'Karaoke' and the Purity of Not Knowing

I've been cutting Chris Chong Chan Fui's first feature 'Karaoke'. Set in Malaysia and with dialogue in Malay and Tamil, I've discovered a sort of purity in editing a film shot in a language that I don't understand. To date, I've understood pretty much all the dialogue in the films I've cut. Except for a few snippets of the Northeastern or Southern Thai dialects here and there.

Normally, after watching full takes with the sound turned on, I tend to edit entire scenes with the sound muted. But working on a film in a non-native language is different from muting the sound. With 'Karaoke', I still get all the atmosphere and ambient sound along with the dialogue but none of it passes through the language recognition parts of my brain. The dialogue becomes just another sound element. It's direct meaning is submerged and what emerges is the purity of language, the intonation and rhythm that can convey the emotional states of the characters.

While cutting 'Tropical Malady', I had an editing supervisor from Italy, Jacopo Quadri, working with me. He told me that there weren't enough Italian films to work on so he mostly edited foreign language films. At the time, I was sceptical that one could edit a film shot in a foreign language and be able to accurately judge performance or maintain a correct rhythm. And it seemed like an impossible task for an editor to wade through hours of takes in an unintelligible language. But with 'Karaoke', I found that the purity of not knowing allows me to concentrate much more on the acting performance when I'm not pre-occupied with the meaning of the dialogue.