In this chapter the author claims that the understanding of the "film text" in the history of cinema points to set of questions for film subtitling that emerge prior to interlingual translation, as part of a larger hybridity of words in relation to the film image. Drawing on examples from narrative and documentary cinema it proposes that the fundamental ambiguity of cinema's "source text" complicates AVT theory's attention to verbal messages and codes. Focusing on the history of English-language subtitling, this chapter concludes by arguing that subtitles are both "the way" and "in the way" of an encounter with foreign films, an "aporia" that could not be resolved by the cinephilic art film print, in which titles are burned into the substrate and constrained by the microtemporality of projection.