Subtitles drive me mad!
Why put English subtitles on an English poetry video??
I run Viral Verse (a website like Moving Poems) which features video poetry. I regularly crawl the net for new (and old) work. For some reason I cannot figure out, poetry videos often have the verse both spoken and written. It’s horribly distracting and a total waste of the poet’s (or actor’s) voice. We can’t help but read when we see words on a screen, but having 2 voices in my head – the actor’s and mine – becomes irritating .
I’m at the point now where if the subtitles start I turn off the video. English movies don’t have English subtitles. Is poetry so bloody special that it has to be drummed into the viewer?
Viral Verse, 
Natalie 10:31 am on May 21, 2010 Permalink |
VV, the subtitles are helpful for those who are deaf or hard of hearing and sometimes, even fully functional ears can’t pick up mumblers. Personally, I also like seeing the words.
Dave 12:05 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink |
Good point, Natalie, though in general I agree with V.V. that subtitles are distracting. YouTube makes it easy to add subtitles which a viewer can choose to turn on — I think that’s a really good way to go. Another option is to upload two different versions of a video, one with subtitles and one without. Someone alerted me to a good example of this last night with a video I’ll be featuring a week from now at Moving Poems: “My Story is Not My Own,” by Canadian poet Steven McCabe, on Vimeo. I’ll be posting the version without subtitles.
V.V., I presume you’re not as bothered by animations that make creative use of text? The Poetry Foundation-sponsored series of videos, for example, all include the text of the poem in some way. It begins to feel formulaic after a while, but it’s usually integral enough to the video not to feel distracting (to me, at least).
renkat 3:55 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink |
Well, actually I guess I think my poems are that bloody special. It also has much to do with what and how one defines the poetry of “videopoetry” in the first place.
I am very used to subtitles as everything I see on television and at the theater is subtitled as a rule. I no longer hear competing voices or have trouble processing the two kinds of interpretation. I think it is a matter of what one is accustom to and tolerates. Different things irritate (annoy) different people, I suppose.
Dave 4:01 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink |
Do you really think of the animated text in your videos as subtitles? That’s not how I would’ve characterized it.
renkat 4:05 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink
oo that sounded a bit more pissy than my intonation would have been
No- I don’t think of it as subtitles at all, but there is certainly the same issue of “two voices”.
Viral Verse 4:27 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink
The issue of ‘two voices’ is exactly what I mean.
I don’t see subtitles in movies, TV, theatre, except when subtitling is needed for communication.
What I’m talking about is a video style. And I don’t know why film makers do it. Videos that use typography in interesting lyrical ways – brilliant. But when a film maker sticks the words in (creatively or just along the bottom), over film/animation as if the reader won’t catch all the words then I switch off – the writing becomes noise to me and ruins what is often a great recital, reading, video.
Anyway I don’t mean to offend anyone – I was looking for a video this morning and I came across….
renkat 4:39 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink
Maybe it does have something to do with “filmmaker” vs traditional poets- that is, a differing primary approach to the subject matter. For me the visual serves the literary, not vice versa. I have not had an ambition that the aural nor the visual presentation would equal the words. Sometimes it is important to know the difference between morning and mourning, too.
Dave 5:39 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink
I think there are good reasons for including text sometimes, and as Ren says, it depends on your orientation. When I first started making videopoems three years ago, I wasn’t familiar with the genre at all, and my only model was the digital poetry postcard. I even referred to my early efforts as video postcards. But I didn’t include readings. When I eventually got the idea to start doing that, I dropped the text, except for a couple translations. Because for me, poetry is first and foremost an oral/aural medium — I’ve never cared much about the arrangement of words on a page, for example.
Obviously I don’t react nearly as negatively as V.V. to videos that include both text and voice — if I did, the Moving Poems archive would be considerably smaller! But I think it’s good that we have our different preferences and foci. Viral Verse is definitely a better place to see spoken-word videos, for example, and that’s a genre I usually find myself skipping when searching the web for new videopoems.
Viral Verse 8:19 am on May 22, 2010 Permalink
Dave and Renkat bring up a very good point – how we come to poetry from different perspectives.
Until last year, poetry was only a literary experience for me, then I went to a poetry slam and was blown away by the performance aspect. Poetry became a musical experience, where you necessarily don’t catch all the words but you’re (or at I) was affected by the emotion, the rawness, the musical delivery.
However I find live performance very difficult to translate onto film, and most times I’m disappointed by spoken-word videos (though as Dave says I post quite a few on Viral Verse).
It’s just wonderful to see how diverse poetry can be!
renkat 9:01 am on May 22, 2010 Permalink
I just finished writing answers for a little interview, so I won’t go into too much detail – but, yeah, I do think it is a complete waste of time to try to capture the live performance in video as an experience (of course it is a documentation). My background is in theater and I came to poetry in the first place because of how much I loved the physical experience of reading it or hearing it read (preferably by a baritone)… (I think I will go write a blog entry on this now
!
Dave 12:13 pm on May 22, 2010 Permalink
(Ren, feel free of course to post a link to your blogpost here in the forum, and/or that interview .)
renkat 12:38 pm on May 22, 2010 Permalink
Thanks- will do when Nic sets it up. I am doing a series of posts called ars poetica – http://www.nothingbutmetaphor.com/2010/05/17/ars-poetica-part-1/
ChristineSwint 8:00 pm on May 21, 2010 Permalink |
Here’s a link to Ren’s poem, “Hydrotherapy,” which includes text as part of the animation. I don’t want to put you on the spot, Ren, but I think this video is a good example of how to incorporate text with voice.
http://movingpoems.com/2009/11/hydrotherapy-by-ren-powell/
Viral Verse 8:29 am on May 22, 2010 Permalink |
Great video! I just wish the words weren’t included. Oops…. here I go again.
I speak French and when I see a French movie with English subtitles I can’t help but read them, though I wish I didn’t, because I overlook or rather tune out the actor’s delivery. All their hard work for nought.
And on this video the same, I end up reading the words – the actors voice sank into the background. I watched the video a second time and squinted so I couldn’t read the words and the voice became richer and I enjoyed the video a lot more. But as Renkat says, the written words are the thing.
I see I’m a lonely voice in the crowd. So be it.
Confession: In spite of my protestations I do include some videos with text on Viral Verse, hard to avoid at times.
renkat 8:59 am on May 22, 2010 Permalink |
I doubt at all you are the only one with that opinion. Even I am going through a lot of soul-searching about what I am doing with the melding of the two, to be true to what I believe is the heart of poetry while giving the visual/aural aspects their own indispensable role in a finished product. I mean, that is my goal. I am just starting out.
I have been living in Norway for 17 years and at first the dual text/spoken word did drive me batty. It is just how things are now and my brain deals with it and incorporates it without noticing.
I did notice the “favorite” post on your site had subtitles
Viral Verse 11:26 am on May 22, 2010 Permalink |
If you mean “I Can Write a Rainbow”: http://viralverse.net/wordpress/?p=949 – it is an absolute favourite! And the subtitles are fantastic!
Because the child’s speech is so difficult to understand the subtitles become necessary. The baby speech juxtaposed with the subtitles draws attention to the eloquence, maturity of the words, while demonstrating the child-like innocence of love. I sososo love that video.
I heard the poet (Tony Walsh) perform the piece at the festival and he performed it as a man in love with a woman. He had not seen the film – the director was given complete freedom to interpret the poem as she saw fit. The film played after his performance and we were all stunned! Tony sat beside and he too was impressed and very surprised. The film is a completely different beast – child like love. Beautiful.
It’s is one of the few videos in which the visual takes the original meaning to whole new level. No, I take that back. An earlier post of Dave’s demonstrates this point: The 2 versions of Billy Collins: The Dead.
renkat 12:49 pm on May 22, 2010 Permalink
That’s really interesting because this, in my head, means that this kind of videopoem is really not an art object in the same way an original poem or original painting is. It is a post modern expression like Little Big Chief (a photograph of a statuette of a Native American stereotype). The result there though is an intellectual experience, not an aesthetic one. Isn’t this also taking a finished poem and presenting it in another context – effectively desecrating the original for irony and detachment typical of post modern “art”? (If this sounds like I am being critical, I am not – just analytical – because I believe there is a difference between post modern derivative works that are intellectual in their aims and old fashioned cathartic art. Not that one is intrinsically better than the other, but they are two different beasts.
Viral Verse 1:17 pm on May 22, 2010 Permalink
Wonderful comment! I figure if it works as a stand alone piece then it has both intellectual ‘insider’ value, as well as just plain good art.
Modern art used to intimidate me because I was introduced as a child to it by an critical ‘insider’ (ie someone who knew about post-modernist expression and trashed it).
However over the years some of these highly referential pieces, of which I have no background knowledge, really hit me at a gut level. If the reference is cultural or a reworking of an iconic piece of art that I know, I’ll appreciate it all the more. I want my art to be profound, loads of meanings, aware of it influence – it keeps it interesting.
I like the way music is using samples now in brilliant new ways. Young kids may not recognise the original piece, but they don’t suffer for it.
renkat 5:56 am on May 23, 2010 Permalink
I know I am a horrible egoist, but I don’t think a piece can stand alone as an art object when it is created from other people’s work. The very definition of art used to be the “expression of an individual genius” – and included the craftsmanship and individuality expressed through things like the quality of line and brush stroke. I think it is the feminist in me that rears up in the face of modernist and post modernist techniques like found art and the (is it technically a mash-up) videopoem with Ronald McDonald that Dave posted. I don’t accept the death of the author or the death of history. I don’t think mine is so much an intellectual objection, but an emotional objection to the destruction of the artwork it takes from. If one approaches the Collins poem for the first time in this video, it will never been the Collin’s poem as he wrote it that speaks to the viewer. The new work has completely murdered the life of the older work.
I know my attitude about the ethics of that is extraordinarily old-fashioned and unrealistic and almost religious in its sense of the sacred in art. But I am not the first person to dare to say things like this. There are people who question whether the Mona Lisa can be viewed and experienced as the art object is was. The Mona Lisa, in one sense, in Da Vinci’s sense, no longer exists.
Maybe I just have a very pathetic and uncool ancestor worship when it comes to art.