A Still from CAMP (2011)
film. The subtitle traditionally embodies a contradiction: it glosses the cipher of the foreign but visually intrudes in the image that the voice aims to illuminate. The educated native-English experience of watching a foreign film entails a subtly racist self-congratulation in which the foreign is reduced to a coy alternative form of the viewer’s native language.
Stigmart: What's the role of voice over in CAMP? We have found really interesting the use of Mandarin... Peter Freund: Without explanation, the space of the voice-over is split in CAMP between Mandarin and Arabic narrators. My naïve aim was to de-center the euro-centric narrative at an implicit level. But I had a problem with the standard formula of simply reversing center and margin. Introducing the two languages became a way to triangulate the narrative by suggesting a center/margin beyond the European center: namely, a Chinese and an Arab vantage point. In CAMP, the young Mandarin narrator shows an overt indifference to the subject at hand, while the Arabic narrator implicitly points up what the narrative obviously lacks for the Arab (e.g. Palestinian).
The fundamental conceit of CAMP is of course stipulated only through the English (it doesn’t work in Mandarin or Arabic), which turns the cipher/gloss hierarchy a bit upside down. As a nod to the Arabic and Mandarin speaker, there are moments in CAMP where the subtitle in fact doesn’t translate the voice. The twist here is a bit clumsy. Probably I’ve handled the question of translation more elegantly in other work, for example, Acorus Calamus (2009). Stigmart: It could be considered a specious question, however, we have to do it: what has been the reaction of the audience to
At another level the narrative space is split between voice and subtitle. This decision follows my interest in the effect of translation in
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