Second Run’s second Jan Němec film is released today, complete with a video appreciation from Peter Hames and a booklet essay from yours truly. None of the reviewers have spotted this yet, but a fair chunk of the second half was essentially recycled from the booklet for The Party and the Guests – though I gave the text a thorough going-over and updated the story of Němec’s career to include his latest film, The Ferrari Dino Girl (2008).

The DVD presented an interesting challenge that I hadn’t come across before, which is to do with potentially over-zealous subtitling. The Czech DVD (released by Filmexport Home Video) subtitles all the film’s spoken content in English – which might seem exemplary, but for the fact that the film is in Czech and German, and part of the overall feeling of disorientation towards the end of the film comes from the fact that the boys don’t seem to understand their captors. Interestingly, the hard-of-hearing subtitles also offered by the Czech disc simply transcribe what’s being said – i.e. the Czech is presented in Czech, the German in German, so the German dialogue is not translated for Czech audiences in any form. Given that there’s so little spoken content in the film, it might seem perverse to deliberately omit subtitles, but there did genuinely seem to be a case for it here.

In the end, Second Run consulted Němec himself, to find out which lines he specifically intended to be understood by an English-speaking audience, and the final subtitles reflect that.

Reviews

• The Digital Fix (Clydefro Jones);
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson);
• DVD Outsider (L.K. Weston);
• Mubi (Glenn Kenny);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.