I first saw Battle Royale during my freshman year as an Undergrad here at Iowa. Having seen few films like it before, I wanted to show it to my friends back home. This was also during my time was an hobbyist DVD pirate, and so I made a copy of the film, having borrowed it from the library, to bring home with me over Christmas Break.
When we popped in the copy I made, we found that the disc lacked the subtitles needed to understand the film, provided one didn’t know Japanese. Having seen the movie about 20 times in the 3 months since I had seen it originally, I was pretty well versed in the plot of the film, and we decided that I would just explain what was being said from memory.
This project, made 4 years later, is an attempt to re-create that event for a video during a group show called “Translation”, showing the entire film with an audio track of me explaining the narrative, but no subtitles.
For the piece, I watched a DVD of the film, that included, unbeknownst to me, extended scenes in which I had no clue what was being said. Having not seen the film for a while and being confronted by what amounted to a director’s cut, there were many instances in which the only thing I could add was the clinking of the ice in my glass and a yawn or two.
