In his latest Film Socialisme, the legendary Swiss-French film director Jean-Luc Godard played a little avantgarde game with subtitles leaving his audience baffled and causing a wide range of reactions amongst the critics, some of which stormed out during the screening.
The movie is a "symphony in three movements", a multilingual collage of fragments set on a cruise ship visiting Egypt, Odessa, Israel, Greece, Naples and Barcelona.
And what is the fuss all about, you might be wondering?
Well, what is seen on screen is very different from what is heard.
The English subtitles don't follow the original but are a made-up version of the French dialogues. No subject-verb-object constructions. Just keywords, clusters of words, slogans, neologisms.
Godard's slogan in one of his recent interviews was "Don't translate, learn languages". A left-wing European intellectual's stance on our new globalised era where people from different cultures are brought together by English as a lingua franca.
Watch the longest and the shortest of the 6 trailers available for the film:
