The reception of dubbing in France 1931–3: The case of Paramount

The international film trade changed dramatically with the generalisation of sound films. It became more difficult for Hollywood to export English-speaking films than during the silent era. One solution was multiple-language films, which helped French stars to become even more popular in France. The Hollywood studios quickly opted for dubbing as the best solution. The first two Paramount films dubbed into French were Derelict (as Désemparé) and Morocco (as Cœurs brûlés) in 1931. How were these dubbed versions received by critics and the trade press in France? Popular film magazines did not object to dubbed versions so much, while cinephile magazines considered they were rushed jobs. This chapter studies the evolution of the reception of dubbed films in France in 1931–3, using evidence from the trade and popular press. It traces the beginning of the opposition between original-language versions for upmarket movie theatres, and dubbed versions aimed at popular neighbourhoods.

Universal language, local accent: Music and song in the early talking film

With dialogue in early talkies complicating international product exchange, the film industry cherished the notion of music as a ‘universal language’. But this music required degrees of translation, both in the literal textual sense and in the matter of adapting ‘foreign’ customs, cultural and social, and musical styles. This chapter explores the issues principally through case studies of five key singing stars of early American and European sound films: Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Carlos Gardel, Marlene Dietrich, and Richard Tauber. German producer Erich Pommer’s goal of combining universal appeal and nationalistic attractions, most evident in the multilingual Congress Dances, is also explored. After the mid-1930s, film music’s universal language significantly changed in response to technical developments, Hollywood’s solidified world power, and its development of a pervasive orchestral soundtrack style partly shaped by exiled European composers. European elements and local accents remained, but were now subsumed in a global American product.

‘A splendid innovation, these English titles!’ The invention of subtitling in the USA and the UK

This chapter offers the first account of the beginning of subtitling in the United Kingdom and in the United States. The release of foreign-language films with superimposed English titles began in both countries in the course of 1931, and became generalised in 1932. The chapter discusses early experiments in titling, including the use of interpolated titles after the fashion of silent films. It also raises a number of methodological problems, including the difficulty of interpretation of press data. This difficulty means that as yet we have only a provisional picture of early subtitling practices in the UK and USA, and for several of these early subtitled versions the nature and extent of the titling is not known. The chapter also discusses the question of survival of the material artefacts of these subtitled versions.

The significance of dubbed versions for early sound-film history

Dubbing as a film translation technique has been largely taken for granted since its origins. Yet such origins are rarely looked into from historical, technical, and artistic perspectives. The study of early French-dubbed Hollywood and European films has a lot to teach us. This chapter examines aspects of voice-acting, lip synchronisation, dialogue alteration, and sound mixing in nine American, German, and British films. It reveals how the makers of French dubbed versions, in Hollywood and in France, were keen on recreating the soundtrack of foreign films according to their own perception of sound and voice treatment, sometimes disregarding the source material to the point of ‘enriching’ it. This approach has major implications for the reception of these versions, but also for the study of the evolution of sound practices in the early sound period. The historical merits of these versions also have significant archival and exhibition implications.

Early titling on films and Pathé’s innovative and multilingual strategies in 1903

The shift from titles on lantern slides to the practice of titling on the film itself dates to the turn of the 20th century. Early examples of preserved filmed titles are rare, but occasional advertisements can be found in the UK in catalogues of James Williamson (1899) and Robert William Paul (1901), and in France in a catalogue of the Parnaland film company (1901). Although evidence shows that Pathé was using this technique in 1901, catalogues from its British branch reveal that it advertised it from May 1903. The advertisements highlighted positive outcomes for producers and exhibitors, and promoted titles in a variety of languages. This early titling strategy allowed Pathé to get ahead of its competitors in terms of industrialisation, control over its product, and domestic and foreign market share. This chapter focuses on early filmed titling and intertitling practices, Pathé’s innovative offer in 1903, and its evolution until 1908.

Film translation in Sweden in the early 1930s

The main focus of this chapter is how the Swedish film industry settled on subtitling as its method of film translation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The early 1930s saw a gradual shift towards favouring subtitling over dubbing and intertitles. Subtitling was further promoted as new methods for providing the subtitles on the film were developed. A second focus in the chapter is the heightened media sensitivity brought on by dubbing and how this may be related to distributors’ experiments in film translation during the early years of conversion to sound. As the years progressed, a consensus developed in Sweden in favour of subtitling, which was perceived as unobtrusive, since it masked the technical construction of the film medium for those spectators who knew the spoken language in the film.

Dubbing in the early 1930s: An improbable policy

This chapter uses the case of dubbing practices in the early 1930s to consider the possibility that the impact of screen translation techniques on film aesthetics is more significant than has been recognised. The focus is on Hollywood’s unexpected adoption in 1931 of voice dubbing as its principal means of preparing films for the main foreign markets. Hollywood’s reliance on dubbing is contrasted with practices in the German film industry, its main rival for the world film market, where films for export were prepared in foreign-language versions rather than dubbed. Dubbing involved more than voice replacement to affect motion picture style in various ways. Trade press documentation is used to suggest that the dubbed American films of 1931 typically featured less speech; fewer close-ups of speaking actors; more reaction shots in dialogue scenes; more cuts overall; framings and props that concealed rather than displayed the actors’ moving lips; and other stylistic quirks.

A ‘delirium tremens’: Italian-language film versions and early dubbings by Paramount, MGM, and Fox (1930–3)

This chapter sheds new light on the strategies that Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox developed in the early 1930s to target the Italian-speaking market. It documents how the Italian government, local film traders, and the press responded to the majors’ Italian-language production during a critical turning point for the national film industry. The chapter draws on a range of historical records (diplomatic, censorship and administrative state documents, film prints, press reviews, and other publicity materials) from Italian and North-American archives. The findings show that the majors’ experiments with Italian dubbing and versioning were not always successful and elicited ambivalent responses in Italy; the findings also demonstrate the gradual emergence of dubbing as the most commercially viable solution for both the US majors and the Italian establishment. Incongruities in the archival records, and the scarcity of surviving film prints, pose interpretative problems and call for further empirical research in the field.

Confessions of a film restorer

When restoring a film, the aim is naturally always to provide the definitive version. However, many factors make this an impossible mission. This chapter draws on actual film archival practice and theory, exposing a minefield of obstacles facing any academic study trying to examine film history based on restored works. The focus is on silent cinema restoration, intertitles, and translation issues. Using Mark-Paul Meyer and Paul Read’s categories—from a one-to-one duplication to the creation of an altogether new work—the aim is to give an insight into the complexity of silent film restoration and the practical, and sometimes very unacademic, nature of the actual restoration work. The fact that most film restorations typically concentrate on image quality rather than titles, which are often merely supposed to support the visual action, adds to the complexity of transparency about the provenance of the filmic titles as an object of study.

‘Don’t mention the war’: The Soviet re-editing of Three Live Ghosts

Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.