To read or not to read

Reading subtitles while watching a film is always distracting. But I don’t mind making an exception for Shakespearean films

Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy in Hamlet

It has always irritated me when I see English subtitles for English language movies in the cinema or on television — a practice prevalent in some parts of India and Asia. Inadvertently, reading subtitles while watching a film in a language you can understand is always distracting. If you try and keep your eyes on the top half of the screen, there is the risk of losing some critical detail at the bottom. At the risk of annoying my English professor, I make only one exception to this — film versions of Shakespeare plays. In 2016, the whole world will be celebrating ‘Shakespeare 400’, a year-long cultural programme marking 400 years since the Bard’s death. I will kick off my personal commemoration by revisiting Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964), in Russian with English subtitles.

In Bangalore (as she was called then) in the 1980s, the Karnataka Chalachitra Academy used to screen classics of world cinema at Badami House on Mondays. Seating was limited and first-come, first-served. It was there, seated on the floor as I’d arrived too late to catch a seat, I drank in Kozintsev’s masterpiece for the first time. Shot in stunning, high-contrast black and white, the film brought alive and enhanced my English professor’s declamations during class. No mention of Hamlet is complete without the soliloquy. Kozintsev takes his time before the famous words. Tidal waves lash a rocky coastline before settling down. The soaring score gives way to something more ominous and then, the gooseflesh moment when we see actor Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, playing Hamlet, on screen. We hear the soliloquy and read the subtitles, but incredibly, Smoktunovskiy does not declaim the lines. He does not speak. His lips do not move. He fixes the camera with a basilisk stare and then gazes out to sea. The rest of the soliloquy plays out over Smoktunovskiy walking away towards the rocks and climbing up steps cut into the escarpment.

This was a revelation for me. Though actors usually speak to themselves, and thereby to the audience, during soliloquies, Kozintsev’s brilliance lies in interpreting the phrase ‘unspoken reflections’, part of the very definition of the term soliloquy, by having the actor speak it but using it as a voice-over. And there, just like that, I could never watch English language versions of Shakespeare with any degree of comfort ever again, with the honourable exception of Orson Welles’

Macbeth (1948), as the towering actor/director imbued the Bard with the same sense of drama that Kozintsev brought to

Hamlet and later

King Lear (1971). I recently tried watching Michael Almereyda’s

Cymbeline (2014) with Ethan Hawke and Ed Harris, but the spoken text as opposed to subtitles that take me back to English class just did not work for me.

Before writing this piece, I googled Badami House and found in the pages of this very newspaper that the Karnataka Chalachitra Academy is moving premises within the next three months due to legal issues. It is the end of an era.