Occasionally I search my press emails for an upcoming film, and I’m confused when it doesn’t show up. I search the director and actors’ names, find the poster with their faces. But it turns out the movie is called something else entirely.
This happened to me this month; while writing about the Luis Buñuel retrospective upcoming at filmkunst66. I was confused by the title The Strangling Angel – a Buñuel I had missed during film school? No, it was in fact just the German title for his masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (in the original Spanish, El Ángel Exterminador). The altered name gives off a totally different mood and feeling – more calculating than constraining.
The whole phenomenon is a great talking point over a beer at the Kino bar.
The title of a film bears a lot of weight. Like an elevator pitch, it gives one a sudden burst of understanding, or it plays with you viscerally. Often the title is translated as literally as possible into new languages, but different countries have different film markets and audiences – what works in one area may not land in the same way elsewhere.
Sometimes distributors decide against the original title, renaming it or adding a long sentence that wouldn’t pass for the byline for the picture. In the comparatively verbose German tongue, the straight-up translation method doesn’t work as easily.
A quick scroll of a reddit thread under r/Germany gives innumerable examples. The 90s touchstone Cruel Intentions is Eiskalte Engel – “ice-cold angels” – in Germany, and it’s hard to imagine that a movie with such a pop to its original title could exist any other way. The 1981 cult Americana romp Fast Times at Ridgemont High is Ich glaub’ ich steh’ im Wald, a German idiom that translates to “I think I’m standing in the woods”. The 1999 John Carpenter sci-fi flick Escape from New York turns into “the rattlesnake”, or Die Klapperschlange. (Snakes on a Plane, however, was not translated to “Schlangen in einem Flugzeug” or at all).
Stripes with Bill Murray as an army misfit? In German, that’s Ich glaub’ mich knutscht ein Elch!, “I think a moose is smooching me.” The German title for the 2007 buddy cop flick Hot Fuzz adds “Zwei abgewichste Profis”, “two jerked-off professionals”; Lethal Weapon 4 tacks on “Zwei Profis räumen auf”, two professionals tidy up”.
Beloved teen romps often get a girly still-in-English retreatment: Mean Girls is Girls Club; Bring It On is Girls United. Some skew particularly literal – 1979’s Alien with “Das unheimliche Wesen aus einer fremden Welt”, “the creepy creature from a foreign world” and 1980’s Airplane! with `Die Unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug`, “the incredible journey in a crazy plane”.
Some are particularly silly, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is Die Ritter der Kokosnuss, the knights of the coconut. A particularly cute one is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film about a man who has his memories erased, which becomes simply Vergiss mein nicht!: forget me not!
“There’s actually a whole PhD somewhere within this content,” a friend of mine, who works as a visual archive researcher in the film and television industry, remarks when I show her the reddit list. The whole phenomenon is a great talking point over a beer at the Kino bar, and certainly cause for amusement.
It’s an interesting pocket of the German film world, a window into how it interprets film for audiences and how the large international crowds in cities like Berlin fit into the dialogue. I understand it much like I do the German obsession with dubbing – it’s almost as if German distributors take the films and make something entirely new out of them, something that corresponds with the language and fits with the culture.
I may not take on a whole PhD studying English-to-German film titles, but I remain astounded by the complexities of the German language and I enjoy the linguistic differences, the bizarre hiccups and the conversations that film title translation creates.
