Intro: In this post, filmmaker and current OHMA student Storm Garner discusses the practice of subtitling accented or non-normative spoken English in documentary filmmaking and video presentations of oral history.

My father, at 70, is now finally admitting he’s suffered some hearing loss with age, and thus has perfectly legitimate reasons for craving subtitles, closed captioning, anything and everything that might increase his chances of following a film’s dialogue (or monologue--David Attenborough-style), but I remember a time--decades ago--when his hearing troubles seemed accent-particular. 

We were an American family from Washington DC, living in Paris in the 90s, and non-dubbed American movies and shows were extremely rare on French TV channels at the time. Less so non-dubbed British fare. 

So my family would occasionally gather around the TV set and indulge in some late night James Bond, or Mr. Bean, or a mesmerizing BBC nature documentary in some strange ritual of nostalgia for the sound of our spoken mother tongue. Except that it wasn’t our native accent, as my father’s constant stream of “What did he just say?” made clear. (My sister and I, as kids, seem to have adapted more easily to the Britishisms, having been heavily exposed to British English in our international schools as our brains were still developing, perhaps.) I remember being 13 or so, awkward and angsty but unfailingly entertained by my father’s repeated, arduous attempts at reconstructing what had just been said by a British actor from reading the French subtitles at the bottom of the screen out loud, then translating them back into a probable piece of English movie dialogue, but in his own American accent, with a self-satisfied “Oh!” when he finally got it. Every time we watched a British movie! 

At 18, back in DC, my first film job was coincidentally in intralingual subtitling. Creating subtitles, in other words (literally!), in the same language that was spoken on screen, but… more “correct” somehow, more “widely intelligible”. I was hired to work in post-production on a documentary film about the 1970s heavy metal music scene, which featured lots of interviews with aging metalheads whose brains had clearly been addled by decades of substance abuse, which they often described vividly in their stories about their glory days. When they spoke, they spoke English, mostly a sort of mid-Atlantic American middle-class WASPy sort of English, but with such heavy speech impediments from the drug use, plus acquired cultural jargon--un-updated since the ‘70s--and so many curse words, unfinished thoughts and false starts, that even my patient, ever-curious adolescent ear sometimes simply could not compute. I had to pop in beta tape after beta tape, type up my best, slightly more “standard English” approximation of what was said, make it fit in the caption box, tweak the timing, censor the obscenities for TV, research (usually just by asking older Americans) words and idioms I didn’t understand, and occasionally resort to defeat: typing “[unintelligible]” into the caption box. 

I felt a terrible pang of guilt and horror in my chest every time I did that. I pictured the narrators on the screen before me, aging painfully enough already--their health, careers, and former fame now mostly fizzled--slowly sitting down to find some comfort in a movie about their salad days, only to see the word “[unintelligible]” branded across their own chest in the medium close-up shots, or even, occasionally, branded across their own mouth in extreme close ups! 

Even when I managed to create “good” subtitles--ones that both captured the narrators’ personal speaking quirks and made sense to someone like me, born well after their prime--I couldn’t help but feel hurt on their behalf that, unlike the vast majority of English language documentary film subjects, they were being subtitled at all, which fact instantly relegated them to a realm of the Other, the Gazed-Upon, the Studied, the Interesting-But-Never-Quite-Understood. These poor shriveled could-have-been rock-stars would be told, by my subtitles, that their own ways of expressing themselves were, in essence, invalid. That they couldn’t speak their own language. I tweaked and I tweaked, but there was nothing I could do to fix this bigger problem within the confines of my subtitling duties.  

I didn’t last long at that job, needless to say. 

In my 20s, during my first forays into making my own films, I was always being reminded by my mentors, teachers, and filmmaking how-to books, “Make sure the dialogue is clear! Intelligible to all!” A pat exhortation no doubt derived from the widespread assumption that the medium of film is a popular medium, for the masses, i.e. the largest possible audience, i.e., as Hollywood world box office statistics analysts like to characterize their target audience, “a 13 year old boy in India.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to make films for the largest possible audience anyway.

Besides, I knew (thanks to my father’s disruptive family-TV-time habits of olde!) that sometimes, even fairly standard-accented Americans have a hard time understanding even fairly standard BBC-British accents--the supposed gold standard of English as a Second Language audio courses… So who’s to say what accents or choice of words or idiomatic constructs “more people” or “most people” or even “a 13 year old boy in India” would most happily digest? Not to mention the obvious problematic power relations involved in any particular variant of a language becoming “standard” to begin with, especially in colonizing languages like English. The intractability of the conundrum puzzled me so much that I ended up making a film in which the protagonists speak an entirely made-up language. Which gets no subtitles ever. 

Now as an OHMA student, collecting video oral histories for my Queens Night Market Vendor Stories project from mostly non-native English speakers (street-food chefs from all over the world!) I’m faced with that cursèd subtitling problem again! I hate what subtitles do to the act of listening to speech in video formats, but I do want to cobble together engaging documentary films from these interviews that would be accessible not just to the “widest possible audience” in the abstract, but specifically to my father, who is now legitimately hard of hearing, and increasingly dependent on subtitles. 

Two weeks ago, I was just in the middle of devising the “least terrible” formula for correcting some of my narrators’ minor grammatical errors or word misuses in the subtitling process I dreaded but had resigned myself to thinking necessary, when I heard Lorina Barker share her stance on the matter as a special guest speaker at OHMA, in a conversation about her own oral history documentary filmmaking practices: no subtitles, ever. 

It came to me like a revelation: one could make such a choice and get away with it!

I still could not quite put my finger on why I resisted subtitles, so it helped me to hear her motives for resisting them. As an Australian Indigenous scholar, her first commitment is always to her own community, who is also the subject of her documentary filmmaking. She makes these films for them first and foremost, so they can have a video record of their own community history. If they can understand themselves and each other, who cares if some American couldn’t parse the Aussie accents and community-specific idioms, or doesn’t  know the word “mob” could be used to mean something rather more friendly than a group of Sicilian gangsters in 1930s New York or a hoard of pop-star-frenzied fangirls! 

As a total outsider to Australian Indigenous culture and clearly not the target audience for her films, even I still felt freed by her refusal to subtitle her oral history/documentary film narrators. Watching her short film, “A Shearer’s Life”, I felt like I was right there in the world she documented, like a shy but curious tag-along child in the work-world of adults, learning new pronunciations, new idioms, new actions with every uttered word, every gesture I followed. Sure I missed a few words, but all my senses were so alive with full-body listening effort, I’m convinced I ended up understanding, in a more holistic, empathetic sense, much more than I would have had I been given subtitles to read and process much more intellectually. 

Reflecting again on my own oral history video subtitling dilemma: who do I want to see and understand these international street-food chefs’ stories of favorite childhood meals back home, moving to the US, learning English, starting a small business, (mis)adventures in the food industry? But also, do I want their words to simply be understood, or could I also strive to foster in my non-immigrant, non-food-industry American audiences that child-like sense of wonder, curiosity, and concentrated learning that I got from Lorina Barker’s documentary as an outsider audience member, because my whole being was working to comprehend “[unintelligible]” ? 

Storm Garner is a DC-born, Paris-raised, NYC-based multi-disciplined artist, and ever-aspiring storyteller of the ineffable. She joined OHMA's 2018 cohort in the hopes of bringing her work and her lived experienced into closer dialogue. She's currently collecting the oral histories of the Queens Night Market’s (mostly international food) vendors, to be featured in her documentary film series and a co-authored cookbook.