Posts filed under 'sound'

Visual Noise: Alejandro Adams on Screen Languages

My films and fiction writing come out of notes and ideas that are rooted in this raucous inner life, this biological story urge.

Alejandro Adams is a writer and filmmaker whose pictures include Canary (2009) and Babnik (2010), both about the buying and selling of body parts. (The latter involves sex-trafficking, the former organ-harvesting.) He is also the director of Around the Bay (2008) and Amity (2012).

Though Adams is an Anglophone filmmaker—most readily understood by his audiences in terms of a broadly New World sensibility—it does not follow that his films are Anglophone or monolingual: they comprise substantial Russian, German, and Vietnamese in addition to their English. Of interest to the Asymptote reader in Adams’ work are the complex translation dynamics involved in their trans-linguistic performance and production; Adams writes in English for multilingual casts and asks them to reproduce iterations or facsimiles of certain script segments in their respective languages. Then, returning the recorded dialogue to English in post-production, Adams subtitles with at least as much attention to his cinematic vision as to denotative content. (He discusses this process in more detail in an interview with Vadim Rizov, explaining, “We agreed from the beginning that I’d subtitle it however I wanted—the whole thing is fiction, why should I have any fidelity to translating dialogue?”) I originally recruited Adams for a conversation about the forms and functions of this multilingualism in his pictures, but when we actually spoke, the conversation expanded to include a broader range of visual and sonic signification in narrative cinema.

Rachel Allen (RA): I thought we could start by talking about your second feature, Canary, which features long passages of untranslated (unsubtitled) Russian, Vietnamese, and German. There are also these long, garrulous scenes—I’m thinking of the workplaces especially—of undifferentiated dialogue. The parallel I see between those two kinds of scenes is in their seeming disregard, at least from a narrative or expositional perspective, for the semantic content of language, suggesting that the narratively relevant stuff isn’t in individual propositions. But the dialogue in those scenes is also so specific to its context, and to the individual characters within them, which suggests to me that someone is attending very carefully to the language, even at the level of individual words. I wondered if you see or feel that tension in Canary, between attention to and disregard for language. Or words, maybe: is this a film that sees distinctions between “words” and “language” and “communication”? Does Canary distrust words? (Do you?)

Alejandro Adams (AA): You’re asking if I believe in language, or words, and I’m reminded of another interview I did where the first question was “Do you believe in morality?” It was about one of my other films, but the idea that I don’t put stock in some fundamentally human aspect of existence is troubling. These questions stop you in your tracks, but they also demonstrate that these films are made by someone who obviously can’t handle water cooler talk so let’s go for the throat, no appetizer.

About words themselves and the way words are used to create a texture in the film, the hyper-specific dialogue is extremely scripted—even the overlaps, like the litany of things one can do with a partial organ. Other material is entirely improvised but orchestrated down to how many times an actor touches a child’s toy or picks up a phone. So it would seem that I have all this vision around the sonic impact of human speech, trying to make an office lobby feel as chaotic as the beachhead in Saving Private Ryan, but what I really wanted was silence.

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Translation Tuesday: “Love Crisson” by Milli Graffi

Talklossenette wavening / the palpid culdicurve / ambashes.

I fell in love with the poetry of Milli Graffi in 2008, when I was seeking authors to include in a dossier for Aufgabe on “poesia ultima e della ricerca,” or the latest Italian poetry of research. It was immediately clear to me that we had heroes in common—Lewis Carroll and James Joyce in particular.

There’s a section in Finnegans Wake on Anna Liva Plurabelle in which Joyce speaks of “loosening your talktapes.” When he translated this passage into Italian, Joyce himself rendered this phrase as “scioglilinguagnolo,” a translation that likely reveals the matrix of the original notion he had in mind: in English, we speak of tongue twisters, or what we might render in Italian as attorcilingua, while in Italian one uses the term “scioglilingua,” or tongue-dissolvers, tongue-thawers, tongue untiers. The Italian idiomatic expression might very well have been the origin of the “loosening” that ended up in Finnegans Wake, a book in which all languages converge in tangles of phonemes and roots.

I discovered this point of correspondence in a book of English exercises that Milli Graffi edited for Paravia publishers, aimed at high school students—because Graffi, unstoppable champion of the avant-garde that she is, chose this mind-twistingly complex passage for the teaching volume. When we got together this summer in Milan to prepare for a public chat on translation, on a sultry heat-thickened afternoon further stultified by a city-wide transit strike, Milli told me that she had used the word in a poem, and I knew that I had to try translating it.

The work was published in Mille graffi e venti poesie, 1977-78 (Geiger, 1979), and I soon found that Graffi had rendered Joyce’s phrase even more Byzantine, because she transformed scioglilinguagnolo into sperdilinquagnolo, turning the action of loosening embedded in the original Italian phrase into loss (sperdersi refers to losing oneself; sperdere means dispersal, scattering), and lingua (“tongue; language”) into linqua, some sort of calque tending toward the English “linkage” while containing the heavily deictic “qua” (Italian “here”; Latin “what; as; in the capacity of”). I took other necessary liberties while working with this poem: my translation of ambiscia is a calque of ambassador and ambush, and so on. A proper gloss would proceed word by word, but I’ll leave it up to readers to discover some tripwires of their own.

—Jennifer Scappettone

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