Subheads
Subtitles are text panels, mostly in silent films , that run like a red thread through a film or comment on it. They mostly explain what the director or screenwriter did not want or could not translate into the visual language. Many subtitles were only used to make the dialogues or the explanation of a scene visible to the viewer.
species
The two main groups that can be distinguished are speaking titles and explanatory titles .
There were many ways of using and designing subtitles. For example, Paul Wegener 's rhyme form was used in Rübezahl's wedding (1916) . In many films, including those of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), subtitles were visualized in a way that gave the viewer the impression that they were reading a letter or a page torn from a book. At the beginning of the 1920s, experiments were also carried out with colored subtitles, such as For example, The Toll of the Sea from 1922, the second film shot in two-color Technicolor red / green.
history
The first film with subtitles is said to have been Our New General Servant by Robert W. Paul from 1898, but it is considered lost. How It Feels to Be Run Over from 1900 could definitely come up with an ending title . Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost from 1901 could then come up with real subtitles . However, these are not yet classic speaking titles , but merely introduce or delineate the beginning of the individual acts.
At the first Academy Awards in 1928, there was still the category "Best Subtitle". The first and only inter-title designer to receive the Academy Award in this category was the American screenwriter Joseph Farnham for the three films The Fair Co-Ed , Between Frisco and Manchuria and Laugh, Clown, Laugh .
When editing foreign silent films for German cinemas, the subtitles had to be redesigned. At the same time, it had to be ensured that the text panels looked exactly like in the original setting. However, for cultural, political or technical censorship reasons, the original text was often not translated, but a similar-sounding text was used.
Subtitles were also used after the silent era, such as For example, in Moderne Zeiten (1936) by Charlie Chaplin , in Silent Movie (1976) by Mel Brooks , in Juha (1999) by Aki Kaurismäki . Who digs up the deadly nightshade (2005) by Franka Potente or in The Artist (2011) by Michel Hazanavicius .
Subtitles are sometimes used in sound films, for example before a new chapter or a certain scene. In the gangster comedy Der Clou by George Roy Hill (1973), Sally Potter's Orlando (1992) or the film essay Munich - Secrets of a City by Dominik Graf (2000), all chapters are introduced with subtitles.
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://murnau.neue-wege-des-lernens.de/murnau/zwischentitel/index.html
- ^ Michael Althen, Dominik Graf: Munich - Secrets of a City . absolut medien, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89848-391-9 .
