Paper short abstract:

Subtitles contribute to the thought images of scenes in ethnographic (sometimes experimental) cinema from MacDougall’s final scene in To Live with Herds, to sexual jokes in Chick Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory, to metanarrative mistranslations in Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s The Axe Fight.

Paper long abstract:

I will be considering how subtitles contribute to the thought images of scenes in ethnographic (sometimes experimental) cinema from MacDougall’s final scene in To Live with Herds, to sexual jokes in Chick Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory, to meta-narrative mistranslations in Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s The Axe Fight. These subtitles offer inside jokes or seek to legitimize anthropological claims in their context. How effective a strategy are they? Whom do they exclude from the conversation? I am presenting a few classics from ethnographic cinema to expand the conversation from MacDougall’s subtitle descriptions to how they 1) enhance ideas of untranslatability; 2) tell parallel stories that shadow certain unspoken violences, and 3) gesture torwards ethnographic authenticity. MacDougall's subtitles enhance the punctum of the image and the conversation. The double speak here entails silence and offers words over the silences. In Chick Strand’s work she often melds together traumatic happenings with everyday life as a means to grasp at women’s presences (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/36193). There is usually depicted pleasure and humor for Strand’s women and here is no exception because even the shadow of the rumor is laced with self aware irony. Meanwhile, in The Axe Fight, subtitles translate a woman’s jeers at a group of men she’s angry with. Here they are used to grant the filmmakers’ authority. All three versions of subtitles offer different meanings through their (mis)translations. The hesitancy I have about this is that they remain inaccessible in that they depend on vocalizations for their impacts.