Languages ... while stoned
Sep. 29th, 2022 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomRecently, I watched several films (not all in the same evening) while stoned. The first was Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965, dir. Federico Fellini), one of my all-time favorite films. The plot concerns the titular character who finds herself having an emotional crisis rooted in her childhood, while also dealing with the suspicion her husband Giorgio is cheating on her. I've easily seen it a dozen times, including at least once on the big screen, but never before while stoned. The version I watched this time had no subtitles, but I know the plot inside and out and so was not concerned about understanding the dialogue.
Before I speak about the language in the film, there is a remarkable shot towards the beginning, starting around 4:40, that was filmed in a single take. It's only about fifty seconds, but a considerable amount of activity is going on. The shot begins with several of Juliet's friends in the front yard. They approach the house (which has the lights turned off, for a candlelit anniversary dinner) and make their entrances. The lights come on and Juliet's ditsy friend Valentina greets her in a third person POV shot. The camera then follows Valentina as she races up the stairs and looks out from the landing, then the camera pans back down as the other guests, including a psychic, greet Juliet, in an almost first person POV shot. I say almost because the psychic looks directly at the camera at first as he addresses Juliet, then he and everyone else address her as if she's standing to the immediate right of the cameraman. I have no idea if this was intentional, but in any case, with so much movement of the characters, it's quite a shot.
As for language, later in the film Valentina visits Juliet again and starts to babble incessantly about the house, the lawn, and some peppers that Juliet and her maids are preparing. And though Japanese and Italian sound nothing alike, I wondered what it would be like if I tried to listen to Valentina as if she were speaking Japanese. What happened was I felt like she was speaking some rare, offshoot dialect of Japanese, one that most Japanese people could not speak, but somehow I had the fortune of being able to understand it! (I did mention I was stoned)
The second film was Return of the Bastard Swordsman (Bu yi shen xiang, 1984, dir. Chun-Ku Lu), which was in the original Chinese with English subtitles instead of being dubbed. I don't speak a word of Chinese aside from nǐ hǎo (hello) and xièxiè (thank you). I tried to learn a little once but was completely daunted by the tones. Anyway, the Chinese spoken in Return was unlike any I'd heard before. Perhaps because it was delivered not by average people but by professional actors speaking “dramatically”, but what I heard seemed to go beyond mere words and tones. For example, at about 11:50 our hero goes to see a fortune teller. The fortune teller—and of course, it’s his job to have some dramatic flair—explains his fortune to him in the most remarkable sounding tones, including pitch bends, vocal fries, rhythmic patterns, sustained syllables, rising intonations in non-interrogative sentences, and facile changes from front to back occurring vowels, sometimes within a single syllable. The last one I find particularly intriguing—Japanese and Chinese sound nothing alike: Japanese vowels tend to be spoken at the front of the mouth, whereas Chinese vowels sound like they can occur at the front or the back. Also, Japanese doesn't have final “r” sounds, so English words like “runner” are rendered ran’na (ランナー) with a sustained final ah sound. Chinese not only sounds like it has final “r” sounds, they sound like they really growl them, like “runn-ERR”. Here's the clip from the film: I've done my best to transliterate some examples as best I can.
I'm sure to most Chinese this is all pretty mundane, but when I'm stoned everything sounds more musical, even everyday sounds like running water, so the speech in Return, particularly that of the fortune teller, sounded almost like opera!
Despite what I said in my blog about dubbers for kung fu films not using stereotypical Asian accents, they sure seemed to in Swordsman with an Umbrella (Shen san qi xia, 1970, dirs. Kan-Chuan Chen and Hung Shih)! Besides boasting a series of pretty outrageous kung fu action (for example, the hero catches multiple arrows shot at him and hurls them back, killing all the archers), the dubbing is quite laughable. There are three types of accents heard: standard Western English (presumably by Australian dubbers), stereotypical Asian (L sounds become Rs, TH sounds at the start of words become Ds, etc.), and an accent I didn't recognize at all. It might have been Dutch* as the version I saw was hard-subbed in Dutch. But in any case, these dubbers rendered “just wait here” as “she's wet here”, “this school” as “diskoo”, and “miserable” as “mizzer-rebel”. Even better, two of the characters had names that sounded like “Teens Want Sex” and “Pig Want Whore”. That, plus the fight scenes, certainly made for some good laughs. Watch it here. Note: the film title says The Magnificent Swordsman, which may be an alternate title, although there was also a 1968 martial arts film with the same name.
*Upon reflection, the dubbers for The Amsterdam Connection (He lan du ren tou, 1978, dirs. Mei Sheng Fan and Chi Lo), hitherto the most hilariously dubbed film I've ever seen, have similar accents.
Before I speak about the language in the film, there is a remarkable shot towards the beginning, starting around 4:40, that was filmed in a single take. It's only about fifty seconds, but a considerable amount of activity is going on. The shot begins with several of Juliet's friends in the front yard. They approach the house (which has the lights turned off, for a candlelit anniversary dinner) and make their entrances. The lights come on and Juliet's ditsy friend Valentina greets her in a third person POV shot. The camera then follows Valentina as she races up the stairs and looks out from the landing, then the camera pans back down as the other guests, including a psychic, greet Juliet, in an almost first person POV shot. I say almost because the psychic looks directly at the camera at first as he addresses Juliet, then he and everyone else address her as if she's standing to the immediate right of the cameraman. I have no idea if this was intentional, but in any case, with so much movement of the characters, it's quite a shot.
As for language, later in the film Valentina visits Juliet again and starts to babble incessantly about the house, the lawn, and some peppers that Juliet and her maids are preparing. And though Japanese and Italian sound nothing alike, I wondered what it would be like if I tried to listen to Valentina as if she were speaking Japanese. What happened was I felt like she was speaking some rare, offshoot dialect of Japanese, one that most Japanese people could not speak, but somehow I had the fortune of being able to understand it! (I did mention I was stoned)
The second film was Return of the Bastard Swordsman (Bu yi shen xiang, 1984, dir. Chun-Ku Lu), which was in the original Chinese with English subtitles instead of being dubbed. I don't speak a word of Chinese aside from nǐ hǎo (hello) and xièxiè (thank you). I tried to learn a little once but was completely daunted by the tones. Anyway, the Chinese spoken in Return was unlike any I'd heard before. Perhaps because it was delivered not by average people but by professional actors speaking “dramatically”, but what I heard seemed to go beyond mere words and tones. For example, at about 11:50 our hero goes to see a fortune teller. The fortune teller—and of course, it’s his job to have some dramatic flair—explains his fortune to him in the most remarkable sounding tones, including pitch bends, vocal fries, rhythmic patterns, sustained syllables, rising intonations in non-interrogative sentences, and facile changes from front to back occurring vowels, sometimes within a single syllable. The last one I find particularly intriguing—Japanese and Chinese sound nothing alike: Japanese vowels tend to be spoken at the front of the mouth, whereas Chinese vowels sound like they can occur at the front or the back. Also, Japanese doesn't have final “r” sounds, so English words like “runner” are rendered ran’na (ランナー) with a sustained final ah sound. Chinese not only sounds like it has final “r” sounds, they sound like they really growl them, like “runn-ERR”. Here's the clip from the film: I've done my best to transliterate some examples as best I can.
I'm sure to most Chinese this is all pretty mundane, but when I'm stoned everything sounds more musical, even everyday sounds like running water, so the speech in Return, particularly that of the fortune teller, sounded almost like opera!
Despite what I said in my blog about dubbers for kung fu films not using stereotypical Asian accents, they sure seemed to in Swordsman with an Umbrella (Shen san qi xia, 1970, dirs. Kan-Chuan Chen and Hung Shih)! Besides boasting a series of pretty outrageous kung fu action (for example, the hero catches multiple arrows shot at him and hurls them back, killing all the archers), the dubbing is quite laughable. There are three types of accents heard: standard Western English (presumably by Australian dubbers), stereotypical Asian (L sounds become Rs, TH sounds at the start of words become Ds, etc.), and an accent I didn't recognize at all. It might have been Dutch* as the version I saw was hard-subbed in Dutch. But in any case, these dubbers rendered “just wait here” as “she's wet here”, “this school” as “diskoo”, and “miserable” as “mizzer-rebel”. Even better, two of the characters had names that sounded like “Teens Want Sex” and “Pig Want Whore”. That, plus the fight scenes, certainly made for some good laughs. Watch it here. Note: the film title says The Magnificent Swordsman, which may be an alternate title, although there was also a 1968 martial arts film with the same name.
*Upon reflection, the dubbers for The Amsterdam Connection (He lan du ren tou, 1978, dirs. Mei Sheng Fan and Chi Lo), hitherto the most hilariously dubbed film I've ever seen, have similar accents.
