat and left before I could ask her anything, which is how it should be. The last dark room in the city keeps its secrets between the seats.