에릭 로메르의 <웨일즈인 페르스발>을 통해 본 자막번역의 난제: 말과 시각이미지의 관계에 대한 사례연구

Abstract

The French film director Eric Rohmer, who was a literature teacher and novelist himself, explored the relationship between the novel and film, speech and images during his career that lasted for around 50 years. Particularly, his early works that helped him gain reputation as a director were all adapted from novels. Among his many adaptation films, this study examines Perceval (1979) which was adapted from one of the oldest French novels, Chrétien de Troyes's 12th-century Arthurian romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail. After Rohmer himself translated this medieval romance written in verse into modern French verse, he used this text almost without any changes. This means that the characters of the film speak not only in dialogues but also in the third person’s narrative for descriptions and narratives that are spoken in the third person's narrative in the novel after designating themselves as the third person. As a result of this exceptional experiment where the narrator role is given to (assigned to) characters instead of a camera in the film, the familiar relationship between speech and image is broken in this film. With this change, Deleuze discovers some features of the modern film (or the second stage of sound movie). According to Deleuze, no longer do speech and visual images interact with each other directly, but begins to make a relationship freely and indirectly. Then, the problem left for the translators and translation researchers are largely condensed into two. The first problem has to do with how to translate this exceptional experiment of Eric Rohmer. Second, a self-assessment of our perception of subtitling that still remains at the level of classical sound movies, although contemporary films have already absorbed the outcomes of such film experiments that are more than 30 years old.