Open-captioned movies

Liar, Liar

Seen: 1997.06.07

I almost did not notice, in the repertory cinema listings, that an outfit called Deaf Canada Today was to sponsor an open-captioned screening of Liar, Liar at the massive but dilapidated Bloor Cinema in Toronto. The ad clearly said Tripod Captioned Films.

There were 2:00 and 4:00 shows. I went to the former, and fewer than 50 others were present. I walked in, with some trepidation. A hearing guy instantly pegged me as also hearing (let’s face it, many deaf people look deaf) and handed me an evaluation sheet even though I hadn’t seen the film yet, asking me to fill it out. The guy started talking with a very old and apparently hearing man who whirred in on a scooter, explaining that the movie had “closed captions” so the old man could follow along with it. One did not expect naïve walk-in traffic to this showing.

The first film was a short, Edda’s Song, featuring a 20ish woman in a leather jacket talking, via ASL, with her grandma Edda. The song in question was gestural and was not rendered into subtitles, though the other scanty dialogue was. The sound man (sic) on the movie later worked for Sony Music, where he and I had a very interesting discussion about the crappy captioning on Sony Music Canada videos, and now he directs his own vids. It’s a small world after all, etc.

The movie Liar, Liar started with offscreen voices (many – a teacher and students), none of them identified. I should point out to readers that I haven’t seen open-captioned anything, except for decoded closed-captions, since roughly 1980, and I’ve never seen an open-captioned movie in a theatre. (From what I can tell, virtually no one else in Toronto has, either. This may have been the first showing ever.) I was at my most alert in an effort to evaluate the captioning mindset at work. Observations:

The captions were actually subtitles. A credit at the end clearly IDed the creators or the “laser captions” as Cinetyp, Los Angeles.
There was very much a subtitling bias at work. I personally tire of the entrenched malapropisms of subtitling, which I intend to reform, by destroying the existing techniques if necessary. Here Cinetyp gave us milky-white letters (laser-cut right into the film stock?), nearly always set at bottom centre. During the opening credits, some creative positioning was necessary, and even though the letters were bigger than the Goudy uppercase type in the credits, they were still hard to read.

There was no attempt, really, to move captions to denote who’s speaking. When that did happen, blocks were left-justified (a Line 21 perversion forced by the inept design of the system), and generally the captions after the first moved caption ended up back at bottom centre. This, of course, is one of the Canadian captioners’ many bad habits, and maybe we now know where they got the idea.

This is not trivial. Anyone who suggests otherwise either doesn’t take in a lot of information in visible words or doesn’t know captioning or both. If you can’t hear, you cannot always tell who’s speaking without some kind of cue. The only explicit speaker IDs were written [IN CAPITALS] and on the same line as the rest of the caption. Such IDs were rare, usually reserved for audio playback from an unseen voice.
Another subtitling annoyance is finishing every caption that does not end with punctuation with an ellipsis, ..., as though we’re too stupid to know that some subsequent caption will carry end punctuation. It’s unnecessary, it confuses the use of the ellipsis with pauses or trailing off, and it’s an insult to the intelligence. (We see it all the time in Captions, Inc. work.)
Songs were captioned very weirdly indeed. Cinetyp borrowed the Line 21 staffnote look. All lyrics were set in italics for no good reason. I saw all these formats –
- | Happy birthday to you |
- Happy birthday to you
- Happy birthday to you ||
- | Happy birthday to you
– where | is a single and || is a double staffnote (eighth and sixteenth notes). There was no clear reason for this divergence. Anyway, we tire of the NCI pretension of using a double staffnote to denote the end of a song. There is too much of an emphasis on collapsing unclear nonverbal information onto punctuation.
Captions used a gratingly cute Telidonism is the use of a dilatating telephone icon instead of the simple phrase [Phone ringing]. The phone icon doesn’t look much like a phone (much less like a cellphone – a skiamorph at work here), its flashing is a distraction, and it is simply tack. (Skiamorphs are terms evoking technologies that have since become outdated, like blackboards that are green or dialing a modem which has no dial.)
Only one font was used. It’s an undifferentiated grotesk, similar, to untrained eyes, to Helvetica, but more like Arial, the debased Monotype/Microsoft Helvetica knockoff. The quotation-mark character is neutral and the left stroke sits lower than the right. Interestingly, font sizes were used to denote SCREAMING! which is not unacceptable. We dearly need better speaker IDs and positioning, and a background behind the characters, or at least a switch to yellow type, which floats legibly above nearly everything. (Cinetyp and Captions, Inc. do use yellow type for home-video subtitling on occasion.)
A typo here and there was seen. Also, there was a too-slavish reliance on narrow phonetic transcription: “going to,” “want to,” etc. were all rendered as “gonna,” “wanna,” etc.

Interestingly, the queue outside for the 4:00 show numbered a good hundred, nearly all of them signing away. I kept to myself. Looking forward to the next open-captioned showing.