Fellini Satyricon (Frederico Fellini, 1969)
what to say about this sprawling fever dream of a movie? idk, really. it's gorgeous, i love the color and vitality that it gives to the ancient world; i love how it has ruins and fragments from earlier times, reminding us that even antiquity had its own antiquity; i love the linguistic mishmash (though i strongly dislike the way this was presented on my Criterion disc), reminding us that in Rome, just as in any large modern city, people from all over were there, living their lives, which were not always or even usually legible to any other random person. i love seeing people with so many different lives, abled and disabled, fat and thin, of any color you can imagine, never being portrayed as lesser or freakish for it, they're just there, and it's beautiful.
on the language: the primary language of the film is Italian, but there's a lot of Latin, some of it fairly prominent (most notably in the play at the beginning of the film), and smatterings of German and Greek, along with what i am pretty sure are gibberish sounds given just enough structure to sound like a language. Criterion subtitled the Italian in English, and nothing else got captions at all, not even my despised [speaking foreign language]. captions and subtitles, in my opinion, should be used to give people that can't understand the language being spoken an equivalent experience to those who can; even if the normative viewer is presumed to be monolingual and hearing, they can obviously hear something other than [speaking foreign language] when another language is spoken: the words should be written in that language (and of course some viewers will know that language, and understand the words, whether written or spoken!). gibberish should still be transcribed, even if you can't read all of the subtitle in the time it's on screen, that's a similar experience to hearing something and being able to parse out a few syllables but not the whole thing. but what frustrated me the most in this was that i simply can't imagine the experience of a native Italian speaker hearing Latin to be similar to a native English speaker hearing Latin; much more of Italian is derived from Latin than English is! of course they're not going to have perfect fluency but i would imagine they'll pick up much more of it than i can. what i really would have loved to see (and what would obviously have been a lot of work! i understand why they didn't do this, even though i'm disappointed by it!) would for the Latin to be translated to something like Middle English for the subtitles: something that a monolingual speaker of the modern language can, if they try, get a general sense of the meaning of, even if they're missing nuances. that feels much closer to me to what a speaker of Italian experiences when hearing spoken Latin.