Misnomers

Mårten Westö finds some curious errors in the Finnish translations of subtitles in Swedish-language films: 

Tabben fick mig ändå att ägna resten av filmen åt att analysera den finska textningen.

Den visade sig vara en katastrof.

Det vimlade av fel och direkt missvisande information i nästan varje scen. Ibland blev det snudd på galghumoristiskt, som när pappans svenska arbetskompis säger till sin norske kollega: ”Och så får vi slita röven av oss. Det är bara för att ni har oljan.” På finska: Saamme huhkia toden teolla. Saadaksemme olutta (En i och för sig kul freudiansk felsägning som varje frustrerad översättare säkert kan identifiera sig med.)

Peter Weiss - 2

A recently-published dissertation by the Swedish filmographer Jan Christer Bengtsson gives a fascinating inside view of the creative personality of Peter Weiss. Focused on Weiss's work for the cinema, the dissertation examines Weiss's career in chronological sequence, but is not limited solely to the films: Weiss's literary work and painting are also considered in detail in the course of this extensive treatment, and numerous interviews are cited and quoted.

Bengtsson places Weiss within the context of postwar European - specifically Swedish and German - cinema, He proceeds from an analysis of Weiss's early short films of the 1950s (many of them utilizing surrealist techniques), through the documentaries and officially commissioned work all the way to the less well-known full-length film projects of Weiss's later years, including Hölderlin and the collaboration with Francisco Javier Uriz involving the latter's screen version of the Spanish Civil War section of the first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Of particular interest are the links to a 1961 German television interview (Berlin stellt vor, in which Weiss is interviewed by the literary critic Walter Höllerer (the links are here and here), and Bengtsson's own consideration of The Studio of Doctor Faust (1956), which as Weiss's English-language Wikipedia entry states, "shows a persisting link of the emigrant Weiss to a German cultural background."

Vampires

At Absinthe Minded, Thomas Kennedy shouts about Lars von Trier's Antichrist:

The dozen or so ticks or chiggers that affix themselves to the Willem Dafoe character’s hand as he sleeps with his arm dangling out the window say it all. They are tiny vampires sucking his blood in a "crime” of opportunity – but no, they are as natural as we are. No, in fact, we are more despicable than those little bloodsuckers – we heartlessly, rationally organize nature for our pleasure and convenience.