Language Barrier

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In the US, the Melville film is called Le Samourai*, not The Samurai. Similarly, Bob Le Flambeur is not known as Bob the Gambler. But then again, L'armée des Ombres is more commonly known in the English-speaking world as Army of Shadows.

Truffaut's fourth feature film is known either as Jules and Jim or Jules et Jim, depending on how large a boost of self confidence the writer needs at that moment. The vast majority of Kurosawa films are known in the US by their English titles, until you reach 1970, where a small cluster of his work is known only by the Japanese titles. In the case of Dodes'ka-den, the English version would wind up being something like Chugga-Chugga, or whatever you tell your kids is the sound a train makes, so that's understandable. Virtually none of Fassbinder's films are known in America by their German titles. When it comes to Fassbinder's countryman, Werner Herzog, the same thing holds true -- what is it about German, I wonder?

None of this bothers me, mind you. Bob Le Flambeur is a better title than Bob the Gambler, after all, and the choices made about which language will carry through to the American release seems almost entirely arbitrary. Yes, some foreign language titles scan better, even to monolingual Americans such as myself, in their original French or Spanish or Russian or what have you than the English equivalent, but replacing "and" with "et" when talking about Jules and Jim is just silly. You're fooling no one.

But at least in that case, you should by now be prepared to hear either one. What really gets up my nose is when somebody takes a foreign film that is known exclusively in the US by its English title, and then digs around to find out the original title, so they can throw it out in print, or conversation. By way of example, I have very little doubt that some version of the following conversation has taken place:

Guy #1: So, what do you want to do tonight?

Guy #2: I'm in the mood for a movie. A bunch of movies, even, but I don't feel like going out.

Guy #1: No problem, we can stay in and watch a marathon of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.

This is meant, one assumes, to solidify the speaker's place among the elite, or what they view to be the elite, and to weed out any listeners with whom the speaker may not want to associate. This is a working theory only, but I feel confident that at its core, this practice is motivated by wickedness.

This expanded version of what should have been a Facebook update has been brought to you by my having recently seen someone refer to Michael Haneke's Code Unknown as Code Inconnu.



*Sorry, this computer wouldn't let me do the two little dots over the "i".