Henri Béhar is a subtitler, film critic and journalist who is best known for his regular participation in the Cannes Film Festival and for his subtitling of many well-known films.
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Life and career
Béhar was born to Jewish parents in Cairo and educated in Paris. He has been North American correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. He was familiar with Arabic, French, English and Italian from childhood and later learned German and Spanish.
He first worked as a subtitler for Woody Allen on Zelig in 1983. He went on to subtitle more than 100 films from French and English. He worked extensively with Woody Allen, Atom Egoyan, Todd Field and Gus van Sant. He has frequently chaired events at the Cannes Film Festival.
Béhar has been widely interviewed about his subtitling practice. He has referred to subtitling as "playing 3-D Scrabble in two languages". As a professional subtitler he sees subtitling as "a form of cultural ventriloquism, [...] the focus must remain on the puppet, not the puppeteer. Our task as subtitlers is to create subliminal subtitles so in sync with the mood and rhythm of the movie that the audience isn’t even aware it is reading. We want not to be noticed. If a subtitle is inadequate, clumsy, or distracting, it makes everyone look bad, but first and foremost the actors and the filmmakers. It can impact the film’s potential career."
Films subtitled
Béhar has subtitled more than a hundred French- and English-language films.