When minor characters who are also ethnic minorities start talking among themselves in their native tongues, they sometimes take advantage of their invisibility to say things. Sometimes they break the Fourth Wall and start ranting about the movie director. Sometimes, they spout random obscenities or natter about their lousy lunch. It’s all in not-English, so whatever they say doesn’t matter! And the actual translations of their lines can be a secret source of hilarity in films where actors are instructed to use a Gratuitous Foreign Language (GFL) in order to make a scene sound more authentic. When some Native Americans cast in Westerns were told to speak their own language to add some authenticity, these actors took the opportunity to crudely editorialize about their director, which allegedly resulted in Native American audiences (in)explicably cracking up laughing during scenes that were meant to be dramatic.

Minorities can be marginalized in film, but not silenced.

(via salon)

in the original Star Wars one of the “alien languages” that the rebels used was actually Swahili. My dad watched Return of the Jedi in Nairobi in a packed theater and during a space battle shot some nameless extra shouts “this is not my watermelon!” in swahili and the entire theater exploded into a mixture of laughing and cheering

(via yiffmaster)

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notcuddles:

marimagdaliny:

production designThe Fifth Element (1997)

by Dan Weil

#after terminator and blade runner and robocop sci-fi decided that the future will be desaturated  #muted colours tinged grey-blue and glass and dark sleek steel  #(for minority report spielberg overlit every shot then bleach-bypassed the negatives  #to get create a dark drained look every dystopia after has tried to copy)  #amidst all that the fifth element is a shock of colour and hypersaturation and elaborate art deco flourishes  #there’s fun and irreverence and silliness in every frame before you even get to the outrageous plot  #but also breathtaking setpieces that are vast and bright and weird and beautiful  #there is cynicism but this is not a cynical film and it refuses to show you a dark future  #humans are frail and corruptible  #but also adaptable and dreaming  #this film understands that given enough distance we’d look absurd and incomprehensible to previous generations  #and instead of trying to close that gap by plunging you into the future and explaining every electronic inch of it  #it relishes that unbridgeable strangeness  #our future will be alien to us  #so this future is bright and wondrous and alien and overwhelmingly strange  #also goofy as hell oh god i love this film it’s the most ridiculous  [x]

Seriously this film is so great and the world building is wonderful.  There’s a lot of really great, tiny touches – like the Corbin’s cigarette that is almost entirely filter – which show you the ways in which someone was thinking about the future.