SUBTITLES DONE RIGHT

Americans don't watch subtitles. That's the traditional wisdom among US distributors who view adding subtitles to a movie as a way to automatically wave bye-bye to a huge portion of your potential grosses, and they're right. Last year only ten foreign films earned more than US$1 million at the American box office, and foreign acquisitions seem to be slipping: out of 54 Oscar nominations, only 12 have US distribution in 2005, compared to 19 in 2004. Part of this decline is attributable to people who say they don't want to "read" movies and the only solution seems to be dubbing movies into English. But the Russian film NIGHT WATCH offers a third way and it impressed me to no end.

NIGHT WATCH is a big budget blockbuster about a war between good and bad vampires on the streets of modern day Moscow, and it was a huge hit in Russia when it was released a couple of years ago. Fox Searchlight picked it up for US distribution and they instantly had a big problem: what to do with a foreign language action/horror movie with no pretensions to the arthouse. Director Timur Bekmambetov had a solution: integrate subtitles into the visual design of the film so that they flow with the movie, rather than feeling like something tacked on at the last minute.

The result is subs that come and go as characters speak. They sometimes appear in different places on the screen, most strikingly when a character is hurled across a kitchen and his shouts of "No!" and "Stop!" explode across the screen like impact marks in a comic book. The words of a curse appear in red and disappear in puffs of digital mist. A computer's output types itself across the screen with a blinking cursor. Some of these stunts work, and some don't, and they may only make sense because this is a fantasy film. But one place that everyone could learn something is in the timing of the subtitles, because it's perfect. Jokes are set up so that the punchline doesn't appear full minutes before it's delivered onscreen. If a character pauses, the subtitles pause. If a different character starts talking the subtitles for the now-silent character go away.

The result of all this? Although the occasional sub stunt is too conspicuous, for the most part the subtitles disappeared completely giving the illusion that you were hearing the characters talk in their natural voices. And that's the goal of subtitles.

Fox Searchlight collaborated on this experiment with director Timur Bekmambetov and say that this isn't part of some new approach to subtitling all their movies. But this is something every distributor of foreign films should take a look at because it works.

(NIGHT WATCH opens in NYC on 2/17 and then opens in the 15 major markets the following week)