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A rundown of the individual elements and artists that would join together to form the musical film. To create the songs, studios bought music publishers and hired songwriters to create lower-common denominator versions of Broadway and pop hits. Music arrangements and sound recording slowly improved, as did photography and editing. Two-color Technicolor was hugely popular, then became a liability through its limited palette and loss of quality control. The personnel drew from both stage veterans and film people: directors such as Lubitsch and Mamoulian, stage and opera stars like Jolson and Lawrence Tibbett, and silent-film performers with acceptable voices, such as Bebe Daniels and Gloria Swanson.

Chapter 3 looked at microsound, a form of electronica often characterized as minimalist. Chapter 4 looks at music that can be described as “maximal” because it tests the physical limitations of listeners through excessive durations and volumes. These various manifestations of excess all purport to transcend meaning, to push sound beyond semiosis to a state in which it communicates directly to listeners’ bodies. The chapter focuses on maximal genres such as drone music, dub techno, and noise music, enlisting theories on excess and the sublime by Georges Bataille and Immanuel Kant. It also situates noise as a reaction to but also a confirmation of traditional notions of beauty in music.

This concluding chapter extends the book's readings of aurality and visuality over a wide-range of late 20th-century African American cultural production including works by hip hop artists Common and OutKast, political figure Malcolm X, artist Robert Colescott, and musicians Parliament/Funkadelic. Intimating the applicability of the book's critical currency of “the remix,” the chapter illustrates the continued salience of art to political discourse.

This chapter aims to address the question, “How does an audience watch/read an imported cultural drama series?” It develops a comprehensive, relatively formal, conceptual framework for the analysis of pan-Asian, transnational pop culture consumption. It specifically explores the circulation and reception of media products in locations where an ethnic-Chinese population predominates, namely the People Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The possible emergence of a pan-East Asian “community of consumers” and its implication is also investigated. Before exploring the reception of imported drama series, one significant peculiarity of their circulation in Pop Culture China should be noted. It then deals with the question of dubbing and its effect on the audience. Regional marketing of pop cultures is now configured into their production cost. The predominantly ethnic-Chinese locations constitute a subset within East Asia and can be conceptually designated as Pop Culture China, with histories of established networks of production and consumption of Chinese language based genres of pop culture.

In summary, this book proposes that improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provide a key to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly. By analysing a range of emergent practices, Speaking in Subtitles has explored ‘errancy’ as a fault line rapidly spreading across the surface of contemporary screen translation, transferring attention away from endless, unresolvable debates on ‘quality’ towards the geopolitics that determine and delimit value systems in the first place. The concrete translation practices explored in this book identify language diversity as a major trajectory within digital and online modes of media engagement. Paying attention to improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provides a crucial key, it argues, to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly—these ‘error screens’ are central, not peripheral, to screen culture as the risks of linguistic and cultural mutation that attend interlingual translation keep films, TV programs and other forms of screen media circulating, evolving and living-on.

This chapter addresses Woody Allen’s approach to vocal performance as a means of providing a broader meditation on the ventriloquism of the dubbed voice in film by examining the relationship between Allen and his regular Spanish dubbing actor, Joan Pera, in order to explore the wider location of the voice in Spanish dubbing. Dubbing has formed an integral part of Spanish film practices. Yet the discussion of dubbing also provides the opportunity to reflect more widely on the fundamentally split nature of all voices, whether technologized or not. In using Allen’s ‘Spanish double’, the chapter considers two areas of dubbing that have received little academic attention: the vocal performance of the dubbed voice, and its place within the soundtrack of the film. Also addressed are the challenges and contradictions that surround the dubbing of nonverbal sounds, such as the stutters and stammers for which Woody Allen is well known.

Returning to the origins of the Mad Max franchise, this chapter focuses on the distinctly regional, Australian voice of the first Mad Max in 1979 in order to pave the way for broader scrutiny of the role that language and accent play in the series as a whole. Specifically, it deploys the notion of ‘accented filmmaking’ developed by Hamid Naficy to explore the limitations and connotations of the dubbed version of this film prepared by distributor American International Pictures (AIP) for North American audiences. Despite switching accents to mask Mad Max’s Australian origins, AIP’s dub created multiple moments of cultural dissonance that served to emphasise rather than eradicate the film’s accented address.

Latin America has played a major role in the history of film translation. Most of the research on film and audiovisual translation to date has focused almost exclusively on Europe, and there is hardly any research on Latin American countries. Apart from the intrinsic interest in and need to expand research to other geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts, in the case of Latin America there is also a double motive: the magnitude of the Spanish-speaking market; and the fact that, for many years, virtually all the translation into Spanish for audiovisual productions was carried out in specific Latin American countries. This chapter explores the development and implementation of audiovisual translation in the Spanish-speaking context, on both sides of the Atlantic, from intertitles to subtitles, multiple-language versions, and dubbing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter addresses film translation into Hebrew in Mandatory Palestine, from the 1920s to the 1940s, when silent films were gradually replaced by talkies and the need for translation increased. It combines ‘macro history’ with ‘micro history’, the study of history through primary sources. Its main primary sources are the autobiographies of two pioneering translators, Ya’akov Davidon and Yerushalayim Segal, who specialised in dubbing and subtitling, respectively. While local production at that time served Zionist ideology, the main function of foreign films was to provide entertainment. Film translators faced two obstacles: official British censorship and the objection on the part of some sectors of Jewish society to the screening of films in foreign languages, considered a threat to Hebrew. Despite these obstacles, translators had the freedom to import, invent, and experiment with new technologies, and to adapt not just the translation to the film, but also the film to the translation.

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.

This chapter examines the electronic mediation of the human voice in Jamaican popular music. The manipulation of vocal timbre and pitch in studio production since the 1970s, and through the software plug-in Auto-tune in more recent years, has enabled Jamaican musicians to channel the voices of the dead, the vulnerable, and the voiceless, and in doing so, represent the sufferings of the historical past, as well as the depredations of the contemporary forms of exclusion and poverty. This chapter surveys the history of the sound-system and dub music, and shows how these innovations form the basis for the technological development and social valence of vocal production in Jamaican popular music. The chapter closely analyzes the innovative recording practices of the celebrated roots reggae performer, Burning Spear, as well as the more recent controversial work of dancehall performer Vybz Kartel, and proposes that they are linked by a shared interest in vocal timbre, and how it can be sculpted electronically so as to invoke historically resonant personae, and reflect on questions of dispossession, deprivation, and political representation in the present.

Reggae music is seldom analysed without a reference to the Rastafari movement, the founding event of which was the coronation of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, which took place on November 2, 1930. In Jamaica, some interpreted it as the fulfillment of the prophecy announced by Marcus Garvey before his departure for the United States. Some scholars have proposed an analysis centered on religion, usually based on the Jamaican case and focused on sacred practices, and the beliefs in which they are grounded. In contrast with the religion-focused approach, other scholars have considered the Rastafari movement from a socio-political standpoint, emphasising its historical emergence in relation to a context of domination and its articulation around the key notion of liberation; these works usually concern the Jamaican case, and often represent a Marxist approach, using terms such as neo-colonialism, social stratification, economic deprivation and racial prejudice. This chapter explores the history of reggae and the Rastafari movement, focusing on dubbing and the emergence of the reggae dancehall.

Focusing on the polarising nature of sub/dub debates, this chapter provides an overview of attitudes and approaches to screen translation both within and beyond screen culture. Dominating the little attention paid to translation within Anglophone Screen Studies, and shaping much research within Translation Studies, sub/dub wars encapsulate the entangled prejudices and value politics that beset the field. This chapter revisits insightful arguments posed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther during his anti-subtitle campaign, before expanding the frame of reference for this debate by turning to Translation Studies and national screen translation preferences beyond the Anglo-American context.