Subtitles

Last night I watched a Swedish film (no, no, no, not THAT sort of Swedish film) – ‘A Man Called Ove’. Unsurprisingly, because the film was Swedish, the dialogue was in Swedish and so I watched it with subtitles switched on. Now, I am not a huge one for foreign language film or TV although I have recently watched three series of ‘The Killing’ (Danish), two series of ‘The Bridge’ (Swedish) and a few episodes of ‘Inspector Montalbano’ (Italian) and so watching programmes with subtitles isn’t something I do often or something I have thought about much before.

Anyway, once the film had finished it immediately struck me that I had been almost completely oblivious to the fact that I was listening to dialogue in Swedish but reading subtitles in English. I FELT as if I had just been watching a film as I normally would, assimilating the dialogue without any different effort or attention than I would have done if everything had been in English. I had certainly been reading the English words and I had certainly been hearing the Swedish words but my brain had tricked me into thinking that I had just been effortlessly absorbing everything, like I had been rearing/heading AND INSTANTLY UNDERSTANDING Swenglish (for want of a better name). It was quite a weird realisation. It then occured to me that I might quite possibly PREFER watching a foreign language film with English subtitles because I suspect that to do so I had to focus more intently than usual and so had probably entered something more akin to a ‘flow’ state (at the very least a minimally distracted state of mind).

It was interesting.

Incidentally, I enjoyed the film a lot. It was tinged (understatement) with a lot of sadness but also softly and playfully humorous throughout. And it made me want to own a classic Saab car (but obviously not a Volvo…) [watch the film].