Different Eyes…. Different Views….

One of the many reasons I like/love foreign movies (essentially anything outside of Anglo-American as American culture and British culture are similar in SO many ways) is that they often tell the same kinds of stories in very different ways. You don’t have to go as far as Chinese action films or Japanese Anime to get that feeling, just watch a French comedy or Russian SF film to see what I mean. Different cultures can see things in very different ways and this starts you thinking about your own culture differently. Things that you took for granted, tropes you have seen a thousand times to subconsciously know what’s coming next stop working in predictable ways when you cross a national or notional cultural border. It’s at that point that you question the fact that the hero is always X or the baddie is always Y. Or the fact that the story progresses along path A rather than path B or that the ending resolves issue 1 and 2 but leaves issue 3 open for the audience (or the sequel) to resolve. Do stories have to work that way? Actually no, they don’t.

Now I’m the first to admit that my primary and, indeed only, language I feel in anyway happy in is English. I have a smattering of schoolboy French and can ask for various items in German, Italian, Spanish or, at a push, Portuguese. So foreign films are watched with subtitles (I hate dubbed movies with a passion) and foreign titles are read in translation. To my mind (and my ear) foreign movies need to be spoken in their natural language for the rhythm and cadence to say nothing of lip-synch issues. Good translations can get this idea across in print and I think foreign language text flows differently from both standard and American English. But even more important is the view.

Growing up in any culture you soon begin to see everything and everyone inside as normal, fixed, inevitable and even natural. Inside is safe, predictable and, by and large, understandable even at a gut level. Most of this you pick up without even realising it. You see things the way they are because that way seems right and natural. Watching a movie from a different culture and especially one with a different language or reading a book translated into English (in my case) breaks that normality. The words are printed in English but the culture behind the words doesn’t think in English and, if you’re paying attention, it shows in the narrative. It might be a fantasy novel, an adventure book or a spy novel but there’s something definitely different about it. Even if you didn’t know who it was by or even knew the title you’d quickly clue into the fact that it wasn’t penned by a British (or American) author. There’s something ‘off’ about it, something different, something odd. It’s a bit like those glasses you can get that bend the light so you’re seeing things upside down or at a weird angle. It takes some getting used to but, with practice, you can get around OK. Then when you take the glasses off there’s a period of disorientation and reorientation before reverting to normal. But something has changed. Now you know you can see things through glasses that bend reality, that reality is constructed in the brain rather than outside in the world. Likewise after reading books in translation you see the world slightly ‘off’ before returning to the normal world again but this time knowing that how you see the world depends on where you stand. With practice you can bend the world without needing to wear the glasses and see things as others see them. Then you see that normal is a perspective and that common is a point of view. Seeing through other eyes from time to time improves your own vision as both objects and ideas can be seen clearer using many viewpoints. Try it sometime. You might be surprised.