When it comes to subtitled films, there’s what happens in your brain, and there’s what happens in the entertainment business. “When you’re watching a subtitled movie, you have to be engaged with the screen and be more attached, but once you engage with that, you can have as rich an experience as if it were your language,” he said.
Rather, the extra work does not necessarily detract from the experience the movie has to offer, he said. The need to read to understand what is going on means you have to use other parts of your brain, according to Tim Smith, an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Birkbeck, University of London.īut there is no scientific proof that the extra cognitive load is what keeps people from plopping down in front of a screen to read and watch a subtitled movie, Smith said. “That information includes what the words are and how they are ordered but also information about pitch and amplitude, which tells you a lot about emotional expression,” he added. “Whenever you are watching a movie there is a whole orchestra’s worth of things happening in your brain,” said Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychology and brain science at Washington University. Dubbing, in which speech in the target audience’s language replaces the original dialogue, is an easier alternative, some say.Īnd it’s true that watching a movie with subtitles is cognitively different than watching one without, experts say. ‘Drive My Car’: In this quiet Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”įor people who dislike subtitles, common complaints have been that they distract from the action onscreen, are hard to focus on, or that reading them can feel like work if a plot is complicated.‘Passing’: Set in the 1920s, the movie centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white.
The second factor, they say, is Netflix itself.
The first is a 2016 rule from the Federal Communications Commission that made it mandatory for a TV show that has been captioned for broadcast to also be captioned when it is posted online or on a streaming service such at Netflix or Hulu. Researchers credit the shift in part to two factors. Over the same period, as streaming services have replaced network and cable television, subtitles have also gained a stronger toehold on smaller screens, from cellphones to TV sets.
The film joined a small group of subtitled films that have broken through to mainstream success in Hollywood over the last two decades, like “Roma” (2018), “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), “Amelie” (2001) and “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” (2000), a Chinese drama that earned $128 million, making it the highest grossing foreign language film in the United States. Even before “Parasite,” a thriller about the class divide in South Korea, took off, there were signs that things had begun to shift for subtitled entertainment in the United States.