Niall Flynn
An Intimate Encounter: Reading Subtitles through Deleuze
Year: 2014
Keywords:
Gilles Deleuze, subtitles
Information:
Institution:
Independent Scholar
(at time of presentation)
2011–2012: MA (Film Studies), University College Cork
Publications include: A Review of Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film by Akira Mizuta Lippit, Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media 6.
Publication:
n/a
See also:
n/a
Abstract:
Subtitled films consist of a series of encounters of discursive and formal elements that do not operate according to the same logic. Viewers undertake a process of negotiation between these elements when watching subtitled films. I bring this process into dialogue with the approach Gilles Deleuze takes in his two Cinema books; their shared methodology of negotiation shed light on each other in critically productive ways. Next, I describe the series of encounters that takes place in subtitled films: specifically those between text and image, and between the original film and the subtitled film. Finally, I explain how this process of negotiation leads to an affective as well as linguistic response to subtitled films. In fact, subtitles reconcile those disparate discursive and formal elements.