Closed captions pretend to be the least opinionated layer of a film. They are full of judgments.
[ominous music] does not transcribe sound. It reviews it. [indistinct chatter] decides a roomful of speech has become texture. [speaks foreign language] can turn a language perfectly clear to millions into noise defined by one character’s ignorance.
The choices are unavoidable. Sound has no natural unit. A caption can call the same event [footsteps], [heels clicking], or [someone approaches]. One names a source, one a texture, one a consequence. None is neutral. Even silence needs classification: tense, awkward, expectant — or left blank, as if nothing happened.
I like captions most when they resist pretending to be a transcript. [song continues faintly in another room] does something the image cannot: it draws the architecture by ear. A good cue gives access not only to the fact of a sound but to the place it occupies in the scene.
There is power in every bracket. Captions decide which noises are information, which voices are language, and which feelings the score is already allowed to name. The film has a second narrator, speaking from below the frame.