A picture can really tell you more than words could describe.
What would you say though? Turn a foreign film on mute, or let it go?
Do you think it will be distracting or what?
Monday, September 26, 2011
To mute, or not to mute?
There are plenty of ways that you can watch a film to mess around with your sense. I usually just watch a movie. That's it. Over the weekend, I was assigned to watch the movie "Che" for my Spanish Caribbean class. The whole movie was in Spanish. I don't speak spanish. I'm not positive if it's easier to watch a movie in a different language, or just turn it on mute. The constant fast talking took away from the movie a little. In high school, I took three years of Spanish but translating that movie would probably be the most difficult level of Spanish that I've ever encountered. I spent more time thinking about what some of the words meant than actually paying attention to what was going on in the movie. Once I started paying more attention to the visuals, and not the words, it became a lot easier for me to understand what was going on in the movie.
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Subtitles?
ReplyDeleteI feel like those are distracting. Like I'm paying too much attention to reading, and not enough attention on the actual scene.
ReplyDeleteI honestly disagree with the idea of muting a film- whether you can understand it or not. (Besides the fact that if you are watching it for a Spanish class, isn’t the point for you to be able to become more fluent in the language?) I think, though, that a film is not just about the pretty pictures, nor is it just about the words that are spoken. Whether or not you understand the words that are being said, you hear the emotion that is being put into the words by the actor. Also, music plays a very important part in film...whether it gives a sense of foreboding, sadness, joy, celebration, etc. I mean..there are silent films for a reason, and when the films aren’t silent films, there is obviously a reason for the audio. I think that to just mute the film would be deliberately ignoring some of the signals that the director placed into the work.
ReplyDeleteLa vita รจ bella (Life Is Beautiful), completely in Italian, is one of the most intense and impactful movies that I have ever seen. The fact that I have never taken Italian in my life did make it difficult to understand everything that was being said, but the feeling behind the words spoke volumes above the words themselves.
It's not a spanish language class. It's a seminar class. It wasn't really fair that we had to watch it I don't think. There are only three kids that don't speak spanish in the class. I study German, not Spanish.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what the teacher was expecting the class to gain from it then, but I do think that regardless of what language, you can take a lot from audio besides just what the words mean.
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