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Mates,TCM had a good run of Harold Lloyd silent movies last evening including the famous 1923 "Safety Last" (re: man hangs from clock). These restored movies with new scores are very entertaining and wonderful to see again, but I'm reminded about the odd character of the dialogue cards that are intersprsed in each scene to explain the action.
It's highly disruptive in silent movies to the action and atmosphere to cut away from the visuals and have to read something, so it got me to wondering: why weren't subtitles used?
There were process shots from the very beginning of film, it seems it would have simple to have a shutter mask that left the bottom 1/10th of the frame black and then run it with another negative with the upper 90% blanked and the dialogue running it the bottom slot.
Subtitles would seem to be well within the technology of 1910, but I've never seen them used in the silent era. Any thoughts as to why such a useful, liberating thing as subtitles was introduced only AFTER sound?
I do find the oddest things to concern myself over..
Cheers,
Bambi B
Follow Ups:
It was within the technology but it was more work and more money. You also ran the risk of ruining the film on the second exposure. It would have been very impractical.
In the silent era there was no such thing as "foreign" films per se; what would be done by all major studios, international & domestic, is to have prints made inserting the appropriate title card transalations of the scripted dialogue, story interludes, etc., in the language of the country importing the print.Had processed subtitling been achievable BEFORE sound films it would most certainly have added greater expense to export prints (i.e., having to create additional negatives for each set of international prints in the language of the country importing), and it's doubtfull that such processing could be added to finished prints without producing a separate set of negatives for each language. OTOH, language specific title cards, openning credits, etc., could theoretically be inserted at any point in the process, spliced in and out, revised, censored, re-edited, etc., as required.
Subtitling didn't enter the picture (pun intended) until the early 30's talkies, and even then not right away. Many of the early talkies were shot multiple times in various languages by studios in America as well as other countries. For instance, Von Sternberg shot The Blue Angel shot in both German & English with the same casts; The Testament of Dr Mabuse was filmed in both German & French with different casts by Fritz Lang; the original Dracula was shot in this country in both English, by day, & Spanish, at night, using the same sets with separate casts and crews (Note: Of the two versions the Spanish directed version has been critically assessed as being better in just about every way except that Bela Lugosi's performance is supposedly superior than the Spanish actor).
Of course, once subtitling arrived on the scene the added expense of shooting foreign language versions for export became a moot issue.
Cheers,
AuPh
*
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General Sherman sucks.
...those days. And then, even among those who could, there were too many who had learned English a posteriori , their mother tongue being Italian, Spanish,..., or even Chinese, in no few cases: reading from a screen would distract them from seeing the bad guy approaching the dumb blonde, knife in hand...At least thatīs how I see it, Occamīs razor in hand.
Regards
BF
And understand the power of images.
To make sure they had to have text.
Of course Bernardo you are, I think, fully right!
Obviously, subtitles are a device to aid in the understanding of dialogue in talking films. Audiences of silent movies didn't require "wall to wall" subtitles, because the film plots were driven by visual action, not dialogue. The well placed dialogue cards-for more than occasional usage-were enough to help advance the storylines, and thereby keep their audiences informed and entertained. "Talkies" were and are dialogue driven entities. Having to hang on every word requires thorough subtitling. (Stallone film experts may beg to differ.) Now, one could see the value of translated title cards, because audiences couldn't lipread foreign actors. Imagine being a non English speaking film goer trying to read John Barrymore's lips, as he spoke the lines from Hamlet, "to be or not to be," in the silent film version of the aforementioned play. Films have always been made with "textless" versions with main and end title sections so that the foreign distributors could produce their own translated titles. Same then as now. Sorry for the overblown post.
Regards
Most films use to be made in " double " for each country one....
My wife and I were flipping around and caught a bit of that Safety Last. Fun movie! Many silent films like that wear on my nerves after a while, however. Yeah, he's dangling from a clock. It's fun for about twenty seconds, after the second minute I'm changing the channel.I'd guess, from the length of time they showed the script cards in between takes (about half a minute for a 12 word sentence) that they assumed people had a hard time reading on the big screen in a linear fashion, much less at the same time as people are "talking" on screen.
/*Music is subjective. Sound is not.*/
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