Time-coded, Hardcoded, Decoded: Excavating Variants and Practices in Swiss Film Subtitling

This article proposes a model for studying film subtitling as a variant-based audiovisual practice, situated at the intersection of film studies, media archaeology, audiovisual translation (AVT) studies, and digital humanities. Drawing on Siegfried Zielinski’s variantology and Descriptive AVT Studies, we combine archival research with the close reading of paratextual sources, manual video annotation as a form of close viewing, and the semi-automated recognition of concepts, persons, and patterns as a form of distant viewing. This integrative framework enables the systematic comparison of film versions and their subtitle variants, which appear not as stable textual supplements but as artefacts of variation shaped by material infrastructures and institutional practices. Framed by the title’s conceptual triad – time-coded, hardcoded, decoded – we approach subtitling as a layered object of inquiry. Subtitles are time-coded in their alignment with audiovisual rhythm, hardcoded in their material entanglement with film prints, digital carriers, and projection formats, and decoded through interdisciplinary, semi-automated analysis that excavates the histories and politics of their production and circulation. We apply this framework to the Swiss context between 1920 and 2020, using film and non-film collections from the Cinémathèque suisse. The case of Die Erschiessung des Landesverräters Ernst S. by Richard Dindo and Niklaus Meienberg (CH, 1976) demonstrates how variant-based analysis can be operationalised through integrated archival and computational workflows.