Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film
Old Italian Songs: Wonderful to Hear, Hard to Explain
by John Aquino on 03/18/19My family on both sides is Italian, but we didn't speak Italian in the house because of the American melting pot" concept that ran through much of the 20th century and lingering prejudice against Italian-Americans. And yet, I did spend some of my youth listening to old Italian songs--on records, performed at parties, and sung at weddings. Those who have seen the movie The Godfather have heard the Neapolitan song "C'e la luna mezzo mare" sung by the mother of the bride in the opening wedding scene, and the song has been a frequent part of Italian-American wedding receptions. But translating or explaining or even singing these songs to certain audiences can be difficult because they tend to be, for want of a better word, earthy.
My Mom used to sing a song when she was cooking, and I learned it from her.
We', Marie, We', Marie,
Quanto sonno giu perso per te.
Fammi dormi, una notte abbreciata cue te.
When my wife and I were in Italy on a pilgrimage and an Italian bishops was with us, after dinner, he suggested we sing songs. Eager to show off, I started to sing, We', Marie." The bishop blushed, stammered, said, "I cannot sing that," and walked away. That was probably because the Italian lyrics, sung by a man outside of a sleeping woman's window, mean, roughly, "What long restless nights you have cost me./Let me sleep with my arms wrapped tight around you."
"C'e la luna," which was written 92 years ago, is even earthier. The Italian lyrics are
C'e la luna mezzo mare
Mamma mia maritari
Figlia mia, a cu te dari,
Mamma mia pensaci tu.
Si ci dugnu lu babberi
Iddu va, Iddu veni
' U rassolu manu teni.
Si ci pigghia la fantasia
Mi rasulia la figlia mia."
"Oh, Mama, me voglio marita.
Oh, cump a, quand bella baccala"
It's sung to a sprightly tarantella. But the lyrics translate as a dialogue between a daughter and her mother:
"There's a moon in the middle of the sea.
Mother, I must get married."
"Daughter, whom should I get for you?"
"Mother, that's up to you."
"If I give you to the barber,
He will come and go,
Go and come,
Carrying a razor in his hand.
And if it strikes his fantasy.
One day, he'll razor you."
"Oh, Mama, I want to get married.
Oh Godfather, bring on the wonderful codfish [for the wedding]."
And then the mother goes on to describe similar ends if the daughter marries the carpenter, the shoemaker, the farmer, the butcher, the fisherman, and the gardener. The outcomes sound violent, but there's sexual meaning behind each profession--the butcher has a sausage in his hand, the gardener has a cucumber, etc.
In reworking the lyrics into English, songwriters took great liberties for the American market. A version that was popular in the 1930s and 1940s was titled "Oh, Ma-Ma (The Butcher Boy)" and went like this:
"Hey, Marie,
I gotta da lamb chop,
Hey, Marie,
I gotta da pork chop,
Hey, Marie,
Marie,
Ya wanta marry me?"
"Oh, Ma-Ma!
Oh, catcha dat man-a for me.
Oh, Ma-Ma!
How happy I will be!
Oh, Ma-Ma!
I will cheery-beery be.
Oh, Ma-Ma!
It's-a the butcher boy for me."
Its pigeon-English is insulting for Italian-Americans, but it's not surprising they went simplistic given the sexual innuendo of the original. And the best they could do was "cheery-beery"?
When I was growing up, I'd hear Al Martino sing his recording of the song, titled "Lazy Mary,"which was popular then. He sings first in Italian and then, he says, he will sing the next verse in "British," with, again, lyrics that have nothing to do with the original but are insulting to Italians in a different way:
Lazy Mary,
You better get up.
She answers back,
I am not able.
Lazy Mary,
You better get up,
We need the sheets for the table.
The singer/bandleader Louis Prima came closer to the original in his English lyrics, although he only mentions the butcher boy who has a cannoli in his hand and the musician who carries a trumpet.
The original lyrics for "Ce la luna" reflect a culture that was bawdy and rough with women. There's no disguising it. Come to think of it, it was an appropriate song to begin The Godfather.
Italian lyrics, even non-earthy, non-violent ones, are also just difficult to translate. "Ce' la luna" isn't really in Italian. It's in the Neapolitan dialect with some Sicilian mixed in. I remember asking my sister Jean, who studied and studied and learned to speak Italian very well, about Dean Martin's recording of "Volare," which means "to fly." He sings some of it in Italian and the rest in English. Where the Italian lyrics go, "Nel blu, dipinto di blu/E che dici di stare lasu," Martin translates it as, "No wonder my happy heart sings,/Your love has given them wings." Even I, with my poor Italian, couldn't find any similarity between the two lyrics. Jean said that the song is about the singer being transported into the skies with his love and that earlier in the song the Italian lyrics go, "I think a dream like this never comes back,/You paint me with your hands and your face is blue,/Then suddenly I was kidnapped by the wind/And began to fly in the infinite sky." And so, the last lines, beginning "Nel blu" translate as "In blue, painted blue, [I am] happy to be there [with you]." The English lyric writers didn't try to translate this ethereal concept and instead went with lines like, "Let's fly way up to the clouds,/Away from the maddening crowds." A lot was lost.
But that's usually the way it is with translations. Something is always lost.
Copyright 2019 by John T. Aquino
Struggling with Catholic and How the Church Reasoned
by John Aquino on 03/15/19Many of us who are Catholics are struggling, A March 19, 2019 Gallup Poll showed an increasing percentage of Catholic who say they are considering leaving the church. Even some, who are not Catholics but have respect for those who are, are struggling. The struggle is an attempt to balance the history of the Roman Catholic Church, its contributions to the inner well being of human beings, its tireless efforts to feed the hungry and clothe the homeless, and its spreading the word of the Gospel throughout the world, with the recent priest pedophile scandal and cover-up.
The scandal comes down to the decision of church officials to focus on keeping the church strong and place little or no attention on helping those hurt by the actions of these priests. This line of reasoning smacks of that expressed by the brilliant but emotionless Vulcan Spock in the "Star Trek" television series and movies: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. As part of that larger context, I found myself sorting out the meaning of the terms "Jesuit" and "Jesuitical" as I understand them. Some have credited the church's reasoning in this scandal as directly or indirectly influenced by Jesuitical thinking. In December 2018, the Jesuits released their own list of members of their order suspected of sexual abuse, and there have been claims that some accused priests found a haven at Jesuit college campuses. And even here there is a struggle to balance a rich and beneficial history of Jesuit learning and selfless giving against a reputation for being cunning and emotionless--Jesuits as Vulcans?--and my own limited experiences, none of which were good. But, again, I balance that with the good experience of family members.
A Jesuit is a member of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order of priests founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, and others in 1534 to serve as missionaries for the church. The order began establishing schools soon after its founding, which today include such universities as Georgetown and Marquette. "Jesuitical" is defined in dictionaries as dissembling and equivocating like a Jesuit. Dissembling means to conceal one's true motives, and equivocation is the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid making a commitment. The background for this labeling is that in Elizabethan England, where Catholics were persecuted by the state and its Church of England, Jesuits advised them to employ equivocation to avoid the sin of lying. If they were asked, "Is there a priest in your house?", they were told to say, "I know not," with the mental reservation that the full sentence was actually, "I know not to tell you" or "My answer is no," to which they were to add mentally "to you." Those critical of Jesuits, however, describe their reasoning as sly and cunning.
If someone listens to your argument and responds, "That's very Jesuitical," it may not be a compliment. In Shakespeare's King John, based on the life of the 12th century English king, the character of Cardinal Pandulph is said to be a parody of Jesuitical thinking. In the play, Pandulph excommunicates King John and urges King Phillip of France to break away from John. Philip answers that he had sworn to support John. Pandulph replies:
All form is formless, order orderless,
Save what is opposite to England's love. . . .
For that which thou hast sworn to do amiss
Is not amiss when it is truly done,
And being not done, where doing tends to ill,
The truth is then most done not doing it.
I have seen program notes to the play describing this passage as "Jesuitical double-talk" and a parody of Jesuitical reasoning.
Having gone this far, I should note that my knowledge of Jesuits and Jesuitical reasoning is limited because, of the male members of my immediate family, I was the only one not taught by Jesuits. I have had three experiences with Jesuits.
First, when I had just graduated from college and still retained my knowledge of Latin, I heard that the division of the church responsible for translating Catholic liturgy and writings into English was looking for a translator. A practicing Catholic, I liked the idea of using my skills to help my church. I applied and went through four interviews with a Jesuit who was very encouraging. I was called back for a fifth, and the Jesuit, whose encouragement had disappeared with a suddenness that shocked by naive soul, informed me that they had decided not to waste time and money with someone like me for whom this would be his first job and to instead hire part-time an experienced translator who had worked with this particular Jesuit before. My assumption is he was misleading me to have me in hand until he signed a deal with the older man. I bumped into the man on the way out and he was thirty years older than I and smelled of alcohol. I heard later that the project had run into difficulties and delays, but I had by then started my career in journalism.
My second experience concerns a scholar I am very close to who was up for tenure at a university. The school's decision-making bodies were split, and the final decision fell to the university's president, who was a Jesuit and who had previously been supportive of the scholar, even writing in a university publication about the scholar's achievements. He decided not to grant tenure for the simple reason that there had been a division among those who were to decide. Someone would be unhappy with his ruling, he reasoned, which could make the future unhappy for the scholar. Not granting tenure was actually for the scholar's own good, he said. It's an interesting line of reasoning. Unfortunately, anyone who is familiar with the university world knows that not receiving tenure for his/her first position is a black mark in applying for other positions, and the scholar, who was and is a great teacher, never taught full-time at the university level again.
Finally, when I was between jobs, I applied for a communications director position with a Jesuit entity. Again, I liked the idea of working for my church. I interviewed four times and was called back for a fifth. There were five interviewers, three were very cordial, and the other two--a former university president and a fellow journalist--were rude and insulting to me from the moment I walked into the room. For the other three, I told stories and they laughed, I gave examples of how I would handle the position, and they nodded appreciatively. For the other two, when I said something, anything, they rolled their eyes and shifted noisily in their chairs. I received a letter just two days later informing me that they had hired an individual who had been trained by Jesuits and had worked with Jesuits before.
Other things about Jesuits come to me second-hand. My father was proud of his education at Georgetown and spoke highly of his Jesuit teachers. He was, as I have written before, the son of Italian immigrants who never learned to write English. He left home for the first time when he came to study at Georgetown, and he left with training that made him a skilled attorney who practiced for 40 years, a leading example for both his profession and his church. And the Jesuits' work in education over the centuries is a formidable achievement.
There is, I would think, much to be learned from them. And I even said this at my final interview at that Jesuit entity, I was asked how I would present what was the Jesuits had done and were doing. In my answer, which was off the top of my head, I described how for my birthday that year my wife had given me a copy of the noted British writer Evelyn Waugh's biography of Edmund Campion, an Elizabethan Jesuit who was hanged in England in 1581. My wife didn't know when she gave the book to me that I would be interviewing with this Jesuit organization. She just knew I liked reading brilliant writing. In reading it, I was struck by a passage that described how, when Campion and other Jesuits were preparing to enter England, knowing that they were likely to be hanged, they wrote their wills, at ease with the possibility of dying for their faith. Later, when preparing for my fifth interview with the Jesuit entity, I came upon an article one of the interviewers had written on the three white "freedom riders," college students who were in Mississippi in 1961 attempting to register African-Americans to vote. They were ultimately killed by Ku Klux Klan members. The article noted that before these three, brave young men left for Mississippi, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked a member of his staff if the students were prepared for the dangers they could encounter. The answer he received was: "They're writing their wills." This, I told, the five interviewers illustrates the relevance of the Jesuit story. The example of 1581 reaches out four centuries to the example of 1961 of individuals who will risk everything for what they believe.
As I wrote earlier, I didn't get the job. But I believed then, and I believe now, that, if one can come to terms with what "Jesuitical" means, there is a lot to be learned from Jesuit history. I also hope that reasoning by religious leaders that benefits the many at the expense of the few is on the way out.
Copyright 2019 by John T. Aquino
Ash Wednesday and Thoughts of a Lenten "Groundhog's Day"
by John Aquino on 03/06/19On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent on the Roman Catholic calendar, my thoughts were turned not only to the path to Easter 2019, when Lent ends, but to Lenten inspiration from the 1993 Harold Ramis' comedy Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.
The service on Ash Wednesday allows the congregation to stand and have ashes placed on their foreheads as the priest or Eucharistic minister says, "Remember, man, that though are dust and onto dust though shalt return." Actually, that passage was the only one read during the distribution process when I was growing up. Today, there is an alternate passage, which was the one read to me today: "Repent and turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel." The older sentence is a stern reminder to the congregation after they have celebrated (or over-celebrated) the night before in Marti Gras festivities on Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday. The modern passage instructs the listener to repent but also provides a ray of the hope of salvation if he or she follows the Gospel.
In the homily at Mass today, the priest urged us to not limit the Lenten things we do--penitential thoughts, contributions to the poor, periodic fasting and abstinence--to Lent but that we do them throughout the year. It is similar to the urging in a Christmas sermon not to confine Christmas thoughts to Christmas, or, as sung by Bing Crosby playing a priest in the 1959 movie Say One for Me in the title song by Sammy Cahn and Jimmie Van Heusen, "It's not the things you do at Christmastime, /But the Christmas things you do all year through."
But the priest's suggestion, for some reason caused my mind to think of the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray relives February 2nd, Groundhog Day, over and over, for months if not years, until he becomes more generous of spirit. I wondered about a "Catholic Lenten Groundhog Day" in which an individual wakes up and finds it is Lent every day. Every day there is little joy, the colors are drab, the day consists of fasting and penitential thoughts, and there is hope but it seem a long way off. Groundhog Day is a parallel version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and its many film versions where Scrooge learns to be more generous after being visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. (Murray had starred in a modern version of A Christmas Carol called Scrooged in 1988.) Perhaps the idea of a Catholic Groundhog Day is a modern conception of purgatory, the Catholic doctrine of the place where people who do not deserve to go to hell but whose sins on earth to not merit a place in heaven. There is, however, hope of heaven in purgatory, just as the second passage recited during the distribution of ashes offers hope. And perhaps heaven is a Christmas or Eastern Groundhog Day, where there is joy and hope the whole year through. Just a thought.
Copyright 2019 by John T. Aquino
The "Evaporation" of The Washington Post's Style Section and What It Means
by John Aquino on 03/04/19The February Washingtonian Magazine ran a story on the Washington Post's Style Section "Is the Style Still in Style?", by Andrew Beaujon. He asks and goes on to explore the question, "But what if the important issue with Style isn't that it has gotten worse but that--at least in one important sense--it no longer exists?" The article meant something to me because the Post is my hometown paper and because I am a former contributor to the Style section.
My contribution appeared over 30 years ago on a Sunday. It was an article on the 100th birthday or the actor John Barrymore and included analysis of his film acting and how he influenced generations of actors. The article was a lengthy one--a column on page one of the section and a page and a half following. The Style section ran articles of that length on Saturdays and Sundays then and an number of articles on weekdays on the arts and "style." I remember visiting the bar named "Barrymore" in midtown Manhattan a few years later and seeing my article framed there. I am proud of that. Regular writers for the Style section included Tom Shales, Sally Quinn, and Judith Martin.
I wrote other articles that were published in the Post a decade and a half ago--one on fictionalization in fact-based films and another on the copyright for fictional characters, but they appeared in the Outlook section, never again for Style, although I tried. Most recently, seven years ago, I submitted an article to Style on the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Irving Berlin's last musical, Mr. President, in Washington, D.C. on its way to Broadway where it subsequently failed. The editors hemmed and hawed and finally rejected it, saying it was too lengthy and about something that happened too long ago. I finally posted it on this blog. Nowadays, a weekday Style section can have one mid-sized and two short articles, one or two op-eds, tidbits, and maybe a book review. On Sundays, the Arts and Style section will have are a few broader appeal articles, and perhaps a Q&A with a performer or director who is coming to town. I can go through a weekday Style in three minutes and, unless the Sunday section is on the Academy Awards or something, finish it in five.
The change in the Style section was part of a trend. In 2009, the Post stopped running its Sunday Book World as a stand-alone section. Book reviews now appear in the weekday Style section and the Sunday Outlook section. Beaujon's article notes that the change in the Style section has been gradual. It started with the decline in newspaper advertising. In 2012, Marty Baron, who was portrayed in the movie Spotlight on the Boston Globe's breaking of the Catholic Church's pedophile scandal when Baron was Globe's editor, became executive editor of the Post in 2013. He couldn't understand the Post's siloed coverage--separate movie reviews on Fridays in the Style and Weekend. In 2014, a major reorganization combined Style, Food, Travel, Weekend, the Sunday magazine, and other departments into the Features section. Articles tend to be first posted online. Beaujon suggests that this online approach works for some sections of the paper but not for the Style section. You can't find the print Style section online. Some op-eds, reviews of books, and articles from the Features department that are posted online ultimately find their way into the Style section of the print edition so that the print Style still, technically, exists.
In my three-plus decades of publishing, I have developed and been subject to a number of reader surveys. There's always a group of readers who complain that the articles in our publication are too long and they don't have time to read them. This complaint has grown as subscribers say they read articles on their phone or tablets. I and editors I worked for have, dutifully, implemented policies shortening the maximum length of articles and promoted this change to readers and advertisers. As an editor, I've never seen any increase in circulation, advertising or online hits after having made and promoted these changes. And in the next reader survey, there was a group of readers complaining that the articles were too long.
The New York Times has retained its stand-alone book section on Sundays and continues to have reasonably-sized weekday and weekends sections covering the arts and style. Other newspapers have de-emphasized style, arts, and books sections. This gets into the discussion of the death of the print media, which has, I think, been exaggerated. There's no question the Internet has brought about decline in newspaper advertising and that some people prefer to read newspapers online on their phones and tablets. But the Post also gives away a free print version of the paper called the Express that subsists on advertising. You can go onto a bus or subway and see lots of people reading the physical Post paper and the Express. I seldom see people read newspapers online on the bus or subway, probably because of wifi issues. People have also been predicting the death of newspapers and bookstores due to a combination of people being able to order books on Amazon.com and reading newspapers and books on their phones and tablets. But Amazon has opened physical bookstores, and, according to the American Booksellers Association, independent bookstores are thriving.
My wife and I read the Arts and Book sections of the New York Times on Sunday and subscribe to the weekly London Times Literary Supplement. In February 2018, bookseller.com reported that TLS's circulation grew by 20% "as people value longer reads." I remember not so long ago reading TLS on the subway, and a teenager wearing a Cardoza high school jacket sitting next to me kept looking at the newspaper and finally asked, "Mister, what kind of paper is that?" I showed it to him, explaining that it was, basically, an entire newspaper devoted to reviews of books on all subjects. I said that I could sit on the subway and learn through long articles about books on biology, literary criticism, history, politics, almost any subject area. I asked if he would like to take it with him. He said, yes, and as the train pulled away I could see him out the window standing and reading the TLS. I like to think it perhaps spurred some interest.
I miss the having a substantial Washington Post Style section and Book World. The world is less informed and less literate because such sections are disappearing, just as it is because articles are running shorter. My hometown newspaper is a lesser one because of this loss.
Copyright 2019 by John T. Aquino
More Thoughts on WWI and "They Shall Not Grow Old"
by John Aquino on 03/01/19Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Hobbit trilogy, and King Kong (2005), looks back and ahead in the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, back at providing human faces and voices to World War I and ahead to future films using 21st century technology.
Jackson recounts the genesis of his new film in a prologue. He was approached in 2014 by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the UK to utilize its vast archives of film that was shot during the war (1914-1918) as part of the centenary of the war's end. There were many technical issues that Jackson took back to his studio in New Zealand to solve. Silent films were shot at various speeds from 10 to 20 feet per second (fps) compared to the modern film speed of 24 fps. And so, silent film speeds have to be converted to a modern film format. The IWM films were shot at the full range of silent film speeds, and a big challenge for Jackson and his team was determining the speed of each film, which was done, he said, by the laborious process of watching people walk in each piece of film and slowing down or speeding up the film until they walked naturally. The IWM material was, course, silent and in black and white. Modern technology allows for the addition of voices and sound effects and for colorization, a process that generally provokes criticism because it ignores the choices made by a director, either to shoot the film in black and white rather than color and, having chosen black and white, to set up his shots to their best advantage in black and white. Jackson decided that, in 1914, those making films of battles didn't have the choice to shoot in color and would have if they could have. Another criticism of colorization is that those deciding which colors to add to a black and white film don't have the time to make the right choices. A colorized film starring Frank Sinatra, for example, gave him green eyes rather than blue. Jackson, however, had the time to research the issue thoroughly.
Jackson said the film was developed over four years. His achievement is quite remarkable. The film begins in black and white, showing soldiers in training, and, when they are depicted as moving to the front, it changes to color. Sound was added to allow us to hear the creak of vehicles, the footsteps of marching soldiers, the firing of cannons, and, most of all, the voices of the soldiers, supplied by actors speaking words as determined by lip-readers. Some of the archive material was so dark no images could be seen and consequently had been ignored by previous documentary filmmakers. Jackson said that he and his team were able to restore the images, meaning that these previously dark images are being seen for the first time.
They Shall Not Grow Old has been criticized by some because it manipulates what is shown, something that is frowned on in documentaries. In a 30-minute short following the 1 hr. and 39 min film, Jackson, evidently aware of the concerns, lays out the details of the measures he and his team took: he traveled to Belgium, where much of the original material was filmed, and took thousands of photos of the land to ensure that the ground and grass were properly colorized; they determined what outfits the soldiers in particular shots were from to ensure that the uniforms were shown in the proper colors; for the voices, he hired actors from the region of the United Kingdom where the soldiers were from; they used cannons and rifles from the period to create these sounds; for a scene in which the lips of an officer reading a notice could not be clearly seen, Jackson and his team tracked down the notice and, reading it aloud, matched it to the officer's lips; and the only narration is from oral histories of WWI veterans acquired from the archives of the IWM and the BBC.
The effect is touching. The camera pans over a group of soldiers and one points at the camera and says, "Here it comes. It's pictures" and then the soldiers smile and pose. Jackson comments that the soldiers in the footage are continually noticing the camera, for in all likelihood they had never seen one before. They pose for it as they had posed in civilian life for still cameras until someone tells them to move. Jackson's film brings these soldiers back to life, a century after many of them died.
The film has its limitations. The archives are full of materials shot during the war, but none show actual fighting. Because the cameras were hand-cranked, the cameramen would have been sitting ducks in the middle of a battle. A WWI-buff, Jackson had acquired a collection of a serial publication titled "The War Illustrated" in which artists depicted battles for families at home. Jackson used these images because they were from the period, although, he admits, the drawings were mostly imaginary and generally propagandistic, with depictions of heroic British soldiers and cowardly Germans. The film does depict other horrors--rotting corpses in the mud, rats, and trench foot with blackened toes. A four-minute clip from the film is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUReYO2n06w and shows the final results of the wizardry of Jackson and his team.
I had written on this blog at http://www.johntaquino.com/Blog--Substantially-Similar.html?entry=thoughts-on-veterans-day-wwi of another WWI documentary made for the centennial, Pershing: Paths of Glory, which makes an interesting companion to They Shall Not Grow Old.
A recent book provides an ironic coda of these thoughts on what was termed the "war to end all wars." In The Trial of the Kaiser, William A. Schabas describes attempts to bring German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II to trial for crimes as the war's aggressor. There was agreement, but no preparation, between the winning powers to do so, and, after failed attempts to capture him, the kaiser remained in seclusion in neutral Holland for the rest of his life. Schabas suggests that, if WWI had resulted in a war's aggressor's being tried as a criminal, this deterrence could have, perhaps, averted the next world war, rather than postponing the revisiting of this issue until Nuremberg 16 years later.
In addition to looking backward, the work of Jackson and his team provides interesting ideas for other film projects. Theoretically, other silent films can be colorized and dubbed with the consultation of lip-readers. The problem is that most silent film actors, knowing that they could not be heard, didn't exchange dialogue with another actor but instead spoke platitudes (parodied in the film Singing in the Rain by Gene Kelly, playing a silent film actor in his first talkie saying, "I love you, I love you, I love you" over and over), gibberish or even, according to some lip-readers, obscenities. There may be some exceptions. The first film version of a play by William Shakespeare is 1899's King John, which was recently rediscovered. The actor and manager Beerbohm Tree filmed portions of his stage production of the play. Researchers found several segments, including film of the last minute of the play, John's death scene, which can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lWn99STB1o . Tree, presumably and apparently, speaks the actual Shakespeare lines as he did on stage. The segment could be colorized and dubbed by a Shakespearean actor, using the techniques Jackson and his team employed and turning an historical artifact into an accessible piece of film. There may be other such silent films on which these techniques could be used. It could also be used on film of late 19th and early 20th century speeches, using lip-readers, actors, and perhaps the written texts of the speeches. Just a thought.
Copyright 2019 by John T. Aquino
