Blog Cinematheque puts Caicara in pained English

Subtitles seem such a natural part of watching a foreign-language movie that I feel pretty helpless without them. No matter how simple the plot or how obvious the body language, most films just don't feel right without some basic dialogic crutch. But, heaven forbid, it appears that not every movie made in another language has been conveniently re-packaged for those of us in the English-speaking world, and that includes some Portuguese-language films screening in Madison this month. The programmers at UW's Cinematheque program are bridging that gap by hand when it comes to one of their current series, "Brazilian Films of the 1950s," in one case creating, as programmer Karin Kolb puts it, "subtitles from scratch."

For three of these five films, Kolb says, Cinematheque received non-subtitled prints to project, but at least had the benefit of subtitled DVDs to start from. "We ripped the subtitles of the DVDs (and hope the prints are not completely different)," she explains in an email. "One has to import the files into a PowerPoint file. I can only say that it takes forever to import over 1,000 subtitles." But cinephiles will see the product of some even more tedious and incredibly cool effort on Friday evening, when the 1950 drama Caicara screens at Vilas Hall. Brazil's '50s movie darling, Eliane Lage, stars as a troubled young woman taken from asylum and into an unhappy marriage. Her journey—shot on-location against a beautiful, mountainous island backdrop—only grows more arduous as the film goes along. Cinematheque's programmers also endured quite a lot of hassle just to translate the dialogue in a film-friendly format.

If you don't have subtitles and you have to screen a Portuguese-language film to an English-speaking audience, what do you do? Recruit someone who speaks and studies Portuguese—UW grad student Rebecca Laird—to transcribe the film. From there, it gets even trickier, because the lines on-screen have to be timed correctly with the action, and of course you can only jam so many words into a frame. Ben Brewster, Associate Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, handled the next few steps of actually creating the subtitles. Kolb detailed the process for me in an e-mail:

"Divide the transcribed dialogue into sentences or phrases, each of which
will eventually have one subtitle, and get beginning and end timings for these
chunks.

"From the timings, establish the maximum number of words we have for each
subtitle (there are standard formulae for this).

"Translate the dialogue into English, and condense each chunk into the
appropriate-length subtitle.

"Prepare the PowerPoint slides.

"During projection of the film, show the slides at the appropriate times. Rebecca will have to push the button for each subtitle. There is probably an easier way, but we only received the prints about [two weeks] ago, and the DVD and the print did not match 100 percent. And they are archival prints, so we should not overuse them, of course."

Considering that people generally get into arts-related fields so they won't have to putz around with PowerPoint all day, this is incredibly sporting of them. If you're watching Friday night and understand what everyone's saying, see if they'll let you leave a tip or something.