Speaking English
I didn't know Saddam Huessien spoke perfect English. I thought he spoke Arabian in real life. They should have spoked Arabian and use subtitles, to get a more realness to the movie.
share*rolls eyes*
share
MovieChat Forums > House of Saddam (2008) Discussion > Speaking English
It's a series filmed more for an American/British audience, so of course, they would put it mostly in English. By the way, it's not Arabian...it's Arabic.
shareKenny, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that English is not your native language.
Am I right?
Unfortunately, yes :(
shareObviously it was don that way because if they were accurate, with subtitles it would've been too distracting. And I don'tthink Saddam knew much Englishin real life, although I remember in an interview he once claimed he didn't (I think it was an interview with Dan Rather), although I have my doubts.
shareI think so too. I remember when he was in jail they had something on the news about him liking doritos and Brittney Spears...
"I left my heart in England, with the girl I left behind".
The purpose of language is to communicate ideas. Films often use language to communicate ideas, but films are not meant to be perfect recreations of reality. They are an art. Even most documentaries try very hard to not be realistic (they are biased, they are personal, they are emotional, and they exploit editing like nobody's business).
If the point of a film is to convey a story about these people and what they said and believed, why would it be advantageous to make them unintelligible to the audience? Certainly it is more "realistic" but most people viewing it already understand that those people wouldn't be speaking English in real life, and the mini-series made repeated references that within the narrative they weren't *actually* speaking English, which is why they watched Arabic language TV, spoke in Arabic on the phone, made Arabic messages, read Arabic words, and needed translators.
If realism is the primary goal, and not communicating what happened, then why even make the attempt? In real life there wasn't a camera watching all this happen. It's unrealistic to watch anything that happened unless the footage was taken live at the event. Thus by your standard, no film or TV show should ever be made. Because seriously, between language being wrong, and a camera man just "happening to be there" at the most important times. Which is least accurate? At least when they speak English they are speaking. The whole premise of a film supposes someone else was invisible and always standing by to record important stuff with perfect audio and edits on the spot.
You get what I'm saying? You trade away for too much realism and you'll end up with nothing. Telling a story presupposes that it already happened and it won't be entirely accurate, and what exactly is the point of a telling a story to someone in a language they don't understand? Sure you can have subtitles, but now you lose all connection to emotion and it becomes a distraction.
This series intentionally took liberties to "westernize" some events to make it more relatable, so that the viewer doesn't just sit there thinking the whole time "what the hell am I looking at?" I was reading that one reviewer bitched about the exposition. Well, I'm sure to that one expert in Iraqi history she didn't need the rundown, but for most people viewing, we don't know everything that went on in Iraq from '79 to '06.