Geek of All Trades

There's translation, and there's translation

At the movies last weekend to see a newly released, highly anticipated Hindi film called Om Shanti Om (recently reviewed at Filmi Geek), we saw the usual handful of previews that one sees before a movie; this time, all previews for upcoming Hindi films.  One of these is apparently an animated feature called Roadside Romeo; the preview showed a slickly animated anthropomorphic dog - the titular Romeo - having a screen test for his part in the movie.  In his screen test Romeo undertakes a rapid-fire succession of impressions from famous films, reciting famous lines from beloved Indian films like Sholay, Deewaar, and Dilwale dulhania le jayenge.  (You can see the spot, without subtitles, here.)

What interested me most about these was not Romeo's renditions, not the choice of films (nor the fact that I recognized so many of them) - it was the way they were rendered in the subtitles.  The subtitles looked like approximately this:

"You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender."

"You want the truth?  You can't handle the truth!"

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

That is to say, instead of literally rendering the famous lines from the Hindi films ("How many men were there?" &c.) the subtitler chose a conceptual translation that slipped the category of "famous lines from Hindi films" to "famous lines from Hollywood films."  This rendition conveys the force of what is happening on the screen - the dog is reenacting famous movie scenes - much better than could have been done by a literal translation.    

I have read essays by Douglas Hofstadter about this kind of translation; the concept comes up a lot in different permutations throughout his work, especially in his book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.  The subtitling in the  Roadside Romeo trailer is perhaps more precisely viewed as an analogy than as a translation.  And yet, if the purpose of a translation is to convey the meaning and intent of the original to speakers of a different language, then the Roadside Romeo trailer is perfectly rendered; it is not a linguistic translation only, but also a cultural translation. 

(A separate question is raised as to whether the cultural translation is required; arguably, even the non-Hindi-speaking members of the audience for both the trailer and the movie are likely to be well-enough versed in Hindi films to recognize that famous films are being referenced in the screen test.  I think the conceptual translation was the right choice, as it is the most inclusive and expansive.  I know that a lot of people who are relatively new to Hindi films saw Om Shanti Om and the Roadside Romeo trailer.  There is interest among some in the Hindi film industry in expanding the overseas markets for their films.  The fact that Roadside Romeo is being produced by the Hindi film production company Yash Raj Films in partnership with Walt Disney Studios adds some more data to the equation.)

 

We are all of us Simpsons

David and I saw the Simpsons movie and liked enjoyed it.  I'm not going to review it.  There are plenty of reviews out there that get it right - it's funny, it sustains, it's about as good as a good episode of the TV show.  We've been singing the "Spider pig" song all weekend -

Spider pig, spider pig
Does whatever a spider pig does
Can he swing from a web?
No he can't, he's a pig

And I've found myself quoting lines, like President Schwarzennegar's "I was elected to lead - not to read!"  So all in all it was a successful film, I think. 

The official website is the best part though - you can make yourself a Simpsons-style avatar.  Here are David and me.

Indian regional cinema: the numbers

Most people know that there are lots of movies made in India, but reports of the actual numbers tend to very widely.  It is commonly reported that "Bollywood" produces 800-1000 films a year, but this is not correct.  The error arises from a misapplication of the term Bollywood, which really refers only to the commercial sector of Hindi language films.  But there are some Hindi films that are not Bollywood - and there are films made in other languages all over India.  Bollywood only represents a small segment of the films that come out of India.

I recently came across some more authoritative numbers, reported in the LA Times:

Language	Number of films in '06	Change from '04
Telugu	245	+21%
Hindi	223	-9%
Tamil	162	+25%
Malayalam	77	+8%
Bhojpuri	76	+262%
Kannada	75	0%
Marathi	73	+30%
Other	160	+19%

Those are some interesting numbers.  Telugu films have started to outpace Hindi films, with growth in the former and reduction in the latter.  There are still plenty of Hindi films - but the growth in pretty much every other regional cinema (at least the ones broken out here - I don't know what's happening in Bengali cinema these days, for example) is a really interesting sign.  It means to a certain degree the various regions are retaining their individual linguistic and cultural traditions despite increasing globalization and the increasing use of English.  From what I have learned of India in the past few years, it strikes me that India is in a unique position to have this kind of simultaneous preservation and progress - Indians recognize that development need not come at the expense of cultural identity.  This is one of the many compelling facets of modern India. 

The Namesake

I don't often dedicate an entire GOAT post to plugging a single Filmi Geek review, but Mira Nair's The Namesake, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a lovely film that's likely to have some crossover interest (i.e., you needn't be a hardcore Indian film junkie to enjoy it), and it's playing in theaters all over the U.S. right now.  So here's a link to my review.

Busy little geek, and a small plug

Just popping in to issue a quick apology for the radio silence here at Geek of All Trades.  There's quite a bit going on. 

I've been juggling a lot of different projects at work, wearing both my patent prosecutor hat and my litigator hat.  I'm starting to have a strong opinion about which of those hats fits me better. 

Also, my Hindi class has resumed, with a vengeance; it now meets twice a week, and I'm lucky if I can manage to get to half the sessions.  I'm taking the class more for the social opportunities it offers than for language learning; the class isn't challenging me at all at this point, but I've made so many excellent friends from it that it just makes me happy to go.

David and I have resumed our efforts to get our house remodeled, and this time it's really going to happen, though we are still in the planning and talking and "dear lord it's really going to cost that much" stage.   I will have updates as they occur - once they start tearing our home apart you will definitely hear about it here. 

Those of you who care what I have to say about Hindi films as well as the sundry random topics I toss up here will have noticed that things have not been quite as quiet over at Filmi Geek.  Keeping things going over there does take some time.  There's more, too - I'm also now writing for the South Asian Films section at the relatively new Jaman website.  Jaman is several things.  It's a source to download high-quality movies from all over the world - not just India, I promise.  But perhaps even more importantly, it's a community for people who love to talk about movies, who watch movies and who make them.  Jaman is in a growing phase now, and it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, so please stop by and have a look. 

That's all for now.  More substance to come in the future. 

Juzo Itami's Tampopo

I've always loved the Japanese film Tampopo, ever since I first saw it when I was in high school, shortly after its original release.  Sometimes described as a "noodle western," the film intersperses its main story - a woman's quest to make the perfect bowl of noodles - is interspersed with tiny vignettes that explore the many and varied roles of food in the lives of humans.

These roles are diverse, but they are all essential - the film fugues on food and business, food and sex, food and death, food and culture, just to name a few.  In one vignettes, a group of salarymen attend a lavish French restaurant.  Each orders the exact same simple meal that the boss has selected - right down to the drink.  At the end of the table, though, a young man dares to flout the unwritten rules of business, engaging in a thorough dialogue with the waiter about every nuance of the menu before ordering a rich, exotic meal.  In another vignette, a dying woman's last act is to prepare a simple fried rice for her family, which they eat, sobbing frantically, as she collapses and dies at the foot of the table.  It sounds horrible, and it is - but somehow there is also a dark humor, a wry mood that permeates even the most outlandish scenes in the film. 

It is in the film's main story, though, that the late filmmaker Juzo Itami's knack for creating quirky characters really shines.  It begins when two itinerant truckdrivers duck into a roadside noodle shop on a rainy night.  Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a gruff and manly, sports a cowboy hat and moves with the deliberate languidness of a man who has spent a lot of time on his own - he is probably the reason for the "noodle western" epithet.  Goro's sidekick Gun (Ken Watanabe) is more sprightly and energetic, but less philosophical.  The noodle shop is owned and run by Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), a sad, struggling single mother.  After Goro criticizes her noodles she begs him to help her make them better, and so begins their quest.  They conduct reconnaissance missions to competing noodle shops, peering through windows and bribing or tricking employees into giving up the secrets of their toothsome noodles or flavorful broths.  They collect a rag-tag bunch of allies as well - an elderly chef who is a master of broth, a driver who also happens to make the best noodles in town, a contractor willing to spiff up the shop's interior.  Tampopo trains with Olympic fervor, obsessively focused on that perfect bowl of noodles.

The story and its characters are delightfully peculiar.  Everyone has an opinion on what makes a perfect noodle - this is not merely a matter of taste and texture, but of philosophy, the very stuff of existence.  That is why the vignettes sprinkled throughout the film work so well, despite their disconnect from Tampopo's quest - they illustrate and expand upon the musings of Goro and his friends.

Some people probably don't care for the genre of "food movies" - I guess I am not one of those people, as films like Eat Drink Man Woman and Big Night, as well as Tampopo, consistently figure among my favorites.  Food is obviously essential to life, but it is also so much more than that - a decadent pleasure, a focus of family and social life, a defining aspect of culture and ethnicity.  Tampopo illuminates the many facets of the relationship between people and their food, from all angles.    

It was a great treat to finally obtain this film on DVD. I believe there must have been a dispute over distribution rights following Juzo Itami's death, because for many years there were no new copies available in the US and the film is so wonderful and popular that used copies on Amazon or eBay were going for as much as $300.  I was pleased to discover recently that Amazon is now carrying an import edition from Japan for a very reasonable price.  (It does have English subtitles, and I had no trouble playing it in my US DVD player, though some of the user comments suggest these might be problems).   When I got this DVD I watched Tampopo for the first time in perhaps ten years, and was delighted to find that I not only remembered nearly every scene, but that I still enjoyed every bit as much as the first time I saw it. 

More international note for Filmi Geek

I mentioned almost two months ago now that my Hindi movie blog Filmi Geek was a highlighted as a "Featured Blog" by my bloghost Typepad. 

Now it has also been featured here, in Typepad's German version of the "Featured Blogs" blog. 

My German isn't quite as good as my Hindi, so I had to rely on Google's translator to get the gist of what this feature says about me:

Bollywood cinema - who thinks there only of heart pain strips for hours and handpainted film posters, is exactly correct with Carla Levy: in its English-language Blog Filmi Geek shows it, what hides itself still in such a way everything behind this term. Films for Bollywood Einsteiger, classical authors and English-language productions are presented; five decades Hindi film, crime film classical author such as Don, Arthouse trips such as park Avenue and films from other regions such as Ghare Baire pass revue. Listings after star and alphabet round Filmi Geek off to the purposeful search.

This is quite nice.  I particularly like the phrase "Arthouse trips."   

There seem to be quite a few Bollywood fans in Germany - I have discovered an entire webring of German language Bollywood blogs (does anyone still use the term "webring"?  It sounds so 1999 to me and evokes memories of flagrant abuse of the HTML 1.0 "flash" tag), and I am lucky to count many of their authors among Filmi Geek's readership. 

A very filmi Christmas

Christmas is, for us, just another day off - we don't have big family parties to attend or anything like that - so we just had a gigantically lazy three-day weekend.  I cooked a little, and we took a couple of walks, but mostly we sat around like bumps on a log. 

My big accomplishment of the weekend?  I watched four Hindi movies, and reviewed them all over at my other blog, Filmi Geek. 

Kaifi aur main

I promise this will be my last post about Shabana Azmi for a little while.  I said earlier that I would tell you a little about her show, Kaifi aur main; if you want to read my impressions of it, they are available in this post on my other blog, Filmi Geek.

(Shabana and her father, Kaifi Azmi.)

More on Shabana ji and Javed sahib

I mentioned a couple of days ago my excitement at meeting my favorite Hindi film actress, the brilliant, talented, and beautiful woman who started it all for me, Shabana Azmi.  This came about because Shabana jii and her husband, the revered screenwriter and songwriter Javed Akhtar, are in the United States touring a show they have put together about Shabana's father, who was also a famous poet.  I saw the show as well, and I'll tell you about that later.  The day before the show, Shabana and Javed made a hastily-arranged appearance at Harvard, which is where I met her and took the pictures I posted the other day. 

I found myself face-to-face with Shabana not long after I arrived at the venue; she was sitting inconspicuously on a couch and I walked up behind her unknowingly after spotting my Hindi teacher Naseem jii nearby.  I looked down at Shabana, she looked up at me, and my brain short-circuited; I think I managed to say "Hello, how are you?" and she responded politely.  My teacher introduced us.  "Shabana jii," she said in Hindi, "this is Carla, one of my students; she loves you very much."  She shook my hand, which was warm and sweating, I later realized.  She asked me a couple of polite questions; I was incapable of thinking of anything intelligent to say, and then it was over. 

I returned to my seat behind her and just watched and listened as she interacted with other people who came by to say hello; some fans, some friends.  I had the completely surreal experience of listening to her exchange email addresses with my teacher; that felt more like something I would have witnessed in a dream than in real life.  Eventually she and Javed took their places at the front of the room and the event was underway.  They were there, they said, to listen to what was on students' minds, so they opened the floor immediately, without any prepared remarks, for questions about art and activism, the twin foci of both their lives.

I took copious notes on the presentation, and I wrote them up for my friends at BollyWHAT?  I also want to present them to you here, but they are quite long, so they continue below the jump.