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Speaking of Esperanto films

de Miland, 2007-junio-26

Mesaĝoj: 33

Lingvo: English

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 10:25:49

We know about Gerda Malaperis! by now, of course, and Imagu, the parent company are soon to release another film, La Patro. At 40 minutes, that one will not be of regular feature film length, however.
But this raises an interesting question: if, as I suspect, the number of feature-length films in a language only has a chance to grow when the number of its speakers reaches a critical mass that can support a film industry, how many speakers of Esperanto are there, and do we have any other languages with a comparable number of speakers for comparison, where the number of speakers is only just enough to begin to support film making in it?

mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 10:55:36

Miland:do we have any other languages with a comparable number of speakers for comparison, where the number of speakers is only just enough to begin to support film making in it?
Italian directors wishing to shoot a movie in Italian can ask financial help to the Ministry of Culture or to the national public television service (RAI). I guess, but I am not sure, that this kind of support is available in other countries as well. Of course esperanto lacks such a solution, so I do not think that a mere comparison of the number of speakers is enough to draw proper conclusions. I might be wrong, though.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 13:34:41

The issue might be helped by statistical modelling if we had enough data about the amount of state support for film making, or (more crudely) its presence or absence). But we would need a good number of examples of populations both with and without such support (say, at least a dozen each) to make much progress.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 14:17:43

The number of Esperanto speakers is not really known. I wouldn't believe the "2 million" number that you see around. It is probably not more than a few hundred thousand.

This puts us in a similar ballpark as Welsh (has some homegrown movies and TV shows but not many - and keeping in mind that most Welsh-speaking people live in a very small territory with their own parliament and laws protecting the Welsh langauge) or Tahitian (I have never heard of a Tahitian movie industry but maybe they have one), etc. A good example may be Ladino, which also has speakers in the hundreds of thousands. Ladino speakers are spread across many different countries, as are Esperanto speakers. I have never heard of a Ladino film; I have just heard of one film with any substantial amount of Ladino in it, and it was at its core an English-language film (with Tom Hanks, no less).

Frankly I think that the Esperanto community does pretty well for itself, considering our small size, and the scattered nature of our speakers. I wish Imagu luck with their films; hopefully production quality will come up with time, and look a little less amateurish. I will perhaps purchase "La patro", simply to support the idea of Esperanto films.

Mendacapote (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 14:41:11

Why not filming Esperanto theater works on stage? My sister is an actress and she usually records her work that way. She has been working lately with marionettes and her films are even cooler now! Believe me: she hasn’t got any money to spare… Unfortunately, she doesn’t speak Esperanto.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 14:57:35

Mendacapote:Why not filming Esperanto theater works on stage?
That does happen. There are a few DVDs available which are recordings of theatrical performances in Esperanto.

mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 15:10:10

Mendacapote:Why not filming Esperanto theater works on stage?
Look up "Venu rapide homoj", from the IJK in Assisi, 1997.

EL_NEBULOSO (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 19:50:43

Hi,

I guess, some of you have also seen the movie "Incubus". I really like the film, not only because it was filmed in Esperanto (well, with strong accents, though).

If there are films in Esperanto available, I would certainly consider to buy them.

I also liked the link in another thread here, where old Russian films are subtitled in Esperanto.

Anyway, commercially it might be easier to at least dub films in Esperanto.

About Ladino (Ladinisch, Raetoromanisch): it's actually not even one language but a mixture of very heterogenous languages. Nevertheless, a written version of this language was developped, that somehow was supposed to be a consensus...

Gerald

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 20:12:08

EL_NEBULOSO:About Ladino (Ladinisch, Raetoromanisch): it's actually not even one language but a mixture of very heterogenous languages. Nevertheless, a written version of this language was developped, that somehow was supposed to be a consensus...
I think this is the old language vs. dialect debate. Ladino has its roots in a variety of language, but as you say, it developed its own literature, and it developed as a language past being simply "Spanish with Hebrew words mixed in". I hope this doesn't mean that you don't think Yiddish is a language either. Many creoles, as well. I consider Ladino (and Yiddish, and the aforementioned creoles) a full language, not simply a mix of other languages.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2007-junio-26 20:14:20

There is a good article on Ladino in Wikipedia which indicates that it has around 150,000 speakers. The IMDB lists 7 films involving Ladino of which Tom Hanks is in Every time we say goodbye(1986). But one title is wholly in Ladino, El Principe de Argel (2004).
It was Sidney Culbert who estimated the number of Esperantists as 2 million, and I believe that Ziko Marcus Sikosek wrote that if this were true, and the speakers were divided evenly, there would be 180 fluent speakers in Cologne whereas there were only 30. This suggests that about 300,000 speakers is nearer the mark.
So I hypothesize that 1 million or so speakers are needed for a film industry to take off. Of course the critical mass could be several times this figure.

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