Antonella Sisto
When Italian actor Ferruccio Amendola passed away in the summer of 2001, national audiences, foreign‐film production teams, and actors, said goodbye to the “King of Voices”: the vocal personification—dubbing voice—of numerous Hollywood stars in Italian. Beyond their flesh‐and‐bones flickering on screen, Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro, among others, shared Amendola’s voice, or rather, they were spoken by him.
Through the technological trick and performance of dubbing—a cinematic splitting of a voice from its body and its substitution with another voice/language—Ferruccio Amendola became an international celluloid hero, and one of the best‐known representatives of the art and craft of voice dubbing. The suturing of the acting body and vocal performance is a staple of sound cinema in Italy. It is a specific cultural variation and application of a foundational aspect of sound cinema: the illusion of a unified audiovisual spectacle that is disparate but pulled together technologically by way of synchronizing image and soundtrack. With dubbing, the soundtrack is linguistically recreated, and more or less synchronized to lip movements, to produce an audiovisual translation. The resulting vocal exchange has profound significance for the film, as it affects the body and performance of the actor, the rhythm and flow of the language, the communicative texture and timbre of the voice, and the coherence of voice and gesture. This in turn affects audience perception of the audiovisual construct, as cinema translation deals not with a written but with a multisensory text (Fodor 1976).
In the following text, I trace the peculiar relation to the soundtrack that characterizes cinema production, postproduction, and spectatorship in Italy, using as a guide the remarkable theoretical reflections and creative interventions—starting in the early 1940s under the Fascist regime—of the young film critic and later director, Michelangelo Antonioni. Exploring the evolution of the soundtrack following the insights (or insounds) of this renowned “man of images” (Antonioni 1996) allows us to follow the fundamental but often marginalized role of sound in film as technological process, sociopolitical practice, and creative project. Employing Antonioni’s commentary on the cultural politics of the Fascist soundtrack and addressing his radical innovation of film language and experimentation with narrative techniques central to the emergence of modern cinema’s new audiovisual expressivity and sonic imagination, this analysis will point to the specificities of the Italian national case.
A decade into the Italian enterprise of voice dubbing, film critic Michelangelo Antonioni (1940) introduced us to Clark Costa, an impossible celluloid hero who played only for Italian audiences. Half Clark, half Costa, Antonioni described this figure as “a tall sturdy guy, a masculine face [who] strangely looks like Clark Gable,” but with a “somewhat rough, deep voice that strangely recalls that of [actor and voice dubber] Romolo Costa” (238). In the article “Vita impossible del Signor Clark Costa” (“The Impossible Life of Mr. Clark Costa”), Antonioni identified “signor Clark Costa” as an embodiment of the myth of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, particularly the idea of a manipulation of the human body and its parts, recomposed a piacere. In a wry conceptual move, Antonioni has replaced the ancient gods in Plato’s myth, who were the agents of this manipulation, with godlike Fascist authorities.
The thought of dubbing as the celluloid reenactment of divine omnipotence is not only provocative, it is not that far off the mark: dubbing finds its matrix in the cultural and political context of xenophobic purism and nationalist Fascism that dispensed its authority to regulate cultural production, and, explicitly, cinema, famously referred to by the Duce as “the most powerful weapon” (Bondanella 1993, 6). In other words, the emergence of sound cinema within Italy is clearly linked to a political, not just technological, moment. In the beginning, the sound revolution was silenced, and then coopted by the regime for its own ends. Italians’ partial or incidental exposure to original soundtracks, as had happened with The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), the first sound/musical film with synchronized dialogue, which made it to Rome in April 1929, was soon forgotten as the ministry of the interior released a circular, in October 1930, that banned foreign languages at the movies, and imposed the removal of any foreign dialogue.
The plug that accompanied the film Anna Christie (Clarence Brown, 1930) declared triumphantly that silver‐screen icon Greta Garbo “talks.” Expectation and excitement quickly turned into enchantment for audiences and critics; with her first words, “Give me a whisky … ginger ale on the side … and don't be stingy, baby,” the cheering was unanimous. Richard Watts, Jr. wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "her voice is revealed as a deep, husky contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world” (quoted in Landazuri 2015). Everyone was enthralled by her voice, comparing it to wine, velvet, mahogany, a Swedish foghorn, or a cello (Basinger 2000, 471). Anna Christie was a sensation that made Garbo a more dazzling star than she had been in her silent films.
While the cinema world boasted of the talkies, fascinated by actors’ and actresses’ voices, Italians were left with a silent option, or a silenced one. Journalist Filippo Sacchi, writing in Il Corriere della Sera (March 27, 1931), could only report what he had “heard” or read about Greta Garbo:
Those who listened, in the original version … say that it has a powerful effect, and that the way in which Garbo pronounces her confession, with her warm, deep and a bit raucous voice (here only the part where she says “Father, father” was left) is great. Maybe. Restricted in this way, abridged into ordinary intertitles, she leaves us, it is useless to conceal it, with a different impression.
(Quoted in Quargnolo 1986, 14)
“A different impression” indeed. Sacchi’s is an understated and resigned commentary on the procedure that erased without much garbo (“grace” in Italian) the fascinating voice of the “divine,” enacting the back‐into‐intertitles suppression of the new expressivity of the film medium and of acting. Consider this later comment by Sacchi in the Corriere (November 8, 1931) on Garbo’s other film from 1930, Romance (Clarence Brown), where he notes how all we hear is a “little part of dialogue that they left at the end of the film” as the prima donna pronounces her parting lines. “Thus,” continues Sacchi, “we listen to the famous voice of Garbo, a voice warm and soft from low pitched musical inflections, without canto, all hers” (quoted in Quargnolo 1986, 24).
This testimony expresses the titillation offered to Italian audiences, a token gift of a few words in Garbo’s own voice that resonate in the listener’s imagination as a vocal opening—but at the same time a closure that became definite with the regime’s imposition of voice dubbing. Greta Garbo would find her alter‐voice, enabling her to speak in Italian theaters, in Tina Lattanzi, who declared how she wanted to give to Garbo’s voice the appeal of her eyes (Di Cola 2004, 353). Film sound technology met Fascist linguistic censorship, along with artistic imagination and desire—and hybrid bodies with other’s voices proliferated.
Together with the celluloid amalgam of body and voice on screen, a peculiar fusion of linguistic nationalism and pride filled film articles in magazines and newspapers. In reviews and commentaries, dubbing was embraced for its “intelligent potency” and “metaphysical function.” In Diego Calcagno’s analysis (1940, 293), the perfection of the Italian language renders more appealing and photogenic Hollywood stars such as Greta Garbo; in her lips, “while they move, no expression can sound as sweet as a ‘Sì.’” Her charm is doubled. Likewise we might say that the consciousness of sound film in Italy was doubled and altered in the mixing of excitement for the new spectacular possibilities of cinema with the technopolitical reality of its Fascist regimentation. The regime’s prohibition, effective in practice by 1929, against projecting films in their original languages (Gili 1981, 34) fomented a desire and expectation for the talkies. Thus, the dubbed second coming of sound film to national theaters met with a mixture of enthusiasm, willing credulity, and a mandated obliviousness to the trick.
Linguistic purism, in aid of the battle for a unitary national Italian language, is the first and most commonly identified justification for blocking the nascent cinematic Babel. In tracing the history of Italian language in cinema, Sergio Raffaelli explains how state vigilance regarding foreign languages, as well as vernacular language and local dialects commonly spoken by the majority of Italians, started within the Liberal government of Giolitti in 1913, when cinema was still silent. Then the Ufficio di revisione cinematografica, later inherited and reinforced by the Fascist regime, was instituted to assure that only linguistically and morally edifying films received authorization to be publically shown, after careful examination by the state commission. Patrolling the screen, beginning with the preemptive revision of film scripts, in defense and promulgation of the Italian language, also meant monitoring dialogue for moral and political issues, thus implementing content censorship.
Despite sparse critical research into cinema censorship in the period from 1915 to 1945 (Raffaelli 1992), discourse around the Fascist ventennio often points to a relatively broadminded attitude toward cinema on the part of the regime, together with its commonly affirmed ineffectual and centrifugal politics of control. This general view of the regime’s relationship to cinema stems from the ingrained bias that the cinema is fundamentally visual; it begs revision in light of careful attention to the aural dimension—attention that reveals how striking and pervasive the xenophobic imprint of the Fascist ventennio on the dubbed soundtrack was.
Fascist film censorship was not only linguistic but also cultural, and invisibly knitted into the adaptation and Italianization of the audiovisual text. Italianization authorized the manipulation of dialogue and plot, and the elision of scenes—abridged thanks to dialogue reformulation or glued back together with the addition of extra musical interventions. Italian writer Italo Calvino’s comments on seeing and hearing Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938)—director Marcel Carné’s masterpiece scripted by poet Jacques Prévert—grasp the range and effect of Fascist screen censorship as it played to a sensitive and attentive filmgoer. Calvino wonders in disbelief what happened to the crafted beauty and poetic realism of the French film, and to the plot itself:
I felt that French cinema discussed more disquieting and vaguely forbidden things. I knew that Jean Gabin in Le Quai des brumes was not a veteran who wanted to go cultivate a plantation in the colonies, like the Italian dubbing tried to make believe, but a deserter who escaped from the battlefield, a subject that Fascist censorship would never have permitted.
(Fellini, Calvino, and Betti 1993, 35; emphasis mine)
Calvino’s testimony suggests how the almost occult practice of dubbing‐as‐make‐believe, while working to cover narratives inconvenient for the Fascist view of life, also created in the spectator the feeling of other things being narrated on the screen, pointing to its own fabrication. And fabrication it surely was. For the censors, French cinema was, in general, considered an immoral artistic practice, burying the medium’s potential to set moral example in the mists and miseries of human wreckage and lowlife outcasts. Le quai des brumes received the enraged attention of Luigi Freddi, director from its foundation in 1934, of the Direzione generale per la cinematografia. Freddi had denied authorization for any public screening of the film, which only circulated in the sanitized and depoliticized version seen by Calvino at the end of Freddi’s mandate in 1939 (Gili 1981, 69–72). The directorate governed the entire apparatus of film censorship: forcing scripts to be rewritten; eliminating scenes; and Italianizing names, products, and places as it deemed necessary—before granting approval for dubbing. It then checked the final version before permitting a film’s distribution in Italy. Thus, the nation was boxed into an all Italian‐speaking and “right‐thinking” cinema world. Given this omnipresent sonic filter, as Calvino and Antonioni describe, that world inevitably raised serious issues of credibility.
To fully appreciate the issue of credibility, let us say that sound cinema came “schizophonically” to the Italian screen. The term was coined by acoustic ecologist Murray Schafer (1994) and is used here to express the aberration inherent in foreign‐film dubbing. Forged in relation to schizophrenia, the term schizophonia points to the disjuncture that originates with the technological possibility of severing sounds from their sources and applying them to different contexts. While this procedure is at the basis of sound cinema in general, which operates by way of synchronizing the disparate realities of sound and image track, the maneuver conducted by dubbing—substituting original voices, rhythms, timbres, and inflections with Italian ones, superimposed on the “foreign‐ness” of the film (body, faces, gestures, places, and objects)—forces the audience into an essentially incongruous position of cognitive conflict or even denial.
Calvino foresees, or forehears, the notion of schizophonia as a gnawing cognitive dissonance caused by the incommensurable split of sound and image, when he asserts that Italian spectatorship is effectively alienated from the soundtrack. By alienation Calvino means that consciousness of the trick of postsynchronization distances the spectator and calls attention to itself. In “L’autobiografia di uno spettatore” (Fellini, Calvino, and Betti 1993, 31), he recalls his favorite movie theater during his adolescence under Fascism and his fascination for what could be heard from the operator’s cabin facing the main street:
the absurd voices of the film resounded, metallically deformed by the technical instruments of the time, and even more absurd for the language [eloquio] of Italian dubbing that did not have any relationship with any spoken language, not from the past or from the future. And yet the falsity of those voices must have had some communicative strength of its own, like the sirens singing (emphasis mine).
The idea of the seductive power of the voice, twisted by the consciousness of its falsity revealed to him first by the early technology’s flaws, extends into Calvino’s reflections about the substitution of the original voice, and the abstraction of dubbing, that for Italian spectators filled actors’ and actresses’ mouths with:
a conventional and extraneous and insipid elocution, not less anonymous than the printed captions that in the other countries (or at least those where the spectators are considered mentally more agile) informs [one about] what the mouths communicate, with all the sensitive charge of a personal pronunciation, of a phonetic signature made of lips, tooth, saliva, made above all of the different geographical origins of the American cauldron, in a language that, to whoever understands it, reveals nuances of expressions, and to whoever does not understand it, has a surplus of musical potentiality …. Therefore the conventionality of the American cinema got to me raddoppiata [redoubled/redubbed]—please excuse me the pun—by the conventionality of the dubbing.
(Fellini, Calvino, and Betti 1993, 37)
The pun on the word raddoppiata points to the effect of film dubbing as a doubling in the minds of Italian spectators who, for Calvino, were always conscious of the spoken word in cinema, that, deprived of its distinctive physicality and musicality, was “always felt [and heard] as a superimposition, a capital letters caption.” (37) This constant doubling—what I am calling schizophonia—is understood by Calvino as the audience’s alienation from the soundtrack.
However imaginary the cinematic illusion, and despite all willful suspension of disbelief, consciously or not, the film spectators perceive an impossible split when Jean Gabin in Le quai des brumes not only speaks Italian but also has the same voice as John Wayne in The Searchers (John Ford, 1946), Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), and Charlton Heston in Ben‐Hur (William Wyler, 1959). The result is cognitive dissonance and the experience of disassociation: the myth of Aristophanes comes back again and again, assorted and protracted, in the long list of actors reformed and “spoken” by the same voice. To fully appreciate the dissonance, let us return to Clark Gable—aka Clark Costa—remastered into Clark Cigoli in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939).
The voice actor Emilio Cigoli, who began his work in 1936, became, in the 1940s, the most sought after dubber in Italian cinema. He supplanted Romolo Costa, the original Italian voice of Clark Gable, and became the aural embodiment of protagonists for hundreds of films. He was the voice for an astonishing assortment of Hollywood stars. In addition to Le quai des brumes’ Jean Gabin and the actors just noted above, we can add Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, Joseph Cotton, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart. Instantly recognizable by the domestic public, his voice inhibited Italian sonic consciousness of languages and eliminated difference in its homogenizing of the grain of actors’ voices and their characterizations of masculinity. They all coalesced and collapsed into the domain of one voice, praised and celebrated, and passed on with fashion and fanfare, after Cigoli’s death in 1980, to his heir Ferruccio Amendola.
The bias that allows for an acceptance, and often celebration, of the vocal colonization of the acting body—a linguistic and, as I have suggested, ideological appropriation of the filmic construct—is embedded in a theoretical and critical discourse that values film as essentially visual, and considers sound ancillary—offering the verbalization of content, narrative advancement, and music as emotional enhancement. (The work of Rick Altman [1992] and Michel Chion [1994] is foundational here.) In the history, technology, and ideological implications of this bias—and in the convenience of its perpetuation—we can articulate Italy’s peculiar, continuing, national practice of not only accepting but also normalizing the Fascist imposition of foreign‐film dubbing that rendered unproblematic and often celebrated, even after the demise of the regime, the substitution of dialogue and voices and the reworking of music and noises.
In 2009, with both serious and humorous intent, the Teatro Popolare della Svizzera Italiana (TEPSI), under the direction of Yor Milano, revoiced Sentieri selvaggi, the Italian version of The Searchers, in ticinese, a West Lombardy/Italian Swiss dialect, with John Wayne now revisited by local actor Gianmario Arringa. Se ta capi ta copi/Se ti prendo t’ammazzo (If I Catch You I’ll Kill You) represents a third degree of separation from John Ford’s original, as the film, with a great deal of vernacular ingenuity, comes to occupy the sociolinguistic space of regional self‐assertion. Attendance at the première at the historical film theater Cinestar in Lugano was stellar, and this initial showing was soon followed by the insertion of the film in the programming of the Cineteca di Milano.
In the works is the redubbing of Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) to become Düü Testimoni Scomod (Two Inconvenient Witnesses), and possibly Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) into Bela Tusi. TEPSI deems its initiative worthwhile in fostering appreciation of the local language, affirming that it is promoting the idea of an Italy characterized by the diversity of its dialects while at the same time respecting an original work that remains visually the same. However, in recasting the Fascist dubbing practice that opposed itself to dialects, TEPSI still espouses, without blinking an eye or lending an ear, the common fallacy of cinema as a medium of images, a notion that has allowed the continuation of dubbing as an unquestioned modality of audiovisual translation in Italy.
At a distance of 70 years, the myth of Aristophanes at the movies, formulated by Michelangelo Antonioni, is sardonically teased and complicated: the agents of the alchemical manipulation of voice and of body on screen change, yet the question of Italian language and dialects remains. Now John Wayne can speak like a banker from Lugano (Rotondo 2009) instead of a politely standardized (confected for the cinema) Italian. What does not change is the appropriation of the sonic space of foreign films as a right to substitute words, voices, and more. The aural and visual unity recreated by postsynchronization, imagined to be the unaffected original work with the added quality of linguistic localization, assumes or accepts that the original (or any) soundtrack is more or less disposable and interchangeable, usable to fulfill a supposedly compartmentalized or autonomous function. This overlooks both the cultural and social content of language and the entailments of the cognitive process that produce in the spectator a perceptual interlocking of sound and image, and audiovisual signification.
Sound and image in the flow of perception are grasped as a sensorial unity. Moving images and their settings are imbued with the sounds and voices that inhabit them, conferring a particular cultural and sociolinguistic tone, a sonic ambience and atmosphere, a sense of place, time, context, and reference (gestures, manners, expressions, and connotations). These cultural, spatial, temporal, timbral, psychophysical, and affective coordinates do not remain the same when bodies and environments are reinhabited by a new score; rather, subtle and not so subtle shifts, dislocations, and relocations of perception arise, affecting an audience’s sense of verisimilitude, coherence, and meanings as they emerge and shift. From a nonverbal point of view, or point of listening, sound gives depth to the screen, or creates its fourth dimension. This formulation, first articulated by Sergei Eisenstein (and interestingly explored and applied by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his theoretical and filmic work) indicates the opening of the illusory perspective and perceptiveness of the flat image into new signification that does not follow from the visual but reworks it in profundity (Calabretto 1999, 314; see also Deleuze 2007, 235, 262–80). With an elementary tenet, Michel Chion (1994) sums up the interaction, reworking, and signifying function of sound in film: “We never see the same thing when we also hear; we don’t hear the same thing when we see as well” (xxvi).
If we conceive of film as an audiovisual text where sound and visual tracks are inextricably intertwined in the production of meaning and affectivity, it follows that dubbed‐film spectatorship must inevitably be characterized by alienation. Dubbing renders the spectator fundamentally skeptical; his or her relation to the film is vitiated by a disbelief that diminishes the propensity to enter and take in empathically the filmic experience. While nominally enjoying the story, the audience is performing an ulterior (doubled) interpretive operation. The power of exposure to the film is weakened by the (consciously or not) perceived forgery, as Calvino so well articulated, that embeds unfamiliar visuals into an ordinary sonicscape. The travesty of the foreign, less believable, somewhat unreal, ultimately defines and/or vitiates foreign reality in as much as the foreign always, somehow, corresponds to being Italian. Based on a disregard for, or originally Fascist and xenophobic suppression of, the integrity of the foreignness of a film, dubbing continues to produce a cultural disregard for, or skewed perception of, foreign cinema (and television), that, after all, in its fictitious domesticity is dismissible as false spectacle.
From Antonioni’s and Calvino’s youth to today there is a word that indicates the particular language of cinematic and televisual Italian: doppiagese, denoting the affected cadence and recitation that exists only on the big and small screen (Baccolini, Bollettieri Bosinelli, and Gavioli 1994). Despite the artificiality that dubbing confers on audiovisual texts, as well as the cultural and semiotic violence it enacts, it is habitually discussed as an innocuous add‐on—with Italian dubbing vaunted, with national pride, as “the best in the world.” Its normalization, trivialization, and acclamation places national spectatorship in a bind, as dubbing eludes the cultural consequences of its practice as unquestioned continuation of a Fascist heredity. Framing dubbing from this critical perspective complicates studies that consider it as simple film translation and asks us to ponder its social entailments as technocultural procedure that, by refashioning foreign films, impedes full exposure to the other in his or her own terms literally, representationally, and ideologically.
Voice dubbing and studio sound have consistently been characteristic traits of Italian filmmaking. Directors never had a propensity for location sound. Even neorealist filmmakers, who were renowned for shooting on location, taking the camera to the streets and the people, and using nonprofessional actors to reveal the trauma‐filled postwar reality, maintained the practice of voice and sound postsynchronization. While breaking away from the polished canon of Fascist film style and content in order to display the stark, ruptured, reality of post‐Fascist Italy, they did not renounce the norms and technological expertise developed during Fascism. Neorealist filmmakers demonstrated both a practical and conceptual disinclination to explore sonic realism (as opposed to French directors in the same period who fervidly opposed the practice of undoing the sensorial unity of reality). More than the impediments of the burdensome technology of location sound recording, it was the ease and availability of studio sound recording and professional voice actors, as well as established practice, that were never questioned. Aural mimesis was never sought for, acting bodies were revoiced into doppiagese, and neorealism kept the gritty images of bombed streets and distressed populace within a standardized and sanitized sonic rhetoric.
In 1934, Alessandro Blasetti, a leading filmmaker of the Fascist period, made 1860, a patriotic epic celebrating the historical events and battles that led to the unification of Italy, an enterprise the Fascist regime boasted it was continuing. The film is a fascinating and revealing outlier in Italian production, as Blasetti recorded live sound, demonstrating what location sound could bring to filmic realism. Often referred to as a precursor of neorealism, Blasetti cast all nonprofessional actors, whose voices and dialects constitute a fundamental feature of a film that might be called both a travelogue and a dialect‐logue. The immersive quality of the soundtrack builds a dynamic sense of place and eventfulness that results in a sonic sensorial narrative, muffled and noisy, like reality, where, as Massimo Mida (1941) commented in his review for the magazine Cinema, the nonprofessional actors offer spontaneous and authentic performances. Speaking in dialects—Tuscan, Roman, Genovese, and Piedmontese—they give voice to the fragmentation, regionalism, and difference of the people in preunification Italy. This fragmentation was still very real at the time of the film and was something that the Fascist regime labored to overcome. For the censor, the showcase of discordant dialects served (somewhat paradoxically) the cause of a unitary language, thus, the regionally inflected dialogue was able to escape manipulation. Beyond the Fascist proposition, the film offered an unprecedented score, carefully worked by Blasetti, beginning with myriad indications and figurations of sonic events anticipating, precipitating, and prolonging the visual ones—present in the film script and implemented during shooting.
This daring soundtrack of choral litanies, whistles, clangorous bells, people’s uproar, wind, screams, drums, and silences was tamed in 1951, in a version that followed the “clean” aural conventions, through the use of postsynch sound and professional voice actors. The coarse grain of the score was smoothened, and the diverse dialectal cadences and syntax were adjusted to a more uniform, dialectally “adjusted” Italian to simplify intelligibility. Eight years after the end of the regime and of the Direzione generale per la cinematografia, and as Italian neorealist film received worldwide acclaim, the film lost its originality to a standard dubbed treatment—its murky realist imprint of location sound and voice spatialization sacrificed to the packaged sound of studio recording.
Technological developments create habits in modes of production that generate spectatorial expectations, but also allow for the emergence of new creative endeavors. For a crucial example, we return to Antonioni, now as filmmaker. For his use of postsynchronization, he seems subject to his own radical condemnation of dubbing. However, this would mean conflating the technical aspect of the procedure—postsynchronization is common in some sense to all film—with the artistic, and in so doing, ignoring the political and cultural. In fact, at the center of Antonioni’s (1940) critique are precisely the political and cultural aspects of dubbing as an imposition, removal, and substitution of the original film soundtrack. His aim was to illuminate the ideological tampering and aesthetic loss that such practice entailed. As filmmaker, extending creatively from that critique and from his profound consideration of sound in film, he uses postsynchronization to radically refashion the role of the soundtrack in modern cinema, consciously laboring for an organic audiovisual syntax—one that renders deafness to the work of the soundtrack virtually impossible.
Different from voice/cultural translation and adaptation, the use of postsynchronization becomes an artistic choice and tool in as much as the original film includes the ideation and postsynching of its sound as an indispensable component of the project. The composition of a soundtrack made of chosen voices, noises, and music is, in this case, creative process and practice. Contrast this with dubbing, or the cultural and/or ideological revision of a completed work—what happened to Blasetti’s 1860 or Carné’s Le quai des brumes being good examples. We can posit that, while dubbing signifies the use of postsynchronization merely as a form of translation, postsynchronization, in its most meaningful sense, refers to the director’s choices to compose and/or elaborate the soundtrack in postproduction.
It is precisely through the use of postsynchronization that Antonioni shifts the work and function of the soundtrack from packaged predictability toward the perceptual, ethical, and aesthetic exploration of existential reality and audiovisual expressivity. The same technique that encourages neorealist directors to continue using a conventional grammar of sounds and words allows Antonioni to change radically the modalities of audiovisual signification, opening the register to new possibilities. If neorealist directors continued using Hollywood‐style musical commentary and dialogue to guide the spectator—following the moods and modes of the plot, anchoring the images to given meanings and emotions, rhetorically gluing the editing cuts—Antonioni loosens the tight and univocal correlation of words and music to the interpretive service of visual narrative, rendering it more abstract and contemplative. Verbal and musical guidance are given up in favor of the creation of a sonic and dialogical space that delves psychophysically into characters and locations, blending the human (dialogues) with the urban, mechanical, natural, and at times metaphysical environment (sounds and noises perceived in the liminal space between the real and the imaginary).
The first step in the creation of this new soundtrack is the elimination of the music track, or musical commentary, that traditionally—and extraneously to the screen narrative—dominates. Strings for love, brass and percussion for meaningful events, and minor‐key piano for fear: the traditional music track conventionalizes audience response and reduces it to an essentially passive role. Instead, Antonioni favors minimal musical intervention and the marked use of diegetic sounds, carefully timed and mixed, as they carry a realistic imprint, and open sensorially and expressively to extra‐mimetic signification, placing the audience in an interpretive and participatory position.
Antonioni manifests this innovative approach to the soundtrack from the beginning of his filmmaking career in the early 1940s, right after penning his instructive censure of dubbing. Throughout his intellectual and creative career he embodies the ear of sound film in Italy, or, better, its sonic consciousness, as he recognizes in sound a significance and importance that is both poetic and political. Through his awareness of the poetic function of sound, he understood the political abuse of the Fascist praxis, and went from being one of the most articulate critics of the appropriation and disregard for sound to becoming one of the major poets of modern world cinema, using sound and image on screen to cultivate an emotionally vigilant audience that listens carefully and generously. In Antonioni’s films, the use of the technology of postsynchronization that had circumscribed Italians within a forced and fictitious cultural frame of “Italianicity” is turned on its head as the screen opens to the sonorous reverberations of being, of human relations, and of the world we live in.
Emblematic is the idea of alienation that returns constantly in critical discussion of Antonioni’s films. The word is not used in Calvino’s sense to identify the relation of the Italian public to the dubbed soundtrack, but to refer to the existential conditions of Antonioni’s characters. Caught up in alienation, his filmmaking can be interpreted and framed within the dire impossibility of human agency, as a cinema invested in exposing alienation as the condition of modern living in which incommunicability and estrangement rupture human relations, and boredom, precariousness, and a sense of nothingness define subjectivity. This is exemplified superlatively in the recurring trope of the disappearance of characters from the story in films such as L’avventura (L’Avventura, 1960) and L’eclisse (L’Eclisse, 1962) or their visual evaporation within the frame in Blow‐Up (1966).
The soundtrack of Antonioni’s cinema offers the power to recast the representation of alienation. As individuals disappear, what happens to the notion of human responsibility and existential affirmation? Antonioni leaves the spectator with musical lingerings and sonic cues that command attention as they shift language and representation toward the nonverbal and ineffable. He asks us to listen to make sense, abandoning the appeal or desire for closure, certainty, or stable identity. In polar opposition to alienation, he invites us to create a deep relational contact with things and beings in the world by way of listening to their reverberations; the ear functions as the organ of interconnectedness. This places us/the subject into a space of sound and audition that, be it physical or mental, is transformative and dissolves the gap between self and world. Perception is deepened beyond the subjective into acute synesthetic sentience of one’s own being‐in‐the‐world—one’s relationship to what Andrei Tarkovsky (1991, 159) has called “the organic resounding of the world” in which subject and world can become one through immanent energy, sensory connection, and affective perception. The incidental circumstances of the sound world, the wind rustling in the trees, rain pouring in the black of the night, hollow footsteps in an empty house, or breaking sea waves are transfigured beyond the contingency of their immediate signification into soundful events. The word “soundful,” coined by phenomenologist Don Ihde (2007), indicates the intrinsic and extrinsic significance of sound: the multiplicity of sense that sound can hold is materially pervasive and full of meaning. Human beings orient and disorient themselves in space not only by following visual coordinates but also by experiencing sound responsively—understanding distances, separations, and directions, and practically following aural indications. At the same time, sonorous vibrations and rhythms enter the body via the eardrum and affect it sensorially, creating sense that both informs and eludes immediate informational grasp.
Discussing his ideas about the creation of the soundtrack, Antonioni (2001, 127) indicates the process and importance of the collection and selection of sounds to fit the images:
For L’avventura I had recorded a huge quantity of sonic effects: every possible more or less rough sea, rumbling waves breaking against the caves, and so forth and so on. I had a hundred reels of magnetic tape available, only for the sound effects. Then I selected those that constitute the film’s soundtrack.
He also notes how the purpose of his use of sound effects is not realism but a separation from reality that makes reality into poetry (241).
This poetic and phenomenological approach to the world of sound arises organically within the conceptual frame of musique concrète and experimental music that, emerging in the 1940s, drew physical and conceptual attention to the worldly materiality of music and its sources and, conversely, the musical materiality of the world. Listening becomes a mode of existential exploration and a source of indeterminate knowledge. Electronic music, with its further conceptualization and reworking of natural sounds and ordinary perception, also plays a fundamental role in the creation of audiovisual scores that surpass the illustrative, and edge film characters and spectators into a stance that consists not of a purposeful signifying, but of listening.
From the point of view of the technological apparatus, it is the commercial availability of the portable magnetic recorder, particularly the Nagra II in the mid‐1950s, that opened unprecedented possibilities of auditory approaches and creative experimentation. Most commonly used in film production—lightweight, compact, and easy to handle—it allowed wide dynamic range recordings with superb fidelity and minimal distortion. This technology favored a close collaboration of film director and music composer working in postproduction, where sounds captured on location could be imaginatively reworked in new compositions.
This is precisely what happened with Antonioni, who from his second documentary N.U. (1948) through Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) worked with composer Giovanni Fusco to create enthralling and baffling soundtracks that abolish musical plenitude and cliché to perform minimalistic music in polyphonic dialogue with the ubiquitous flux of everyday sounds. Suspended musical phrasing and unresolved motifs become synergistically interrelated with ambient noises and voices; the sound score plays and reinvents the auditory experiences of modern life from car honks to juke boxes and airplanes breaking the sound barrier, creating a perceptual musical texture that imbues the images both materially and abstractly and that functions emotionally. In Fusco’s words, “music is the light” of film, indiscernibly giving “soul” to the images (quoted in Magaldi 1964, 340). His collaboration with Antonioni made for a cinema composed as an audiovisual score, signaling, in cinematic terms, the emergence of a new mode of making films. Vittorio Gelmetti (1964), an electronic music composer who contributed the electronic parts for the score of Il deserto rosso, puts it perfectly, affirming that music stops functioning as “extra furniture” but works at the semantic level of film language (146–47).
Il deserto rosso, often praised for its visual chromatic abstractions, is guided by sonic gracefulness, aggression, and sensoriality. Antonioni and Gelmetti worked at length modifying, adapting, and playing with fragments taken from Gelmetti’s compositions. Juxtaposing them with the soundscape of industrial Ravenna and its noise of machines, boats, exhausts, and refineries, they transfigure that soundscape expressively. This abstract, sonic “indefinite” functions as a dilating counterpoint to the romantic and nostalgic pieces composed by Fusco. The disembodied vocalizing performed by Cecilia, Fusco’s daughter, over the blurred opening titles, and the Technicolor scene of the mysterious fable invented by the protagonist Giuliana—an expression of and desire for perfect harmony—mystifies the dissonance of the city’s industrial noises that punctuate the visual track freely (the sounds do not correlate directly to the images on screen), and functions as a short‐circuit to the protagonist’s interiority. The combination of noise, inaudible dialogue, and nonnaturalistic discordant sound connotes abstractly the material industrial scenery of Ravenna’s harbor as it in turn alludes to Giuliana’s altered perceptual and psychological condition. The synergy created by the free and indirect interrelation of music‐sound‐image‐character on the screen opens to a plurality of interpretive/cognitive paths suspending the rational quest for definitive understanding. The film asks the spectator “to feel and listen,” as Antonioni himself put it when asked about its difficulty (quoted in Felloni 2007, 15).
Feeling and listening imply opening the self to perceptual indeterminacy, experiencing ephemerality rather than discerning straightforward meaning. The director presents human fragility and precariousness in a changing technologized world as a means to deeper perception and connection, as a drive toward the expansion of our imaginative power and sense of time, being, and space. The title of the opening piece, “Astrale” (“of the stars”), literally points to an opening to the celestial as it foreshadows a scene in the film in which, for over two minutes, Giuliana, and we the spectators, gaze at a stunning structure that extends majestically into the sky before its purpose as a radio‐telescope built “to listen to the noise of the stars” is disclosed by one of the onsite workers. The alternate use of shallow and out‐of‐focus background shots plays with the powerful materiality of the antennas immersed in raw nature, blurring their red color with a chromatic gesture that undoes the definite contours of the hi‐tech apparatus, softening them into ambivalent impressions around the human figures. Electronic sounds underpin the scene, first continuously then sporadically. The vibrancy, which seems to originate from the technical infrastructure, helps create a feeling of the liminality of the space, both in a physical and psychological sense. This scene of spatial‐sensorial transcendence, in my reading, is a declaration of the love and attention that Antonioni has for technology and sound, for their capacity to expand and alter human experience, shifting its boundaries, expanding the mundane horizon into the cosmic, and complicating perceptions, cognition, and subjectivity. The antennas reach into the sky to listen for and capture the sound of the stars, an aural counterpoint to the more usual stargazing, a shift of the senses in the direction of the ineffable: of sound.
In the opening titles accompanied by “Astrale,” the out‐of‐focus terrestrial images of trees, industrial complexes, and chimneys are blurred ethereally, and are animated by cosmic/electronic sounds and a harmonic singing without words that intimates the ephemeral nature of human presence, grasped only through “clairaudience” (Murray Schafer’s formulation), a mystical and clairvoyant hearing that Giuliana seems to possess or project. With her lack of a balanced self, she grants access to a precarious and utopian understanding that accepts the uncontrollable complexity of our world, and in so doing, in Roland Barthes’ words to Antonioni, is able to “crumble, disturb or undo the fanaticism of meaning” (quoted in Nowell‐Smith 1997, 67).
In this audiovisual cinema of poetry, listening becomes an ethical and aesthetic proposition for a philosophy and praxis of cinema and life that escapes prescriptive regimentation, ideas, values, and subjectivities. Touching new chords of cinematic expressivity and emotion inspires an embrace of multiplicity and difference.
Altro che Clark Costa!