Monthly Archives: June 2010

On Foreign Films

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Posted by maxporter on June 29, 2010 – 3:45 PM
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So, yes, this is another post about me going to movie theatres. I feel that it could apply just as well to any public screening of a foreign film, though.

Recently, I was browsing the website of a local arthouse theatre chain that frequently screens foreign films.
I clicked through their films, trying to figure out what would be the best candidate for a movie night, a complicated process that involves several criteria:
-Is the film produced by an English-speaking country (Ireland, non-Quebec Canada, Britain, etc)? If so, toss.
-Does the film’s plot heavily involve a “meeting between different cultures”? If so, toss.
-Is the film produced by a director whose native language is not English, but his or her goal is to “reach as large of an audience as possible”? Is so, toss.
And so forth.
It’s a long list, but it doesn’t end there: my next step is usually to cull my finalists and look at the list of languages on the film’s imdb.com page. Protip: If “English” shows up anywhere on that list, it’s a good bet that you should toss it unless you have very strong reasons to believe that you won’t end up miserable after the movie because you couldn’t follow the plot.

…Then I noticed that the website indicates whether a film was “fully subtitled” or “partly subtitled.”
…JOY!
Suddenly, I could simply toss my list of criteria straight out of the window! Now I can simply go to a “fully subtitled” film if I choose to splurge on a night out.

“But Max,” you may now be protesting, “Wouldn’t all foreign films be subtitled? I mean, they talk in a language I can’t understand, so I read the English words just like you do!”

Well, as it turns out, the answer is no, not always.

Let me illustrate my point with an event that occurred in 2004.

Poster for the film Walk on Water. Shows the text WALK ON WATER above two men walking in the sea, facing away from the camera.

I had a very good friend who lived up in the city, which was 40 minutes away. Since she lived in the city and enjoyed movies, this provided me with an excuse to see her and watch foreign films at the arthouse theatre.
We would see each other maybe once a month or so and watch a random foreign film. I loved the ritual of our companionship: we would watch the movie, she would drive me to her home, her mom would feed us dolmades (and cookies and tea and maybe lasagna…), we would talk about the film that we had just seen and catch up on the minutiae of our daily lives, then I would drive home after her mother told me to be very careful in the snow.

One day, we decided to watch Walk On Water, an Israeli film.
We knew nothing about it besides the fact that it was Israeli, but we figured it would be interesting enough.

Well… As it turns out, the plot centers upon Israeli tourguides who are guiding German tourists on a tour through the country.
I can still remember the pivotal scene for me, the scene that forever altered my perception of the accessibility of foreign films: The tourists and guides are driving over the rocky landscape in a jeep. The Israeli guides ask in Hebrew: “Do you speak Hebrew?” The German tourists shake their heads to indicate that they do not understand and ask in German: “Do you speak German?” The Israeli guides shake their heads and ask in English, “Do you speak English?” The German tourists reply in English, “Yes, we do.” All parties chuckle and, with great relief, begin jabbering on in this language that all parties can understand.

…Except for me, who suddenly found myself lost without subtitles.

As it turns out, subtitles in foreign films that are screened in the US are intended for hearing English speakers who simply need a way to understand the language that is being spoken onscreen. If this need is eliminated via a character who speaks English, it is no longer necessary to show subtitles.

Back to 2004. I’m sitting there, watching this whole movie that I can’t understand, trying to piece together bits of the plot from the few subtitles and the visual language. But, even today, I could not tell you what the film was about. 95% of it turned out to be spoken in English.

My friend and I continued to be friends for a long time after that, even after we went to colleges on opposite sides of the US. (I’m not even sure I should be using the past tense to refer to this friendship, actually.) But I don’t recall ever having watched another film at that arthouse with her – after that experience, I became distrustful of foreign film screenings because I had learned the hard way that they would not always be subtitled. From that point onward, we stuck to DVDs at her house or my house.

So… This is why I really appreciate the fact that my local arthouse theatre tells the audience whether a film is fully or partly subtitled.
I think that this should be a standard policy for every public screening of foreign films. Libraries, arthouse theatres, radical bookstores, etc. It would also be really awesome if all DVDs were labelled in this manner too.

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Notes:
-Although hearing people sometimes joke that they wish they had subtitles for that one Scottish/Irish/whatever film that starred characters who spoke English with such a thick accent that “it was like watching a movie in a different language!”, I’ve found that screenings of heavily-accented English-language films are very rarely subtitled in the US.
Most of the time, if there is a problem, lines of dialogue are simply redubbed for its US release. Example: Trainspotting.

-I have heard of similar things happening in other countries – for instance, francophone countries do not subtitle the French spoken in foreign films because of course the entire audience is hearing and they all speak French. Example: I was once told that the French DVD for L’Auberge Espagnole sold in Quebec does not subtitle the French-language voiceover.

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Music, Take 2: “Music Videos”

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Posted by maxporter on June 10, 2010 – 2:30 PM
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I can still remember the first song that I ever listened and enjoyed. I was fifteen years old and a music video introduced me to it.

-~-~-~

When I was 15 years old, I loved to watch music videos. Not the stuff where you just watch the band stand around and play their instruments and sing – that was just boring.

No, I loved videos with a narrative. My favorite videos were things like Deadweight by Beck and Bachelorette by Bjork with elaborate storylines. (Both of these videos are by Michel Gondry, by the way. I love most of his music videos.)

Bachelorette is really more like a mini-film than a representation of the song – it has a love story, it opens with a narrative (“One day, I found a book buried deep in the ground”) before the song begins playing, etc. There is so much going on in the narrative & visually that you could play it without audio and it’d still be a good film.

Anyway, one day, the music video for The Science of Selling Yourself Short by Less than Jake came on TV.

(This particular video doesn’t have great sound quality but the Youtube one won’t let me embed it. You get the idea.)

Like my other favorite videos at the time, this one has an interesting storyline and does interesting things cinematically, especially the rotoscoped animation. The difference between this video and things like Bachelorette is that it focuses more on the music – you see the band playing their instruments. There is a narrative in the video, but the music is not just a soundtrack.

Anyway, the channel where I saw The Science of Selling Yourself Short only showed a few videos on repeat: Everything Sucks When You’re Gone by MxPx, Perfect by Simple Plan, one or two others I can’t remember, and this one.
Every time this particular video came on, I’d turn up the volume. One day I was just like, “hey, maybe I like the music, not just the video!”

Now, I wasn’t about to go out and buy the CD – this was before iTunes started selling songs for a buck each, and I didn’t want to buy all these songs on the CD because… what if I didn’t like the other songs on the CD? (Since I began listening to music during the MP3 era, I still don’t get this.) Deeper than that, though, I honestly didn’t even really understand how people could listen to twenty whole songs, especially not in a row! (Funnily enough, I now prefer to listen to full albums in one go.)
Plus, I wasn’t even sure if I actually liked the song – would it still be good minus the video?

So I downloaded Limewire and began downloading the song. This was, what, 2004? It was the early days of P2P, after Napster’s collapse but before web 2.0 happened. So it always took forever to download stuff…. I waited and waited and waited for days for The Science of Selling Yourself to download.

Finally, it finished downloading, and I listened to the song…

When I hit “play,” I was actually interested in this song, for a change! My favorite parts were the opening horns, the singer’s voice, and the chorus.

Before then, I was totally bored with the stream of noise that came out of my parents’ and friends’ speakers. They mostly played stuff like Madonna’s Ray of Light or Jesus music like Jars of Clay… it all sounded the same to me.

The Science of Selling Yourself Short, on the other hand, is ska-punk and the lyrics are about addiction. It was different from anything I’d ever heard before and, by the end, I was in love. I subsequently put it on repeat for a month or so and, as you may imagine, I got sick of it fast… but I loved it. I actually memorized the lyrics and would mouth along to the song until it became difficult for me to make out his voice after the chorus plays for a second time.

-~-~-~

After I got sick of The Science of Selling Yourself Short, though, I just didn’t see where else I could go – I tried other songs by Less Than Jake but didn’t really like any of them except for Sugar in Your Gas Tank. I just couldn’t get into the music and the lyrics were difficult to make out in most of LTJ’s songs, so I couldn’t participate by mouthing along. (At the time, I wanted to mouth along to music, hence why I ended up putting Madonna’s American Life on my ‘favorites’ list.)

This was before Pandora, before last.fm, before music blogs. There was nothing that could suggest new music to me. My friends tried to introduce me to music but at the time I just didn’t like what they listened to. I also wasn’t sure where to get music – I didn’t want to illegally download a song again and iTunes still hadn’t begun selling singles for $1.

I tried listening to Brand New for a while because I liked the video for Sic Transit Gloria, but as it turned out, I didn’t like the song on its own. So I figured that The Science of Selling Yourself Short was a one-time fluke and subsequently stopped listening to music on its own and just focused on watching music videos again. There were exceptions here and there, like the time I listened to Sugarcult a lot because I enjoyed the song Stuck in America (which has no video as far as I know), but they were few and far in between so I always wound up getting sick of listening to this small playlist over and over.

While I was watching all these music videos, there were a lot of songs that I dug but I didn’t really explore the music beyond the videos like I did with Science of Selling Yourself Short – at least, not until many years later.
I tended to skip stuff with videos that I found boring like Joga by Bjork or Protection by Massive Attack. Joga features lots of long takes of the Icelandic landscape and shots of Bjork singing, whereas Protection goes from apartment to apartment in a Paris(?) apartment building. Not exactly as fast-paced as most music videos – I didn’t have the attention span for them back then.
So I was really focusing more on the videos than the music as a teen.

Sidenote: The videos for Joga and Protection are also by Michel Gondry. I now like the songs in both videos and I like the video for Protection. I also currently have an attention span for long films because I have been corrupted by my film classes that screened things with long takes like Jeanne Dielman, a three-hour film that shows a woman’s daily life.

-~-~-~

I will end this post by bringing it back to the present.

One artist that I’m digging right now with music videos that are like mini-films is Janelle Monae. A friend introduced me to her the other day.

Here is Tightrope:

The video for Many Moons, an earlier song, is also pretty awesome.

I just really dig all the film references she puts in her videos and the fact that they are basically short films. I like the whole concept of her albums – I like concept albums in general. The music is also awesome. I can’t really analyze it to the extent that some fancy music blog could, but I can tell you that I like it and it’s not really like anything I’ve heard before. And her dancing, oh my word.

I heard that Monae wants to make a video for every song on her new album ArchAndroid. I would love love it if that happened.

Music videos are a really underrated medium, in my opinion, and I hope that people like Janelle Monae help their audience realize it’s possible to have a video that contains lots of meaning in 5-10 minutes of film.

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Music, take 1: “A brief background & 2010.”

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Posted by maxporter on June 8, 2010 – 4:06 PM
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For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write a post about music, but there is so much to say that I keep getting sidetracked.

I think that this complicated topic is best addressed in installments. So this is the first one. I’m going to do what Dolores Claiborne did: when she was trying to decide if she should start the story from the beginning or the end, she compromised by starting somewhere in the middle, then filling in both sides.

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There are millions of deaf people. Sometimes it seems to me that each deaf person will have a unique perspective on music. I’m no exception.

This makes a lot of sense. Hearing people usually think of deafness as an either/or thing: you have hearing, or you don’t. But, like a lot of other things in life, deafness is not a binary.

First, there is the physicality of deafness.
Some people have more hearing loss in the high ranges than in the low ranges. Some people experience exactly the opposite. Others have hearing loss at either edge and hear the mid-frequencies just fine, whereas others hear extremes better.
People have a different range of hearing loss: some people hear less than others overall.
Some people are born deaf. Others become deaf later on, but it’s not just old people who go deaf because deafness can occur at any age: 4, 15, 27, etc.
Some people have hearing loss because the bones in the inner ear are missing; others have hearing loss because of something in the brain or nerve damage; others have hearing loss because the hair cells in their cochlea are missing. (The last one is the most common kind.)

Personally, I have what is medically known as “profound deafness.” That means that, in some frequencies, I hear so little that it doesn’t show up on my audiogram. (My audiogram only displays hearing loss up to 120 decibels. For reference, 60 decibels is human conversation and 120 decibels is a propeller airplane.)
As far as everyone knows, I was born deaf. I was born in a time before doctors performed routine hearing tests on newborn babies, so I was diagnosed when I was two years old, but it’s very likely that I was born deaf.
I personally have more hearing loss in high ranges than in low ranges. So if something is 120 decibels and very high pitched, I have no chance of hearing it. If, on the other hand, it’s very low pitched, I am more likely to hear it.
My hearing loss originates from missing or damaged hair cells in my cochlea.

Further complicating things, people respond in different ways to deafness.
Some people have hearing aids, some people have cochlear implants, some people have instruments that conduct sound through their skulls, etc.
And others have absolutely nothing at all.
I grew up wearing hearing aids because the cochlear implant surgery was much more dangerous in the early 90s than today, and it was impossible to get an MRI back then due to the magnet.
But in the late 90s, a cochlear implant with a magnet that could be unscrewed for an emergency MRI was developed and my parents asked me if I would like one. I said yes. I was about ten years old.
Since then, I’ve gone through stages when I didn’t wear it at all, most notably 2009 when I didn’t wear it for about a year for a lot of reasons. I still don’t wear it around other deaf people or in annoyingly loud places like the subway. Generally, though, I wear it most of the time.

Deafness also has a social dimension.
There is a d/Deaf culture. Some deaf people argue that Deafness is akin to an ethnicity in that it has a unique language (American Sign Language) and history of oppression.
Other deaf people see it as a simple medical condition that must be fixed and go as far as saying that parents who don’t get a cochlear implant for their deaf child are abusing their child.
This issue is just way too complicated to get into right now. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of perspectives and I disagree with both of the perspectives that I just described: I agree more with the former argument than the latter argument, but I have problems with describing deafness as an ethnicity.

Further confounding all of this is that, even in one family, there’s a myriad of different ways to experience deafness.
My sister was born with more hearing than I was – she was “hard of hearing.” As time went on, she lost more hearing and eventually got a cochlear implant when she was twelve years old or so.
90% of all deaf individuals have hearing parents and I am no exception.

So for all of these reasons, it makes a lot of sense to me that individual deaf people have vastly different ways of experiencing music.

-~-~-~

An image that shows the top six artists that I had listened to in the prior three months. They are: Bad Religion (252 plays), Massive Attack (204 plays), Bjork (87 plays), Good Riddance (85 plays), Dr. Octagon (82 plays), and Operation Ivy (54 plays).

In this post, before I talk about how I got to where I am now, I’d like to discuss what I currently listen to. Then I’ll build up in subsequent posts to this point, six months into 2010.

Earlier in 2010, I listened to punk pretty much exclusively. Mostly Bad Religion. (Favorite songs by Bad Religion: Sanity, Markovian Process, Won’t Somebody [acoustic], 21st Century [Digital Boy], Damned to be Free, etc…)
I also listened to a lot of stuff like Bjork and Massive Attack. (Favorite songs by Bjork: Hyperballad, Army of Me, Human Behavior, Big Time Sensuality, etc… Favorite songs by Massive Attack: Karmacoma, Sly, Radiation Ruling the Nation.)
There also was a bit of ska (mostly The Aggrolites) and some hip-hop in there too (mostly weird conceptual-futuro hip-hop like Dr. Octagon or Deltron 3030).

Nowadays, I’m starting to listen to slightly mellower stuff – still enjoying Massive Attack a lot, especially since I just found out about their new album, but I’m also listening to things like Guster and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Older stuff, too, like David Bowie.

Also, since I have a lot of free time on my hands this summer, I’m basically just trying to listen to everything that I haven’t listened to before like contemporary R&B or Depeche Mode or whatever. I know embarrassingly little about musical history so I’m trying to remedy this.
As time goes on, I’m discovering what I like and don’t like. For example, I concluded that I don’t particularly care for chiptunes because they sound too much like a hearing test – all the beeps and bloops!

I’m pretty much the farthest thing from a music snob, so if any of these bands are obscure or a valued asset to establishing subcultural cred, uh, sorry. I wouldn’t know because I know so little about music. I’m not trying to sound ~cool~ or whatever.

I currently listen to music using my cochlear implant. I have a headphone jack for my cochlear implant that plugs my cochlear implant directly into my computer. The end result is that I can sit right next to somebody and they can’t even hear what I’m listening to, but I can listen to music directly. It’s not even distorted by my non-audiophile-quality speakers or anything because the electronic signal from the MP3 goes directly into my cochlear implant’s computer. It’s kind of futuristic/cyborgish if you think about it too much.

Most importantly is my attitude – I’ll talk about this more later, but my attitude right now is: music is fun, it’s okay to listen to and won’t ruin my identity as a deaf person, it is a worthy leisure activity, I can listen to music with my friends, everybody has a different taste in music so my taste is no more or less valid than a hearing person’s taste.
None of these attitudes were ones that I particularly held in the past.

So that is where I am right now. Now, if you will excuse me, I think that that No Doubt discography is calling my name.

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Netflix

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Posted by maxporter on June 5, 2010 – 1:01 PM
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In June 2009, Netflix wrote a blog post saying that the technology to caption streaming video was extremely difficult for them to figure out and labor-intensive, then explained that it would take them approximately a year to implement the technology.

It is a year later. There have been no status updates regarding this project.
In the meantime, however, they have introduced new features such as the option to stream video to the wii.

Frankly, I feel insulted.
A friend of mine explained why it would cost a lot and how server-intensive it is based upon the description on their blogpost.
But, honestly, I don’t care if it costs Netflix a lot of money or resources. They recoup that money in profits, it is against the law to refuse to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled people (even though corporations have been allowed to flout these laws via loopholes regarding subtitles for about 20 years), and they clearly have the funds to develop technologies such as providing streaming video for the wii.

The message that Netflix is sending to me is loud and clear: “We don’t care about you as a customer. You’re just getting in the way. Take this paltry alternative.” (In this case, deaf people are expected to only use the mail-in DVD service and not complain about the lack of access to streaming video.) Unfortunately, this response is all too familiar for me.

To say that I’m extremely frustrated with Netflix is putting it mildly. I have definitely considered subscribing for their DVD mail-in service, but I’m just too disgusted with their behavior to financially support them in any form. I’m going to stick with my local library’s DVD collection this summer, thank you very much.

I do, however, feel that I am missing out on a great service.
I wish that I had the convenience of watching streamed videos on my laptop.
I wish that I could access Netflix’s extensive DVD collection. They have such an extensive library that looking at the selections practically brings tears to my eyes – I feel like Charlie Bucket gazing into Willy Wonka’s candy store before he got the golden ticket.
Also, since I am a film studies major, this could be extremely useful for my studies, not just leisure activities. What if I’m writing a term paper on Werner Herzog and I have to access a documentary about him that will not be available via inter-library loan in time to finish my paper?

I simply can’t wrap my mind around this in the least.
I grew up with wheelchair slices without thinking about them twice, and I’ve definitely used them when wheeling groceries home.
Why can’t subtitles be the same way? They should just be a fact of life that are simply there and will in fact prove useful for everybody in the long run. In the case of subtitles, hearing friends tell me that they sometimes put on captions because people mumble or have difficult-to-understand accents.

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