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Notes -
Love this video, thanks for linking it.
I don't think this is inconsistent with what I wrote though - if you're somewhere that the audio is literally unintelligible (for any reason), captions are the obvious solution. Personally, I would rather try it out as intended by the creator rather than immediately going to the written form. Perhaps Nolan's choices are so extreme that this pretty much means you need to be in a top-end theater - sure, fair enough.
Yeah I'm with you on this - I pretty much have to have subtitles these days because my hearing is shot, but I think it's undeniable that I am missing part of the experience. That said, I don't know if it's just growing up watching a lot of stuff with subtitles (when I first moved to Australia as a kid we lived in a semi-rural area and the only channels we could get were the ABC and SBS, and SBS primarily played foreign language content) but they don't take me out of the film or show at all. I know they are intellectually, they must be, but I don't feel any detraction.
Actually, thinking about it, it's probably more accurate to say that they are less detrimental to my experience than the feeling of frustration and confusion I get when I can't hear half the script.
I don't know. I don't feel more immersed in Swedish or English language content that I consume effortlessly without subtitles than content in other languages where I have to use subtitles. Maybe it's just a skill issue on the part of people unused to subtitles? Perhaps it depends on how fast one reads? If you can read a sentence at a glance then you're not really "looking away" for any appreciable amount of time.
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