Film Sound in Italy

Listening to the Screen

A. Sisto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137387714
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A critical engagement with cinema in Italy, this book examines the national archive of film based on sound and listening using a holistic audio-visual approach. Sisto shifts the sensory paradigm of film history and analysis from the optical to the sonic, demonstrating how this translates into a shift of canonical narratives and interpretations.

CHAPTER 1

Sounding Fascism in Cinema

Technological innovations bring change and unpredictability, redefine sensory perception, motor ability, and cultural horizons, modes and ways of acting and interacting, they require the development of new knowledge and skills which are implemented in turn in the socio historical context of their advent and progress: technologies are absorbed into and modify human social systems, becoming part of the environment which forms our thought, actions and creativity. Cultural and technological reciprocity is a fundamental issue in the history of modernity. A significant cultural historical coincidence in modern Italian society is that the much-anticipated sound revolution came to cinema when cinema came to the careful attention of the fascist Regime in charge of the life of the nation. Situating the advent of sound cinema in its given social and political moment allows us to consider the developing modalities and specificities of the new cinematic apparatus, now made of images and sounds. There is something like a universalized history of the emergence of sound cinema, which I will consider from a national perspective, and there are a few general studies concerning film censorship during Fascism, which I will explore in relation to sound cinema. My main interest is to focus attention on the interrelation and significance of the coming of cinematic sound technology in the national case of fascist Italy, and how it has played out politically and aesthetically during Fascism and in the post-fascist neorealist cinema and beyond. Exploring how this technology was used by the Regime, and what effects and opportunities that use had on the history of cinema in Italy.

Thus the operative lexicon of the following chapters includes words like: cinema, sound cinema, Fascism and censorship. I examine how the coming of sound in cinema is related to fascist censorship. What happened within the mechanics of fascist censorship after the introduction of sound in cinema, and what use Fascism made of sound cinema. Why did the Regime, following and expanding on censorship laws of previous Italian governments, believe it necessary to censor sound cinema? More specifically: What sounds were to be censored, why, and what did this entail administratively and technically? And, what effect did it have on cinematic production, and audiences?

Due to the economic collapse following World War One, when sound came to the screen in Italy in the late 20s, after various trials in the period of technological adjustment, Italian national production, important in the 10s, was still in crisis and struggling for a revival. Given the scarcity of Italian films, the new apparatus would have, for the most part, given voice and sound to American films, which apart from the crisis, had been consistently present and popular in Italy since the dawn of cinema. But in the cultural economy and social politics of the Regime the new sound technology was first negated and then appropriated for the Italian language. No film could talk unless it spoke Italian. As Jean Gili reports, by 1929 the prohibition to project films in a foreign language was total; therefore films had to be “silenced”. Until the 1930s the original soundtrack was stripped of the dialogue and there

remained only musics and noises, while the film scenes were continually – and not very aesthetically- interrupted by the inter-titles with the translation of the dialogue. The original films thus lost their rhythm and their value. For some films, abundant with dialogue, a huge number of inter-titles was necessary: these sometimes were more than the images, generating those films that the satirists of Marc’Aurelio called “films 100% read” exactly when cinema boasted (even in Italy, when it was possible, that is to say, with the few national films, or foreign films recited in Italian) about being able to offer films “100% spoken”( Quargnolo in La censura ieri e oggi 49–50)¹.

On October 22nd 1930, a circular from the Ministry of the Interior made it official, indicating that no authorization for projection should be granted to any film that speaks a foreign language (Quargnolo in Voci d’autore 11–12; Redi 52). Only the advent of dubbing, that is, the substitution of the original soundtrack (voice and music track) with a national one, allowed foreign films to talk and, as Quargnolo says, permitted many “crimes” to occur (La censura 52). From this perspective we can begin to see dubbing as a technical, juridical, and ideological procedure and modality that allowed the fascist Regime to handle and re-formulate the sound and substance of talking films according to its own agenda.

For the most part, in various general analyses, this historical appropriation is instead considered the necessary and non-problematized solution to the coming of sound, and foreign sounds and languages to the screen. It is often seen as the American solution to overcome the linguistic barriers and to profitably distribute Hollywood production around Western European countries. On the other hand, from a national perspective, dubbing is seen as an economic mechanism, an expedient to generate money and to finance Italian film production through the introduction of state taxation. (Casadio, Brunetta Il cinema del Regime, Redi 52). Roberto Paolella’s monumental Storia del cinema sonoro exemplifies the tone that presents dubbing —invented by the Austrian Jakob Karrol and appropriated by the Americans— as a technical procedure purified of its specific political history. For Paolella, dubbing functions as pure theater, somewhat magically as,

actors, different from those who participated in the original version of the film, lend them their voice in the language of their own nation. It is like a reversed ventriloquism, because while the ventriloquist throws his voice without giving the impression of talking, the dubber makes believe he transferred his voice in the body of another person. (26)

With little variation, magical or mechanical, much the same can be said for the vast majority of film studies when the subject of dubbing is broached.

Virtually no investigative analysis or critical attention is dedicated to this practice of deleting/lending voices in the frame of Fascism/cinema studies. Circulating discourses on the ventennio nero—the 20 year fascist Regime—focus and articulate it in terms of what the Regime’s ‘liberal’ attitude towards cultural production, or it’s ‘incapable’ and non-programmatic repressive politics allowed to cinematic expression —as a creative, inter-textual cultural practice and endeavor inscribed into, and belonging to, a transnational narrative and community. This framing, however useful, becomes myopic, as it eludes a more problematic and less seductive or benevolent reality made of harsh directives and illiberal prohibitions full of related consequences in the sphere of artistic creation and consumption (Ben- Ghiat, Cannistraro, Brunetta, Hay). If Italian Fascism never generated a perfect apparatus for control, control was culturally persuasive and pervasive. The Regime appropriated the cinematic cultural space of university education and youth intellectual formation (GUF), specialized cinema formation (CSC) and production (LUCE, Cinecitta`, ENIC) through the institution of various boards and organizations, schools, associations, prizes and festivals (the Venice Film Festival, Littoriali). Thus, along with censorial legislation, Fascism’s workings need to be looked at in their meta-discursive intricacies as processes of a socio cultural-scape that was complexly articulated and indefinite, made of direct and indirect, explicit and implicit connivances and deviances, promises, exceptions, and prohibitions.

The expressed belief and emphasis on the cultural laissez faire and nonmonolithic politics of the Regime, or in that of a complicated and contradictory, more than complicit spectatorship, meets, in the study of cinema censorship, the necessity and difficulty of exploring in depth the terrain of state control. Consider the fact of the absence, and perhaps impossibility of any systematically documented history of film censorship which as Jean Gili—himself author of a unique work on film censorship during Fascism—explains would require

the possibility of looking up the deliberations of the censorship commissions in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior, for the period 1922–1934, and the Ministry of Popular Culture for the period 1934–1943. This is not possible: no such document is visible at the State Central Archive, subsequent researches have not allowed us to find the place where such documents could be kept. It is not even certain that such documents still exist, taking into account the confusion caused, in the last years of the WWII, by the destruction of the places where administrative documents were kept. So much so that, the oldest archives of the now Ministry of Tourism and Spectacle, simply date back to 1945. (in Quargnolo La censura 6–7)

Despite the increased but unsystematic availability of material at the Central Archives and the Vatican Archives, a history of censorship during the 20-year fascist Regime does not exist, so too a cultural history of dubbing. The central purpose of the present work is to prick our ears to listening to the history of sound in film in Italy. This certainly will illuminate aspects of censorship and open that missing cultural history, as it necessarily starts with the national practice of dubbing being embedded in censorship, both as a direct practice and at the same time hidden in the foundational fascist motif that set it in place and regulated it. It is necessary to highlight the strict connection between the politics of linguistic xenophobia that characterized the fascist Regime, its censorial legislation in merit, and the institution of dubbing.

To ignore the main function of dubbing, which was that of suppressing foreign words and voices, while emphasizing instead the notion of dubbing as film translation that created revenues, or simply stating its institution, as is commonly done in film and historical studies, is to accept it teleologically. As a critical position, this needs to be explored in light of the laws, practices, attitudes, apparatus, and effects of the virtually absolute use of dubbing or sound post-synchronization for both foreign and national films in Italy from the birth of sound cinema. Dubbing is a cinematographic technique that encloses Italians in “Italianicity” through a filter that is linguistic and ideological, and that eliminates; the sonic expressions and expressivity of the foreign other. This reality that defines talking cinema in Italy is the necessary setting for an understanding of a historical period that still stirs debates, and that left many inscriptions, still visible and audible, in the sociocultural construct of the nation, not the least part being sound film dubbing that became the normalized modality of film translation.

Sensorium Commune and Schizo-Hollywood

Aspects of a newly focused critical approach to dubbing are evident in Steven Ricci’s Cinema and Fascism (2008). In a discussion of the complicated intertextual links that connected the fascist Regime with cinema as a developing artistic form, and product, to be regimented inside the fascist codex according to the specificities of the national case, Ricci underlines the importance of the imposition of the process of dubbing not simply from an economic point of view but also from an ideological one. Relating it to the Regime’s politics of xenophobia and national linguistic purism, he calls it “by far the most significant institutional measure” in the creation of a fascist cinema system that allowed the state “to shape key features of cinema content,” thus referring to it as an indirect censoring practice “applied more often than traditional censorship methods” (157–158).

Ricci explores the inescapable Hollywood-Italian cinema connection, with Hollywood cinema as the site of much dread and desire, and always consistently present during the ventennio nero. He affirms that, on the one hand, “the systems of representation of the classical Hollywood feature were not fundamentally transgressive to an imagined fascist social order” (ibid.), but he also states that Hollywood did indeed represent a threat. As an example, the author points to the more variegated roles that women were offered there, in defiance of traditionally assigned gender representations of sexuality and sexual mores. Sexuality, and specifically women’s sexuality, in the boisterous and unstable entrance into modern times, was very problematic for the Regime’s politics of domestic and demographic normativity. Of course, the exposure to other models of being a woman and different sexual agencies could create “unfascist” drives that were not welcomed by the Regime. Ricci’s point is that the Regime created itself as an apparatus that extended from pure regulation into a pervasive infiltration of the public and private sphere, being virtually omnipresent, thus aiming at shaping all aspects of civil society. “Fascism branded itself as a producer of an idealized social organization” (160) and every citizen was always called to his/her civic responsibilities. The fascist agenda theorized and, in fact, tried to erase the private sphere of individual subjectivity and make the subject a fascist subject tout court, existing only as fascist. Even as cinema spectators, Italians were addressed as political subjects. Before a feature film, the LUCE documentaries and newsreels produced by the Regime offered and guided interpretations and responses to the film and contextualized the moment of vision inside the fascist life of the nation through images of the current state of things, as they fascistly were, or should be.

As Ricci affirms, this operation was conducted also through the dubbing into Italian of every foreign film starting from 1930. But if dubbing was of fundamental importance for the construction of a fascist cinema, what were its functioning mechanisms? The statement begs for an investigation of the entailments that come packed with it. What does the suppression and substitution of foreign voices and languages mean in terms of the filmic text, apart from freeing censoring possibilities? How does Hollywood remain Hollywood, while being Italianized, literally translated, linguistically and phonetically? What kind of schizoid identification process on the part of the audience is generated in front of images that tell stories of an America that speaks the domestic language? In his articulated taxonomy, Ricci keeps Hollywood as a referent somehow untouched by dubbing. Talking, for example, of American gangster films, he writes, “Italian audiences were encouraged to read issues of criminality—otherwise absent from Italian screens—as symptomatic of the American failure to resolve contradictions characteristic of modern urban life” (156). The depiction of the other as debauched and undesirable functioned already and was guaranteed by shrewd narrative mechanisms mostly operative in the national film production, the so-called escapist production that Ricci cleverly analyzes in its ideological undercurrents. In the imported foreign films, dubbing could rephrase any content deemed subversive by the authorities in charge of the revision through a manipulation of the dialogue (and music) track. The objective was to offer crime, and criminality, as something that happens abroad (while Italy was depicted as the bastion of integral morals and worldly values). But, by doing so they, paradoxically, reappropriated linguistically that foreign evil, making it Italian, as the other, however malevolent and debased, could only speak Italian. Thanks to the cinematographic maneuvers operated by the fascists on Italian screens, dubbing is entrapped in a contradiction: it gives national voices to that evil and bad other. An intratextual strategy, dubbing inserted and reestablished fascist hegemonic coordinates inside the film itself, in doing so it had to make reference to already known representational schemas, a bad familiar, bad Italian voices, made doubly bad by the mismatching of voice and culturally specific images.

The bad voices recall an interview with the director Elia Kazan, published in Filmcritica in 1970, for a report on dubbing that as an unresolved national issue comes around almost cyclically, but only in the niche space of film magazine discussion. Even if the comment refers to a time distinct from the one under observation, it can be considered to look back at the origins and practices of dubbing:

I do not like dubbed voices, they are terrible. Even if they are good, they are the worst: the better the voices are, the worse. All voices sound the same in every film. And the characters sound the same, and women always are [embody vocally] the idea that one has of what is a “sexy” voice. It is really laughable. (266)

“Laughable” surely, but, more profoundly appalling for the film, the audience, women, and men. I would suggest a much darker history, that since its imposition under Fascism the continuing dubbing practice has been, essentially, the result (and then cause) of a mix of fear, rejection, and ignorance of the other, in a process of linguistic, cultural, and vocal exorcism.

Kazan’s comment points to the often not too subtle vocal/personality erasure and ideological misappropriation of the characters in the reinterpretation, or vocal rewriting, of the dubbed film. Beyond the linguistic autarchic intentions of the Regime, the process of domestication of the other through linguistic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Sounding Fascism in Cinema
• 2   Dubbing in Deed, and Listening to Dubbing
• 3   Cinema Talk: Between “Make Believe” and Schizophonia
• 4   The Soundtrack after Fascism: The Neorealist Play without Sound
• 5   Michelangelo Antonioni: The Wind Is Photogenic
• 6   Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Thousand Notes of Contestation
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index