First use of Subtitles?

[movielocke]

I recently watched Eskimo from 1934, it's a film that's made almost entirely in the native Inuit dialect, but the film uses intertitles rather than subtitles for translation. That got me wondering, when did subtitles first begin being added to films? I had heard or read somewhere that subtitles first began for 'bouncing ball' sing-alongs in shorts in the thirties, but I'm not sure where I got that tidbit of info. Both Grand Illusion and A Nous la Liberte were nominated for oscars in the 1930s, but were they subtitled in that initial release. wikipedia is unhelpful on this question. :-p

[domino harvey]

Bordwell and Thomson talk about the subtitling of foreign films in their Film History but I don't have my copy with me here

[HerrSchreck]

Well, we should remember that each and every silent film when brought to an export market had its original intertitles translated with new cards... in other words the subtitles became the new title cards. Though I'm sure for something to truly qualify as "subtitling" the original language must be present somewhere, either onscreen or on the audio track (in the case of a sound film).

Therefore I'd say the first case of subtitling would have to be those occasional silents with prints produced for more than one linguistic market... I've seen prints-- for example the Soviet silent Prostitute-- where the original Russian intertitles also contained Japanese characters, as well as english... tri-lingual intertitles!

I have an old copy of Murnau's Schloss Vogelod that has both the original German and the English sharing 50/50 space on the title cards... in which case you could consider the english text an early form of subtitling.

[Tommaso]

As to subtitling within multilingual sound films, an early example would be Pabst's "Kameradschaft" (1930) in which the French spoken parts seem to have had 'burnt-in' subs in original German prints, and vice versa for French prints. You can see that in some moments on the German disc, where some parts coming from a French print have the German subs blocked out by a black bar (which looks unbelievable stupid, but it's a bad disc anyway).

[zedz]

I have an old copy of Murnau's Schloss Vogelod that has both the original German and the English sharing 50/50 space on the title cards... in which case you could consider the english text an early form of subtitling.

You can see the same thing - one example of French / German and one of French / English - on two of the early silent shorts on the recent Painleve disc.

[movielocke]

Bordwell and Thomson talk about the subtitling of foreign films in their Film History but I don't have my copy with me here

oh, I do have that book on hand, but didn't think of it, doh.

ETA: Bordwell says that subtitles were attempted right as sound began but no one much liked it or any of the alternatives (dubbing, intertitles, showing it in the native language untranslated, or filming a person explaining whats going on and cutting it into the film) which resulted in studios deciding multi-language productions were necessary, such as was done for Dracula, amongst many others (the first being a British film called Atlantic), later in 31-32 when post sound mixing became acceptable subtitles were tried again and found to be more acceptable--this would coincide with the release of films like M and A Nous la Liberte in the United States. And post sound mixing allowed for easier dubbing as well, so dubbing and subtitling became the standards.

[lady wakasa]

I've seen a number of Chinese silents (Cinema Epoch's Chinese Classics series - even mentioned here in an earlier thread) which combine some flavor of Chinese and what might be called a sort of English on individual intertitles. Unfortunately, there won't be much in the way of years for those right now. That would seem to fit the criteria.

(And with that, I give up and head for bed.)

[Michael Kerpan]

I've seen a number of Chinese silents (Cinema Epoch's Chinese Classics series - even mentioned here in an earlier thread) which combine some flavor of Chinese and what might be called a sort of English on individual intertitles.

I was also thinking of this. Ironically, some of these early subtitles are now so illegible that new subtitles need to be added over them.

[Jarpie]

I would assume that we've had subtitles on movies in Finland since 1930s or '40s when we started to get foreign sound-movies. As far as I know, Finns have never dubbed movies because it wasn't technically possible in that time, and later on it would've been too expensive and people already had grown used to subtitling, also I doubt there was even remotely enough people who spoke other than finnish or swedish.

[whaleallright]

There are still many original-American-release prints (or dubs of original-American-release prints) of films like Lang's M or Feyder's CARNIVAL IN FLANDERS floating around. In fact, when I was in college, the version of M that circulated on home video was the same version that had shown in screens in New York in the early 1930s. I recently saw a print of Ophuls's LIEBELEI that looked like it was struck from an original American release print.

There are subtitles on these prints, but they tend to skip much of the dialogue and often simply "summarize" long passages of conversation. This is in contrast to contemporary practice in which typically every line of dialogue (including, often enough, the lyrics of songs) is translated. My hypothesis is that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the art film and foreign film were commercially ascendent, it started to become worth it to commission more thorough translations of films for the American market.

There's a good article to be written here, if anyone's willing to do the research.

[jdcopp]

What is the technology of subtitling prints? Was the optical printer necessary?

[HarryLong]

Once upon a time, probably. Now I'm pretty sure it's done digitally.