Mirror images

Notes on translation and remakes after Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

When Susie (Dakota Johnson) arrives at the foot of the grey Markos Dance Academy in West Berlin, I’m certain this isn’t Suspiria. The movie has barely started and, already, something’s off, something’s out of place. A prologue has set the tone: the lead dancer (Chloë Grace Moretz) tells her psychotherapist the academy is run by a coven of witches; televised protests are carried out in the wake of the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181; Thom Yorke sings over the title sequence, which shows Susie’s mother dying in bed in the American Midwest. What happened to Goblin’s synth score? What happened to the profound lack of context that made Suspiria feel suspended in a void? The academy’s exterior—a slab of cold concrete—is a tomb. It seals the bright red, open grave that is Suspiria.  

Susie enrolls, dances spectacularly for the director, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), and is swept into a coven, a space for female collaboration, that has its own political turmoil. The dancers speak English, mainly, but also German and French. Somehow, this too is an anomaly. Of course, it makes perfect, logical sense. The academy is an international dance troupe located in an increasingly porous Europe. And yet, it makes no sense within a hereditary context. Dario Argento’s original film, like much of the supernatural subgenre of giallo, is an Italian production dubbed in English.   

All of these layers of language make me wonder if remakes are a kind of translation. They do often involve an element of literary translation, when the remake is made in a different place, in a different language. Here, language moves from an Italian script translated into English to an English script translated into German and French. But there’s also a temporal translation from 1977 to 2018, and a cultural translation, too.

What does it mean to translate an image?

In general, translation is a process that claims to maintain as much meaning as possible in the move from one language to another. Director Luca Guadagnino has said his film is “[an] homage to the incredible, powerful emotion” of experiencing Argento’s film. But an homage is certainly not a translation, so my question seems answered. Perhaps, it was doomed from the start. Images don’t need to be translated. The international film circuit, in festivals, multiplexes, and homes, is a testament to the supposed universality of the image. It’s only language that changes, taking shape as subtitles or dubs. But these forms are not equivalent; subs and dubs are a point of contention, a conflict of values. In some cases, as with the films of Studio Ghibli, choosing between subs and dubs means choosing between two different movies.

There is always a gap between what is said and what is written. As any bilingual viewer knows, subtitles never capture the nuances of spoken dialogue. When I watch movies in French, I discover omissions and distortions, appropriations and mistakes. Most embarrassing are those translations that try to replace one cultural expression with another. But all of these mishaps are inevitable. Each act of translation is informed by different values, and those values inform which textual qualities are maintained and which are considered expendable. Maintenance is the purported goal of translation; it does its best to mediate a primary text. In doing so, a translation always acts like an index, pointing back to that primary text. The best translations add something ineffable, whether you call that humanism or an act of approaching difference.  

I wouldn’t be the same person without Naomi Lazard’s translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s selected poems or Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel. In one sense, my understanding of these texts is necessarily incomplete. Until I can read Urdu and Japanese, I have to hope the translations convey something of what the primary authors intend. In another sense, however, my affective response is complete. Even if these translations fail, they become texts in themselves (and I am aware of how these misshapen texts lead to important questions about privilege and appropriation). Is my reaction to these hypothetical texts unreal?

In her essay “On Translation,” Mizumura reminds us that the kind of translation we take as natural—translation as maintenance—is historically recent. Religious texts and philosophy have always been treated with this kind of reverential translation. But, at least within a Japanese context, fiction, until recently, was loosely translated at best. English novels were treated as frameworks for creative potentialities and “fantastic adaptations.” When they were translated, the “translators freely abridged the original, inserted digressions, and sometimes came up with their own endings.” As translation slowly became consolidated after the Meiji Restoration (1868), it brought with it “the notion of text, of authorship, and even of intellectual property rights.”

I’ve wandered a bit from Guadagnino’s Suspiria, but this secondary, historical understanding of literary translation seems to fit a contemporary mode of cinematic remakes. Without reverence, remakes take indiscriminately. They add and remove scenes and characters, contexts and settings, and, in their intentional misshaping, make fantastic adaptations.

Perhaps this is the answer to my question of “What does it mean to translate an image?” Without the principle of maintenance, translation is free to trace whatever figures, values, or sensibilities it likes. Historicizing literary translation lets us approach remakes beyond simply judging whether or not they adhere to their primary material. In this sense, Suspiria (2018) is a kind of translation of Suspiria (1977) from one image to another. What is added and what is taken out has to do with the values of the translator (in this case, an entire film crew) and the values of a particular place and time.

Suspiria (2018) translates the plot of Suspiria (1977) by taking it out of its expressive, generic European context and placing it into an American mode. There is no attempt to capture, and thus no value ceded to, the tone, rhythm, or rhyme of Argento’s movie. Instead, Guadagnino’s remake shares the values of our contemporary horror moment. Every narrative detail is explained. Every conflict is mapped out to privilege the viewer’s understanding. There is nothing truly uncanny in these images, no narrative step steeped in ambiguity, even as the remake tries to expand the flimsy mythology of the original. This new Suspiria is half Hollywood and half art house; horror that would rather feign political relevance than give in to its generic urges.

But the translated image always adds, since it exists alongside, rather than in place of, the original image. Guadagnino has provided space for spectacular performances from Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson, and Suspiria (2018) offers an image of genuine, multifaceted female collaboration. My experience of this remake is invariably informed by the weight of Argento’s film, which caught me at the right time, challenging me to experience sensation without narrative, in deep reds and with an unsettling score.

The joy of these fantastic translations is that they always point back to their original. Suspriria (2018) is not Suspiria (1977); they each offer a different experience. As problematic as American remakes can be, they, at the very least, act as reminders that we can and should encounter movies in other languages, from other value-contexts. Even if the surge of Japanese horror remakes in the mid-2000s was nothing more than an attempt to cash in on an instantaneous demand, it turned me toward Japanese cinema (and Verbinski’s The Ring might still be able to stand on its own). Maybe I was mistaken when I said Suspiria (2018) was a tomb. It’s closer to a spade, covering and uncovering the open grave of Suspiria (1977).