Hey, I put a lot of thought into the decade. Looking up other reviews of the comic and the movie mention either the 1920s or the 1930s. Historical events that are mentioned in the movie are the death of Nicholas II (1917), the destruction of Jewish books in Russia under Stalin which started around 1919 - but the film seems to pre-date the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934, and is pre-WWII. What really made me prefer a later year was the fact that one of the characters owned the half-track vehicle that had been used to make the Croisière noire, which finished in 1925, and when the vehicle is first shown it's obviously been sitting unused for a long time with cobwebs in a garage, so I thought it fair to add a few years after that - then there's the African guidebook based on the expedition, but I didn't look that up to see if one was actually printed. Also, to a lesser extent, the first printing date of the cameo I mentioned.
Regardless, North African political tensions never come up; the characters simply aren't interacting with anything on that level, and the French colonial period between the world wars in Algeria doesn't sound particularly dramatic. Oh, and the anthropologist they encounter is definitely from the old-school anatomist tradition, not from the Neo-darwinian synthesis.
And you know what - I'm over-analyzing the date, but at the same time that kind of little nit-pick irritates me, after all the work I put into it. I don't think the original author wanted to pin down the date, or he'd have mentioned it really specifically. The artist wanted that vagueness. After the Stalinist crackdown on Jews in Russia? Definitely. Before WWII? Definitely. Beyond that, who really knows. Like I said, the characters aren't interacting much with larger events going on in the world.
What matters to me most of all, at least when subtitles are concerned, is communication. When characters are talking quickly or are using concepts and expressions that would take too long to read in English when a subtitle can only be on the screen for 2.3 seconds, you have to sacrifice literal meaning and go for the spirit of the speech, if not the exact word. I took words out of the subtitles like 'sanhedrin' because very few people would know what that meant (I certainly didn't), and I replaced it with "Jewish court" because that allows the brain to go with the flow.
So I also added a subtitle at the very beginning of the film. As the camera pans across the ships in the port, I stuck in: "Algiers, North Africa, 1930s". Because I assumed a good chunk of the audience wouldn't know the setting offhand. "Algiers? I've heard of... where is Algiers? Oh, North Africa. 1930s. Ok, I get it now." If I'd mentioned 1927 or 1931 or it would have seemed overly important merely by the fact that it was specific. By rounding it off to a decade, it's (A) easier to read, and (B) implies that the general decade is more important, not the specific year. Sure I could have said 1920s, but I decided to round up instead of round down.
Letting the audience enjoy the work without needing to wrack their brains over extra, complex details is what ultimately matters. Pedantry doesn't.
Hey, I put a lot of thought into the decade. Looking up other reviews of the comic and the movie mention either the 1920s or the 1930s. Historical events that are mentioned in the movie are the death of Nicholas II (1917), the destruction of Jewish books in Russia under Stalin which started around 1919 - but the film seems to pre-date the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934, and is pre-WWII. What really made me prefer a later year was the fact that one of the characters owned the half-track vehicle that had been used to make the Croisière noire, which finished in 1925, and when the vehicle is first shown it's obviously been sitting unused for a long time with cobwebs in a garage, so I thought it fair to add a few years after that - then there's the African guidebook based on the expedition, but I didn't look that up to see if one was actually printed. Also, to a lesser extent, the first printing date of the cameo I mentioned.
Regardless, North African political tensions never come up; the characters simply aren't interacting with anything on that level, and the French colonial period between the world wars in Algeria doesn't sound particularly dramatic. Oh, and the anthropologist they encounter is definitely from the old-school anatomist tradition, not from the Neo-darwinian synthesis.
And you know what - I'm over-analyzing the date, but at the same time that kind of little nit-pick irritates me, after all the work I put into it. I don't think the original author wanted to pin down the date, or he'd have mentioned it really specifically. The artist wanted that vagueness. After the Stalinist crackdown on Jews in Russia? Definitely. Before WWII? Definitely. Beyond that, who really knows. Like I said, the characters aren't interacting much with larger events going on in the world.
What matters to me most of all, at least when subtitles are concerned, is communication. When characters are talking quickly or are using concepts and expressions that would take too long to read in English when a subtitle can only be on the screen for 2.3 seconds, you have to sacrifice literal meaning and go for the spirit of the speech, if not the exact word. I took words out of the subtitles like 'sanhedrin' because very few people would know what that meant (I certainly didn't), and I replaced it with "Jewish court" because that allows the brain to go with the flow.
So I also added a subtitle at the very beginning of the film. As the camera pans across the ships in the port, I stuck in: "Algiers, North Africa, 1930s". Because I assumed a good chunk of the audience wouldn't know the setting offhand. "Algiers? I've heard of... where is Algiers? Oh, North Africa. 1930s. Ok, I get it now." If I'd mentioned 1927 or 1931 or it would have seemed overly important merely by the fact that it was specific. By rounding it off to a decade, it's (A) easier to read, and (B) implies that the general decade is more important, not the specific year. Sure I could have said 1920s, but I decided to round up instead of round down.
Letting the audience enjoy the work without needing to wrack their brains over extra, complex details is what ultimately matters. Pedantry doesn't.