I want dubbing!

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm tired of reading subtitles. I want to be able to actually look at the picture when I watch a movie. And, if the movie's not worth watching that closely, I'd like to be able to thumb through a magazine or look something up on the internet and still listen to it.

I do understand the appeal of subtitles. You get to hear the actors' real voices, but it doesn't do that much good when you can't understand the language. Dubbing only bothers me when they have men with deep voices doing the dialog for tweenage boys, or adults speaking in falsetto to dub the voices of children. I saw an Italian movie where they dubbed an old man's dialog with a cartoon-like old man voice, although the actor may have sounded that way in Italian, too.

So much stuff is post-synched now anyway. I hear they dub most scenes in American movies that aren't filmed in a studio. I walked into the living room. My family was watching Mel Gibson's Man Without a Face. There was a scene with some kids on the beach talking. They didn't get the lip sych exact. And no one noticed but me.

I don't know if Americans would come to accept it. I hear that the Japanese insist on subtitles while Europeans are baffled by subtitling. MTV took a survey and found that people in Latin America preferred Beavis & Butt-head with subtitles.

A French actress appeared on the David Letterman show. She couldn't understand why her movie was subtitled. She pointed out that one of the actors in didn't speak French. His dialog was dubbed into French---why not just dub it into English. And you have Italian movies which, for years, were all shot without sound and dubbed. What's the point of watching it dubbed into Italian and subtitled in English?

There was Jacques Tati's movie Mon Oncle. He filmed two versions, French and English. He filmed without sound and dubbed, but, in the English language version, the actors spoke phonetically correct English and the signs were in English. They used the same actors and two versions were filmed simultaneously. But only the French version seems to be available in the US. None of the arguments for subtitles apply in this case. But the petit-bourgeois rubes would rather read than watch the movie.

Which is a little like that William Shatner movie that was filmed in Esperanto. Shatner did pretty well, sounded very natural speaking it. Or like that Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. They had English-speaking actors and they were made primarily for an English-speaking audience, but they wanted subtitles for no good reason.

And here's something else. I think they stopped movie dubbing about the time they stopped foreign accents. I wrote about this before. I watched part of The Odessa File with Jon Voight playing a German reporter. He spoke with sort of a German accent. Roger Corman argued against this when he made Von Richthofen and Brown. "Germans don't speak English with a German accent." No, but they don't speak English with an American or a British accent, either. They do speak German with a German accent. At least get that much right.

They used to dub foreign films that way----French movies were dubbed with actors speaking with a French accent. They don't anymore. Could that be what turned people against dubbing?

And I just watched Melancholia, a Danish movie filmed in Sweden. But the actors were all American and British. Foreign filmmakers are forced to use US actors to get their movies viewed in the US in part because of this aversion to dubbing. It's part of cruelty of US cultural hegemony.

Chuck Norris vs. Jacques Tati

Tati wins, obviously It was the 1980s. Things were different in those days. Some friends and I rented the movie Delta Force, starring Chuck Norris, with Joey Bishop and...some other people. I don't remember. Was Lee Marvin in it? I don't know what possessed us to rent the stinking thing. At least we didn't see it in a theater. 

But that was the '80s. In those days, in every commercial movie, the camera moved constantly and for no reason. Every shot was a tracking shot.

Delta Force's Zionist director Menahem Golan pioneered a money-saving technique I hadn't seen before or since. He would just roll the camera back and forth on a short length of track in each scene. The camera was constantly moving but he only needed to lay half as much track.

When you read anything about independent filmmaking in those days, they were always talking about improvised dollies, tracks, cranes. Wheelchairs were the big thing, of course. It was refreshing to see a Jacques Tati movie, shot entirely in static camera long shot. Look for Mr Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Trafic. And Playtime is interesting, with English dialog by Art Buchwald.