The Foreign Film Name Game

It's rough being a fan of foreign films. It's a very niche product, which often means that you have to pay a premium for access, having to wait longer for access, and having to worry about things like crummy translations and eye-rolling marketing tactics. Especially with the older films, sometimes it can be tough just identifying a movie as the one you're looking for. In fact, one of the most basic issues that I've run across lately, trying to watch and catalogue foreign films, is what to do about titles.

For instance, I just watched Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day," a Chinese language film about life in post-War Taiwan. "A Brighter Summer Day" is the official English title. The original Chinese title is "Gǔ lǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn," which translates directly as "The Murder Incident of the Boy on Guling Street." In this case, the choice is pretty simple. All the major film databases including IMDB and Wikipedia use "A Brighter Summer Day" as the title. When the film has its long-awaited Criterion edition release, I can expect to search for it on Amazon under the title "A Brighter Summer Day."

However, what to do about other movies where it's not clear which title is the correct one? Some foreign films don't have English translated titles, at least not ones that stuck. Federico Fellini's classic "La Strada" literally means "The Road," but everyone just calls it "La Strada." To call it "The Road" would invite confusion with at least half a dozen other films. The same is true for Fellini's "I Vitelloni," Edward Yang's "Yi Yi," and Michaelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura," and Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali." More recently, Michael Haneke's "Amour" was listed in a few places with the helpful alternate title "Love," when it was playing festivals earlier last year, but "Amour" is the title that stuck.

Then you have the titles that have been translated multiple ways. The Glauber Rocha film "Terra em Transe" proved difficult to track down until I realized that the translation of the title that I had, "Land in Anguish," isn't the commonly accepted one. I should have been looking for "Entranced Earth." Then there was Rocha's "O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro," which translates to "The Dragon of Evil Against the Warrior Saint," but in the United States, it was released under the name of its main character, "Antonio Das Mortes." Children's films are especially prone to creative retitling. The French animated film, "Le Roi et l'oiseau," literally "The King and the Bird," has been known by at least five other English titles alone.

Sometimes this problem also crops up for non-foreign films, which might be released under different titles in different markets. The most famous is probably the British Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger fantasy film "A Matter of Life and Death," which was released in the Unites States as "Stairway to Heaven," because the distributor didn't want the word "Death" in the title. The 1941 version of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" was originally released as "All That Money Can Buy," and has also been known as "Mr. Scratch," "Daniel and the Devil," and "Here Is a Man." There's a lengthy Wikipedia page devoted solely to cataloging media that have different titles in the US and UK.

Attempts at correcting mistranslations don't tend to go very well. Some film historians put of a fuss a few years back that "Ladri di biciclette" should not have been translated as "The Bicycle Thief," but as "Bicycle Thieves." There's continuing debate over which is the more appropriate title of the film, though both have become accepted. Then there's "The 400 Blows," which is a correct literal translation of "Les quatre cents coups," but misses the meaning of the French idiom, which is "to raise hell." Once a title has stuck, it tends to stay stuck, and it's only in the rare case of a really odd or inappropriate title – like "The Thief and the Cobbler" becoming "Arabian Knight" – that they might revert over time.

The long and the short of it is, there's no rhyme or reason to the name game. Trying to catalog films consistently based only on one approach or another is an exercise in futility. You simply have to accept that one film from a foreign director will have a translated title, and the next one may not, depending on the whims of the distributors, the marketers, and occasionally even the audiences. Fortunately we are living in the age of the internet, and alternate titles are simple to find. Also, films with multiple titles are usually listed with AKAs to make things easier on confused viewers.

In spite of all the remaining hassles, it's much easier to be a foreign film fan now than it has ever been, and I've been happy to take advantage of that.
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