Review

http://www.newstatesman.com/200501010060

New Statesman
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Sukhdev Sandhu
Published 01 January 2005

Subtitles: on the foreignness of filmEdited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour MIT Press, 544pp, £22.95ISBN 0262050781

Ultimately, and this is what makes the book so rich and resonant, to talk about subtitles is to talk about the boundaries that we construct, or that are constructed for us, to separate the local from the foreign, "us" from "them". Amresh Sinha even argues that subtitles themselves are illegal aliens in the republic of cinema, existing "on the borderline between image and voice. They remain pariahs, outsiders, in exile from the imperial territoriality of the visual regime." Other writers des-cribe them as "symptomatic, foreign-body disturbances" and, pointing to the high proportion of subtitlers who are Jewish, speculate about the relationship between nomadism and multilingualism.

Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city is published in paperback by Perennial