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Film-maker ventriloquism in ethnographic film : Where subtitles don ’ t let subjects “ speak for themselves ”
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Mckee, Robert |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | The purpose of the present paper is to make and illustrate a point concerning the use of subtitles in ethnographic film. The point concerns the received notion that ethnographic film-makers use subtitles to enable film subjects to “speak for themselves” – to speak their own words in their own exotic languages, which film-makers render via subtitles into the language of the intended audience. The point is that film-makers might sometimes instead use subtitles ventriloquially, as a kind of “voice of Oz” (cf. traditional film narrative’s “voice of God”), putting their message into subjects’ mouths more than faithfully translating subjects’ speech. The film speech and subtitles by which the point is illustrated are those of the 1989 ethnographic television film Spirits of defiance: The Mangbetu people of Zaire (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] 1989). (Since the May 1997 overthrow of the Mobutu government, Zaire is again called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) There are four film languages concerned: French, which was Zaire’s one official language; Lingala, which remains the most widely spoken of its four major national languages; the local Mangbetu language, in its predominant Meegye dialect; and English, the language of the film’s primary intended audience and thus also of its narration and subtitles. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.gial.edu/documents/gialens/Vol11-1/McKee-Film-Maker-Ventriloquism.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
