The French film critic Serge Daney, writing about Andre Bazin, whose still vital, two-volume What Is Cinema? has recently been republished by California University Press, once argued: "Bad cineastes have no ideas; good cineastes have too many. But the great cineastes have just one idea. Such an obsessive idea stabilises them on their way, yet guides them into ever new and interesting landscapes."

He could easily have been talking about the film director Atom Egoyan and the Canadian academic Ian Balfour, who have together edited a remarkable 500-page book, printed in 1.66:1 Cinemascope ratio, that not only explores the history and contemporary usage of subtitles, but uses them as a metaphor for discussing a very wide range of topics, from Borges's opinions on Citizen Kane ("it suffers from gigantism, pedantry and tedium") to White House tapes of Osama Bin Laden admitting his part in the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Subtitles rarely get good press. In America, the men and women responsible for them are not even credited at the end of a movie. Many cultures do away with them altogether, preferring to dub foreign films. The assumption is that subtitles are too distracting, and that by forcing us to read rather than gaze at the big screen they deny us one of the fundamental pleasures of going to picture theatres. They are prophylactics that shield audiences from the primal energies of real movies. Class and cultural distinctions also come into it: subtitles are seen as anti-popular, a marker of poshness on a par with using finger bowls at the dinner table.

They are certainly not infallible. One of the contributors to the volume, Henri Behar, tells the story of how Gus van Sant was contacted by a translator unsure about the meaning of the line, "And God made a bet" in Drugstore Cowboy. The director replied that he had no idea what the translator was talking about, and asked for the context. Upon being told that Matt Dillon, James LeGros and two girls were meant to have just walked into a motel room, van Sant suddenly twigged. "Oh," he said. "The line is, 'No hat on the bed!'"

Behar goes on to argue that because there are only so many words that can fit at the bottom of the screen, subtitlers face greater challenges than print translators. Fast dialogue is a particular problem, so that it is harder to render the verbal overlappings and cross-volleys of a David Mamet picture than translate any Shakespeare adaptation. Equally tricky is how to represent the compacted, mutating vernaculars of particular speech groups. At one point in Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton's 1991 tale of LA 'hood life, Laurence Fishburne tongue-lashes his son Cuba Gooding, Jr for hanging out with bad company: "What are y'all, Amos and Andy? Are you Stepin and he's Fetchit?" Behar - weakly, he admits - was forced to render this as, "Vous jouez a quoi, Laurel et Hardy? Il est Abbott, t'es Costello?"

At least the French aren't as scared of subtitles as audiences in the US. The American critic B Ruby Rich offers a suggestive thesis that ascribes the decline of Europhilic cineasm in her country not to the rise of late-1970s blockbuster movies or to the emergence of home VCRs, but to the linguistic exceptionalism of those who during the 1980s passed bills that banned the spending of public funds on languages other than English. The result is that film companies, like telecom companies ordering their Asian call-centre workers to neutralise their accents, now go to great lengths to disguise the foreignness of their products: trailers are purely imagistic or completely voiced over. Rich, describing subtitles as "an incipient anti-war gesture", says that she would like to think that "it's harder to kill people when you hear their voices. It's harder to bomb a country when you've seen their cities in films that you've loved."

Ultimately, and this is what makes the book so rich and resonant, to talk about subtitles is to talk about the boundaries that we construct, or that are constructed for us, to separate the local from the foreign, "us" from "them". Amresh Sinha even argues that subtitles themselves are illegal aliens in the republic of cinema, existing "on the borderline between image and voice. They remain pariahs, outsiders, in exile from the imperial territoriality of the visual regime." Other writers des-cribe them as "symptomatic, foreign-body disturbances" and, pointing to the high proportion of subtitlers who are Jewish, speculate about the relationship between nomadism and multilingualism.

One of the book's many virtues is its commitment to dissensus. The contributors do not stick to the same line about subtitling. Some argue that, rather than preserving and honouring the otherness of films, or the societies on which they shine a light, subtitles actually obscure cultural differences. Like old-school ethnographers, they are said to take the frayed, necessarily fuzzy world of meanings connoted by the original act of speech and make them conform to new and smoother idioms; rather than being seen as an act of interpretation, they are taken as gospel-truth equivalencies.

Perhaps so, but rather than dwelling on such critiques derived from post-structuralism, I am more drawn to an essay by Hamid Naficy in defence of "accented" cinema. The world, he laments, often seems dominated by Hollywood-influenced pictures that employ loud, easy-to-understand visuals to fashion a rather banal universality. The films he cherishes are imaginatively and aesthetically rich, but derive their poetry from the deep histories and politics of local places. These films, be they by Mohsen Makhmalbaf or Sembene Ousmane, fuse dreams of collectivity with distinctively individual visions. They are personal. They are voiced.

And they need, more than ever, subtitlers to help them be heard by film-goers tired of the anechoic monoculture.

From the New Statesman