🦋 Opening shot
 I'm finding myself annoyed and puzzled by a bit of subtitling at the beginning of Heimat. Long, beautiful tracking shot without dialog (is this a German thing originally, or is it borrowed from Westerns?*) -- the young man is walking home from war to his village -- and then the view switches to a young woman in the village looking out the window, seeing him come, and says to an older woman, exactly what I'm not completely sure but it sure sounds like, "Ist das niemals Paul?" -- I don't know this idiom but it sure sounds like it would mean something like "Hey, isn't that Paul?" and not, as the subtitlists assure us, "Isn't that Paul Simon?" Why give us this bit of information, that the characters last name is Simon? This is going to be important certainly but there's no reason to cast it in there... And of course it is distracting because of the name being what it is. It seems like very frequently in the first half hour or so, somebody will say "Paul" and it will be subtitled with his family name.
 Aargh, never mind, what the characters are saying is of course "der Simons Paul" -- the subtitles were doing the right thing if I would only let them work. * Well according to Alan Bracchus, the technique has been around as long as the medium of film; but he says "perhaps the first true, universally-accepted ‘long tracking shot’ is Orson Welles’ opening shot in Touch of Evil (1958)." I guess I am associating this technique with German directors because I've watched a lot of German movies lately.
posted evening of Monday, January 18th, 2010
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