The Sonic Object of Italian Cinema: from the Ideology of Dubbing to the Audio-Visual Images of a Cinema of Poetry

By Antonella C. Sisto Laurea in Foreign Languages, Università degli Studi di Bari Italy 2001

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2010

This dissertation by Antonella C. Sisto is accepted in this present form

By the Department of Italian Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______

Massimo Riva, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

Katherine Bergeron, Reader

Date______

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Reader

Date______

Millicent Marcus, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______

Sheila Bonde,

Dean of the Graduate School

iii

Vitae

Antonella C. Sisto received her Laurea in Philosophy of Language at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bari in 2001 with a thesis entitled La Voce, Le lingue: Sul Doppiaggio. Twice recipient of the Ateneo di Bari

Fellowship for Cultural Activities she organized La Babele Felice, voci mai dette (2001,

2002), a film festival in original language, editing the documentation for both festivals.

With a Fellowship for International Research and Relations, she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University during the 2002-2003 academic year. In 2004 she entered the Department of Italian Studies at Brown as a

Ph.D. student, “listening” to cinema and its soundtracks and teaching Italian language and culture classes at Brown and RISD, using language and cinema as transformative tools to open up ideas and cultural identities.

The sonic object of Italian cinema: from the ideology of dubbing to the audiovisual images of a cinema of poetry is the title of her dissertation which reflects her interests in the history of ideas and technologies, fascism, cinema and identity, aural/visual studies, literary and cultural studies.

To my family, and Peter

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter I

Sounding Fascism in Cinema 19

Sensorium Commune and Schizo-Hollywood 24

Historical Beginnings, Linguistic Battles 30

Foundations of Cinematic Censorship 31

Dubbing and the Sonic Unconscious 37

Multiple Languages, Cultural Singularities 49

Chapter II

Listening to Dubbing: Between “Make Believe” and Cultural Schizophonia 54

Dubbing Debuts 62

Dubbing Coupons, Words Coupons 64

The Pope, the State and the Expressive Potential of Sound-Cinema 73

Dubbing or Post-Synchronization: Alienation and Complex Consciousness 80

Antonioni’s Clark Costa: Dubbing and Aristophanes’s Myth 83

Chapter III

The Soundtrack after Fascism: the Neorealist Play without Sound 100

After Fascism 102

Blasetti’s Real Sound 113

The Sound Oddity 118

The Sound-Image Split, a Contradiction? 123

Jean Renoir and Neorealist Post-Synching 127 vi

Bazin’s Closed Ears 135

How Realist? 140

The Musico-Aspect Critique 142

“For a Viewer Who Listens Closely”, There is not Only Music 150

Chapter IV

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Wind is Photogenic

The Post-Synchronization Regime 152

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beginnings 156

The Poetics of Sound Film 158

“For a Film on the River Po`” 161

In Film 168

A Cinema of Poetry 172

The Binomial Act Antonioni-Fusco 181

Antonioni’s Post-Synchronization 188

Listening to Red Desert 197

Chapter V

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Thousand Notes of Contestation 208

“There is no Law against Post-Synch” 213

Sound, a Relation that Grows 217

Listening to Arabian Nights 222

Voices 227

Bibliography 242

vii

Filmography 263

List of tables

Table I Editing Plan for Nettezza Urbana (1948) 170

viii

The Sonic Object of Italian Cinema: Introduction.

The work of this dissertation is sited across academic disciplines, and as the title enunciates the object of inquiry is sound in cinema. Posing the theoretical and analytical significance of sound opens up to a variety of crucial and unexplored, cultural and historical issues: from the governing of the medium on the part of the State to technical and creative discourses and practices, and to aesthetical and culturally specific modes of film sound production and apprehension.

As the title posits the specificity of the Italian national case delineates the inquiry and reveals how by listening critically this cinematic national history reverberates with details about the coming of sound to the screens, the use of sound recording technology, the management of the film industry, and the related development of film sound practice and aesthetics. The concurrence of the arrival of film sound in Italy with the consolidating power of the Fascist Regime is significant and calls for study of the ways in which the evolution of the cinematic apparatus occurred practically and aesthetically in the context of a political regime that infiltrated all aspects of cultural production; I illustrate how sound film played a singular role in the making and then possibly the un-making of the fascist agenda. By listening to Italian screens and researching the history of censorship, the notion of dubbing as ideological fascist praxis becomes evident, debunking the normalized perception of it as a viable audio-visual translation modality, and complicating the picture of the ways in which the Fascist

Regime operated its control on the cinematic medium. By listening to national films, a specificity in the mode of production and post-production also becomes evident, that is,

the general use of the technology of sound post-production, the same technology that allowed for the dubbing of foreign films. It is by listening to the interplay of culture, technology and aesthetics that some relevant traits of Italian national cinema and screens find significant explanations. Listening complicates the filmic analysis of post-fascist directors’ production, revealing the endurance of traditional filmic modes inscribed with fascist rhetoric in Neorealism, and later the radical shaping of modern audio-visual film aesthetics on the part of creative filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Thus while tracing a genealogy of film sound in Italy, at a fundamental level the work is a call to reconfigure critical studies of cinema through the recognition and appreciation of film as audio-visual creation, and to undo the visual bias of film studies analysis that commonly neglects how sound is as an essential component of filmic enunciation, constitutive of film meaning and perception. This aspect opens to a more general one that is critical awareness of the nature and importance of sound in the media and across the spectrum of modern life.

To arrive at an appreciation of listening it is necessary that we give sound a theoretical valence as an expressive element, produced and entwined in an inter-textual system of signification where technology, collective and individual subjectivities, subjective expression and politics produce meaningful and significant trajectories worth investigating.

The general cultural notion of sound as a characteristic of things, and not a thing in itself impedes the articulation of organic thinking about and around it. The argument

3 was eloquently formulated by Christian Metz in his essay “Aural Object,” which constituted an opening in the direction of a way of listening to film that is not subjected to vision and that wishes to consider sound not as a characteristic of things, as an adjective, but as Metz put it, as an object itself: “‘buzzing’ is an object, an acoustic object in the same way that a tulip is a visual object” (in Film Sound 156). This approach would undermine and re-dimension the authority of vision as the legitimate sensory apparatus for the understanding and apprehension of reality and truth, where sound, occupying the romantic space of the ineffable, remains un-investigated, or under- investigated.

The emerging field of sound/aural studies helps us to think about the ways sound, music and noises influence human perception, emotion and cognition, while the neurosciences are also contributing significantly to the ongoing conversation about the power of sound for and on the brain. We need to increase our consciousness and cultural analytical understanding of how sounds, changes in the sound-scape, alteration of rhythms and intonations, volume, speed and pitch of voices, ambient and atmospheric noises produce and stimulate different perceptual, affective, and intellectual reactions in human beings. Sound theorists emphasize the physical effect and sheer power of sound on the body contributing to variations of temperature, blood circulation, pulse rate, breathing (“The sonic playground : Hollywood cinema and its listeners in Hollywood Spectatorship” 125-126). Different frequencies vibrate through different parts of the body, very basically with the lower frequencies — below 65 Hz — resonating in the lower back region, pelvis, thighs and legs and the higher frequencies

4 affecting the upper body: chest, neck and head. David Sonnenschein, in his fascinating and detailed study on the emotional, communicative and unintelligible power of sound and music in cinema (Sound Design 97-99) proposes the notion of entrainment for an understanding of the effects of sound on the body. Discovered by Dutch scientist

Christian Huygens in the 17th century, entrainment, a physical phenomenon of resonance, originally indicated how two pendulum clocks swinging side by side enter

“into a remarkably synchronous rhythm, way beyond their mechanical accuracy” (97).

Defined as the synchronization of two or more rhythm cycles, entrainment operates in biology, chemistry and psychology, so that, in Sonnenschein’s words, “everything that vibrates in the universe seems to lock in and swing together” (97). The entrainment process, defined in bio-musicology as the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, causes us to react in resonance with the vibrations and fluctuations in our surroundings, it follows that our psychological functioning may be altered by the impact of sound waves, from the digesting activity of our intestines, lungs breathing, heart beating to the rapid firing of neurons in the brain (97).

Sonnenschein cites a number of real world extreme examples: the nausea caused by low frequencies, due to their resonance in various organs of the digestive system; police crowd control through the use of high frequency sirens that resound with the human anal sphincter; trance states or deep sleep induced by shamanic drumming in low frequencies which influence the production of a brain waves characteristic of sleep. The list might well continue with acoustic bombardment on the battlefields of

Iraq, the much debated torture by music used by US interrogators playing rock music at

5 excruciating sound pressure levels (volume) resulting in sleep deprivation, physical pain, disorientation, noose bleeding in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, and the ongoing acoustic weapons research and deployment. In this direction, musicologist Suzanne G. Cusick explores how the understanding of the power of sound on the body has gone well beyond theoretical and research stages to the implementation of the use of sound as weapon of war. In her article “Music as torture/

Music as weapon”, she offers an extensive account of the destructive uses of the sheer physical power of sound, and power’s appropriation of sound, tracing the history of the development of “acoustic weapons” for crowd control and as lethal devices by the

Department of Defense contractors since at 1997. 1

The force of this account of the implementation of the power of sound is intense and significant for the present work, because it helps us to undo romantic and ephemeral notions of sound and music even at the cinema, to re-think visual hierarchies, and think about the immense power of sound to affect us physically, emotionally and cognitively. And how consequently, it is fallacious to analyze filmic

1 For an extensive analysis on the subject, the article “Music as torture/Music as weapon” in the Transcultural Music Review is available online at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm. She traces the history of the research, and the use of sound (musical and non) for war, an extensive quote from her work demonstrates power’s appropriation of the sheer power of sound sound: “Acoustic weapons” have been in development by Department of Defense contractors since at least the 1997 creation of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Task Force, accounting for 1/3 of the Task Force’s budget in 1998-99. . . . The earliest contract I know to have been let for such a weapon was on November 18, 1998, authorizing now-defunct Synetics Corporation to produce a tightly focused beam of infrasound– that is, vibration waves slower than 100 vps [vibrations per second] –meant to produce effects that range from “disabling or lethal”. In 1999, Maxwell Technologies patented a HyperSonic Sound System, another “highly directional device ... designed to control hostile crowds or disable hostage takers”. The same year Primex Physics International patented both the “Acoustic Blaster”, which produced “repetitive impulse waveforms” of 165dB, directable at a distance of 50 feet, for “antipersonnel applications”, and the Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generator, which produces “high intensity impulsive sound waves by purely electrical means”.

6 artifacts as visual texts with the sporadic addition of comments on sound. Film is audiovisual. This does not simply point in the direction of recognizing the importance of the soundtrack, often basically understood as the music-track, but to appreciate it as a textured ensemble of voices, noises, silences and music interwoven with the images.

The soundtrack might best be thought in relation to the notion of sound-scape as coined by Canadian composer and environmentalist, R. Murray Schafer. His notion of soundscape helps us to understand how we live immersed in sound, and how sonic experience is immediate. Sound penetrates the body and the thinking self. Human experience and cognition is made of listening, either passively or actively, to the surrounding and enveloping natural sounds of the weather, of wind and rain, animal vocalizations —of barking dogs and chirping birds—environmental sounds created by human artifacts and technologies, and sounds directly human, of voices in conversations or singing. All sounds then have a “soundful” valence as philosopher of sound Don Ihde poses. “For the human listener there is a multiplicity of senses in which there is word in the wind”

(Ihde 3). Ihde calls attention to the word and the world, as soundful, full of sound significance, because in human experience all sounds are meaningful, and not only for the thoughtful listener, sound is pervasively full of sonorous meaning (soundful).

Philosopher Jean Luc Nancy also, playfully and powerfully, poses the listening subject sensing sense on philosophical grounds, a sense where perceived meaning arises in accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound:

Listening opens (it-self) up to resonance and that resonance opens (itself) up to the self: that is to say both that it opens to self (to the resonant body, to its vibration) and that it opens to the self (to the being just as its being is put into

play for itself). But being put into play . . . , or the referral . . . of a presence to something other than itself, or to an absence . . . and always, in some respect, of something to nothing . . . that is called sense, or meaning.(25)

Thus listening is not simply about sense arising from verbal or tonal articulation, but from the sonorous articulation that meets the sensorial and perceptible self and enters the register of the intelligible: danger, fear, pleasure, expectation, space, and distance rustle through the self. Listening functions by opening strict meaning into affect: “being inclined toward affect and not just towards concept” (26). Nancy identifies the possibility of sense with the possibility of resonance and sonority itself, which also entails that sense “consists first of all, not in a signifying intention but rather in a listening” (30). It is the listening subject, who vibrates with listening and gathers sense beyond the restrictions of verbal signification.

Once we envisage and posit this power of sound to signify beyond words, the question of listening to film cannot be eluded any more, as film studies have generally done so far. Despite the influential and unique work of French theorist and composer

Michel Chion who articulates a taxonomy that helps to discuss and think cinema as powerfully made of sound-images, the academic conversation on film resists a methodical investigation of sound on the screen and the film theatre, and forgets how all cinematic affects and effects are inextricably audio-visual. Despite such neglect, the work of Michel Chion constitutes the basis for film analysis that wants to engage with the sonorous dimension of cinema. In his Audio-Vision (1990/1992), he uses the word synchresis, a combination of synchronism and synthesis to indicate the coming together of a sound and an image when they occur at the same time, and their mental unity in

8 the moment of apprehension. Cinema is based on this cognitive process that generates visual/oral one-dimensionality, what Chion terms “the audiovisual illusion” (58 and extensively chapter 3). Provocatively he states the non existence of the soundtrack per se, as the soundtrack does exist only in relation to the image track with which it constitutes a significant and complex text (40) that needs to be seen/heard as one because: “We never see the same thing when we also hear; we don’t hear the same thing when we see as well” (XXVI).

Thus with the idea that sound shapes human perception and imaginary, the present work is based on the assumption that discourses on cinema have to account for the power of sound in its ineffable, elusive, and at the same time clear and precise sense. When we start listening critically to films many untold socio-political narratives and aesthetic strategies emerge, as I show with the case of the entwined history, aesthetics, and politics of the soundtrack in Italy.

I explore how the revolutionary conversion of cinema to sound is not only an intercontinental phenomenon related to technical discoveries and the economics of theater wiring for sound but also a specifically national one. Each country fashioned its own approach to national and international sound-films. Thus the arrival of sound cinema does not simply mean the possibility of the talkies and the development of a new film grammar.

In the first and second chapter I investigate how in Italy it meant the mobilization of the government to control and prevent a flow of foreign cinematic voices and cultural narratives that would interfere with the fascist project of xenophobic

9 and purist nation-building. Complicating the bland belief that dubbing is the technique of post-sound recording chosen by Hollywood as the solution for translating and distributing its cinema globally, I trace the origins of its practice in the nationalist fascist ideology that imposed it in Italy, where it continues to this day, as an unquestioned heredity of a Fascist past.

Listening to soundtracks in Italy reveals an untold history of invisible literal and cultural censorship, implemented through the dubbing of all foreign films into Italian, a procedure that I define as the techno-political manifestation and application of the principle of covering and anesthetizing the other. Literally, in fact, at the time of the coming of sound to cinema, films were immediately “silenced” in Italy by the authorities in power. Just as the cinema was boasting about films that were “100% spoken,” the sound was cut, and films were shown with scenes continually interrupted by inter- titles—with the dialogue translated into Italian—generating films that the satirists of the magazine Marc'Aurelio called "films 100% read."

If, as is commonly recognized, Mussolini understood that cinema is “the most powerful weapon” he also grasped the power of the soundtrack which constitutes the most articulate, direct, and at the same time most fleeting component of film, which through the use of music, noise, dialogue, and voice-over, govern the image and the audience’s audio-visual perception. The fascist regime made so that in Italy sound cinema, at the time mostly American cinema, came to the screens only if “dubbed” in

Italian, with the revisions of the censoring authorities. In league with the Catholic

Church and Pope Pius XI, the fascist government legislated the impossibility of the

10 circulation of foreign films which had not received state approval and that were not dubbed into Italian. Dubbing was not limited to foreign films. The state, insisting on linguistic unity and purity, instigated the removal of Italian dialects from the screen, dubbing all films into ‘standard’ Italian, a studio fashioned and affected language that existed, vocally and linguistically, only at the movies; “il doppiagese”, the dubbed language of cinema, made Neapolitans and Milanese, Sicilians and Tyrolese, New

Yorkers and Parisians speak the same non-existent Italian.

My approach challenges the academic allotment of the discussion of dubbing inside of the field of translation study, which presupposes a normalized acceptance of a practice that is, still today, a form of abolition of foreign films from national screens, while praising it for its professional qualities, it ignores the vocal and cultural cannibalization of the other. Mindful of Foucault’s definition of genealogy as a “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary” work which “operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments” and documents, to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality “ seeking them in “what we tend to feel is without history”

(139), my study seeks to disturb “what was previously considered immobile,” to fragment “what was thought unified,” to show “the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself”(Language, Counter Memory, Practice 147). In the genealogy of the ‘immobile’ and ‘consistent’ best dubbing in the world, we are taken into the entangled web of its fascist matrix, its imposition and instrumental use for censorial and xenophobic practices, its fear of jazz and ‘negro music,’ and all that sounded other. We are taken to consider how the fascist regime well recognized this

11 new power of a cinema that spoke and used sound and music to articulate, seduce and enthrall, and how the technique of sound post-production allowed for the invisible substitution of foreign music with national ones, foreign voices with domestic ones, and for the removal of inconvenient scenes and the adjustment of deemed subversive plots.

Considering the superimposition of an alien sound-scape on the original film I explore the cultural “schizo-phonia” that dubbing produces. I use the term schizophonia, coined by musician and author Murray Schafer, to express the technical condition of a sound split from its source. The concept is useful here as it extends to indicate the voice split from the body (The New Soundscape 43-47), and to suggest the schism that dubbing operates, unsettling and disturbing whether the audience is aware of it or not. Again it is the power of sound. As film spectators while viewing we are also listening, and in our inner dialogue—the intra-psychic space of signification, where we make sense of things, and provide the discursive “glue” for the shots and sequences on the screen— we encounter a slippery set of elements emerging from the false juxtaposition of national language and sounds with foreign faces, expressions, gestures, modes and settings. The result is a clash of the ordinary sonic with the unfamiliar visuals. Even if we account for the general audience desire to be duped into the fiction of the film, the subdued knowledge of the trick and its schizo-phonic effect creates psychic resistance in the filmic reception, and a sort of alienation from the moving/sounding images. In this light I present Italo Calvino’s reflections of his youthful cinema going, listening to dubbed films and feeling the disconnect, similarly to Maurice

Merlau-Ponty who in his Phenomenology of Perception exposes the cognitive gap that

12 dubbing creates in the spectator. What I want to point to is the cultural and semiotic violence operated by dubbing on the foreign film, and the way that dubbing works as a form of unrevealed colonization, which undermines the foreign film’s worth and right to speak on its own terms, as it can exist only in the cultural space of the colonizer. While the foreigner is literally not accepted in his/her own terms, at the same time the film’s foreignness, restrained through domestic, linguistic and ideological appropriation, is denied and made false – viscerally counterfeit —and as such can be disregarded. Thus dubbing undermines the believability of the other: it creates a fictitious domesticity that perceived by the spectator renders the film an untrue and dismissible spectacle.

Framing dubbing as neutral is an act of socio-historical erasure that willingly forgets, and ignores its impingements on cultural reality. It conveniently forgets its fascist ideological matrix and the way it functioned then and now as a controlling dispositif. Despite its deliberate censoring function during fascism, and beyond, its use as a necessary instrument for the moral and political maintenance of a healthy and safe national life, because of the deafness of film studies, the importance of dubbing has been ignored to the point that an Italian film historian of the caliber and perspicacity of

Gian Piero Brunetta can say that cinema during fascism had the strength and the ability to constitute itself in the collective imaginary

as a real space and a possible world, as a habitat where the presence of fascism could almost be reduced to zero and one had enough freedom to operate and see the cultivation of cultural, linguistic seeds and values systems coming from international realities. (Dialoghi di Regime 31)

If spectators saw something of them, they certainly didn’t hear them! Critically listening to films allows demonstrating the perverse cultural censorship that was operated on the

13 nation and reveals how dubbing constitutes itself today as the sonic-scape of the nation’s fascist repressed unconscious, and how its unquestioned status participates of a national disinclination to come to terms with the fascist past.

In the second part of the dissertation (which starts with the third chapter) I aim to differentiate the ideological practice of dubbing from what I define as the creative use of post-synchronization. I use dubbing to indicate the imposed mode of audio translation of foreign films, while I refer to post-synchronization to signify the post- production of the soundtrack of national films which are not in need of translation. To maintain the distinction is somewhat complicated since the word “dubbing” tends to be used indiscriminately to indicate both practices. Keeping in mind the distinction between dubbing as film translation modality, and post-synchronization as soundtrack post-production technique is relevant for my argument.

When these two meanings are collapsed into the single word ‘dubbing’, an extant critique of dubbing emerges which in reality is essentially a critique of the non use of direct sound in cinema. Soundtrack post-production of foreign and domestic films was never radically challenged even after the fall of the fascist regime, and became a normalized mode of filmmaking. Over a number of years, from the fascist period through neo-realism to the modern cinema, a contingent of French directors as diverse as Jean Renoir, Jean Rouch, Jean Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, have radically critiqued the indiscriminate use of “dubbing” which they take to indicate “post- synchronization”, on the part of Italian national directors. They dismiss any use of post- synchronization in the process of filmic production. The aesthetic-ideological

14 intransigence that guides their critique discounts the creative possibilities and outcomes that emerge in Italian cinema precisely through the use of post-synchronization technologies. Again it is a matter of listening.

Here I want to emphasize how the studios of post-synchronization spread by the fascist regime for the imposed dubbing of foreign films, constituted a technological availability and created a technical expertise in Italian filmmakers which was developed into a style, and when compared with French filmmakers generated a different idea and practice of filmmaking. While French directors were ideologically committed to a cinema that records reality, however expressionistically elaborated later, Italian directors opted for a free, creative and in some cases sound-carefree filmmaking.

Listening critically to film, it is evident that direct sound never entered (until the 80s) the national cinematographic enterprise conceptually or practically, and post- synchronization emerges as a complex cipher of Italian filmmaking. Thus the technological continuity is both a fossilization of the fascist “dubbing” legacy, and an opening to a new cinematic writing technique.

In the third chapter I analyze how direct residues from fascist and conventional film aesthetics are detectable in neorealist films, and how the renowned exploration of filmic expression that characterizes the movement is limited to the visual track. The soundtrack constitutes itself as the limitation element of the neorealist audio-visual construct, the most conventional trait of neorealist filmmaking: from the use of post- synchronized affected actors’ voices ventriloquizing the non-professional actors on screen, to the ploy of dialecticizing Italian, to the use of a baroque musical score

15 triumphantly bourgeois and alien to the gritty images and screen representation of poor people’s post war trauma. The procedural use of music à la Hollywood as rhetorical continuity glue between the editing cuts, and as emotional plumping, and cueing, underscores the absence of any innovative and counter hegemonic break with mainstream practices and master narratives—contrary to the ethical aesthetical poetics of neorealism — when the soundtrack is concerned. I argue that the lack of critical and creative engagement with the soundtrack and the unquestioned use of the sound post- recording technology on the part of neorealist directors constitute an aesthetic and ethical stoppage in their films.

Retracing the history of the politics and aesthetics of the soundtrack in Italy it becomes evident how there is no way to predict or fully control the diverse applications a technology can be utilized for, as there is no way to suppress creative human agency.

The case of post-neorealist cinema, in fact, is remarkable for its radical and innovative use of post-synchronization in the creation of an affective and effective dimension of film sound for the shaping of modern film aesthetics. Any critique of post- synchronization (dubbing), intended as the ideological critique of the non-use of direct sound is thus simply reductive, as demonstrated by film critic Elias Chaluja when he argues, in the 70s, that all Italian directors tend to “consider sound only a simple additive to the image”(Filmcritica 1970).

In my excavation of “dubbing”, one of the major Italian filmmakers,

Michelangelo Antonioni, emerges as what we might call the consciousness of sound film in Italy. Before beginning his filmmaking practice he was a vociferous adversary of film

16 dubbing as foreign film audio-visual translation. Writing for the journal Cinema in the

40s he debunked the entire notion of dubbing as a viable modality of film translation from both an aesthetic and ideological point of view. Antonioni insisted that dubbing destroyed the audio-visual filmic work of art and allowed for invisible censoring as the dialogue and the music could be erased and changed any way the censors liked. His struggle against dubbing tuned his ears to a very critical and careful listening of film soundtracks, and in his film reviews the sound component always occupies a meaningful space of analysis that complicates the understanding of the visual. Interestingly too, as a major European filmmaker his use of sound in film is unique, poetic and innovative. He brings cinema to poetry, as Pasolini put it in his essay on “cinema of poetry”, and as

Deleuze will reaffirm, following Pasolini on many points in his study on cinema.

In the fourth chapter I explore how Antonioni radically re-thinks the role of the soundtrack in modern cinema. Never abandoning the use of post-synchronization, he uses it to modify sounds, voices and in some ways following the ideals of music concret to express in his films the re-sounding of a material and spiritual world made of soundful events. Abolishing the traditional narcotic soundtrack that uses music either as banal and dramatic commentary or obvious enhancer for the images, Antonioni focuses on the affect of sound, and creates sonic-visual interweavings that construct the film as a visual and sound score. Listening to his films through the perceptual, emotional, suggestive and symbolic power of sound allows for readings that do not focus solely on alienation and laceration of modern living—terms which dominate critical discussion of

17 his work—but involve a more gentle and nuanced exploration that suspends judgment and the sense of things which can be absurd, tragic and blissful at the same time.

If with Antonioni, the filmic becomes soundful, with Pier Paolo Pasolini, ideology becomes film and sound. Tracing the peculiarity of the Italian use of post- synchronization, from fascist control to creative subversion we can see how this technique constitutes a fundamental and necessary feature in the radical filmic work of

Pier Paolo Pasolini. His treatment of films as audio-visual texts deserves particular attention so as to fully understand the significant intricacies and provocations of his cinematic creations which use the soundtrack effectively and affectively. Listening to

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films reveals how the cultural politics and poetics of his filmmaking are written in, and write the soundtracks.

In the fifth chapter I show how Pasolini’s ideological consciousness—tragically opposed to Italy’s everyday fascism —finds play in the stylistic dissonant experimentation of bringing together radically different musical and linguistic texts in the soundtrack, unsettling categories of belonging and subverting conventional canons.

This subversion is a call to consciousness, Pasolini’s audiences are not being deafened by post-synchronization, as in Jean Marie Straub’s general accusation that dubbing (as post-synchronization, or non-direct sound) is an imposed deafness. Rather audiences are asked to listen in complex and transformative ways. As cultural assumptions are challenged we are forced to a new listening to actively make sense of his provocations which entail a disruption of well known textual and social structuration of musical and cultural meanings and values. He purposefully uses the soundtrack as counterpoint, to

18 conflict, and reorient the images and the narrative, and as he says, he makes the soundtrack the destination of poetry against the profanity of everyday, of play with oral languages, dialects, and ethno, popular and classical music.

In this last chapter I show how the use of post-synchronization comes full circle, and how with Pasolini the purpose of its use is to expand rather than contract and control social, cultural and political horizons, as it was with Fascism. In the unsettlement of musical, cultural and narrative codes, Pasolini’s intent is that of disturbing fixed notions and relations to create a different socio cultural awareness. Moreover, through close listening of Le Mille e una Notte, I indicate how a listening of his films complicates readings mostly based on visual analysis. In this case I focus on how issues of orientalism in the film can be questioned if we account for the way the soundtrack labors the images and the characters. The juxtaposition and magma of sounds, voices, characters, and images plays with expectations and creates an estrangement that interrupts, suspends and subtracts interpretation from conventional grids and bestows different meanings and articulations to the political and esthetical signifiers at play. The musico- visual pastiche of Le mille e una notte brings forward and destabilizes the dichotomy

East/West and offers a stylistic, ideological and semiotic alternative that Pasolini himself defines as “magmatic” (Calabretto 302), a proliferation of spaces and sounds, disconnected-in-real-time, the time of the audiovisual-moving-images. Pasolini makes the screen the multidimensional space of the cultural unconscious in metamorphosis.

Chapter I

Sounding Fascism in Cinema

This chapter investigates a significant cultural historical coincidence in modern Italian society. By accident sound 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, from a synchronic and also diachronic perspective, an approach substantially unexplored by the current literature. There are few general studies concerning film censorship during fascism, and there is the universalized history of the emergence of sound cinema. My main interest is to focus attention on their interrelation and significance in the national case of Italy and how it has played out politically and aesthetically.

Thus the operative lexicon includes words like: cinema, sound cinema, fascism and censorship. How is the coming of sound in cinema related to fascist censorship?

What happened within the mechanics of fascist censorship after the introduction of sound in cinema? What use did fascism make of sound cinema? Did fascism censor sound? These questions beg more general questions, such as: Why was it necessary to censor sound cinema? What sounds were to be censored, and what did this entail?

Sound cinema is a cinema that talks, as in the common American colloquialism of the time, “the talkies”, a word that finds no correlative in Italian. “Talkies” are films that talk and articulate complex narratives that resemble real life more and more (more than the silent film ever imagined) hence calling life into question on the screen for mass audiences and so attracting the authoritarian state’s attention. 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 was still in crisis 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"(in La censura ieri e oggi 49-50).

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 (Quarognolo in Le voci del cinema 11-12; Redi 52). Only the advent of dubbing, that is, the substitution of the original soundtrack (voice and music track) with another, allowed foreign films to talk and, as Quarognolo says, (La censura 52) permitted many “crimes” to occur. 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.

In various general analyses dubbing is instead considered the necessary and non problematized solution to the coming of sound and foreign sounds and languages to the screen - the American solution to overcome the linguistic barriers and to spread

Hollywood production around Western European countries. On the other hand, from a national perspective, dubbing has been 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 (1966) exemplifies the tone that presents dubbing as a technical procedure purified of its specific political history. Thus with dubbing, invented by the Austrian Jakob Karrol and appropriated by the Americans,

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)

Virtually no investigative analysis or critical attention is dedicated to this practice of lending voices in the frame of fascism/cinema studies. It is my belief that the attentive re-visiting of the ventennio nero (the 20 year Fascist regime) in terms of what the either ‘liberal’ or ‘incapable’ politics of fascism allowed (Cannistraro 285-87, Ben-

Ghiat 140, Brunetta Il cinema del Regime, Hay) to cinema —as creative, intertextual endeavor somehow belonging to a transnational narrative community—eludes the problematic reality of the actual misdeeds and their related consequences. The belief and emphasis on the laissez faire politics of the Regime, though, can probably find its origins in the factual impossibility to explore in depth the terrain of State control. To be considered is in fact the absence of a history of censorship scientifically constituted because, as Jean Gili — himself author of a work on censorship during Fascism— puts it:

A systematic work 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 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 Quarognolo La censura 6-7)

This implies that we can only have the exterior story, mostly made of the legislation concerning censorship, and I would add here dubbing, so that all speculations are limited by this factual impediment of looking into the papers. This should not stop, though, investigation into the period by other means, including inquisitive looking into

23 the available material indicative of events, moods, practices. It is impossible to ignore the strict connection between the politics of linguistic xenophobia that distinctly and intensely characterized the fascist regime, its censorial legislation in merit, and the institution of dubbing. How much, for example, could a comparative study of films in original language and their dubbed version, reveal about direct and indirect censorship?

Ignoring the main function of dubbing, which was that of suppressing foreign words and voices, highlighting instead the notion of dubbing as film translation that created revenues, is too convenient and easy. I want to look at dubbing as a cinematographic technique that enclosed Italians in ‘Italianicity’, through a filter that is linguistic and ideological, and that eliminates the sonic expressions and expressivity of the foreign other. Such an approach is necessary for the understanding of a historical period that still stirs debates, and that left many inscriptions, still visible and audible, in the socio-cultural construct of the nation. 2

2 Dubbing is still today a praxis that does not allow foreign films to speak their language. What would we say if any foreign person visiting Italy would be ‘provided’ with something like a dubbing I-pod that automatically – through technologies of speech recognition and synthesis – elides the personal voice and provides a new Italian voice, that translates and substitutes her words?

Sensorium Commune and Schizo-Hollywood

Steven Ricci has offered his own perspective on this phenomenon in his recent book

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, he 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 he points to the more variegated roles that women were offered there, also 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”

25 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 tended, in fact, and tried, to erase the private sphere of individual subjectivity and make the subject a fascist subject tout court, existing only as fascist (a thesis supported also by Falasca Zamponi). Even as cinema spectators Italians were addressed as political subjects. Before any 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.

This operation was conducted also through dubbing, but whereas Ricci mentions its fundamental importance for the construction of a fascist cinema he does not really analyze its functioning mechanisms. After stating that every foreign feature had to be dubbed in Italian starting from 1930, he does not proceed to investigate the entailments that this poses. 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 recount an America that speaks the domestic language? In his articulated taxonomy Ricci keeps Hollywood as a referent

26 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 analyses 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 manumission of the dialogue track, but also strangely it re-appropriated linguistically that foreign evil, making it Italian in any case, as the other, however malevolent and debased, could only speak Italian. Dubbing as an intra- textual strategy inserted and reestablished fascist hegemonic coordinates inside the film itself, making reference to already known representational schemas, and familiar bad voices.

Here we can usefully turn to 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 worst. 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, tragic for the film, for the audience, for women and men. I propose that since Fascism the dubbing practice has been the result of a mix of fear, rejection and ignorance of the other, in a process of linguistic cultural and vocal exorcism.

If we follow Ricci’s idea that, thanks to the cinematographic maneuvers operated by the fascists on Italian screens, all crime happens abroad while Italy is depicted as the bastion of integral morals and worldly values, dubbing is entrapped in a contradiction: it gives national voices to that evil and bad other. Kazan suggests that there is a sort of vocal/personality erasure and ideological misappropriation of the characters in the reinterpretation, or vocal rewriting, of the dubbed film. The process of domestication of the other through linguistic translation, for reasons that lie in the linguistic autarchy of the Regime, is complicated by issues of acceptable, and then convincing, representation.

Becoming somehow Italians, the American gangsters, or the too modern women, were falsely revisited and, through dubbing, inscribed in a character-space whose artificiality impeded any real commitment on the part of the audience. I do not think that this process was understood, or consciously planned, by fascist implementers of dubbing, but nonetheless it was activated. In short, probably more significantly than through dialogue tampering, dubbing falsified, and falsifies, the other as an-other who cannot be, and does not exist, so cannot be taken seriously. It is just bad fiction. As everybody knows, we all speak different languages, and Americans do not speak Italian. In this sense fascism really managed to control foreign intromissions, creating a theatricality in

28 cinema that directly or indirectly, undermined the coherence and credibility of the foreign filmic representation.

If the estranged experience of a dubbed film by a film viewer like Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, as philosopher of phenomenology and thus investigator of human sense experience, cannot be extended to general audiences, it can nonetheless point to the cognitive and sensorial break that dubbing produces in the cinema spectator. Merleau-

Ponty helps us to depict film spectatorship as an active process with a participant viewer and listener. Human beings are, in fact, “a permanent sensorium commune” (borrowing from Herder) where the senses inform each other reciprocally,

My body is the seat or rather the very actuality of the phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck), and there the visual and auditory experiences, for example, are pregnant one with the other, and their expressive value is the ground of the antepredicative unity of the perceived world, and through it, of verbal expression (Darstellung) and intellectual significance (Bedetung) ( Phenomenology 273).

With this idea of the body as a “synergic system” in the world, complete with all its organs – thus the impossibility of severing any of them – Merleau-Ponty discusses the synaesthesia of sight and sound in perception, and finds a perfect demonstration of the impossible break in the experience of a dubbed film,

When I go to see a film ‘dubbed’ in French, I do not merely notice the discrepancy between word and image, I suddenly have the impression that something else is being said over there. The ‘dubbed’ text, though it fills the auditorium and my ears, has not even an auditory existence for me, and I have ears for nothing but those other soundless words that emanate from the screen. … For the spectator, the gestures and words are not subsumed under some ideal significance, the words take up the gesture and the gesture the words, and they intercommunicate through the medium of my body (ibid).

The breakdown that he describes here is caused by the common disappearance of sound from the screen while the characters still go on gesticulating.

I would extend his “quasi-stupor” to the experience of linguistic mismatching,

Italian (French) language over foreign people, clothing, settings, streets, etc. Not simply, the frequent and normal technical breakdown that disrupts the synchronicity of the audio and visual, but a breakdown that concerns the area of significance, that is, where we make sense of the world, can cause the same withdrawal on the part of the perceiving subject. That there is, then, a cultural process of interiorization and normalization to be taken into account further complicates matters. This thought from

Merleau-Ponty suggests to me the idea of dubbing as machinery that, perfectly fitting the fascist agenda, undermining the foreign filmic consistency created the basis for a pathological dismissal of, at least, the filmic other.

Later in this study I aim to suggest some directions and detours that dubbing as post-synchronization equipment took. As any technology operated by humans, it is subject to subjective appropriation, invention and intervention, and can eventually be transformed into an instrument for that “poetic dwelling” that Heidegger, in his investigation of the modern technological rationality, offers as the human way out of rationalized capitalist automation (The question concerning technology).

Historical Beginnings, Linguistic Battles

Before evolutions and complications in the use of post-synchronization, it is necessary to look at the context that saw the establishment of film dubbing in Italy not simply as a technology for translation of foreign films but as a cultural choice and practice rooted in the socio political contingency of the nation. In Italy, language and words were an issue since the emergence of cinema. We can trace the discussion back to the Italia liberale

(the period from 1870 to the crisis of the turn of the century). The cinema itself was an issue, attracting much popular and institutional attention, as the emerging mass medium both moved and frightened conventional thinkers. In 1908, Il Pungolo - a

Neapolitan newspaper, read by an educated public, and directed by Jacopo Comin, later during fascism active as cinema historian in Luigi Freddi’s team of film experts at the government’s General Directorate of Cinematography– affirmed that cinema was “an immoral spectacle” and had to die. The outraged journalist predicted the devastation of the soul and fantasy of the Italian people. Il corriere della sera, then, as today, an authoritative and highly influential newspaper of the bourgeoisie, morally lynched

Edison as the father of such a disgrace for the human race. Of course, the same preoccupations and negative feelings belonged to the church, which condemned the immorality and perversion of the cinematograph (Argentieri 9-10).

Roman Catholic interference with the life of the nation and its cinematographic imagination would increase with the evolution of the medium and the understanding of its powers, establishing itself openly and institutionally after the advent of sound cinema through the foundation of the CUCE (Consorzio utenti cinematografici educativi,

Consortium of educational cinematographic users) in 1926, and its magazine, Rivista del

Cinematografo in 1928. The Church’s interest in the cinema, and its effects did not end here, as films held the attention of Pope Pius XI who dedicated part of the encyclic Divini

Illius Magistri (1929), and the entire Vigilanti Cura (1936) to the cinema (Brunetta,

Storia, Il cinema del regime 53-57). Thus cinema was the site of a new creativity besieged by intricate social and political interests and attentions that complicated the dynamics and possibilities of its outcomes, which cannot be dismissively considered fascist.

Foundations of Cinematic Censorship

The story of cinematographic censorship begins with Vittorio Emanule Orlando, a key historical figure and notorious protagonist in the various transformations of national politics. A liberal democrat under Giolitti (with his five governments from 1892 to the advent of fascism), a fascist under Mussolini, he eventually authored the text and proclamation (signed by Pietro Badoglio, in 1943) announcing the fall of Fascism. In

1907, he was the head of the Ministry of Justice (Dicastero di Grazia e Giustizia) which at the time had the role of maintaining informal relations with the Church. In 1909, Pope

Pio X praised him for his help with the struggle to hold back the advance of modernity in society. It is he, in fact, who in 1910, as Mino Argentieri reports, promulgates a legislative measure that prohibits the showing of films without previous authorization by the prefect (11) thus introducing both the idea, and the State’s right to police the cinema.

The underlying moral concerns, and preoccupation for the social and political status of the nation, emerge clearly in a circular letter sent on February 20, 1913 by

Prime Minister Giolitti to the prefect’s officials. Placed under administrative and legislative attack are: “the representations of famous bloody acts, adulteries, robberies, and other crimes” and films that

render detestable the representatives of public security and likable the offenders; the despicable excitements to sexuality, incited by episodes where the aliveness of the graphic representation immediately feeds the lowest and vulgar passions, and other [films] from which derive an incitement to hate among social classes that is an offense to national decorum (Argentieri 14-15).

After various encounters and discussions between parliamentary exponents and cinematographic organizations on issues regarding the dangers and damages that preemptive censorship and subsequent taxation could cause to cinematic production, the necessity of order prevailed. On May 1st 1913, the General Office for the Revision of

Films was instituted and on June 25, legislation (n. 785) that established administrative censorship was promulgated. The text proclaimed: “The Government of the King is authorized to exercise control over cinematographic films, either nationally produced or imported from abroad, and to establish a taxation of 10 cents for each meter of film”

(Ernesto Laura qtd. in Gili 16). This was given administrative clout with the Regio

Decreto May 31st 1914, n. 532 which regulated the execution of the law. A censorship commission was created, composed exclusively of functionaries from the General

Directorate for Public Security or Police superintendents, who with the Minister of the

Interior possessed overriding powers to revise film content, and to deny or suppress distribution.

Sergio Raffaelli, in his work on the history of Italian language in cinema, noting the lack of studies that relate the linguistic evolution to censorship, points out that when Italian censorship was born it was not only interested in the iconic, graphic content, and the verbal message of films but also in the formal presentation of the

Italian language, the orthography and grammar presented in the titles and inter titles, and the use of exotic foresterismi (foreign words) (La lingua filmata 168, note 7). This is evident in the formulation of the requirements for distribution that the law stipulated.

To obtain a nulla osta (authorization) to be publicly shown, the law required a film to be presented to the Ministry of the Interior, Service of Cinematographic Revision.

As point C, in article 3, states, apart from providing various detailed information about the applicant company, its legal representative, the title and meters of film etc., it had to provide:

an extremely detailed description of the subject, differentiated in frames, with titles, subtitles and all the writings included in the film, in the same order with which they succeed each other in the film, so that all corresponds to the cinematographic production (emphasis added).

The article ends stating:

The titles, subtitles and the writings, both on film and on the copies of the request, must be in correct Italian language. However they can be in a foreign language, as long as they are also faithfully and correctly reproduced in the Italian language (ibid. 169-70).

Finally, Article 7 gives to the Minister of the Interior the power to prohibit the film or impose the suppression of “given parts of the revised film, or some titles, subtitles and writings contained in it” (Gili 16).

Thus the law of 1913 can be seen as the institutional and legal foundation of the linguistic policing that characterized the years to come, attentive to the formal language and intent on limiting the influences of foreign languages. If the formulation of the law seems to suggest a benevolent acceptance and treatment of foreign languages, that could be included if accompanied by the Italian version, Raffaelli reminds us of the considerable economic expense that the imposition of the translation, hence the insertion of the double inter-titles entailed. Thus, if not directly prohibiting, the law practically discouraged the use of foreign terms, and established a habit of producing mono-lingual films well before the Fascist regime imposed such practice.

In his work on the forbidden words in advertisement (Le Parole Proibite 1812-

1945) Raffaelli observes that, after the turn of the 20th century, the attention to language was more under the sign of aesthetic and literary care. He traces the explosion of Italian ‘foreign phobia’ to 1905-06, and the question of hotel signs. In 1906 the

Ministry for Agriculture, Industry and Commerce sent a circular letter to all the presidents of the Chambers of Commerce to discipline the use “of the Italian language in the titles of hotels” (ibid 50). There were too many foreign languages circulating among the Italian people and he made it known that they were not institutionally welcomed, and to be prohibited.

Thus Raffaelli identifies the antecedents of the linguistic xenophobia characteristic of the Fascist Regime. He studies in depth the legislation regarding the use of the language in advertisement posters, which finds its origins and matrix before the

Giolitti era. The (post unification) nationalistic principle “attributes to political power the

35 duty/right to discipline the use of the language, at least beyond the private sphere, recurring not simply to pedagogical suasion but also to authoritarian repression” (ibid.

5).

The bonifica (reclamation) of the Italian language dates back to a law passed in

1874, which levied taxes on poster ads and shop signs. This continued at the beginning of the 20th century with the debate surrounding the expulsion of the French word réclame from the Italian dictionary, and was followed by the campaigns for the Italian- ness of hotel signs (39-89). Raffaelli explores in detail the gestation of the linguistic foreign-phobia that will extend to cinema when films will appear carrying written words belonging, or better, added to the images to compensate for their silence, and will then move to the spoken language of sound films. While his direct interest is mainly linguistic, Raffaelli’s work is useful as it offers sharp hints for possible and necessary studies that would uncover the bonifica (reclamation, improvement) of filmic texts operated by preemptive and repressive censorship in the name and defense of the public morals and the national language.

Those were the years when cinema exited its so called primitive state and passed from being a cinema of astonishment and attractions that entertained and fascinated people with uncanny lights and colors, tricky apparitions and disappearances — using the magical and illusionist power of filmic representation — to a structurally more complex cinema, consequential and subordinated to a narrative. Film scholar Tom

Gunning (Cinema of Attractions) indicates the year 1906-07 as pivotal to the establishment of narrative cinema in the US, and by extension the rest of western

36 cinemas. Thus films had to incorporate a more consistent number of inter-titles to help sustain and explain the plot, “strengthening the narrative and thematic cohesion of the iconic context” (L’italiano nel muto 27). As Raffaelli illustrates, more inter-titles meant more written words, hence errors and resulting debates around the errors that “even a third grade student” (La lingua filmata 167) would have been able to correct.

The carefree attitude of the cinematographers and the domination of foreign films, in need of translation, was the object of animated discussion in the specialized press. The debates revolved around the unnecessary use of exotic vocabulary, that is, the use of foreign words for the complacency of the enemies of the purity of the language. Since then the purity and unity of the Italian language was equated with the purity and unity of the nation.

The autarchic project of the Fascist regime, as theorized by Giovanni Gentile, its official ideologue and major intellectual figure, aimed at the realization/continuation of the Risorgimento enterprise that had stalled (or was interrupted) under Giolitti who both failed to complete unification of the nation, and struggled to unify the language.

Fascism would create national unity out of centuries of geographical divisions and linguistic diversities. The affirmation of the Italian language as the language of every citizen, who in his/her singularity embodies the nation, and of the entire nation as a fascist ethical category3 was considered instrumental for the success of the enterprise of italianizzazione (Italianization). 4

3 Gentile’s “Fundamental Ideas” second part of the “Doctrine of Fascism” which appeared in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932, under the title Fascism, see web entry http://www.treccani.it/biblioteca/biblioteca_fonti.htm

In her Politica linguistica del fascismo, Gabriella Klein claims that the historical and cultural background for the linguistic politics of the regime is that of the 19th century emergence of bourgeois nation states and the concepts that identify language with nation and language with people/citizens. In the new political structuring the idea of national language is ideological and contains a political, historic and cultural opposition to dialects, minority languages, and foreign languages for the defense of “the national language”: the “idioma patrio” (homeland idiom) in its “purity” and “unity.” She writes:

The affirmation of a “national unity of the language” which in fact, is inexistent, cannot but have as a consequence the attempt to suppress other linguistic varieties, like dialects, vernacular languages …, minority languages, on the basis of a modality of standardization that is strictly mono-centric and endogenous. … The linguistic “Jacobinism” of the fascist government manifests itself predominantly in the form of repression of the dialects, of minority languages and foreign expressions, with the intent of reaching a consensus in the search for linguistic unification which, at that time, had not been reached, notwithstanding the linguistic planning interventions since the first years of the unity of Italy. Though, the by then widespread belief of the usefulness of italofonia (italophony) as “an instrument of national communication” … was “rooted into the average cultural consciousness”, it was however a belief “totally devoid of practical results.” (22-23, emphasis added)

Dubbing and the Sonic Unconscious

Against such backdrop, it seems impossible not to explore the role of dubbing when sound came to the movies. The institution of dubbing created and constituted the

4 Two films come to mind that, with different intents at different moments, portray the “nation” in its multiplicity of languages and heterogeneous realities, from the south to the north: Blasetti’s 1860 (1933) during fascism for fascist edification and Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) that illustrates how the linguistic unity prospected by the fascist regime was not accomplished at all, for an accurate analysis of the first one see Angela Dalle Vacche’s The body in the mirror.

38 perfect machine for controlling the language and content of foreign and also domestic films. Extending Raffaelli`s comment on the lack of studies that analyze the evolution of the national language in its forced relations with censoring practices, I would indicate the absence of a study on the specific workings of dubbing for film censorship that was also used to discipline the language. Given the state of present investigations, dubbing still resides in the sphere of the (fascist) cinematographic sonic unconscious of Italian film goers, and film scholars, and has thus not simply been put aside, but repressed and oppressed. Dubbing, along with its intellectual and economic rationales and general socio-cultural ‘invisibility’ constitutes an interruption (as in Benjamin’s Theses on the philosophy of history, or On the concept of history) in the historic and social analysis, and reassessment of Fascism, which does not take it into account while its continuation and operations have been completely normalized.

While everyone knows that there was dubbing (and there is dubbing) and that it allowed for the manipulation of film-dialogues, no in depth and specific attention is devoted to its proceedings. The tendency to look at cinema as a space that could somehow resist fascism by emphasizing the regime’s practical laissez faire politics - that never really could impede anything - simplifies and obscures the price paid for the actual suppression, a complicated process that is never absolute and total. The attention given to cinematic centrifugal moments minimizes censorial cuts and losses, so avoids looking at them and asking probing questions.

Following Raffaelli’s interest for the cinematic space as the space of national linguistic struggle, in Dialoghi di regime (1997) Valentina Ruffin and Patrizia D`Agostino

39 offer their work of filmic textual excavation. They analyze the national production during Fascism with all its prohibitions of dialectal and foreign terminologies and arrive at the conclusion that cinema’s dialogues resisted the regime’s autarchy parodying it, thus overcoming it. In the introduction Gian Piero Brunetta affirms the practical impossibility on the part of the fascist autarchy to impede the intrusion of the other from the screens as all the prescriptions were ridiculed:

While Fascism tries to regulate –for example- augmenting linguistic prescriptions, the rules that impede the free circulation of dialects and foreign languages on the screen, cinema overcomes daily the linguistic anti-dialectal and xenophobe barriers, ridiculing them (30-31).

A somewhat general and generous comment that looks at the insubordinate power and potential of the talking moving images and almost shuts off questions that escape its emphatic and positive affirmation of cinematic resistance. The observation does not address the factual impediments, inconveniences, impossibilities and negotiated adjustments, the filtering and stereotyping. It avoids considering the ideological entailments of the filmic gesture that it praises and which operates relegating the other, foreign or dialectal, to jokes, accents, disguised and mispronounced words. In my view this filmic gesture signals and creates the implicit/explicit acceptance of the other’s illegitimate or marginal status, and through laughter and parody, confines it to signify mostly a foreign and exotic imagined worldliness, or some form of dialectal and natural wisdom.

Such strategic depiction perfectly mirrors, re-proposes, and thus serves, without contestation, the more general conflicting and irresolute ambivalence of the fascist

40 attitude, coping with modernization, toward anything old and new in the negotiation for the creation of the Italian identity. Here the old/new tension finds linguistic expression in the rooted dialectal languages of rural enclosure and social permanence as old- belonging, and in the urban/foreign languages of cosmopolitan openness and change as new-longing. The reality of both worlds and feelings could not be escaped, none of them could be absolutely renounced or entirely accepted because of the strident necessity to fabricate and constitute a unified national body that was not there yet, not even linguistically. So parody functions to affirm the discordant forces. Thus I claim that in filmic representations the linguistic prohibition of dialects and foreign languages remains rather unquestioned. Thus I claim that in filmic representations the linguistic prohibition of dialects and foreign languages remains rather unquestioned. I would problematize Brunetta’s definition of “centrifugal” moments. If the foreign language becomes the material for word plays, twisting puns, mispronunciations, and mostly a satire of xenophiles, is not the engagement with the other/language being refused or trivialized, thus transversally respecting and playing the regime’s politics? Staging the other as caricature is not understood (if ever originally intended) as a ridiculing of the prohibition, but passes as ridiculing the other, in a representation made of misappropriated words, often rendering the other a mis-speaker, and her culture somewhat unreadable or just silly.

Brunetta, though, writing in 1997, embraces a somewhat simplistic, or simplified view of dubbing’s program and effects affirming how in the collective imaginary the

Italian cinema had the strength and ability to

constitute itself as a real space and a possible world, as a habitat where the presence of fascism could almost be reduced to zero and one had enough freedom to operate and see the cultivation of cultural, linguistic seeds and values systems coming from international realities. … When you lived a couple of hours in places where you saw the triumph of objects designed by Ponti, or armchairs by Frau, or tubular chairs in the style of Van Der Rohe and Barovier’s lamps or Venini’s pots, when you desired to dress in a tailleur, or wear a frac, play tennis, drink whiskey *he writes the Italianized ‘wisky’+, champagne or cognac, nibble a toast with a wurtsel, take a taxi, sleep in a hotel (better if a Grand Hotel), pay with a chèque, play bridge, watch a film, dress in chiffon so as to explode all your sex appeal, it is difficult to continue wearing the autarchic fabrics of cocafil or wanting to wear grey and green, leave for Giarabub or walk on the path of Mussolini’s dream to conquer the world (31).

I added the emphasis in the text to highlight the foreign words that are of current use today in Italian and that evidently for Brunetta signify the entrance of a bigger world in the national one, thus affirming the trans-nationality of a porous cinema that, seemingly via audio-visual osmosis, conquers the space of national imagination and desire, and makes it other. The present use of the terms is projected diachronically almost suggesting the same pervasive use at the times under analysis, from 1930 to

1944. It seems to me that we cannot think of them as then commonly usable. Looking at the separation of the different periods in the cinematic utilization of foresterismi

(foreign words), that follows the linguistic legislation of the regime, as it is provided by

Valentina Ruffin, the linguistic panorama would not appear so international. In her detailed study in fact she schematizes different periods, 1930 to 1935, as characterized by

an apparent positive use of esotismi [exotic words]; 1936-39: their use in the (negative) characterization of snobs is reinforced, substitutive [Italianized] words start to appear; in some example the refusal of the foreign words is highlighted

and made explicit in the dialogue; 1940-44: low frequency [scarce presence of esotismi] and growing affirmation of substitutive words (69).

According to her schema, it is only during the first fascist wave of xenophobia that cinema opposed to the legislation some more or less tolerant acceptance of foreign terminology. Nonetheless, as Ruffin affirms, also this period was somewhat ambiguous in as much as foreign words were connected with “characters or environments from which the narrative context tends to avert the spectator’s process of identification” (48).

Brunetta’s list of “germi culturali”, cultural seeds, reads more like a crescendo of commodities for the mundane scenery of the ‘dream of the good life’, of conventional glamour, of elegant and chic parties. The imagination and space of the other is thus reduced to a non committed consumption idyll of capitalist goodies from stylish and expensive chairs to American toast filled with German ‘wurstels’, an advertisement sketch and phantasmagoria for modern commodity-cosmopolitan urban pleasures. The cultural space proposed by the above described cinema to signify the other is luminescent with escapist desires. A vanity fair that does not seem to offer any real other, who can so be dismissed for its fetishized futility. Thus such cinema would, more than resist and provide some ethical alternative to fascism, obliquely participate in the chauvinistic politics of the regime.

Italian fascism never generated a perfect apparatus for control, but 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

43 various boards and organizations, schools, associations, prizes and festivals (the Venice

Film Festival, Littoriali). Thus apart from the censorial legislation, its 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 and prohibitions.

Ruffin-D’Agostino’s study about the use of dialectal and foreign words in Italian films shows the construction and conception of the (national) other as it was elaborated in the national film production. Regarding the foreign other I would argue that to appreciate his/her representation it is necessary to relate it to the international film production that offers the ways and modes of the other’s self re/presentation. It is here that the flaw created by dubbing cannot be overlooked, as the international other was always re/presented by national dubbing. I am not presently interested in the quantification or detailed analysis of the specific filmic debacles and misrepresentations generated by dubbing, as my intention is to focus and draw attention to it and its proceedings, its ideological entailments and culturally homogenizing and xenophobic results, which seem to go courteously unobserved while they participate in the mediated construction and reception of the filmic other.

Brunetta himself in his Storia del cinema italiano, (vol. 2) presenting the politics of information of the regime, and its censorial legislation, briefly introduces the question of the foreign films for which numerous impediments were institutionally created. He writes:

The strategy becomes more articulated for foreign films: either distribution was absolutely forbidden, or there was intervention on the plot, mutilating scenes,

changing endings, or on dubbing, distorting words and meanings; The Adventures of Marco Polo by Archie Mayo in 1938 becomes, thanks to the obtuse nationalism of the censor, Uno scozzese alla corte del Gran Kan [A Scotsman at the palace of the Grand Khan+ … *while+ another argument of interest would be the adaptation of moments in foreign films to autarchic cultural models (34-35).

Brunetta provides examples of such censorial disciplining that come from the study that Mino Argentieri conducted in 1974, and which remains one of the very few works that details the practice of censorship without, however, paying too much attention to the specific problem of language, hence dialogues and dubbing. Cursorily in his study on censorship Mario Quarognolo opens some windows into what he calls the

"crimes" (La Censura, 52) operated by dubbing. Even if he is only marginally interested in engaging with them, he offers some examples of the expurgations resulting from the new, so called, film translation practice, best thought of as an adaptation practice, socially and ideologically responsive to the fascist authority. The cinematic space allowed to the foreign other was absolutely maneuverable, worthy of no respect and susceptible to any transformation. Even the pure musical space was patrolled to exasperation, as Quarognolo reports the French film,

Feux de joie, from 1938, but released in Italy only in 1942, had as its main superlative attraction the pop music band Ray Ventura et ses collegians. Well, Ray Ventura's orchestra was totally dubbed by an Italian orchestra which remained anonymous. … Probably they did not want to propagandize French music which was carefully avoided even on the radio. (52)

Ermanno Comuzio in his study Colonna Sonora. Dialoghi, musiche, rumori dietro lo schermo (Soundtrack. Dialogues, musics, noises behind the screen. 1980) briefly touches on the “crimes” of dubbing, and its musical censorship. He mentions how with

Rene Clair’s The ghost goes west (1936) the original music by Mischa Spolianski is

45 substituted in the Italian dubbed version with music by the unknown composer Fiorenzi.

Comunzio indicates how the substitution practice continues after Fascism, and offers the example of Paul Grimault’s La bergère et le ramoneur (1952) while in the original film there were numerous and nice couplets and nursery rhymes accompanied by music composed by Joseph Kosma, the Italian version circulated with music by Alberto Brandi.

Peter Brook’s The beggar's opera (1953) had original music composed by the famous

Arthur Bliss based on popular English arias from the eighteen hundreds. Even for an opera-film the dubbed Italian version substitutes compositions by Arthur Bliss with compositions by Paul Abel (113).

It seems very optimistic to imagine a cinema that could overcome fascist barriers when indeed the barriers defined the entire and available filmic soundtrack, chopped it and replayed it, assigned voices, changed notes and words, tones and tunes. Literally, we should start listening critically to film soundtracks to hear the multifarious cultural history and connections that they narrate.

An Italian text like Voci d’autore edited by Mario Guidorizzi (1999) is symptomatic of the kind of sanitized attention that the soundtrack receives. The focus on dubbing praised as one of the best, however neglected, arts that make up the complex enterprise of cinema making, simply does not allow for a critical listening and underplays its ideological and homogenizing character. Guidorizzi’s work aims at shedding light on the protagonists of dubbing, the voices that made, and some of whom still make, the Italian soundscape of foreign films. Invoking the Freudian magic and the surreal of the ‘power of the double’ – of which dubbing acts as the cinematographic

46 vocal incarnation – Guidorizzi proposes to fill the cultural gap that impedes the recognition of what he considers a historical artistic component of the national cinema industry.

The text has succeeded in generating positive and appreciatory consideration of its revealed subject, as is evidenced by, for example, the recent book on the history of sound in cinema, in which author Paola Valentini, praises the introduction of dubbing in the 1930s as a modality of translation of foreign films in Italy that “inaugurates a tradition much loved and of high quality” (Il suono nel cinema 34). An approach willing to view dubbing simply in terms of the factuality of its existence does not allow for a discourse that considers it problematically, historically, ideologically and culturally as a living, sounding heritage of fascism. By assigning any possible questioning arguments about and against dubbing to the sphere of the purely aesthetic - that is question concerning dubbing as a disfiguring of the filmic text in its original format by interchanging soundtracks – the determinist look that the book proposes, participates in the national disinclination to think critically about a fascist past still in need of epurazione (purging).

Usefully, despite its clear laudatory intentions, Voci d’autore presents, if for the sheer sake of excavation, the historical vicissitudes that made dubbing the common practice of film sound remaking, in each case emphasizing how it becomes an art that opens the screens to “the miracle” (14) and “the golden age of Italian dubbing” (18).

Nonetheless, one can read how the first words pronounced by Greta Garbo in the film

Anna Christie (1930), which famously traveled the world with the slogan “Garbo talks”,

47 were silenced and replaced by inter-titles. The historical introduction (assigned in the book to Mario Quarognolo) cites journalist Filippo Sacchi writing in Il Corriere della Sera on March 27, 1931,

Those who listened, in the original version, to the scene, which is entirely spoken, 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 inter-titles, she leaves us, it is useless to conceal it, with a different impression (14).

Hence, the sexy guttural voice of the woman who named herself Garbo, a word that in Italian means ‘gracefulness’, in Swedish “wood nymph”, and in Spanish “animal grace sublimated” (Erkkila) the actress who became and still is reductively but generally considered and constructed as a pure vessel of provocative feminine attributes for a fantasizing male audience, a vamp with no heart, a passionate and romantically disillusioned woman, absolutely undesirable for the Regime - had to be erased. Or only partially allowed, just to titillate the spectators with cinema spoken words, as Sacchi’s comment in the Corriere (November 8, 1931) on Garbo’s other film from 1930,

Romance, illustrates:

[That] little part of dialogue that they left at the end of the film, when the prima donna accompanied to the hotel by her admirers after the good bye party, going up the stairs, turns to say thank you and pronounce her parting phrases. Thus we listen to the famous voice of Garbo, a voice warm and soft from low pitched musical inflections, without canto, all hers. (in Quarognolo La parola ripudiata 24)

We can rightly suppose that the imagination of that sensuousness made voice, unavailable for Italian ears, created a more powerful and objectifying desire, and eroticized even more the space of inaudible foreign women, also because of the

48 extravagant bits of dialogue, arbitrarily chosen, that Garbo was forced to deliver herself in Italian, cutting a vocal opening among the silent inter-titles that surely fed desire and fantasy.

Thus Kazan’s remarks concerning all the women actresses who, when dubbed into Italian, embody the cliché vocal idea of sexiness, may find here its discursive genesis. Sacchi’s little anecdote and Kazan’s comment are interestingly suggestive together, offering insight as to how structurally meaningful and politically useful decisions and then practices – in this case the fascist instauration of dubbing and then its post fascist oblivious (and economically useful) continuation - produce and elaborate cultural perceptions, modes and attitudes that, once current and common, remain essentially unquestioned and simply valued on their own terms, without critical consciousness.

The idea of dubbing as salvage from a cinematic Babel, as proposed in Voci d`autore (14), hinders the possibility of a critical discourse that takes into account dubbing’s cultural effects because it underestimates its premises, mainly the prohibition of a cinema that would propagate foreign languages and all that foreign languages can do, like offering and articulating different perspectives on the status of things and beings. As a recent report from the ISTAT (the national center for statistics, “L'italiano?

No grazie, io parlo dialetto”) substantiates Italians still have a very reticent relation with foreign languages: formal education is the main vehicle for accessing the acquisition of another tongue, their knowledge is generally very basic, and they are not too enthusiastic or eager to get better. Could we ever blame dubbing for that? In

49 sociolinguistic terms dubbing has become an invisible force out of a past planned intervention in the shaping and forging of the linguistic sphere,5 at that time in need of the creation of a synthetic unity of a shared national language.

Multiple Languages, Cultural Singularities

The road to linguistic purification and closure to other sounds and voices started, from basically commercial considerations, with the establishment of multilingual productions or multiple language versions (MLVs) of American films. From 1929 to 1933, American film studios either brought foreign directors, scriptwriters, and actors to Hollywood or opened film production studios in Europe. Warner Brothers was the first American producer to engage in MLV production, with some European producers and all of the major Hollywood studios following the trend. Paramount built a huge studio in early

1930, at Joinville in the suburbs of Paris that started producing films in as many as fourteen different languages. Films were shot simultaneously in two or three languages

5 In the article by Virginia Pulcini “Attitudes toward the spread of English in Italy” which specifically addresses the evolution and relation of the Italian and English language and the spread of the latter in Italy since the advent of Fascism to the post WWII period, dubbing is an invisible naturalized force, she mentions it en passant, as an adjective for films and television series, that in Italy are, matter of fact “dubbed”. Cleansed of its very reasons for being, like impeding the spread of foreign languages, and English, in her analysis dubbing simply produces “faulty shifts of meanings” of English words because of “hasty translations” (81). In her inquiry into the motivations for the poor status of second language acquisition and proficiency, dubbing does not figure at all as one of the indirect repressive agents. Mostly to blame for her is bad teaching, not the fact of having absolutely no linguistic exposure to other languages if not through tourists visiting and travel. She concludes the article affirming, in contrast to nations like France, the open Italian attitude towards English that the lack of linguistic restrictive policies guarantees. In Pulcini’s vision after the linguistic xenophobia of the Fascist Regime, Italians have developed a very democratic attitude towards cultural matters, so dubbing does not have a repressive history, it is simply stratified in the mono-cultural and mono-lingual-scape that the fascist regime successfully implemented.

50 and usually had just one director, but for a higher number of MLVs each could have a different director. Multilingual actors performed in more than one language version, but generally there were different casts for different versions.

Mario Camerini was one of the Italian directors from the period who spent time working in the Joinsville studios, where he developed familiarity with the conventions of the happy ending and virtue rewarded plot lines that can be found in his later films

(Ben-Ghiat 84-85). He also established very productive connections with Hollywood: in

1938 Walter Lang did I will give a million, a remake of Daro` un milione (1935), and Sam

Woods did Heartbeat (1946) a remake of Batticuore (1936). Camerini also wrote the screenplay for War and Peace (1956) directed by King Vidor. He went to Joinsville because an Italian director was needed for the filmic transposition of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, which became La riva dei bruti (1931), the American version called

Dangerous Paradise was directed by William Wellman. But as Camerini recounts, the plan was really to go there and get familiar with the way the new soundtrack technology worked. Obtaining special permission from the director of Paramount to enter the editing room which was generally off limits for the various directors, Camerini was the first, for the Italian cinema, to experiment and play with the soundtrack and the visual track when he found them as separated parts, available in multiple copies with which one could work. There was no necessity to stick with direct sound, or keep the ‘original’ sound as it was first recorded with the filming. He stripped the original sound track, put a new sound track next to the visual track and then ran them together on the moviola.

Covering the noises created by the edits by putting a triangle of ink on the splice so that

51 there would be no signal for the sound lamp, he used this method for his film Gli uomini che mascalzoni (1932). With this technique, as he reports, he started doing sound editing one year and a half before everybody else. In his words “the success of Gli uomini che mascalzoni more than from the story, came from the technique of the film.

That is, while there were films with uninterrupted long takes and limited editing, Gli uomini che mascalzoni was a film with the rhythm [editing pace] of silent films but with sound and dialogue” (Cinecitta` anni trenta 208, Mancini 44). Thus the film was comfortably shot with the fast dynamics of silent movies and with the contemporary, attractive, addition of sound, noises, dialogues and songs.

Thus post-synchronization or the idea of the soundtrack as disposable item to be manufactured and then homogenized to the visual track for the mimetic deception offered by cinema seems to have been with Italian directors since the beginning. Apart from the, true or not, self-affirmed primacy for the invention of the sound technique called blooping6, Camerini was one of the Italian pioneers of sound editing and he immediately understood it creatively as liberation from the constraints of a fixed soundtrack.

Maximum output at Joinsville occurred between March 1930 and March 1931 when one hundred features and fifty shorts were produced. Nonetheless, the production costs of MLVs were too high, moreover their standardized plots created the perception that they were purely commercial products, or that adaptations from the

6 The technical definition of the term and process is generally given without names of famous inventors and specific dates, as in Mary Ann Doane’s essay on sound editing and mixing where she provides a clear and detailed explanation of this post production process that avoids breaks and interruptions of the audio visual flow following the Hollywood values of continuity, or continuous narration (in Film Sound 57).

52 original version lost all artistic value. Hollywood ceased multilingual production entirely in 1933 and Germany and France soon thereafter. Thus the MLVs are generally viewed as failed experiments in the difficult transition to sound cinema. Multilingual versions continued to be made from time to time in Europe. Jean Renoir's Le carrosse d'or (The

Golden Coach, 1953), for example, was shot in Cinecittà, with a largely Italian cast; Anna

Magnani played and spoke in English, Italian, and French in the three separately filmed versions – effectively playing the role three times.

Beyond the inevitable mechanicity of multiple versions of the same film, the tragedy of MLVs, as can be imagined, was also that of a multiplicity of accents that put languages on trial, as very few actors or actresses were really polyglot. Mario

Quarognolo reports in La parola ripudiata the story of the Italian version of the film

Pardon Us / Muraglie (1931) by James Parrot, filmed in multiple versions by Hal Roach in

Hollywood, with the main protagonists, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, reciting in all the required languages, with the exhilarating and hilarious result that can be imagined. They had to read their dialogue phonetically transcribed on blackboards that were put on top of the camera. Thus all the laughing that they provoked did not simply derive from the filmic gags but also from all the mispronunciations which became part of the actors’ performance. Later Fritz Curioni, then director of MGM in Italy, suggested purposely dubbing Stanlio and Ollio in Italian with a very strong Anglo-American accent. The decision resulted in the now famous and super rickety Italian that the two actors speak through their Italian dubbers for Italian audiences.

I would comment that from then on, in Italian dubbing, an affectation of accents, and badly spoken Italian with verbs never conjugated — pronounced always in the infinitive form — is frequently used to signify and signal the foreigner, thus perpetrating the idea of a foreigner with no rights of existing/speaking another language. The idea of the linguistic other rendered as the one who simply cannot speak Italian, exaggerates the theatricality that dubbing superimposes onto the orality of the foreign film. It would be interesting, in fact, to analyze and reveal the travesty of the various vocal and linguistic modes and codes that are used to translate different types of foreigners, by nationality for example, thus embodying the characteristics of their own country and the imagination of the dubbers with all the social, class and political labels attached to it. What I want to underline is that the vocal and linguistic personification that dubbing creates is always charged with cultural impressions and interpretations that produce and reproduce themselves. Framing dubbing as neutral is an act of socio-historical erasure that willingly forgets, and ignores its impingements on reality.

Chapter II

Listening to Dubbing, Between Make Believe and Cultural Shizophonia

If we begin paying attention to dubbing, the very idea resonates with problematic and unanswered questions in its unexplored history. In this chapter I offer an investigation of dubbing and its making of the Italian cinematic sound-scape. I place particular attention not only on the institutional and practical moments of its establishment but also the debates that surrounded dubbing specifically, and the art of sound film in general. What I aim to point out is how the birth and evolution of sound cinema in Italy was displaced by and framed within the techno-political practice of dubbing. When in

1928, in the wake of the sound film, in their manifesto Asynchronism as a Principle of

Sound Film, Pudovkin, Ejzenstejn and Aleksandrov were discussing the creative possibilities of the newly available technology and creating the basis for the foundation of pure and poetic audiovisual images, in Italy the fascist regime with its various

Ministries of Propaganda denied any artistic autonomy to the soundtrack, appropriating and mutilating film’s new born component as it was revolutionizing its language.

Discerning remarks by different commentators from the 30s into the 40s can offer some insight into the social and personal perceptions of dubbing’s workings. Italo

Calvino’s memories of the cinema at that time, for example, include his thoughts on dubbing. He does not focus specifically on the issue, but in the narration of his cinema experiences as an adolescent growing up under the regime, from 1936 and then during

55 the war, dubbing comes up in various comments. It is unfortunate that his views and opinions a propos are not developed further in other texts, though the lack is symptomatic of the general inattentiveness toward dubbing. Nonetheless in his brief comments Calvino succinctly touches all the fundamental problematic points.

In his Autobiografia di uno spettatore (1974), Calvino describes his cinema going as a rite of passage that happened in front of American cinema, watching a cinema of non-belonging that came from a distant world made of celluloid and personal dreams. A different cinema from post WWII Italian production, which signaled a coming of age for the spectator in terms of developing a sense of history, national, personal and cinematic, and the beginning of a cinema made of real life. In his memories, a distinctive trait of cinema during fascism is dubbing. If cinema was for him another world, dubbing was a specificity of an Italian re-representation of the world that, as we have seen, abolished part of the foreignness, reality, and corporeality of the original cinema and was also used as an instrument of censorship. Consider these richly suggestive comments, worth quoting at length:

There were years when I went to the movies almost every day and even perhaps twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, in short the epoch of my adolescence. In those years cinema was for me the world. A different world from that around me, but for me only what I saw on the screen had the properties of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while outside the screen heterogeneous elements were all piled up and they seemed put together by chance, the materials of my life that looked to me deprived of any shape (27)…. I am thinking of a particular movie theater, the oldest in my city, connected to my first memories of silent films, and which, from those times, had kept (until not too many years ago) a liberty style sign, decorated with medals, and the configuration of the theater a big long room extending downwards and sided by

a columned corridor. The operator’s cabin opened onto the main street through a little window, from where 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, and while I walked under that little window, I felt the call of that other world that was the world. (Emphasis mine, 31)

It is interesting to notice how Calvino comments on the technical aspect of the transformation of cinema that talks through machines, and how it was evident and clearly carried by the cinematic voices deformed by the apparatus itself. He then points to the falsity of a language created only for the cinema, the perfect yet inexistent (non- existent) spoken Italian of fascist aspiration, and the deceitfulness of the dubbed voices that like the singing sirens fool you into believing. They create enchantment and then misfortune; even if here Calvino uses the sirens only to indicate the fascination produced, not yet the misfortunes, as he will do later.

While discussing the difference between American and French films, mostly reducible to the sheer falsity of Hollywood productions, or the polished surface and production values, and the social and realist commitment of French cinema, Calvino offers another small but significant detail revealing his sense of the procedures of dubbing that voluntarily transformed the dialogue-track. Referring to Les Quai de

Brumes by Marcel Carnet, for which Prevert authored the scenario and dialogue, Calvino wonders what happened to the poetic realism of the French version, and, essentially, to the film’s narrative itself:

I felt that French cinema discussed more disquieting and vaguely forbidden things, I knew that Jean Gabin in 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 battle field, a subject that fascist censorship would never have permitted (35).

Dubbing as “make believe” could be adopted to caption the untold history of dubbing as censorship, offering forthrightly a personal anecdote, Calvino reveals that he did not believe dubbing. The reasons for the non-belief are vague and do not come from any specifically linguistic understanding but from the indefinite processes of spectatorship generated by the complex cinematographic medium whose holist artificiality is coded to copy and project life. Dubbing seems to breakdown, at some level, the necessary complicity in the medium artificiality and interrupts spectatorship: it signals itself even as it proposes linguistic understanding. Some of the spectatorial/sensorial expectations are not met, and Calvino’s “more disquieting and vaguely forbidden things” being said in French films recall the impression of “something else … being said over there” that Merleau-Ponty has while watching dubbed films. For both of them, dubbing leaves the voices it intended to cover up circulating silently on the screen, or behind the screen, as an auditory phantasmal imaginary that is more real and pertinent to the images.

In the following paragraph Calvino speaks in terms of the debate surrounding dubbing, as someone fully aware of the discourses and arguments that the then young film critic Michelangelo Antonioni had presented against dubbing in his long magazine campaign on the pages of Cinema in 1940-41 that problematized and openly questioned its use as a viable solution for the translation of international films. Antonioni, to whom I

58 will return extensively, argued against dubbing as a translation mode that does not take into account the artistic value of the film as an audiovisual text, given its main assumption that a sound-track is interchangeable, as are the actors’ voices. What is especially noteworthy is the consideration that Calvino has of the musicality of the voice as an instrument of self. This is similar to Antonioni’s views, but even more along the lines of Roland Barthes’s ideas on the carnality and materiality of the voice as sound and breathing, fibrous utterances and sensual rubbing, as vibrant form of being, as he variously expressed in his work, from The grain of the voice to The pleasure of the text and The rustle of language. In addition Calvino underlines the falsity of the vocal performance that at the time was thought to be overly indebted to the theater and its birignao language, characterized by an affected and unnatural way of pronouncing words, slowly and with emphasis on vowels.

If cinema was, for me, mostly made of actors and actresses, I must bear in mind that for me, like for all the Italian spectators, only half of each actor and actress existed, that is, only the shape/figure and not the voice, substituted by the abstraction of dubbing, by 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 of 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 whom understands it, reveals nuances of expressions, and to whom does not understand it, has a surplus of musical potentiality (like we hear today in Japanese films or also in Swedish films).Therefore the conventionality of the American cinema got to me raddoppiata [redoubled] please excuse me the pun7- by the conventionality of the dubbing, that to our ears though, became part of

7 The Italian word doppiata, that is “dubbed,” is contained in the word raddoppiata “re/doubled”, the pun is thus with the word “doubled” “raddoppiata” containing in itself the word dubbed, “doppiata”, as if in English the word for re/doubled was “redubbed”.

the enchantment of the film, inseparable from those images. Sign that the power of cinema was born silent8, and that the word —at least for the Italian spectators — is always felt [and heard] as a superimposition, a capital letters caption. (37)

If the last statement about the power of cinema being born silent sounds too poetic, and conservative, as if Calvino were speaking nostalgically from the time of his early cinema viewing, the second part of the sentence offers a critical reflection with its intransigence. For Italians, given the dubbing, the soundtrack was always something they were made conscious of, or that they were forced to be conscious of, as its fabrication was there in plain listening, the technicality of its operation always too obvious for the ear, and the related cognitive processes. The practice of dubbing, as evidenced in Calvino’s brief analysis, produced what might best be understood as a general alienation from the soundtrack, a sense of discontent and critique that –along with its social and political effects - will also generate, as I will discuss at length further on, very creative outcomes for artistic purposes in its destabilization in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Alienation from the soundtrack took different forms with different levels of awareness in people. If from the voice of writers like Calvino the process is thoroughly analyzed, the general and more naïve audience was introduced and had to get accustomed to a cinema that no matter where it came from was always “vestito a nuovo”, “dressed anew in the Italian language,” as the journalist Gustavo Briareo wrote in Cinema in 1937. In a celebratory article he declared Italian dubbing “one of the best in

8 In Italian the word for silent cinema is cinema muto, “mute cinema,” it emphasizes the absolute impossibility of speech, of a cinema that can talk. The English “silent” seems to be a more evocative word, that defines an atmosphere, silence being the lack of sound but not its impossibility.

60 the world, probably even the best: sophisticated, accurate and rigorous, to the point of a well intended virtuoso” (in La parola ripudiata, 89). Thus the general audience, together with the more cinematically educated one, was formally made believe that dubbing was artistically and ideologically legitimate, something that Italians could do better than everybody else, a national pride and achievement. Pivotal in this construction was a piece, the same year, by Paolo Uccello in Bianco e Nero –the magazine of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia- offering an extended analysis of dubbing as technology and art. The essay argued that, among various considerations of the art, the figure of the director of synchronization (dubbing) is extremely similar to that of the original film director (49).

Nonetheless the virtuosity of the national idiom performed on cinematic foreign images did certainly generate some alienation or estrangement from the “dresses anew” audio visual filmic text as it projected foreign places and faces being spoken in

Italian by Italian voices, thus phagocytizing linguistically and vocally the non-familiar and other, mismatching vocal and body gestures. In fact if we push Briareo’s comment on the film “vestito a nuovo” to tell the truth about films, they were (and are still today) dressed up and masked as something else in an operation that displaces and disperses cultural psychic and sonic coordinates and specificities. Thus the word schizophonia, coined by R. Murray Schafer to express the technical condition of a sound split from its source (The New Soundscape 43-47), can be borrowed here to indicate the voice split from the body, powerfully suggesting the schism, unsettling and disturbing even at a basic, non-conscious, mode of cinema spectatorship, and ever stronger the more the

61 audience is aware of it. A film spectator while viewing is also listening to his/her inner speech, as intra psychic signification, whereby, as Ella Shohat puts it in her essay “The

Cinema after Babel”, “Images and sounds are projected onto a kind of verbal screen that functions as a constant ground for meaning”. Inner speech, which we address to ourselves, provides the discursive “glue” between shots and sequences (112). I would add that the discursive glue may find slippery elements, even if the naïve spectator wants to believe that the voices come from the bodies on the screen, the tremendous and false juxtaposition of national language and sounds with foreign faces, expressions, gestures, modes and settings result in a clash of the ordinary sonic with the unfamiliar visuals. Even accounting for the general audience desire to be duped into the fiction of the film, the subdued knowledge of the trick and its schizophonic effect creates some psychic resistance in the reception of the moving/sounding image. The cultural and semiotic violence operated by dubbing on the foreign film is a form of unrevealed colonization, the colonized film is unworthy on its own terms and can exist only in the cultural space of the colonizer as an inferior other, literally not accepted in his/her own terms. At the same time its foreignness, restrained through domestic linguistic and ideological appropriation, is denied and made false – viscerally counterfeit - and as such can be disregarded. Dubbing destroys any possibility –and believability of the other into a fictitious domesticity that perceived as such becomes just an untrue and dismissible spectacle.

Dubbing Debuts

The dubbing enterprise reached its Italian home and there gave voices to the fascist regime’s much desired perfect and harmonious Italian after the failed experiment of multiple language film versions, and some dubbing experiments abroad, in Germany,

France and the US. In the US these tests were inevitably enmeshed in the Italian

American community -mostly from New York or Los Angeles. Some of the voice actors spoke a decent Italian and others a very exotic, oblivious or dialectal one.

Early experiments in the US were initiated by professional people working in

Hollywood, mostly with social or Italian family connections. In the very first film dubbed into Italian in Hollywood in 1929, at the studios of the William Fox Co., for example, the director Louis Loeffler had lived in Italy where he married a woman from Rome, he knew the Italian language and thus decided to dub the film Married in Hollywood by David

Butler and Marcel Silver. He collaborated with Augusto Galli who had arrived in

California in 1922 accompanying his little sister to their father who was living there. He had planned to go back but after finding a job as a set designer for MGM he decided to stay and worked in many of the various sectors of big studio production, ending up in dubbing. Galli also worked in the studios of Metro with his wife Rosina Fiorini, a first generation Italian American born in New York City. She had an acting background in theater and cinema which positioned her as a good choice for giving Italian voice to

English speakers. The couple followed the events, fortunes and misfortunes of the dubbing enterprise, moving to Rome when Metro decided to dub in Rome at the end of

1932 - Galli an actor and director of dialogues, and Fiorini a doppiatrice (a dubber),

63 giving (her) voice to Joan Crawford. They later went back to the US and took care of dubbing American films for the Italians during WWII, and at the end of the war the two were relocated in Rome. There Galli became the supervisor for all MGM dubbing. The couple’s professional careers embody the character and history of a fascist cinematographic institution that necessarily established partnership with Hollywood and obliged its production and distribution systems to follow the norms of an important market that depended for 50% of its box office on American films (Briareo in La parola ripudiata 42-50, Ricci 52).

Tellingly, the couple’s first relocation in Rome is almost contemporaneous with the Regime’s decision to impose national dubbing thus forbidding dubbing that came from foreign countries. What we might call ‘international dubbing’ had failed the audience test and, as many journalists report, given the variable and unpredictable level of the spoken language, the films were mostly booed. Self-dubbing, for example, succeeded only for comic films where the stuttered utterances helped the jokes as in the famous, previously mentioned, case of the multi language versions of Laurel and

Hardy who hilariously dubbed themselves. Generally self-dubbing, apart from conserving the ‘voice’ of the actor, could not serve the intents and meanings of the film and failed in conveying the psycho-social content of the original performance. Just so, but we must ask, is the imperfect, accented and badly pronounced Italian of international dubbing the reason for the Regio Decreto Legge (October 5, 1933, n. 1414) which in article 1 forbids the projection of foreign films whose dubbing - or verbatim

“supplementary adaptation in Italian language” - has been made abroad? Accordingly,

64 only Italian dubbing was accepted, and as article 2 specifies that meant that it had to be produced in Italian studios by an entirely Italian working team (Gili 37). The purity of the language was guaranteed through complete control of dubbing production, which also ensured the prohibition of dialects, foreign words, and eventually disagreeable content - content offensive and dangerous for the unity and nobility of the nation. This kind of control was absolutely impossible otherwise. What is interesting for us, though, is how the decreto is read so often in terms of its economic benefits, as if they did not partake of the ideological apparatus.

Dubbing Coupons, Words Coupons

Exemplary is the detailed study of Riccardo Redi on the conditions of the passage in Italy from silent to sound cinema, in his analysis the 1933 legislation equates fundamentally to making money for the national film industry. The mandates of decreto (law decree) n.1414 are considered a financial maneuver to sustain and revitalize the field of national production. Dubbing in fact was taxed. The distribution company had to pay 25,000 lire to acquire the right to dub a film. This surcharge went into a fund for the constitution of cinema prizes and thus a revival of the sector. To favor and stimulate national production the distribution company was exempted from the taxation of three foreign films for every Italian film produced, thus receiving three buoni di doppiaggio (dubbing vouchers). Moreover, the decreto imposed on theater owners the requirement to project three Italian films for every foreign film offered. In the conversion of the decreto into legislation (n. 320) on February 5, 1934, a newly included clause offered the

65 possibility of transferring the buoni di doppiaggio to third persons, not necessarily from the production and distribution sectors. In Redi’s analysis this favored a profitable liquidity that generated an immediate increase in films produced, boosting and diversifying production companies, as well as independent films and film companies (88-

90).

If we compare his words with the detailed numbers offered in Casadio’s work on the cinema of the thirties Il grigio e il nero (1989), the national production for 1932-33 was 25 films (plus 2 abroad, Brunetta Storia V.II, 6), this increased to 30 (plus 4 abroad) in 1933-34, and almost tripled in the five subsequent years, to reach 85 films in 1938-39

(16). The 1933 chauvinist law thus marks the end of the filmic crisis, and also the entry into Luigi Freddi’s years with the institution of the General Directorate for

Cinematography of the State Under-Secretariat for the Press and Propaganda that absorbed the entire administration of censorship.

The director, Freddi, was a long time and committed collaborator of the regime who wanted to make cinema a total fascist enterprise. He left us with his written reconstruction of the history of cinema under fascism, of which he was the major and gifted agent. In Il cinema: Il governo dell’immagine he theorized a cinema-scape where censorship was a necessary moral and political foundation for a healthy and safe national life. Like many of the members of the fascist and Catholic ruling and intellectual elites - politicians, educators, thinkers, and philosophers - Freddi was worried about the ethical and social degeneration that cinema could foster. Thus cinema was considered in all its frightening potential and all the possibly dangerous and deviating effects that it

66 could produce on people if it was not monitored. Filmic psychosis (psicosi filmistica) for example is a concept that Freddi uses to define the diffuse state of alert around cinema as a school for crime. He writes,

Scientists identify the influence –that in a sociological sense causes criminality- of cinema, and divide it in three different orders of etiological possibility: aesthetic suggestion, dialectic suggestion, and technical suggestion. For the first case a sort of moral justification of the crime is used, getting to the creation of unaware sympathy for the righteous crime or a pity for the necessary crime, sometimes it deviates into the inevitable crime, presenting cases of morbid origins. The dialectical suggestion works prevalently through the ratiocination of a deformed logic applied to the spectacle exigencies and that tends to demonstrate the simplicity with which the most complicated crimes are perpetrated and concealed. It consists in showing the infallibility of the criminal until the mechanical intervention of chance or of an exceptional investigator that determines the discovery. … Technical suggestion is innate in the morphology of the criminal and it is manifested through the attractive exposition of the methods and modes used to accomplish the crime, to hide it or to conceal and divert the responsibilities. In cinema, we have reached authentic forms of training, even a sort of systematic criminal pedagogy (Italics in the text, 39-40).

Cinema can work as a dissolute machine, as is “scientifically” demonstrated, a school of crime. Any vice thus edifies any transgression as cinema, Freddi insists, for its very economic nature is made of the stuff of fraud and scandal (40), mainly, anything that sells. State intervention is absolutely necessary from an ethical and also aesthetic point of view, as art must be positive and civilizing.

It could be said that Freddi’s writing offers so much insight into the workings of the Regime that his analysis and narrative accounts tend to be accepted with a matter- of-fact approach that does not necessarily complicate and problematize things enough.

As for dubbing, for example, he does not distinctly address it, but he variously mentions

67 it, most prolifically in chapter X, dedicated to State financing of cinema. He obviously discusses the institution of buoni di doppiaggio and explains at length how they worked underlining the economic benefit that they were intended to produce by capitalizing on the absolute right of the state over the national language. And here we find the key point, within the discourse of fascist control Freddi dedicates all his attention to the profitability of the dubbing vouchers while the ideological outcomes and the origins of dubbing are a non debatable issue for him: they are discounted, understood, in no need of analysis. We could probably argue that he paves the way for the simple economic understanding of dubbing, which then, as a profitable enterprise, finds its reason to be justifying itself perfectly within a mechanics of functionality. Freddi only hints at linguistic autarchy as a possible premise for the impossibility of showing foreign films with their original soundtracks. This was the condition that rendered dubbing the inevitable film audio translation, or, to be meticulous, film adaptation into the Italian language, a phrasing consonant with that of the 1414 law. Here is how Freddi constructs the “spirit of the law” for the particular creation of buoni di doppiaggio,

The State considers itself to be the monopoly holder [monopolizzatore] of the national language for its commercial utilization and it allows this utilization under the payment of a tax. The State is then free to use its revenue as it deems best. …. *this+ finds a justification in the consideration that the Italian language becomes in the dubbing of foreign films, one of the substantial elements of their marketability. Thus the State that considers indisputable the necessity to give to the Italian audience films exclusively spoken in Italian language, and considering itself the repository of the national linguistic patrimony, allows the utilization of such patrimony for commercial aims under payment of a tax (107-108).

This brief affirmation emphasizes how the procedure and use of dubbing is not subject to any debate, as foreign languages have no rights, legal or cultural, of circulation in the nation. The State possesses all authority and rights on the language as a form of national expression. The concept of marketability is an interesting one as it suggests that dubbing is marketable in itself as a common necessity, not an imposed requirement/practice. Similarly Redi’s analysis implies the notion that the audience’s satisfaction and film fruition is best realized through the dubbed film product with no subtitles to read. This tendentious assertion of the market value and viability of dubbing, within a reading of cinema as popular entertainment that must gratify the people, underplays and dislocates, as it is tellingly forgetful of, the xenophobic nationalism of fascism.

If it was not for the practice of dubbing, in the list of dangerous cinematic suggestions Freddi would surely have added foreign languages, even if the accompanying reasoning would not be intellectually persuasive. After all, what is it that the exposure to foreign languages degrades, apart from the sense and imagination of a closed and exceptional identity that needs to be protected and maintained pure and identical to itself, and that must be conveniently controllable and managed socially and culturally. Other languages could foster a sense of different inter and trans-national realities that might undermine the idea of absolute cultural primacy and all the approved inter-subjective social and moral values of a nation in the making. The linguistic/cultural closure was operated and possible because of the obedient and orthodox compliance to the authoritarian state’s will - a consensus manufactured

69 through linguistic and non linguistic fascist discourses that proposed and shaped the imaginary of a national fascist identity, strictly monolingual and mono-logical.

The denied access to foreign voices, words, tones and constructions was so drastic that, as previously mentioned, before dubbing became a workable and diffused technology and practice, films were silenced, or censored, creating in the public opinion some supposedly naïve interrogation – mostly quieted anyhow - like that of the journalist Nicola De Pirro who discussing the restriction of sound films in Lo Spettacolo

Italiano (October 1930) wonders,

But then is it really true that, if for some months, films spoken in English, German or French are projected in minimum number and with superimposed translation, some great damage will come to our country? We dare to doubt it. The public is the best judge for the matter. If this kind of spectacle is boring, the public will desert the theaters (in Quarognolo La censura 88).

We know that the public never had a chance to hear, watch, read a bit and decide. As a matter of fact, for the Italian people, sound cinema was born, and lives, dubbed into Italian. The fact that dubbing through the creation of the dubbing coupons became a successful and lucrative enterprise, as Freddi, giving us the numbers, tells us, has progressively overshadowed the original political autarchic reasoning for its institution. It seems somehow evident that the tax created substantial revenues. Under

Freddi, the amount to pay was gradually incremented to L. 30.000 then to L. 50.000, moreover the number of buoni di doppiaggio allotted for each Italian film produced was raised to four, so that anyone who decided to make an Italian film already had State financing of L. 200.000.

Apart from the dubbing tax, foreign films were also subjected to another tax when the total box office profits were higher than L. 2.500.000 after the detraction of regular fiscal taxation, for every L. 500.000 there was a charge of L. 20.000 to a maximum of L.6.000.000. Freddi writes that national production incremented to the point that it could not be sustained by buoni doppiaggio for foreign films, as there were not enough, thus the number of coupons per national film was reduced to two but their value was augmented to L. 75.000. Meanwhile state prizes for the cinema were instituted to finance and also to ameliorate the artistic and technical aspects of domestic production. The State increasingly financed producers who proportionally realized greater numbers of films: in 1934 the State contributed L. 2.850.000 toward the production of 31 films, in 1935, L. 2.369.000 for 38 films, in 1936 L. 2.700.000 for 37 films, in 1937, L. 5.410.000 for 44 films and in 1938, L. 9.800.000 for 85 films (Freddi

108, Casadio 16). Thus foreign films, vehicles for the exposition of dangerous cultural alternatives, which were also competing in the cinema industry, through dubbing, became domesticated and were somehow favorably used to sustain the creation of a national product so much in need of push and support.

But dubbing also offered what we could call other kinds of bonuses, like virtual buoni di parole (words bonuses/coupons), that is, the unlimited possibility on the part of the censors at the General Directorate for Cinematography to change words and meanings in the foreign film script with convenient Italian words that did not need to have any accurate semantic correspondence with the original. The buoni di parole liberated the dubbed film from any constriction or fidelity - other than the pliable

71 mechanics of the narrative - to the original film, as the thing deemed most important was the moralizing enterprise that the directorate endorsed. Special attention was dedicated to foreign films that, as Freddi put it, were “morally and artistically harmful”

(70).

One of the most important operations successfully conducted by the General

Directorate of Cinematography was that of “preemptive revision” of film subjects that

Freddi praises for having been transformed into a collaborative endeavor that included authors, directors and producers (89), effectively meaning they were all somehow called upon to accept the “revised” script so as the film could be made, revised again, and distributed. Freddi does not miss the opportunity to condescendingly ridicule the word

“revision”, a common governmental euphemism for censorship, “so alive is the fear of words” (35) that they do not call things by their own names. He, instead, is not troubled to say openly that he is censoring. However, such a statement begs the question of what censorship is all about, if not precisely a fear of words, words and images that governments and authorities sense the need to suppress so as to impede any disruption, their use and meanings might cause or suggest if given free circulation: just like psychic censorship, the political bureaucratic analogy with which Freud understands the individual/self processes of management (The administration of aesthetics 168-194).

The preemptive revision of film scripts dates back to the Decreto of October 9,

1919, n. 1953, referencing an earlier, 1913 law n. 785 that first legislated for the control of cinematographic spectacles (Il Governo dell’Immagine 35). Supposedly without prior revision of the film script no completed film could be revised and permitted by any

72 commission. Practically, Freddi writes, the law was not seriously implemented until the

Directorate became operative in 1934. Before, only foreign film companies presented their scripts to the authorities prior to dubbing so as to avoid the high expenses generated by the process where the already dubbed film copy had to be revised and accordingly redubbed (39).

The process of revision never stopped solely at the script. Dubbing was always a fundamental tool for the control and revision of film scripts, used to exercise the necessary depuration of the dangerous cinematic machine, to impede that, in Freddi’s words, “the people and the Italian nation are offended, that our traditions and our customs are distorted and slandered, that the honor of the armed forces is damaged”

(89). If from the original script’s revision, foreign films seemed still at risk of not obtaining permission, Freddi would accept for the next revision the films in their original language. At the moment of dubbing it would be easy to modify the dialogue and if cuts were necessary, to render them imperceptible. Already dubbed films consistently complicated things as they limited the possibility of invisible – undetectable - censorship making its work more noticeable and explicit (Gili 43). Censorship via the soundtrack was manna as manipulation could go unseen; the splicing of the visual track and elimination of unwanted frames or scenes could be covered up by a reformulation of the dialogue track.

The Pope, the State and the Expressive Potential of Sound-Cinema

The power of the soundtrack was well understood, cinema had the capacity to literally dictate and frame with words, potentially dangerous or constructive, concepts and ideas while musically enticing the spectator into emotional participation and guiding filmic reception. Even the Pope commented extensively on it. From its beginnings the Roman

Church well comprehended the power the cinematograph had, and continually worked to participate, infiltrate and create a space for Catholic film values, Catholic film associations and film theatres, financing the construction of parish cinemas and magazine publications, working both autonomously and in collaboration with the fascist regime, participating in the commissions for theatre and cinema censorship from as early as 1922 through the women of the Catholic Union. The CUCE (Consorzio Utenti

Cinematografici Educativi, Cinematographic Educational Users Consortium) was founded in 1927, promoting the first Catholic Congress on cinema in 1928, and officially expressing its ideas, in the now 80 years old, Rivista del cinematografo (Cannistraro 455-

456, Brunetta, Cinema Italiano tra le due Guerre 60-61, and for a critical take Aristarco, Il cinema fascista).

Pope Pio XI, the founder of Radio Vaticano, addressed the issue of cinema ecumenically, first briefly in his encyclical Divini illius Magistri (December 31, 1929) where he spoke of modern mass media as God’s gifts, powerful instruments to be used in his service and to combat evil. In the encyclical Casti Connubi (December 31, 1931), he deprecates cinema as it exalts “divorces, adulteries, and the most ignominious vices”

(Freddi 43). Three years later, in April 1934 he presented the closing remarks at the first

International Congress of Catholic Cinema held in Rome, there invoking the responsibility of all Catholics regarding the profound question of the cinematograph. In

1936 (June 29) the whole encyclical Vigilanti Cura was dedicated to the cinema and directed to the US episcopate, praising the “legion of decency” and the work of censorship for the elevation of cinema to a catholic, moral conscience, and calling, ever more forcefully, the Church to its crusade against the evils, offensive crimes and vices of cinema, its fight against the corruption of art, and for Christian honesty and integrity.

The consciousness of the power of cinema that now talks universally to all classes of people, and that uses music to amplify its effects is clearly stated:

The power of cinema is in what it speaks through the images…in the spoken cinema this power is strengthened because the interpretation of facts is easier and the seduction of the music is related to the dramatic spectacle. … Moreover cinema wants at its service the luxury of scenographies, the pleasantness of music, indecent realism and every form of fancy and extravaganza (in Freddi 45- 46).

The soundtrack, as dialogue and music track, is a powerful component of cinema that increments its force to detail, explain and emotionalize the visual text, serving as a tool for the good or evil represented. It is part of the artistic creation. Freddi had articulated his understanding of it in his 1934 proposal for a film on Caterina La Santa

(Catherine the Saint) which includes specific references to the musical track. This was a suggestion for an edifying national cinematography, born out of the ongoing dialogue with the Catholic authorities that Freddi entertained.

A cinematographic subject of this nature will take to the screen magnificent material, universally admired (Siena and all the religious painting of the primitive Italians) and it would express feelings of high moral stance. … To the figural

works of art by the primitives …it should be added, as phonic comment, the patrimony of the musical art of our Rinascenza [rebirth, or Renaissance], typical creation of our race that from the Gregorian chants is humanized by [Giovanni Pierluigi da] Palestrina to arrive to the incomparable melodies by [Giacomo] Carissimi, thus offering all the poetic and intimate elements necessary for a suitable musical comment. I believe that it is appropriate to examine the proposed subject, choose the writer, the script writer and the musician (50).

The film was never produced; nonetheless Freddi’s intentions show the belief in the power of cinema as music and for music, if only as an archival exploration of the musical glory that must accompany the pictorial spectacle of national grandeur. This appreciation is in no contradiction with the politics of the soundtrack as disposable part and parcel of film totally subject to censorial supervision invested with absolute power to control the people, their modes of being, thinking and listening. Music and songs if attached to, or carriers of, non-national values could simply be effaced, substituted or translated.9 The value of the soundtrack was in direct relation to its use in extending the ideological and aesthetic goals of the regime and those who spoke for it. Put simply, the power of the authoritarian state posed itself above any art or part, and as Freddi put it for himself in his role, he felt invested with “a political and human responsibility that goes beyond any purely cinematographic consideration” (Freddi 89).

9 It is useful to remember also how the names of internationally popular musicians, famously Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman, had to be Italianized, literally translated, for the Italian public into Luigi Braccioforte and Beniamino Buonomo. Jazz music as “negro music,” was absolutely not welcomed. In the article “Fascismo e Tradizione” from the fascist magazine Il Popolo d'Italia penned by Carlo Ravasio, (March 30, 1928)- the journalist, future under-secretary of the PNF, wonders why should the Italian people put in the attic violins and mandolins for saxophones that can only play barbaric melodies, or Americanate [things American] of every sort. 1928 signs the beginning of the fascist attack on jazz and the ensuing politics of the national radio (EIAR, Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche) of dramatically reducing the broadcasting of foreign music in favor of national music. See Mazzoletti, Adriano. Il jazz in Italia: dalle origini alle grandi orchestre. Biblioteca di cultura musicale,7. Torino: EDT, 2004.

Thus, if on the one hand the operations of dubbing absolutely and practically denied any artistic value to the soundtrack, on the other there was, together with the idea of the instrumental use that the soundtrack could serve, an understanding of its values, possibilities and a knowledge of the circulating theoretical, moral, and aesthetic debate around it. The notion of the soundtrack as constituent part of the cinematic art, one of its distinct artistic and expressive means, was being praised and theorized for its capacity to transfigure the indexical reality of the cinematic text, specifically for its power to infuse the iconicity of the film images with abstraction. It is along these lines that we might also read Pirandello’s famous essay, Se il film parlante abolirà il teatro

(1929), rather than simply understand it as a piece against the film parlante, aiming to protect the life, space and seats of the theater. Between the lines of his anti- technological analysis of why cinema actors should not speak, that is because of the unnatural mechanical quality of their vocal performances, we can read his indirect but perceptive intuitions about the psycho-physical power of sound, as in the comment about the effect of an “unpleasant unreality” that such voices create given that they all resonate monophonically and with no sound perspective in the movie theater.

The low tech sound production systems of the time, mostly deriving from radio broadcasting, obliterated the main characteristic of sound that is its specific spatial imprint, and also the illusion of spatial depth and different aural positioning fitting the image takes. In some ways we can imagine what kind of critique Pirandello would offer against dubbing and its alienating effect, but here he is stating the common protest, before sound film standardization, against the soundtrack as it plainly shows the

77 sutured work and material mechanic heterogeneity of the apparatus, of the voices incongruously split from the bodies on the screen, coming from the noisy and grumbling gramophones after being recorded in the static reverberant field of some studio. Of course technological progress will eventually come close to resolving these practical inconveniences for the sake of an almost perfect illusion of matched aural and visually integrated perception.

We can appreciate Pirandello’s insight concerning the artistic necessity and desire for a cinema that operates on levels of filmic experimentation that words verbalization and literalization do instead impede: not exactly because they make of cinema just a “photographic and mechanical copy, more or less accomplished” of theater, but because they introduce and take cinema to follow overdetermined models and modes of narrative already existent and codified. Pirandello’s idea of cinema as speechless “pure music and pure vision” (1036) is not necessarily regressive, probably with the technological perfectioning of the apparatus, he would have welcomed the insertion of words and dialogue in a non-naturalistic sense. His idea seems to be primarily against a cinema that reaffirms the world as immediately intelligible to individuals as defined by their own or others’ words. As one can see in the film script for

Six Characters in Search of an Author, that Pirandello started writing in 1929 with Adolf

Lantz but that unfortunately was never filmed, cinema could be used to manifest the imagination of the writer. Dialogue was basically absent, the screen had to become the expressive medium of mind states with their spectral blur of things and beings seen, alive and present, absent, thought, fantasized, or dreamed. The audience could be

78 presented with the mental processes of creation of the fictive characters: multiplying them, breaking them into parts and making them appear and disappear (Mancini 46-49).

Only cinema could do it. Thus against the industrial and commercial decision of an overdetermined narrative cinema, Pirandello was envisioning all the possibilities for an expressive, creative medium. We still do not know what cinema could have done, if it had been used for the “vera rivoluzione” (real revolution) as Pirandello put it, anticipating Deleuze on the revolutionary power and subsequently unrealized possibilities of cinema (Cinema 2).

Also in 1929 Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Il Film Sonoro appeared showing his enthusiasm and fascination for the new technical and artistic possibilities offered by the coming of sound to cinema, and his discontent at the Hollywood appropriation, unwilling to use the medium to capture “the rhythm of life.” With his polyhedric personality and versatile artistic inclination - a member of the avant-garde and friend of the futurists - he imagined a cinema of interiority to be created audio-visually with the use of the futurist instrument intonarumori “artistic predecessor of the acousticity10 of sound film” (27). Futurist Luigi Russolo, author in 1916 of the manifesto The Art of

Noises, ingeniously invented and made the Rumharmonium to capture and perform all the sounds of the world11. Bragaglia, like Pirandello, also coming from the theatre, was against the mediocrities of the cinema parlante that is nothing but filmed theater.

10 Even in Italian the substantive acusticita` from the adjective acustico seems personally coined by the author, or it is an archaic form currently not notated in various dictionaries thus I offer the same old/neologism in English.

11 In Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Douglas Kahn variously and extensively discusses his work, with and without the futurists, in the elaboration of and for the soundtrack of modernity.

Cinema that talks words, where, as he says, “Every attempt of musical transposition of the optical emotion ends, and we go back to be reduced, like in animated theatre, to the sounds of reality” (28-29). Here by sounds of reality he certainly intends all the sounds that are coded for immediate meaning, daily communication, functional domestic verbal exchange and social convivenza. He grasps and formulates the normalizing function that the coming of sound operates on film, moving it away from a possible space of oneiric and poetic expression. The abstract possibilities of the medium are conquered by the narrative and explicative solution that puts the soundtrack at the descriptive and prescriptive service of the images and the images at the service of the narrative soundtrack that functions as verbal and oral captioning or musical commentary that pinpoints the emotional reaction expected from the audience. Thus words operate as normative instruments, narrating and constraining film into plain and codified realism.

The soundtrack of the cinema parlante with its realist commercial logocentric imperative will detract from the power of the available technology and will not allow, or project any special vision, nor foster a space for contemplation, poetic lingering that accounts for the complicated fate of human subjectivity.

None of the above was on the agenda of the cinema industry and its operators.

Cinema was to be the updated modern version of popular theater and literature, the contemporary medium of standard storytelling that simply satisfied the ideological and market system’s processes, thus following the conventions of realistic representation.

Bragaglia’s polemics against cinema as an industrial enterprise guided by estimated costs, mere ideological production and very little use of cinematic imagination,

80 exploration and methods follows his radical artistic inclinations that led him to be dissatisfied and disaffected with the business road that cinema was taking.

Dubbing or Post-Synchronization: Alienation and Complex Consciousness

Framing Pirandello and Bragaglia’s words in this sense, the contribution to the debate around sound film assumes a different meaning than simple rejection, the discourse of experimental and non-traditional filmmakers even today opts for a cinema that navigates in sound, and is not anchored to instructive words. Interestingly Bragaglia proposes a film on the elements, wind, water and fire:

A film on wind, extremely scenic in its optical renderings, which could go from a wrecked and twisted forest to the old castle in ruin where the gusts howl headed for the screeching of tinware pennants on top of the last pinnacle, a film on water, from the running drip in the sink, to the stream, to the flood, to the river at the cataracts, a film on fire, from the happy crackling of the fireplace to the blazing fire, these would be excellent occasions for a good use of the intonarumori (28-29).

It is remarkable how the paragraph evokes the very peculiar ending of a film by

Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Eclisse (1962) to which I will return later, for now it suffices to say that Antonioni poses considerable attention to the elements in Bragaglia’s sense, with a sensibility for sound and silence that speak back at any film parlante. The breeze in the trees is a cipher of his ineffable and attentive ear, the whistle of the poles in the dark of the night, the water dripping or sparkling from a fountain, the stream slowly moving almost like in the description provided by Bragaglia represent moments of cinematic poetry that undo conventional filming modes, and put the audio-visual apparatus to “a good use.”

In the public and critical discourse around sound cinema, there was also what was considered forthright positive enthusiasm, and this is usually identified in the figure of Eugenio Giovannetti who in 1930 authored Il Cinema e le arti meccaniche where he elaborates on the possibilities of sound film as pure audio-visual space:

The sound film must construct itself as a new artistic economy, founded on sound-profundity (timbre) or on sound-extension (melodic phrases, musical motifs)… The sound is, therefore, for the spirit a perennial generator of images. The timbre signifies for the spirit a perfect image (and an association of images) that has already in itself its dynamic invariable: the theme, instead, however brief, signifies an emotive association of images, a series of unforeseen things, a reappearance of each moment in the Infinite (qtd in Mancini, 39).

Images and sounds can thus for Giovannetti work together in an interaction similar to jazz performance, freely, in liberated associational moves. It seems that the canonized differences and division in supporters and non supporters of sound cinema are less precise, or polarized, than what is convenient or necessary for their affirmation and justification. The debate about sound in cinema revolved more around the qualitative artistic and non-commercial use that could have been made of the innovative technology available for the new medium, thus Bragaglia’s observations do not seem so distant from, and opposed to those of Giovannetti.

How the imposed practice of dubbing changed the national relation with the sound track, artistically and ideologically, given the status of its autonomy and separateness from the visual-track is a matter that I investigate extensively during the course of this work. The concept that helps our understanding of that relation is the one beautifully identified by Calvino: alienation from the soundtrack. I intend it not necessarily in the negative sense of estrangement, but also of distancing that possibly

82 fosters a reflective consciousness, and favors a complicated elaboration of the achievable functions and uses of the soundtrack. Given its ‘doubling’ dubbing created the consciousness of complex relationships and possibilities, semantic, cultural, technological, ideological and aesthetic, which opened the control of soundtrack content from censoring filter to expressive and creative opportunity. These elaborations as aesthetic and methodological functions, procedures, and reflective opportunities constitute the positive, creative side of the technology that allows maneuvering the soundtrack in post production. To differentiate the functionalist from the inventive process I refer to the creative modality as post-synchronization, used purposefully by the filmmakers of national film production. Post-synchronization simply indicates the technical process that unifies sound and image in the editing room and opens up the audio filmic space for saying more. Contrary to dubbing which I have investigated so far, and that indicates the post production process for dialogue translation of foreign films on the part of external studios and that, as traced so far, is a strategy often used to monitor and adjust the dialogue and have film say less, or only what is politically and procedurally permitted, or simply what is convenient for production purposes. Using

Antonioni’s phrasing, dubbing happens a posteriori, after the film’s completion (Cinema,

105) post-synchronization is an a priori and works for the unity of the film.

In the filmic praxis we can find a clear example of direct meditation and deliberate exposure of the unseen mechanism and tricks of the soundtrack. Gennaro

Righelli’s La voce senza volto (The voice without a face, 1939) offers an unequivocal revelation and take on the common post-synchronization process. The title itself seems

83 to claim the rights of the voice actors whose faces, and metonymically their identities, are made invisible and denied. The film itself seems to go in the direction of an affirmative recognition of the work that the voice actors provide to post-synched films.

Thus it fosters no critique of the dubbing technique but a filmic engagement with the human reality that dubbing created, some of the social aspects implicated together with the sheer lust of the new technological apparatus in display (Valentini in Bernardi 41-

47).

Antonioni’s Clark Costa: Dubbing and Aristophane’s Myth

Around the specific issue/non-issue of dubbing in Italy, notwithstanding its continuing practice, there has always been a debate between supporters and non-supporters. The non-supporters, mostly in their awareness of its political and ideological nature, were the ones trying to reveal the negative sides of its practice which also derive from an esthetic consideration of film. Even Hollywood applying to participate in a Milan film fair in 1933, given the substantial cost of dubbing, higher than subtitling, attempted to convince the Italians of the “artistic value of the American original versions.”

(Ďurovičová 149) But art was not the point. Dubbing was never about art, it was about the protection and administration of Italianicity through the language itself and as a carrier of legitimated ideas.

The magazine Cinema that Brunetta calls a sort of free port for the young non- provincial minds discussing and theorizing the art of film (Umberto Barbaro e l’idea di neorealismo, 16) hosted significant and critical articles on dubbing. In the September 10,

1936 issue Corrado Pavolini offered a piece entitled “Tradurre un film” where he comments on the various options available, in theory, to translate a film, sub-titling, inter-titling, silencing or dubbing, declaring straight away how:

facing a probable spread of foreign ‘spoken’ *films+ the governing authorities intervened with a provident defense of the national idiom. Cinema in foreign language, never having the possibility of becoming a useful instrument for linguistic culture, functioned instead like a pernicious vehicle to propagate and acclimatize specific affected and artificial jargon and pronunciation habits, a pretentious pose that perverted the nature of the native sincerity, the spontaneous maturation and development of the spoken ‘patria’ language, and of the way to articulate and formulate, and finally of the national customs. (Cinema Fascicolo 5)

The comment demonstrates a clear vision and understanding of the process that dubbing was operating, shaping and forging the modes and mores of national life, exercising control via the fabricated language offered and imposed through the spoken films that spoke out of foreignness the possible world of Italianicity. Nonetheless the conclusions the author provides are candidly opposed to what he considers the overtly intellectual and aesthetically unfit inter- or sub-titles that clash with the jingoistic rationales for the defense of the language, however artificial. Thus he expresses his favor for the “extravagant” dubbing that, as he says, has delegated characters speak for others, adapting onto American or German mouths the movements and gestures of the

Italian language. Emphasizing how language works as framing device, the ideological scope of the operation is clearly understood and agreed on, the cultural falsity of filtering and simmering the filmic other into a national narrative is probably sensed but not subject to critique. Appreciation for dubbing found its expression also in the

85 following issue of Cinema, in an article penned by Cortini-Viviani titled “I segreti del doppiaggio.” For the journalist, dubbing, a miracle of a meticulous combination of advanced technology and human craft, imparts “Italian soul and spirit to the film in foreign language”, the Italian voice actors are wonderful vocal impersonators of the actors on the screen:

Many of the main foreign actors have their corresponding and steady Italian actors, chosen for the perfect resemblance of the voice and for a temperamental adherence in some cases admirable. Our actors have a real cult for their actors, they followed, they studied them in every performance, they eviscerated their intentions in every film, with passion they mimicked every inflection of the voice, and they know everything about them, life, death and miracles. They love them, at home they keep their photos, they are jealous about them. (Cinema, Fascicolo 6)

In the embellishment necessary for praising the dedicated professionalism of the new category of film workers, the voice dubbers, we can read the obvious exaggerations as indicative of the understanding of the conspicuous substitution that dubbing operates and the necessity to meticulously and self-convincingly reproduce an Italian clone of the original foreign performance, or imagine that one can be produced. The lines also express the pathology generated by dubbing, as a vocal doubling of an actor’s personality through mechanical assemblage. But here, in Cortini-Vivani’s account, the process is constructed as a grandiose enterprise of which the director of dubbing is the major artistic contributor, the real capo comico (leader of a theatre company): “he gives the times, suggests the intonations, and sometimes corrects the dialogue adapting it to the sensibility and temperament of the artist”. Just so, far from any idea of translation, this explanation negates the cult for the original performer/ance affirming its total

86 versability not for the sake of any accurate re-mastering of the original text but for the character toning that is needed for the new and different performers. The aleatory fortune of the foreign film and its actor’s performances is virtually unthought-of in the affirmation and crediting of “the delicate, patient and long” work of dubbing.

A stunningly honest definition of dubbing as the “beautiful and unfaithful better than the ugly and faithful” can be found a year later, always in Cinema, in the earlier referenced article by Briareo “Il doppiaggio in Italia” (1937). Discussing the process of lip-synching (or in the actors’ jargon boccheggiamento) Briareo exposes the common and favored choice in the dubbing process, the one which prefers to attach a new dialogue that best fakes a natural adherence to the actors lips thus being unfaithfully modified from the point of view of the literal translation in order to respect the time, rhythm and phonic plasticity of the original spoken dialogue. This is what linguist Istvan

Fodor, in his study on dubbing, calls “phonetic synchrony” that is the recreated unity of

“the articulatory movements seen and the sounds heard.” To obtain it, the writer of the new dialogue plots “all twisted locutions, vowel lengthening or other purposeful distortions…to conform the synch” (1976, 10, 16).12 For Briareo it is this transformation

12 The study on dubbing by Fodor, which is the only monograph and systematic investigation on the subject, explores the dynamics of the process from a technical linguistic, phonetic point of view, with much attention to the problem of “phonetic synchrony” as defined above, and of “character synchrony” as a the creation of harmony between the sounds of the dubber, his/her vocal performance and the film actors’ physical presence, temperament, bodily gestures and facial expressions. The detailed analysis is grounded in a linguistic frame but Fodor goes on to underline the conceptual impossibility of dubbing, as it stages on film the essential discrepancy of foreign words on foreign gestures and technically undermines the profound connection and inseparability of a body that speaks its own spoken words. He also explores the cultural impossibility for dubbing of rendering and maintaining whole the connotative elements of film, as the new (target) language should adapt and naturally fails to adapt to the specific socio-cultural visual representation on the screen. According to Fodor only the denotative elements of film can be carried by dubbing, that is, the verbal information of the film although dichotomized from the specifically paralinguistic and aesthetic information. Also as plot and dialogue translation “content

87 which makes the illusion of a whole filmic text possible. His article becomes then the uncritical space to star the names of the voice actors and praise their versatile performances, for example congratulating the Italian Greta Garbo, who finally after being muted has found her voice in Tina Lattanzi: “her beautiful voice intense with feminine suggestions, mature, centered and central, capable of getting to the softer/lower registers without losing any clarity.” Briareo does not find anything troubling about the process that, as Antonin Artaud put it, in front of “the equine mouth of Greta Garbo” speaking French, devours the foreign voice and spits out another

(national) one from the dissociated distorted facial movements that cannot swallow the voice of another (Yampolosky and Joseph).

Artaud’s unconditional horror in front of a dubbed actor or actress is much closer to the professional and tempered dislike expressed by the then young film critic

Michelangelo Antonioni, who will voice his concern and distaste for dubbing in various articles for the magazine Cinema. After a decade of the fascist battle against films in foreign language and with dubbing as regular national praxis, on November 10, 1940

Antonioni unveils the “Vita impossibile del signor Clark Costa” (“The impossible life of

Mr. Clark Costa”). Nobody has ever heard about him but many people have seen him at the movies:

He is a tall sturdy guy, a masculine face, strangely he looks like Clark Gable; he has a mellow, a bit rough, deep voice that strangely recalls that of Romolo Costa.

synchrony” is somehow problematic not simply because it suffers from the modifications necessary to synchronize the dialogues, cultural and political factors do intervene and can influence the translation of the original text. Moreover Fodor emphasizes how often the requirements of phonetic synchrony are antagonistic to those of character and content synchrony. It becomes a matter of choice what type of synchrony is preferred, thus an impeccable dubbing is unconceivable.

He is a hybrid individual, born out of a chemical combination, who must have a lot of sympathy for our country given that we meet him only here. Half Clark, half Costa: is he not the embodiment of the myth of Aristophanes? (Cinema, Fascicolo 105)

As is obvious Romolo Costa was the Italian voice actor for Clark Gable, one of the most flattered voices in the panorama of voice stars. To come out like Antonioni, undoing all the praise and invoking the mythological chemical otherness Romolo Costa participated in, actually gave voice to, meant a recasting of the conversation about the operations of dubbing. The choice of the myth narrating the pre-human as we know it, when two attached human beings made a whole person, functions immediately. From

Plato’s Symposium the myth of Aristophanes recounts the origins of the human race and wo/men, when the physical unity of different gendered bodies and body parts was naturally and divinely possible, each person was twice what we are now, they had four hands, four legs, two heads, two sets of genitals, etc. The Gods had all the power to split, compose and recompose the human body at their pleasure, eventually each person was cut in two. The mythological allusion can be deduced further to the omnipotent fascist God-drive that works perfectly with Clark Costa, the body of Clark

Gable being spoken by the voice of Romolo Costa. Here Clark Costa, is not an androgynous being or really a double creature but a composition of two human beings stuck together in the Italian cinematographic rendering of the myth, as appropriated by the fascists and put to work through the operation of dubbing that allowed the insertion of one body’s voice into another body.

Antonioni, unlike Artaud, does not indulge in the disfiguring of the body and facial gestures of the actor on the screen, nor is he strictly interested in emphasizing the immediate fascism of the act. Throughout the article he provides an analysis that accounts for all the negative implications and consequences of dubbing. His comments are well wrought and pointed, and the article is worth looking at in detail. First of all he blames dubbing for positing “the Italian audience, compared to foreign audiences, in the same conditions of a baby or a sick person, who in order to eat, has to be fed.” The common thought that dubbing favors the circulation and digestion of foreign films served in Italian language is contrasted with the realities of other countries where subtitles offer a viable and well accepted translation modality for film that moreover does not violate the cinematographic work and the performance of the actors. Dubbing for Antonioni defaces the filmic work in itself as a preconceived whole, and the work of the actors whose performance is whole too, voice and body. In addition, the defacement operated by dubbing is not only conceptual or artistic but also immediately mechanical, it can never be technically perfect as it can never impeccably replace one voice, and language, with another in terms of the visual results of the substitution.

There will always be labial/synch discordances as different languages are articulated differently and have different timing, apart from the actor’s specific delivery.

Dubbing does nothing but fill in the facial movements, as exemplified and attested in a comment by Luigi Salvini, considered to be one of the best directors of dubbing at the time, “Give me some words to fill those faces.” Thus for Antonioni, extrapolating Salvini’s brutal practicality, dubbing, as praxis of ideas, conceives of faces

90 as empty sacks and words as potatoes. And to continue his metaphor, the voice actor or actress is mostly busy balancing the potatoes in his/her mouth to attain that famous lip- synch with the actor/actress on the screen whose talking mouth needs to be filled without grossly apparent distortions. In the end dubbing works as a “simple acoustic surrogate” with no soul. It has no aesthetic consideration or value, at times it can work only through brutal interventions like cuts of scenes, mostly of close ups, where the potato filling is impossible without being evident. Not to mention that the sonic and aural space of film is absolutely unique and irreproducible, you can translate written words, but not sounds and voices, spoken words and their sonic and psychic ambience.

With dubbing the work and soul of the original performance is lost for Antonioni and the actors on the screen will “always remain wounded but with no scar” in a cinema-surgical operation of voice, personality and ambient transplant.

Dubbing, Antonioni writes, can be in use only for practical, economic and political reasons. He proceeds in debunking the false economic argument that sees dubbing as the means to fill film theaters, for him the audience is simply tolerant of the falsity that dubbing produces, evident to any intelligent person. He mentions other

“foreign countries” where dubbing is disliked and avoided by the public itself, and he affirms that if in Italy instead “it were true that a film in original language appeals to less people, the unmade profit would be compensated by the avoided costs necessary for dubbing, which are considerable.” Cinema, Antonioni continues, could be used to educate the public “to distinguish, at least from the language, a German person from an

English one, a French one, a Hungarian one, or a Greek one,” opening to a linguistic consciousness of the culture of the other.

In his consideration of the different cultural possibilities that cinema in original language would offer, the national political situation is referenced with some discretion, almost en passant. It should not be forgotten that Antonioni is writing in Cinema, organ of the National Fascist Federation of the Entertainment Industry, directed by Vittorio

Mussolini, the Duce’s son. The magazine hosted the allotted space for cinematic conversation so as to cultivate the seeds for an Italian national cinema of international stature thus the measures of control were somehow broadminded and judicious self- censorship was acculturated. It is clear that Antonioni, who was 28 at the time of his writing, is negotiating the space to express and formulate his beliefs and aesthetic position in ways that would create the possibility for a practical dialogue that could effectively change the state of foreign cinema in Italy. Therefore he does not mention, as other journalists do, the question of national linguistic purity that is the foundational fascist rationale for the necessity of dubbing as mode of translation of foreign films. He circumvents the fascist matrix of dubbing, and with it, possible official sanctions to his discourse, to expose the practical bad aspects of the technique while inserting, for the politically attuned or alert, just five condemning lines. He envisages and denounces the political motivation as one of the reasons for the continuance of dubbing given “the simplicity with which it is possible to vary, or what is more, reverse, the meaning of a discourse, and even the assumption of a film that is not fully in tone with those which are the rules of our nation/home.” He states his clear disapproval and awareness that

92 dubbing can function as censorship, but the tone of the article pushes more plausibly in the direction of a vindication of the artistic rights of film and film viewers, their desire to listen, and the aesthetic relevance of listening to the real voices from the original soundtrack. He was envisioning the practical possibility of abolishing dubbing or in the worst scenario, as he writes, of limiting it to films “of less value”. Whatever that means, and how value might be defined is another story, but it is clear that Antonioni is drawing a line between art cinema and commercial cinema and affirming their different exigencies and necessities. Nonetheless his true wish would be a cinema that speaks the babel and babble of languages of world produced cinemas.

The article generated an auspicious debate on dubbing in which various journalists, in different magazines and newspapers, participated. In the article “Ultime note sul doppiaggio,” which appeared in the December 10, 1940, issue of Cinema,

Antonioni reported the opinions articulated against dubbing that had appeared in the newspapers La Stampa and Il Resto del Carlino, and the positive endorsements of dubbing, even if recognized as artistically groundless, by the fascist magazines Oggi and

Regime Fascista. The tenor of the responses indicated for him that it was time to deal seriously with the issue of dubbing, which even among its supporters was deemed a

“necessary evil,” thus recognizing plainly its absolute negativity for cinema. At the bottom of the page, at the end of the article, a rectangular insert announced the opening of a public survey on dubbing beginning with the January 10, 1941 issue. The survey went on for three months sheltering different opinions and showing a public divided into so called aesthetes and pure spectators. Indicative of the division was the

93 testimony of the engineer Alberto Foschi declaring himself “a pure spectator” who often goes to the movies to find distraction and not art and does not want to be bothered by subtitles. Still, recognizing that dubbing ruins the cinematic artistic work, he proposes that first run cinemas offer the possibility of watching a film either dubbed or in its original version (25, Gennaio).

Various public people responded confirming that the idea and practice of dubbing is “sacrilegious.” Luigi Chiarini, director of the Center of Experimental

Cinematography (CSC), insisted that dubbing puts “two souls in just one body,” and

Giovanni Paolucci, a journalist at the CSC, affirmed that with dubbing “everything passes for Italian” (10, Gennaio). For the writer Mario Puccini, dubbing is an a posteriori interference with an already complete film that is then linguistically and sonically transplanted into a “Tuscan Italian often false and emphatic.” Many, in light of

Antonioni’s criticism of Clark Costa, referenced the impossibility of subtracting and changing the voice of an actor or actress whose voice is the essence and substance of his/her being and performance, and also underlined the peculiar suggestion that the original sounds and the resonance of the foreign language, even if unfamiliar, create, as the real sonic expression of the rhythm of the images. Fernando Cerchio director of the

LUCE Institute put the question of parlato, as existential, psycho-social and sonic ambient, beautifully:

In the cinematographic expression il parlato [the spoken-dialogue] possesses also a musical function, or rumoristica [noise ambient] of sound, beyond the meanings of the words and the sense of the sentences and the music, the noise of the phrase is important and still more significant is the sonic atmosphere where the phrase echoes (Cinema, Fascicolo 111).

In the same issue Anton Giulio Bragaglia wryly confirmed that he could stand dubbing like the rest of the Italian people could stand the “national blend,” generally barley or chicory, which substituted coffee in those times of shortage. But the metaphor of the national blend, does not account for the nature of the actual shortage in relation to foreign cinema: the shortage of linguistic and cultural freedom.

A number of interventions were pro dubbing with riserva (reservations) considering a dubbed film a practical necessity for the majority of the people but not as good as the real film, as Bragaglia had put it, it was like having the national blend instead of real coffee, or the real film. His liquid beverage simile was followed by that of

Guido Guerrasio, a university student, who opposed to dubbing said that: “Dubbing foreign films is like preparing liquors at home: dosing and filtering carefully prepared mixes, following famous recipes, you can obtain cheap liquor but not the real thing” (10

Marzo 1941).

Dubbing as the national blend or homemade product was generally recognized as inferior to the real thing, a surrogate that substituted and remixed sonic, linguistic and psycho-social ingredients. A cultural remix or recoding whose specific political matrix was, however, being discursively eclipsed. The understanding of foreign cinema as a vehicle of differences was understood, if simply instrumentally and linguistically, by another student who against dubbing, sees in original language cinema a possibility

to elevate the culture of the people, for example for me as I study German and French, it would be very useful, and also for people with a certain theoretical understanding of the language they have studied. Then there is the Spanish

language that is very similar to the Italian and I am wholly convinced that, after a number film visions, one would understand it very well. (Cinema, Fascicolo 113)

It is clear that the young man is oblivious to the fact that the political reason for dubbing is exactly that of impeding the circulation of, and exposure to foreign languages as carriers of anti Italian values, still he freely conceives of cinema didactically as

Antonioni had suggested more polemically and politically in his original article. But the tendency of the nation, and older people generally, was also that of imagining that foreign languages have to be already known and cannot be learned, as the student suggests, through cinema. Thus only people who already know foreign languages can enjoy and benefit from cinema in its original version, the subtitles being considered an obsolete reminder of silent cinema, a visual impediment, an insufficient translation and a mental distraction.

The idea of cinema as a dynamic complex medium that can mobilize or fossilize thinking and provide new modes and models, or maintain and serve the status quo, did not belong to the conscience of the populace which accommodated pacifically to a cultural imposition whose fascist invention and machination was mentally erased. The marginally overt polemics and political arguments that Antonioni offered against dubbing did not find much attention and articulation. It could be said that the people were intoxicated by the homemade blend, addicted to the undemanding translation mix provided by dubbing. Fundamentally, sophisticated and more provincial minds had interiorly grown addicted to the fascist concept of the unique superiority of Italianicity.

The cultured readers who were in favor of dubbing found its supposed betrayals of the film as a work of art equivalent to those of any literary translation: a necessary evil. This seems to be somewhat typical of an intellectual environment that had not come to grips with the fundamental aural/visual shift of the new media. With them too the question of the origins of the strictly created and imposed film viewing habit is left out from the general reasoning. By erasing or ignoring its socio-political birth and related ideological implications, dubbing can be discussed simply in terms of its democratic functionality as translation for everybody or, on the other hand, in terms of the pure aesthetic damage it creates to the film as audio-visual whole. One of the main suggestions from this direction, perhaps articulating Antonioni’s idea, was to continue dubbing the commercial works and save the artistic ones. Only a few random readers, like the journalist and cinema critic Bruno Matarazzo, would fume that if subtitles work

“perfectly in all the countries of the world, there is no reason why they would not work in Italy too: or is it that Italians are the stupidest people on earth?” (25 Marzo, n.114)

Forgetting the official obligation to dub does not help to understand how for the general

Italian public such modality of film translation became monolithically a custom. In the cinematic imaginary, through film viewing practice, the strict legislation made as if sound cinema was born unquestionably dubbed thus broadly removing the desire for, and possibility of other listening.

Nonetheless, from the sample of people offered by the dubbing referendum in

Cinema some attentive viewers did notice, without fully detecting or directly reproving them, the propaganda tricks that dubbing implied and consented. Emblematic is the

97 unpretentious intervention of the handicraftsman Giovanni Bianchini who accepts dubbing “reluctantly” and points directly at “a wrong thing” that dubbing does commenting on

the advertisement of Italian products that are inserted in the dialogue or in the images’ written texts of foreign films. For example: if a scene of a film is taking place in a bar and the artist [character] wants to have something, what does he order? A ‘Martini’ *national liquor+. In the French film Dietro la facciata, [Derrière la façade 1939+ you can hear: ‘Since when do you smoke ‘Popolari’? *National cigarettes+’ in the movie Nulla di serio [Nothing sacred 1937] you can read the sign in big letters on a street in New York City: ‘Salumeria Bolognese’ (Delicatessen Bolognese). In short so many of these things, that we would never stop talking. (Cinema Fascicolo 114)

The deliberate appropriation and inscription of foreign films into national coordinates -and consumer products - seems to the reader the result of an error on the part of the technicians of dubbing who must learn, as he writes “to be more human and not ruin foreign production … because the Italian public … needs to see something different from our own style.” How would the uncomplicated but perspicacious non- acceptance of such practice on the part of the reader change in front of a denunciation of it not as innocent error but as political design? He offers a clear illustration of a common perception of dubbing and its offenses as mere technical and human faults deprived of the political weight and ideological implant that made them possible and directly and indirectly created them.

The three month conversation opened by Antonioni demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, the apolitical normalization of dubbing that fascism produced in the

Italian cinema sphere, having become in truth the cipher of the sonic fascist unconscious

98 which is still operating today, that does not need to be questioned, much less respond to the historical reality of its political formation. In the April 25, 1941 issue, Antonioni closed the referendum with the reluctant conclusion that dubbed films were part of a bourgeois Italian film-going habit and that the abolition of dubbing would have probably emptied theatres and fostered the collapse of the cinema business. Underlining the division of the public into aesthete and spectator, the question of dubbing, for him, lay in the conception that one has of cinema and that only if cinema is intended as entertainment dubbing is a viable possibility. No one who understands cinema as art, and we might add, art as opening and dislocation of meaning, as Antonioni will show in his film production to come, can ever bear even the idea of dubbing. Given the state of things, his practical wish was that of a dubbing that would become an art for the masses, a real work of translation that would try to carry all the “sonic, dialogue and musical motifs” of the original work and that would also try to efface the performance of the dubbers as only the personality of the actor on the screen is important for the film. The skill of a dubber is “inversely proportional to his/her recognizability,” he or she must not come out in his/her singularity (Cinema Fascicolo 116).

The constructive surrender to foreign film dubbing of the director to be, can only be sited in the socio-cultural constrictions that the magazine referendum illuminated as profoundly operative and marshaled, but it also needs to be considered in the perspective of Antonioni himself moving into the practice of filmmaking, leaving the mere theoretical space for something more. Starting with his documentary Gente del

Po` (People of the Po valley, 1943) he will investigate the national subjects and their

99 imaginary, representing them and interrogating them through different means, with what Roland Barthes in his letter to the director, will later call “an amorous vigilance”

(Dear Antonioni 64). From the pages of Cinema to the apparatus of cinema itself,

Antonioni will explore the consciousness and sound-scape of the nation, after having delved in a socio-theoretical way into what the soundtrack does and can do.

Chapter III The Soundtrack after Fascism: The Neorealist Play without Sound

The legal apparatus of the fascist regime, operating to ensure the linguistic and cultural autarchy of the nation, affected in complex and resilient ways the format of not only foreign but also domestic films. The modes of production and reproduction of the soundtrack, through the imposition, naturalization, and normalization of the technique of post-synchronization, characterize Italian cinema as distinct both during the fascist period but also after its demise.

If the dubbing of foreign films, as I have shown, was meant to impede the free circulation of foreign languages, the motivation for dubbing or post synchronizing13 even national films was essentially the same: to control and censor filmic content.

Problematic language, which in domestic films amounted to dialect, was the object of severe scrutiny on the part of the authorities. Film characters had to speak Italian rigorously and with perfect diction (Dialoghi di regime 96, Klein, Raffaelli), a task easier to accomplish in a recording studio and by professional Italian voice actors than on a film set with a variety of different players. So foreign films had to be completely domesticated and nationalized, and domestic films had to be vehicles for

13 For the sake of terminological clarity, I will differentiate between the word and notion of dubbing and post-synchronization when I personally refer to them. I will use dubbing to indicate the imposed mode of audio translation of foreign films, while I will refer to post-synchronization to signify the post-production of the soundtrack of national films which are not in need of translation. To maintain the distinction is somewhat complicated since in other authors, or directors’ references, the word “dubbing” tends to be used indiscriminately to indicate both practices. Nonetheless keeping in mind the distinction between dubbing as translation, and post-synchronization as soundtrack post production technique is relevant for my argument. 100

101 teaching Italian. Dialect was allowed only when ideologically useful to serve the cause of the national language. Dialects, which exposed linguistically the symptoms of a fractured nation made up of different realities and ruralities, posited the need for a unified nation that needed to find expression through a unified language. Similarly, in national films the exposure of foreign languages, as carriers of foreign thus unacceptable customs and ideas, was tolerable only if it entailed an ideological condemnation or ridicule of the native speakers and their culture, signifying, for example, decadent and corrupt models of civilization.14 Thus both in the case of national and foreign cinema, post-synchronization involved soundtrack manipulation and re- narration of dialogues in order for the film to fit the fascist script of italianicity: of language, values, and the prescribed way of life (Freddi).

The scenarios for implementing such a script were various, as were the possibilities of intervening on the part of the film director. While foreign films ended up in completely foreign hands and mouths—their authorship was completely relegated to censoring others—the national production company, maneuvering at home, could find ways to maintain some supervision over the film. The legal obligation to send the film script to the General Directorate of Cinematography for the “preemptive revision” before the shooting of the film allowed for subsequent authorial adjustments that would avoid censorship and probably inspired film writers and directors to develop ways of saying subversive things in indirect ways. In any case, post-synchronization was used,

14 A propos Ruth Ben Ghiat’s examination of a colonial film like Camerini’s Il Grande Appello presented in a conference paper entitled “Modernity and Masculinity in the Italian Colonial Cinema”, perfectly fits the model analyzed at length in Dialoghi di Regime.

102 and still is available to cover up strategically unwanted words or scenes in order to promote nationalist values and linguistic purism.

After Fascism

A look at the modes of production of national films after the fall of fascism indicates that the technology of post-synchronization mandated by fascist nationalism was still a widespread practice. In this chapter I explore how post-synchronization dominated domestic filmmaking. Given the substantial economic investments in post- synchronization studios on the part of the Fascist regime, their availability throughout the country, along with the techniques already mastered by editors, actors and directors, this persistence does not come as a surprise. Post-synchronization had become a habit. The totalitarian and nationalistic underpinnings of the technology were somehow cleaned up and revarnished into a practice that responded to new exigencies, which carried the fascist mandated post-synchronization of every film into a purified as yet non-existent (pan)Italian language into new cultural, political, and artistic realms.

It is after the fall of fascism that the cinematographic style that still today defines

Italian cinema around the world surfaced—and we can still witness how deeply it influences the current Italian cinematic production, as in the recent films Gomorrah

(2008) or Nuovomondo (The Golden Door, 2006). Neorealism emerged as a transformative cultural elaboration of past filmic modes and techniques that also

103 included post-synchronization, thus was not a brusque and absolute break15 from filmmaking modes developed during fascism. The fracture was conceptual and laid in the assumption that cinema was now to be used as an instrument to record and investigate reality, promoting the romantic notion of marriage of film and reality and avoiding deep questioning of representational codes. Neorealism claimed to reveal the real life of the nation, of the people who had been willfully obscured, manufactured, and exploited by fascist film production. On-location shooting, picturing real streets, people and places, was the signature approach to a new filmmaking that celebrates reality then made of ruins, poverty and in need of restoration. The artificiality of film’s artistic construction and dramatic manipulation was hidden behind grainy and gritty

15 Issues of supposed continuity/discontinuity between the cinema produced under fascism and the post war neorealist filmmaking have been widely discussed, and object of long debates. For the sake of the present work’s argument and simplification, if we posit neorealism as essentially founded on an ethical basis, as the renowned communist film critic Guido Aristarco does, it is clear that the will to reject the fascist past is quintessential to the ethical aesthetics of neorealism, thus the break is absolute. The mere formal aesthetic discourse, if ever considered possible in disassociation from ethics/politics, complicates things as there never could be any absolute or proper rejection of the language that cinema developed during fascism despite political affiliations and credos on the part of national directors, etc. Elements of realism fundamental for neorealism imbue much of the fascist film output with various and different ideological intentions; nonetheless at the level of formal representation, the issue of discontinuity cannot be stated unproblematically. Realism in cinema is in fact the common ground of leftist antifascist film makers and theorists who lived their youth or came of age during fascism (Renzo Renzi, Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Cesare Zavattini, Umberto Barbaro) opposing the regime—in the times of the regime—appealing to notions of social realism from the soviet school but also of fascist propagandists. Realism was appropriated to promote the revolutionary fascist cinema. Also fascist intellectuals, against the concept of “fascist art,” explored the cultural panorama of the times and shared the drive to realism that from past national and international literature was encountering new expressive possibilities with the contemporary recording technology of photography and cinema. Famously Leo Longanesi, who penned in 1926 the Vademecum del perfetto fascista, in L’occhio di vetro (''L’Italiano'', Roma, VIII, n.57, Gennaio- Febbraio 1933) called for a cinema of the real to be opposed to the ruling falsity of Hollywood. The notion of the total break is valid only in politically ideological terms. (see Brunetta, Gian Piero. Umberto Barbaro e l'idea di neorealismo. (1930-1943). Padova: Liviana, 1969. De Santis, Giuseppe. Verso il neorealismo: un critico cinematografico degli anni quaranta. Roma: Bulzoni, 1982. Aristarco, Guido. Neorealismo e nuova critica cinematografica: cinematografia e vita nazionale negli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta tra rotture e tradizioni. Firenze: Nuova Guaraldi, 1980. Mida, Massimo. Compagni di viaggio: colloqui con i maestri del cinema italiano. Torino: Nuova ERI, 1988. Furno, Mariella, Renzo Renzi, and Vittorio Boarini. Il Neorealismo nel fascismo: Giuseppe De Santis e la critica cinematografica, 1941-1943. Quaderni della Cineteca, n. 5. Bologna: Edizioni della Tip. Compositori, 1984)

104 images taken from the streets, so distant from the polished canon of aesthetic creation, they functioned rhetorically as signs of unmediated documented reality. Here is Roberto

Rossellini on the subject:

Neorealism consists of following someone with love and watching all his discoveries and impressions; an ordinary man dominated by something which suddenly strikes him a terrible blow at the precise moment when he finds himself free in the world. He never expects whatever it is. What is important for me is the waiting. (. . .) Naturally, this waiting manifests itself in the movement and rhythm of my films, since my work consists of following the characters. (Rossellini 63)

In these thoughts the imagination of what neorealism is transpires with a desire for cinema as source for human knowledge and instrument for something like a pure exploration of reality, where objectivity and subjectivity intermingle. Following someone

“with love” to show a way of seeing, a set impressions, means investing the camera of an ideal power to capture and express life and its becoming, being representational and existential, as love brings a vital humanness to the indexicality of film. The sentimentalized rhetoric of images true to reality is accompanied by a sophisticated and conscious practice of filmmaking that goes even beyond what Pier Paolo Pasolini noted as the neorealist “day-to-day…crepuscular, intimistic, credulous, and above all naturalistic point of view” (in Stacks 109). Rosselini in fact articulates his understanding of realism as style, as “the artistic form of reality. When the truth is reconstructed, one reaches its expression... [the realistic film] does not stop at the surface, but looks for the thinnest threads of the soul” (Neorealismo: poetiche e polemiche 156).16 In the trauma

16 Elsewhere he affirms his disbelief in any cinema veritè because nothing is really real about cinema. Cinema is a creation and the work of the director should not be hidden, or denied for some fetishized love of the apparatus and mythical conception of the medium as revealer of the real. On the contrary one

105 and altered consciousness of post-war Europe, neorealism wanted to expose reality in a redemptive humanitarian project. Neorealism, as De Santis poses it, was built on conceptual, moral, human foundations and on notions of critical and aesthetic analysis

(Il neorealismo nel fascismo 129) in order to create cinema as “revolutionary art inspired by a humanity that suffers and hopes” (in Ingrao 161-167).

With this ethic aesthetic of oppositional realism, against the packaged lies of classical cinema– from Hollywood to its Italian counterparts like the white telephone films—cinema aimed at revealing the present breaking the codes of studio representation and picturing reality, as I previously put it. I use the word “picturing” purposefully, as pictures do not talk or produce sound, in fact one inconvenience of neorealist on-location shootings is that they were deaf. No microphones accompanied the filming process, and if there was any sound recording, it was used later as a guide track to match to the existing rhythm the new elaboration of the sound and dialogue score recorded in the studio. Thus neorealist directors used post-synchronization to attach fabricated sounds and words to the renowned reel real images taken from the streets. While the images turned away from the studios to capture real life and real people, the sounds still came from the studios. Such practice begs inquiry of the aesthetic, cinematic assumptions and also socio-cultural effects that it produces. Why does a director like Roberto Rossellini, considered the father of neorealism, deliberately play with a studio-recorded soundtrack any way he likes: that is, ignoring the sounds should never forget that there is an author who creates the filmic texts and that there is no neutrality in the filming operation (interview for ORTF in Francesco giullare di Dio’s Extra, Medusa DVD). In the interview “Due parole sul neorealismo” (1953), he affirms how “the realistic film is the film that poses questions to itself and others: it is film that wants to generate reasoning” (in Neorealismo, Poetiche e Polemiche 156).

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‘out there’, the ambient noise and genuine voices of the people he is filming?

Phenomenologically, and also aesthetically how does the acoustic of the street differ from or relate to, the studio sound? Does the studio soundtrack contrast theoretically and sensorially with the purposed aesthetic of reality of the image track, and the poetics of realism itself? What does it signify and how does it function in the economy and dynamics of their films?

Rossellini’s practice, representative of the movement that adopted post- synchronization as a norm, can be discussed as either a lack of aesthetic radicalism where sound is concerned, or as a deliberately impure recreation of a functional replica of authentic language and sounds. The main question remains, did neorealist filmmakers undervalue the potential of the soundtrack compared to that of the image- track? From the general literature on neorealist directors, we find no interest in the possibility of recording the sounds that came from the street, or the sound of real voices, or live noises. Nor do we find any discussion of the technical, aesthetical and critical problems concerning the filmic relation of sound and image. It would seem that the ear was not where the eye was. Or the ear was attentive to the production of verbal meaning and exchanges, thus was functionally invested in making sense of the film characters and the images through diegetic and literal explanatory words.

Cesare Zavattini’s ideas, fundamental to the work of all neorealist filmmakers, provide an insight into the mono-sensory visual foundation of neorealism. His definition gives a clear sense of how the movement’s revolutionary intentions were based on a visual literary implant.

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The term neo-realism—in a very Latin sense— implies, too, elimination of technical-professional apparatus, screen writer included. Handbooks, formulas, grammars, have no more application. There will be no more technical terms. Everybody has his personal shooting script. Neo-realism breaks the rules, rejects all those canons which, in fact, only exist to codify limitations. Reality breaks the rules, as can be discovered if you walk out with a camera to meet it. (“Some ideas on the cinema” 243)

Zavattini does not walk around with a camera and a microphone to meet reality: the camera suffices. And yet the elimination of the screen-writer does not entail, or even suggest to him, the possibility of direct audio verbal recording of the encountered reality. With the “elimination of technical-professional apparatus” Zavattini does not mean the post-synchronization apparatus, the voice actors, the sound engineer, or phonic professionals. Reality does not “break the rules” and conventions of the soundtrack. The testimony highlights the absolute disregard for the filmic soundtrack as art, part of the codified canon, grammar, artifice and creation, to be integrated with the images. The sonic dimension of film and reality escapes investigation and is thought and internalized as something that can be grasped and reformulated post facto, through after-words.

Later in the essay, when discussing the exploration of the characters that film presents, Zavattini comments on the language and dialogue track. As a writer himself, his main interest is in the translation of the orality of spoken language into writing. He in fact subsumes the spoken in the written. He does not interrogate what a voice is to a person, or what the sound of language and reality is for him and in the film: how it is technically reproduced or recreated for the film and how it resonates; whose voices and

108 what noises the audience hears coming from the screen; and how post-synchronization has anything to do with (or does any justice to) the real soundings of the protagonists of everyday life in terms of immediacy, freshness and verisimilitude, to use the words that he chooses to indicate the reason why, in writing dialogues he has a predilection for dialect.

Many have observed that the best dialogue in films is always in dialect. Dialect is nearer to reality. In our literary and spoken language, the synthetic constructions and the words themselves are always a little false. When writing a dialogue, I always think of it in dialect, in that of Rome or my own village. Using dialect, I feel it to be more essential, truer. Then I translate it into Italian, thus maintaining the dialect’s syntax. I do not, therefore, write dialogue in dialect, but I am interested in what dialects have in common: immediacy, freshness, verisimilitude. . . . But I take most of all from nature. I go into the street, catch words, sentences, and discussions. My great aids are memory and the short-hand writer. Afterwards, I do with the words what I do with the images. I choose, I cut from the material I have gathered to give it the right rhythm, to capture the essence of truth. (245 emphasis mine)

Zavattini as scriptwriter is describing his writing process, comparing it to the editing moment of the film, thus he equates filmed images with transcribed speech. In an indirect way, the process of post-synchronization is thus being compared to the selection and editing of the visual images. But the comparison cannot really work.

Zavattini undermines the difference between the nature of recorded images and reported dialogue. While the images are technically and mechanically captured ‘from reality’ by the camera, the words and dialogue are recreated in the abstract subjective process of writing out of memory and shorthand notes that erase the sonic substance — timbre, dynamics, rhythm, inflection — the material trace of spoken language.

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Moreover, writing to report oral language is mostly oblivious to non-verbal sounds which resonate in the profilmic world. The film images exist as photographic analogues prior to being worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, and treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms, they exist as testimony before the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the film (Image, Music, Text 19). The technology of sound recording, and thus the creation of sonic analogues, are totally ignored. For Zavattini, his memory and writing function as recording of the oral, but he ignores the material shift and translation that he operates from spoken to written text.

Clearly the materiality of sound t hardly matters, given that an oral conversation can, in his world, be recorded on a piece of paper by a short-hand writer.

Disregarding, or posing the available low tech instrumentation for sound recording as a deterrent for a sonic exploration of reality does not really explain the lack of interest in such practice. Sound recording does not, in fact, appear to have been neither a theoretical nor a practical issue for the film workers of neorealism. Direct listening is excluded as sensorial notion from the process of filmic creation, it belongs, unnamed, to the private subject who artistically recreates and transposes it into the realm of creative documentary writing, passing from the senses to the abstract cerebral medium of letters. The visual and sound tracks are thus considered as separate and heterogeneous. While they combine forces in the moment of junction, during the production process, the soundtrack is conceived and fabricated apart from the image track. For the Neorealist poetics and rhetoric, the analogical plenitude and perfection of the images do not require a sonic counterpart. Words and images are fused together to

110 complement one another but the register of their provenance is substantively different.

The ideological and psychophysical investment in the visuals as the investigative space of reality is coupled with a disengaged but not disinterested treatment of the sonic ambience. Neorealist directors overlook the psychophysical importance of the aural experience, ignoring how sounds originate from dynamic events that always take place in a space; this in turn contributes a social and a physical context to the aural experience: sounds and voices transmit an ambience quite unlike the sanitized spacelessness of studio recorded sounds. The neorealist soundtrack is stripped of reality’s spatial acoustic context and its unique sounds determined by the reflecting surfaces, air turbulence, and thermal refraction. The reality effect of listening is removed from the film, as removed from the neorealist practice is the notion that humans hear the materiality and geometries of a space and navigate space through sounds17.

The main and underlying assumption of neorealist films is that the substance of the soundtrack is in the verbal message that is the dialogue-track, made up of words that can be formulated at some other time than the actual shooting, by a scriptwriter who forges dialogues, and creates a narrative of direct speeches to be recited by voice

17 This is explained by the concept of “aural awareness” developed by Barry Blesser and defined as a complex process “which progresses through a series of stages: transforming physical sound waves to neural signals, detecting the sensations they produce, perceiving the sound sources and the acoustic environment, and finally, influencing a listener’s affect, emotion, or mood. Notice that this conceptualization provides a continuum from the physical reality of sound to the personal relevance of that reality (Blesser 27)”. Blesser develops the concept of aural architecture, as the auditory equivalent of visual architecture and investigates the modes of auditory spatial awareness, very often unconscious in a visually oriented society like ours, cognitively complex, emotionally charged and behaviorally effective (Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth).

111 actors. Thus words do not intrinsically belong to reality, and more specifically to the real characters and their voices: characters have to be re-voiced and reworded to be revealed. While the camera records the looks of the characters and their surroundings, the sonic truth of their conversations is assumed to be irrelevant because the final script and the post-synchronization will make it anew.

Concerning what happens to the characters’ speeches, the semiotic distinction between enoncè18 and enunciation seems useful here (Benveniste). The utterance of the subject—the enunciation that is the act of speech in the context in which it is uttered, characterized by immediacy and physicality—is appropriated and abstracted into the formulation of it as enounced (enoncè), a formal and restructured statement that signifies distantly, and that takes its distance from the factuality of the lived moment.

One might say that the will to truth of neorealist directors is vitiated by the

18This is something of a Russian doll consideration where somehow a similar but smaller statement is nested inside the bigger one which, with post-structural film theory, posits all narrative cinema as enoncè, an arbitrary narration conventionally controlled by a narrating subject; an enunciator that hides references to the enunciation. Thus for example the main disguising trope of the actor who cannot look into the camera, denying the existence of camera and the workings of the apparatus is necessary for the formulation of the enunciation into an enoncè. Fiction film wants to present itself as a natural unfolding of events and even more so did neorealist films with the difference that their ethical aesthetic appeal was to reality with a commitment to show it and change it. Nonetheless the filmic narrative implant they used was the same as mainstream cinema (see theories of narration in film, Buckland, Warren. The Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Jacques Aumont, Aesthetics of Film. 1999. Philip Rosen, Narrative, apparatus, ideology: a film theory reader 1986.)

112 institutionalized and literary language of their concealed authorship most dominant and paternalistic in their workings with the dialogue-sound track.

The mythical gritty images, capturing reality ‘out-there’ are accompanied by conventional musical commentary and are spoken by smooth dialectal Italian, or

Italianized dialect. Nothing so coarse as the real dialects of the real people that Luchino

Visconti will notoriously expose in their unintelligibility in his intense experiment with direct sound in La Terra Trema in 1948. The inaccessibility of the people’s real language that the film deliberately demonstrates, underlines the bourgeois cultural foundation and revision operated by any other form of refined and milder (or linguistically homogenized) representation of the people’s common language. Visconti’s radical and unique experiment and rejection of post-synchronization offered a Marxist commentary on the venture of neorealism and its failures or flaws. Much earlier, however, a decade before the advent of neorealism, and from a completely different political perspective,

Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860 (1934) is also a notable endeavor in giving voice directly to the people, and creating a poignant relation of sound to image. It is worth taking a moment to explore it.

Blasetti’s Real Sound

A patriotic epic of Garibaldi’s making of Italy, shot on location to celebrate the real Italy and indirectly the fascist continuation of the Risorgimento enterprise —from Garibaldi’s red shirts to Mussolini’s black shirts— the film was also shot using direct sound throughout, recording real people’s voices dispensing with post-synchronization. The

113 purpose, effect and affect, of on-location shooting and direct sound for the production of the soundtrack is to attain a more realistic filmic account of the place, things, beings and modes of interaction of common people. It is notable that Blasetti casted almost entirely non-professional actors, anticipating a move that would become a main feature of neorealist characterization. 19

Blasetti’s film demonstrates the previously mentioned impossibility to sever neorealist film style from what are generally called the fascist predecessors’ lessons. But it also bizarrely brings forward the sonic lacuna, or sonic idiosyncrasy of neorealist practice. Stefano Masi commenting on the scarce use of direct sound on the part of neorealist filmmakers, affirms that paradoxically it was used more frequently and despite technical difficulties during the ventennio (the 20 years of fascist rule) by fascist cinema. The affirmation is somewhat preposterous and lacking in specifics: given the

Regime’s intention to use cinema as Italian language propagator and its predilection for perfect Italian voices, post-synch was more the norm, as seen in the previous chapters.

However, Blasetti’s experiment with 1860 proves that there was interest in the possibilities of direct sound, associated with an idea of more direct film realism— incommensurable authenticity, honesty— and better performances by the non-actors.

19 1860 is often considered to be the real precursor of neorealism, despite its open celebration of fascism, conspicuous in the last sequence of the film that graphically matches with a temporal jump cut, the Risorgimento’s red shirt combatants with the black shirts marching at the Farnesina, thus suggesting fascism’s descent and continuation of the Risorgimento. Years later with his film Quattro passi tra le nuvole in 1942, Blasetti himself, working on a subject by Cesare Zavattini, will affirm the end of fascist ideals, with no rebirth in the film and no celebratory epic tale. This film participates directly to open the national screens to new investigations of human dramas and national failures, the subjects of neorealist cinema, while also relying on cinematographic notions of realism and adherence or attention of the camera to national-popular reality, to be captured in its visual and temporal dimensions, where people and their environments fuse as characters.

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In 1941 Massimo Mida, in a film review for the magazine Cinema (“1860”) affirms the documenting effect of the use of direct sound that also allows spontaneous performances on the part of the non-professional actors, who are just being

“themselves.”

The entire soundtrack of 1860 is noteworthy, given its detailed attention to the ambient soundscape that offers a sonorous immersion in the story. The way the audience perceives it is very much related to sonic events that anticipate, participate with, or prolong the visual ones: noises, steps, screams, silences, choral voices, litanies, whistles, trumpets, drums, wind, people’s uproar, clangorous bells, all these build a dynamic sense of place. The spectatorial gaze becomes more perceptive when connected to a sonic sensorial narrative that is consonant with and also complicates the visual figurations of the tale. A cursory look at the film script demonstrates how the film was carefully planned and intended as audiovisual, with sound creating and defining spatial and physical dimensions— distances, and time signals, approaching arrivals and sudden departures—creating an understanding of events beyond and sometimes before the images. Thus the soundtrack is not used to guide the mood of the spectator or to accompany the events musically, but to narrate them for what they sound like in reality: in other words to offer a sonic “take” of reality.

The linguistic aspect of that reality articulated by dialects is paramount. It is important to note that the intentions behind the exposure of the real condition and modes of speaking of the people are not confirmatory; they are not exposed disinterestedly. On the contrary they are exhibited to affirm the need to change them.

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Blasetti was not offering an appreciative reevaluation of dialects,20 but was commenting on the questione della lingua, fundamental for the fascist regime. Their exposure was meant to feed unreserved linguistic nationalism, as dialects were considered linguistic symptoms of fragmentation, regionalism, difference and incommunicability among the people that needed to be overcome for the sake of the Unità d’Italia. Dialects as the main languages of the people vocalize the agony and the hope for a transition to another, unified state of things. Blasetti, an enthusiastic fascist at the time of the film, believed in cinema as a social art with demiurgic possibilities, thus his use of dialects had to serve, and to forge indirectly healthy fascist nationalist ideals.

He also had to follow the fascist legislation that actually forbade the use of dialects in film, unless they functioned, to put it simply, against themselves, for the cause of a unitary language that would help constitute the nation as a whole. It is in this

20 I am offering this comment given the somewhat revisionist tone of several recent articles in Italian newspapers and magazines (also in line with Pierre Sorlin’s account of Blasetti’s relation to fascism that he calls “awkward” and almost denies in Italian National Cinema 64), praising Alessandro Blasetti as a director who needs more recognition than he has received for having been the innovator and father of modern cinema in Italy (see Paolo Mereghetti , Corriere della Sera “Per conoscere Blasetti regista che inventò... quasi tutto” 14 Gennaio 2008; Filippo Rossi, Secolo d'Italia “Blasetti, il padre del cinema italiano con quel cinema antiretorico” 21 Gennaio 2008). Without questioning his aesthetic merits, we should be careful not to defascistize him and his filmic gestures. The occasion for a revival of the conversation about Blasetti comes after the restoration of some of his films, among which precisely 1860, magisterially restored by the Cineteca Nazionale and followed by the release of a DVD package by Ripley. The restoration includes the fascist ending of the original version of the film that equated Garibaldi’s enterprise with the fascist one, whereas this fascist ‘seal of approval’ was purged from the 1951 version. Among praises for the modernity of the plot, narrative ellipses, etc, admiration is expressed for his attention to dialects, as if Blasetti had a special sensibility for them. The writers forget to point out the fascist interest for the subject of dialects was the fascist belief in the need to eradicate them. While we should not underestimate the beautiful work that Blasetti created, we should also not forget the cultural belonging and implications of his work at, and for the times of its production.

116 light that the showcase of linguistic differences in the film could forego censorship. The film is a travelogue and dialect-logue that follows the main character in his mission across the nation yet to be. Carmeliddu, a Sicilian shepherd, commissioned by Padre

Costanzo, reaches the peninsula, traverses it and gets to Liguria to inform Garibaldi of the state of rebellion of his region against the Bourbon rulers. He joins the Spedizione dei Mille that descends to Sicily, where he reencounters his beloved wife and fights the victorious battle of Calatafimi. Travelling he encounters and gives voice to various

Italies, with their different physical territories and peoples of diverse social, historical backgrounds and intellectual orientations, diverging political credos and regional languages. Tuscan, Roman, Genovese, Piedmontese dialects function metonymically to signify the heterogeneity and division of the peninsula; French and German, spoken by the sergeants, point at foreign invasion and oppression. The first page of the script that introduces the important characters also specifies the dialectal identification:

Carmeliddu speaks Sicilian, the regional “autonomista” speaks Tuscan, the mazziniano (a follower of Mazzini) speaks roman, the giobertiano is the only one who speaks pure

Italian, unlike Smith who speaks “the Italian of an English *sic+”, while a young aristocratic man speaks Genovese. During the film the audience also listens to the oratorical tone of the priest from Veneto, and the more proletarian Veneto of the young man who will die in Gesuzza’s arms at the end of the battle. The variegated oral anthropological picture is clear to the ear and clearly intentional. The fact that the only person in the film who speaks Italian is the Giobertiano is probably not an irrelevant detail but a distinguishing or qualifying trait. Having him speak the projected language of

117 the desired nation seems inevitably to have been an expression of strong sympathy on the part of the director.

Such a carefully crafted soundtrack made of direct and post-synched sound shows the innovative audacity of Blasetti, who narrated history with real people in their natural environments and speaking their harsh dialects. When the film was first released there were negative comments concerning the deficiencies of the soundtrack “too often confused and not too clear” (Melopea, Libro e Moschetto). The comment is probably referring to the dialectal dialogues –mostly Sicilian- generally not intelligible for a non-

Sicilian speaker, but it may also point to the different, most likely, murky sonic effect, created by direct sound. Nonetheless, the impact of the soundtrack for the stylistic achievements of the film was described well by Massimo Mida:

The dialogue (often strengthened by direct sound) represents one of the most accomplished experiments of our cinematography from this point of view: in the most emotional moments the fact that the characters speak their own language, underlines realistically and artistically the dramatic representation. It was not a vain experiment: objective reality, precisely because of its particularity and its expression in the genuine element of dialect, acquired a universal range, and furthermore rendered the character's feelings with authenticity. (Cinema, Fascicolo 129)

Despite the accomplishment, evidently too unconventional, the daring dialogue track was tamed in the 1951 version. It was dubbed into standard macchiettistico

(burlesque) Italian, or Italianized dialects, or dialectal Italian, following the lesson of neorealist directors who through the use of post synch, adjusted the cadence, structure and syntax of dialectal dialogues, mediating the authenticity of the particular languages for a general, linguistically heterogeneous, audience. I am not simply inferring that the reason for post-synchronization in neorealist films was only intelligibility of dialectal

118 dialogues, rather I believe that the reasons for the adoption of this technique lie at the intersection of cultural aesthetics and technologically acquired fashions or habits. The truth is that Blasetti’s experiment with the soundtrack was unique in his times and as such needs to be considered as pointing in a direction where the soundtrack could have gone, but did not.

The Sound Oddity

What I would call the national predilection for the more flexible and eventually sophisticated use of post synching instead of the low-tech direct sound apparatus on the part of Italian directors, perfectly recalls Mary Ann Doane’s idea that the sound technology of synching allowed for the elimination of any evidence of the existence of the apparatus and the mechanical nature of the reproduced audio images. It also allowed for the masking of any artificial intervention and manipulation of what is recorded, bringing cinema into the hegemonic sphere of bourgeois ideology of the visible as truth. The world is simply what it looks like, and cinema shows it for what it is

(Ideology and Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing).

While Doane is discussing the use of mimetic sound in the Hollywood studio system and the formation of bourgeois spectatorship, her work is significant here for two points that she makes. First she affirms that the post-synchronization practice renders the revelation of the real world impossible. And while the Hollywood system never aspired to do so, neorealist poetics was based on such belief, the revelation of the real. Specifically, then, the use of post synchronization in neorealist films is functional to

119 a conventional working of the moving images in the sense that it covers the breaks and discontinuities of the image track as in any Hollywood film, revealing the neorealist use of mainstream narrative strategies and technical devices. Such use runs counter the work of cinema as “revealer” of reality. Post-synchronization, by definition, speaks over reality and sounds studio sanitized. I am not assuming that the use of direct sound would allow for the aspired moment of revelation; nonetheless, it is undeniable that, as a recording technique, direct sound holds the documentary power to bear witness to the external world’s sonic events. The neorealist directors’ visual fixation however systematically excluded sounds in the quest to capture reality.

It is interesting to point out how discourses on neorealist cinema never produce an analysis that pays attention to the workings of the soundtrack. Even Marxist critiques eager to expose the use of representational strategies characteristic of dominant cinema (mainly character identification techniques, linearity/dramatization of the narrative, traditional figurations, dissolves, fades, wipes, montage, perspectival vistas) fail to comment on the ideological use of an over-determined dialogue track, closed and controlled so as to efface any possible inconvenient truth narrated by the image track. If there was any consideration of the soundtrack as one of the main characteristics of neorealism, both as a production technique and as a mode of narration, it would pivot on the post produced artificial sound and dialogue track that allows and imposes a dramatic narrative structuration that closes the multiple visual perspectives and inhibits explorations of, and into, characters and physical space.

120

Doane’s argument about Hollywood denies the possibility of the revelation of the real, and sustains only one possible spectatorial response to the assumed invisible post-synch ‘trick’. In practice the process of post-synch is concealed, it literally serves to hide the working of the apparatus, and thus renders the audience unaware of it, duping it into believing the reality and concurrence of the sound/images on the screen. 21

Contrary to Doane’s argument concerning the duped audience though, we may say that the disjuncture of sound and image-track, can sometimes, as in neorealist films, be evident, perceptible and somehow dissonant. In short, I refuse the assumption that the soundtrack goes un-felt and consider it a dismissive move that becomes part of the reason why the soundtrack goes consequently under-investigated, and functions only in ideologically closed analysis. In this direction, John Belton’s observations, not necessarily in contrast with Doane’s whole analysis, complicate her argument, and are useful for the present inquiry. For Belton, the work of sound technology fails to be inaudible and undetectable; the work of the apparatus is indeed evident. It is evident to those who normally listen carefully, or decide to. On the lines of what Merleau-Ponty expressed as his disbelief while sitting in front of a dubbed film, Belton proposes that on screen post-synched, studio recorded, edited and mixed sounds generate a “recognition of a reality of a different order, a reality one step removed from that of the images. The soundtrack corresponds not, like the image track, directly to ‘objective reality’ but

21 Michel Chion, also a supporter of the idea of the audience duped into believing, in Audio-Vision, (63) coins the word synchresis, combining synchronism and synthesis, to indicate the process whereby sounds heard over images are attached to the them by the perceiver. Nonetheless he is also highly aware of perception gifts and the possibility that attentive ears are sensible to sound image mismatching, as in his comments on the carefree style of post-synching of directors like Fellini.

121 rather to a secondary representation of it” (“Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound”

66).

Such commentary has nothing to do with a refusal of sonic innovation, creativity and new possibilities, as Gianluca Sergi understands it (Dolby Era, 67). Rather, Belton’s comment shifts the argument about the soundtrack towards sonic awareness (the first step to sonic creativity) reminding us that humans are animals with ears and that they make sense of places, things and beings through their ears, incarnating meaning in sound and listening (Merleau-Ponty, Ihde 4). Sometimes scholars who focus on sound run the risk of framing its understanding in complex mechanical and technological schemas, forgetting to focus on the “soundful” effects, in Don Ihde’s terminology

(ibidem), which indicate the significance that sounds carry not in any ontological sense

(Altman, “Introduction, Four and a Half Film Fallacies” 39) but in a phenomenological and social one. 22 That is, if sounds mean things then the audience responds to them actively and interpretively; people are not simply passively inundated by voices and sounds assumed to be coming from the images. Sonic creativity generates complex interpretive responses while it modifies the relation of sounds to images to audiences.

Technological change in sound instrumentation for recording, production, and reproduction generates new sounds, new ways of listening and new listeners (Ihde 5)

22 Barry Blesser puts it very simply, in his study of sonic architecture “Physical sound is a pressure wave that transports both sonic events and the attributes of an acoustic space to the listener, thereby connecting the external world to the listener’s ears. Because the physics of sound is complex, transmission includes such processes as reflection, dispersion, refraction, absorption, and so on, all of which depend on the acoustic properties of the space. When arriving at the inner ear, sound waves are converted to neurological signals that are processed by the brain; the external world is connected to inner consciousness” (27).

122 whose subjective, aware or unaware, thoughtful or un-thoughtful responses cannot be underestimated. The common paradigm, often repeated in the critical apparatus of film studies— where images, as recognized sources of knowledge, are viewed and thus

(ideo)logically analyzed, while sounds, as ephemeral and ineffable characteristics of things, are simply experienced, and thus escape interpretation—does not do justice to the complex, holistic, audio visual experience of cinema. In this paradigm which privileges visual ‘truth’, the act of listening is neglected as meaningful/soundful23.

The notion of sound as experienced underlines the belief in the power of sound to get into the body, as Murray Schafer puts it, “We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen”, there is no way to escape the immediacy of a sound entering the body through the ear channel even if this does not entail that “our ears are always open” and that we are ready to engage in listening (“Open Ears” 25). Thus sound is invasive and corporeal but listening is a multifaceted cognitive and transformative experience/activity that produces sensation and sense—in the intellectual or intelligible acceptance of the word—or sensed sense, on the edge of meaning and many meanings.

23 The general cultural notion of sound as a characteristic of things, and not a thing in itself impedes the articulation of organic thinking about and around it. The argument, as eloquently formulated by Christian Metz in his “Aural Object,” constituted an opening in the direction of a listening that is not subjected to vision; nonetheless it never took off in film studies. The authority of vision as the legitimate sensory apparatus for the understanding and apprehension of reality has never been called critically into question hence sound occupies the space of the ineffable. This privileging of vision is arbitrarily ideological, as Metz points out: “Ideologically, the aural source is an object, the sound itself a ‘characteristic’ . . . sounds are more often classified according to the objects which transmit them than by their own characteristics. There is nothing natural in this situation: from a logical point of view, ‘buzzing’ is an object, an acoustic object in the same way that a tulip is a visual object” (Film Sound 146). An approach that considers listening as factual would give sound a theoretical valence and change perhaps the way we produce our reasoning, like producing sense and listening instead of truth and understanding (see also Jean Luc Nancy’s Listening).

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Listening always strains toward “a present sense beyond sound” (Listening 6-7) and it is this attitude, I would argue, that needs to be taken into account when discussing cinema.

In this sense, when considering Italian national cinema, the post-synchronization practice that generates the soundtrack of neorealist films (and later art cinema) is worth exploring for its creative and soundful entailments. Moreover, as I demonstrated in my previous chapters on the dubbing of foreign films, we can pick out original voices from the chorus: even for the understanding of post-synchronization in national cinema there are those who express opinions that do not fit the standards, often non-critical and non- engaging. The fascist imposition of dubbing spread the technology of post- synchronization that neorealist filmmakers voluntarily choose, thus determining a relevant formal feature of their film style worth discussing.

The Sound-Image Split: a Contradiction?

There exists no systematic analysis of what could be called a paradigmatic anomaly in the Italian national cinema of the neo-real. Sporadic comments actually illuminate the anomaly, or the specific practice of post-synchronization simply stating it inside a larger frame of analysis, but mostly never engaging with it and its significance in the economy and poetics of film. This lack of investigation, as I have said, participates in the general tendency in traditional film analysis24 to reduce films to moving images, conferring an

24 In the past twenty years a new discourse on cinema as audio vision has been circulating, the seminal work of French scholar and musician Michel Chion remains the most original creative and sharp. Under the impact of his theoretical work Claudia Gorbman wrote her semiotic account of film and sound in

124 inferiority and ancillary status to sound, a situation that Rick Altman has described as both a “historical” and an “ontological fallacy.” The former derives from the notion that images are primary as they predate the coming of the soundtrack, which was added, and thus as an addition, can be considered relevant or not, “the historical fallacy orders them chronologically, thus implicitly hierarchizing them” (“The Evolution of Sound

Technology” 51). The ontological fallacy grows out of the historicist dead end, confronted with sound technological innovations, film critics’ move was to establish the essence of cinema in the images, and not the sounds. The claim is “that film is a visual

Unheard Melodies (1987), and proceeded to translate for the English reading public, Chion’s best known books The voice in cinema (1998, from the French edition 1982) and Audio-Vision (1994, from the French edition 1990). Outstanding is the pioneering special issue from Yale French Studies, NO. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980) addressing the workings of sound for/with the images. General studies have followed, most notably by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, Film Sound (1985) and by Rick Altman, Sound Theory Sound Practice (1992) collecting contributions by a variety of authors more or less invested in the issue, and construing a historical perspective on sound in film from traditional film theory. Relevant also are interdisciplinary influences from studies on listening and modernity, seminal the work of Emily Thompson The soundscape of modernity (2002) that is surely and important text for the subsequent work by Gianluca Sergi on contemporary Hollywood cinema as the cinema of Dolby sound and pervasive extra human hearing The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (2004). Sergi’s text lead Vivian Sobchack in her article "When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound"— where she is specifically analyzing trailers— to affirm how with Dolby, “sound originates, dominates, and shapes the image, rather than the image dominating and grounding (or anchoring) the sound” (4). The work of film artist, writer and provocateur Philip Brophy is also particularly interesting, in its emphasis on the sensory sensuousness of the explosion of a cinematic experience in dolby surround. This work extends from the phenomenological analysis of Don Idhe – whose work is fundamental in pointing at a turn to the auditory dimension- given Brophy’s emphasis on the relation of new sound technology to the human sensorium. His affective and perceptual approach to film is also indebted to Roland Barthes’s notion of the pleasures of listening. The emergent field of sound studies, following the tactics of visual studies, calls for an engagement with sound as cultural formation and expression of the everyday life, listening to soundscapes is fundamental for understanding the way that we make and create sense and form our manners. Murray Schafer’s The New Soundscape, had invoked new acoustic ecology and music pedagogy in 1969, while Jonathan Sterne’s recent The Audible Past (2003) offers an historical perspective and documents a genealogy of listening practices at various intersecting moments considering technological, medical social shifts, discoveries and applications. Sterne eloquently proves the existent gap of intellectual investment in and understanding of, and how, sound matters. All these fermenting ideas should infiltrate media and film studies so that they can finally address the relatively ignored third dimension of the image, or the depth dimension of the image as Pier Paolo Pasolini defined it (Heretical Empiricism 265): sound. It must be said that currently film theorists are becoming more sensitive and include sounds elements in their analysis, nonetheless more fragmentarily and subjectively than systematically and holistically. In my last two chapters I will offer elements of such an approach concerning the film work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni.

125 medium and that the images must be/ are the primary carriers of the film’s meaning and structure” (ibid).

In this privileging of image lies the basis and bias that led to a normalization of post-synchronization in discourses about neorealism, and probably also the reason for its use on the part of neorealist directors in the first place. I am interested in their attitude to sound that was, one may say, insolently functionalistic, deliberately anti- naturalist, but mostly disinclined to new experimentation or simply not interested in the pains of trying the new and still transitional technology of direct sound recording. As

Peter Wollen states, any new technology as it introduces new possibilities also causes drawbacks, new obstacles and secondary problems “one step forward, two steps backward” (“Cinema and technology” 162).

While it is necessary to acknowledge the reality of the technical difficulties involved in capturing direct sound with very cumbersome and not handy equipment— due to the absence of light and silent cameras, and capable (directional) microphone systems, the generally available omni-directional microphones mounted on the camera captured sounds indistinctively—so too it is essential to comment on the ramifications of the refusal to use direct sound, or even talk about it. The choice is in fact a statement that reveals profound assumptions and consequences concerning what the soundtrack does to, and is for a film. The silent preference for post synchronization led to aesthetic features, evident in the films, that diverge from the formal espoused notion and main stated objective of neorealism, of following life in its flow. Sounds and voices were not considered to be in the flow, thus they were not to be picked out and recorded, and

126 could be formulated a posteriori. From this practice derives the somehow formulaic nature of the soundtrack in neorealist films. The interrogation of reality happened through the gaze that created images of revolutionary newness at the level of the medium’s exploration and visual language, and also at the level of challenging national discourses about the state of the nation and its identity, but that was then inscribed or circumscribed into a dramatic script and a conservative, non-challenging approach to what the soundtrack can do and reveal. The visual claims to reality were matched and packaged with sonic, often banal and not too labored, artificiality. Sounds and dialogues were post produced in studios and utterly synthetic, revealing soundfully the intended role of the soundtrack as verbal reader and musical interpreter of the filmed reality, thus the often melodramatic and theatrical nature of the project.

What this process poses as problematic is not a matter of authenticity in the creation, but of formal aesthetic possibilities and ideological stoppages that produce a mercurial poetics of sound and images, and that impede the ground-breaking potential of this new cinema to attain its full expressive realization, somehow reincorporating it into dominant discourses of imposed narratives, clarity and linearity that renegotiate disruptive and contingent reality with literary dramatic constructions. The film narrativization operated by the soundtrack and the superimposition of dialogues recited by voice actors over the non-professional actors’ performances indicates, more than any other technique, neorealism’s continuity with conventional cinema that uses the articulations of the soundtrack to strictly determine the image, rendering the power of its content, and the claims to reference the reality of the visible, less radical and

127 transformative. Paradoxically because it was never questioned or made to listen to reality, the soundtrack played a conspicuous and prominent role in neorealist films.

Jean Renoir and Neorealist Post-Synching

The unique and striking comments of a film director like Jean Renoir on post- synchronization, give a sense of the profoundly unconventional for alternative film making practices, and the anti-radical approach to sound that Italian directors were using. 25 It is relevant to quote him at length as he reveals at the very least the irreverent ambiguity inherent in the neorealist, not-realistic-at-all, understanding and treatment of sound. Discussing his own filmmaking, Renoir explains his relation to the soundtrack and praises his sound engineer Joseph de Bretagne, who remained in charge of sound for most of the director’s production:

He taught me his creed of authentic sound and with him I really did use a minimum of trickery. Nor have I ever changed my mind about this. I regard dubbing, that is to say, the addition of sound after the picture has been shot, as an outrage. If we were living in the twelfth century, a period of lofty civilization, the practitioners of dubbing would be burnt in the market-place for heresy. Dubbing is equivalent to a belief in the duality of the soul. (My Life and My Films 106)

For Renoir the majority of the post-war directors that populate the Italian temple of grand cinema would be sentenced as blasphemous trickster artists and heretics, who believe in “the duality of the soul” and of cinema. Renoir returns to the subject in greater detail later in his work. In this note, after his unequivocal statement

25 As I mentioned earlier it is difficult to maintain the divide that I am proposing between post-synch as national mode of soundtrack post production and dubbing as foreign film soundtrack translation mode. It is necessary to keep in mind the distinction while flexibly accepting the conflation of both meanings into the word dubbing on the part of various authors that I quote like Renoir in the following paragraphs.

128 evoking the draconian justice of medieval times of the crusades and crusaders, he proceeds to describe how he strove not to dub even an inch of film. He specifically refers to the making of La Chienne (1931),

When shooting out of doors we sought to damp down background noise with hangings and mattresses. We tried the experiment of attaching a microphone to the projector. Hotchkiss, the manager of Western Electric, was passionately interested in these experiments. He took a hand in them, realizing that my achievement might extend the range of the talking film. At that time we had not thought of recording sound on location, particularly not in a town, where the street noises are so loud that they may swamp the dialogue.26 But on the other hand I did not want to shoot street scenes in the studio. I wanted the realism of genuine buildings, streets and traffic. I remember a gutter whose waters rippled in front of a house which was to serve as background for an important scene. The microphone made it sound like a torrent. It must be borne in mind that in those days we did not possess directional microphones. I solved the problem by taking a close-up of the gutter and thereby justifying the noise it made. Joseph de Bretagne was delighted to have a part in the experiment, even as an onlooker, and his enthusiasm gave me a great pleasure. It was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted to this day (106-107, emphasis mine).

It was in fact the beginning of innovation in the creative use of real sound in film that “extended the range of the talking film.” It was the beginning of a new mode of narration that radically included sound’s reality in the process of filmic gestures and signification. Sound became a participating and altering agent in the otherwise linear, more theatrical, staged and controllable ways of arranging, directing and recounting the pro-filmic elements. Direct sound brought to film its inescapable signature of external

26 Think here of how later this technical snag is appropriated and reinterpreted stylistically, used as a reality psycho-acoustic effect that dirties the dialogue and its intelligibility, and at times borders hyper- realism. It is produced, created in post-synch, specifically by a director like Michelangelo Antonioni, who uses the soundtrack, like the image-track modifying it any way he deems for the production of the effect he needs.

129 reality with its urgent contingency. Lacking directional microphones, the technical instrumentation recorded even unnecessary sounds; thus, accepting real sounds in film, meant finding ways to account for them in a now open and inclusive narrative structure.

The example provided by Renoir hints at the practical but also conceptual and figural shift that the practice of direct sound produces. In his solution, the rupture in the filming process of the non erasable reality of a given sound called for explanatory camera work, a simple indexical gesture, somehow altering the codified and imagistic realist gaze. The directorial and spectatorial eye cut close to the noise source. Sound and image get closer in focus. It must be noticed that a specific object singled out and enlarged in close up on the screen becomes overcharged with consideration and acquires an extra meaning which in this case was not conceived in the original script.

Thus direct sound has the power to change the preconceived story and the way the story is told. It breaks the perspectival visual narrative and makes the sounding object, so much larger and louder than life that it becomes an entity (see Deleuze discussing

Balasz, Cinema 1, 95-96).

“The close-up transforms whatever it films into a quasi-tangible thing” writes

Doane, “producing an intense phenomenological experience of presence, and yet, simultaneously, that deeply experienced entity becomes a sign, a text, a surface that demands to be read” (“The Close Up” 94). 27 For Walter Benjamin, the close-up was one

27 For a general critical review of the close up, see Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema”, in dif f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:3 (89-111). Throughout Cinema I Deleuze also offers his beautiful insights into the function and workings of the close up in his story of the cinema, from D.W. Griffith to the Soviet School etc. The close up determines what he calls affection- image, following Eisenstein’s notion that the close up gives an affective reading of the film, and continuing

130 of the significant entry points to the optical unconscious, making visible what in daily life went unseen (90).Renoir’s description suggests that the same is true for sound. Here it breaks into the daily unheard through microphone amplification. Thus the close up can also be auditory: Renoir shoots a sonic-optical close up of water flowing in the gutter that alters the narrative’s spatio-temporal and perceptual co-ordinates, shrinks and expands them at the expense of the linear time of narrative, disengaging from the realistic and familiar frontal representation and entering a more subjective representational state of aural/visual perception and abstractedness.

The new sound, by forcing itself into the filmic figuration, as impingement of reality, augments both the expressive creative possibilities and intellectualizes the realistic intents of the filmic text; it modifies the movement of the camera, the distance of the gaze and the ear, pointing at some meaningful detail and soundful punctum of the story. The realism that Renoir celebrates thus results complexly in a praise of the pro-filmic event and its signifying revelations. The rejection of the dubbing technique does not necessarily entail a more realist filmic representation and results in an abdication of total control over film that opens the filmmaking process to an indefinite and audible exposure to reality, to be reworked through inventive techniques into new filmic modes of narration.

Renoir wryly reports how he gained the reputation of innovator himself with the film On purge bébé (1931). In his words:

to say that a close up transforms anything into a face, in the sense that “it stares at us” (88) even if, like the gutter, it does not resemble a face, it talks to us.

131

As the title indicates, the story has to do with a lavatory. The flush sounds several times in the course of the film, acquiring the significance of a musical accompaniment. In my concern for realism I used a real flush in one of the studio toilets. The result was a cataract of sound that delighted the producers and caused me to be regarded as a great man, which is more proof that one must not attempt to order one’s destiny- Providence knows more than we do (107).

And sound in general knows more than we do, particularly when it comes on us like a “cataract” flooding into film language to affirm the reality and right of sound as protean force and the compliment, rather than the insignificant other to the predominant “reality” of the image. With this comment, Renoir is essentially explaining what he means by realism, which seems to coincide with a notion of attachment to real existence beyond the cinematic representation of events, be they sonorous or visual. It is here that the fundamental difference between the beliefs of Renoir and Zavattini, to be considered spokesperson for their respective national cinemas, is evident.

Renoir’s film Toni (1935) has often been considered a forerunner of Italian neorealist films, but the director himself had reservations about the comparison, in that the “magnificent dramatic” elements of the Italian productions are absent from his.

When shooting Tony, he says, “my aim was to give the impression that I was carrying a camera and microphone in my pocket and recording whatever came my way, regardless of its comparative importance” (154). Without Zavattini’s stenographic secretary to record what he heard, Renoir’s description leaves no doubt as to how his concept of film sounds differs from Italian neorealist directors.

I am a passionate believer in authentic sound. I prefer sound that is technically bad, but has been recorded at the same time as the picture, to sound that is perfect but has been dubbed. The Italians have no regard for sound, they dub

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everything. I remember visiting Rossellini when he was shooting Paisà. The actor he was directing asked to be given some lines. ‘Say whatever you like,’ said Rossellini. ‘I shall alter the dialogue anyway in the editing.’ This was a joke, but it was symptomatic. The difference of approach does not prevent me from being a profound admirer of Italian films. Although Rossellini and De Sica use artificial sound, the feeling conveyed by their films is none the less profoundly real. In Toni the sound of the train arriving at Les Martigues station is not merely the real sound of a train but that of the one which we see on the screen. On the other hand, the entirely artificial sound-track of Rome, Open City is nothing but a sort of accompaniment to one of the most masterly productions in the history of the cinema (emphasis mine, 154-155).

Renoir’s idea of the cinematograph and his production was marked by an uncompromised desire for pure realism, as adherence to reality. That is, of a cinema that comes from what is real and becomes a direct repository of sounds and images.

The director’s belief thus seems to be more ideologically than esthetically founded. The sound must belong to the actuality of the image, being integral and organic to it. Even if it comes out “technically bad” and could be made “perfect” artificially, through the use of post-synchronization: a real bad sound is better than a false perfect sound. This idea demonstrates an intrinsic belief that the unitary composition of reality as audiovisual must be respected and reproduced as such on film despite technical possibilities that, allowing manipulation and separation of sound from image, offer the promise of perfection. For Renoir, filmic practice must follow the idea that filmed sound and image have a degree of authenticity that cannot be altered.

He does not really expand on the notion of the perfection of sound that can be achieved through “dubbing”, which is an Italian practice whose practitioners nonetheless have “no regard for sound.” One may ask, how can the production of

133 perfect sound be considered the product of neglect for sound? What is, or how is sound, being discussed here. The use of the qualifying adjective “perfect” for dubbed sounds is somewhat misleading in its suggestion that the director’s preference for direct sound is only ideological, and that sound perfection can be achieved by others, through other means. We should also bear in mind how through the use of imperfect sounds Renoir expanded the possibilities of sound cinema. Apart from the director’s conception of realism in cinema, the question to be posed is, how does that translate aesthetically and perceptually into film sounds? Does direct sound produce more realistic sounds than dubbing does? Or playing with the words, do sounds recorded with direct sound, sound more direct than those post-recorded? To appreciate Renoir’s observations it is essential to follow them to their practical outcome observing the consequences of the use of one technique versus the other. From Renoir’s notes, it is clear that the adjective

“perfect” is not to be intended aesthetically but technically: in the impeccable recording studio, dubbing creates a sound that is not exposed to any interference from reality and thus carries no blemish.

Studio conditions naturally favor the creation of faultless dialogue scenes, where the voice actors’ performances are obviously more “perfect” than real life and isolated from it, which means more staged and theatrical than spontaneous. The sonic imprint, no matter what technical effects are implemented, at least until the advent of reverberation technologies and digital signal processing, is that of the closed room of the recording studio. All voices and recreated noises have a sanitized indoor ambient

134 sound forgetful of life’s sonic confusion. 28 This is the perfection that Renoir is indicating, nothing close to the soundscape of reality that cannot possibly be recreated in a studio, and to which, as Renoir suggests, Italian directors are indifferent. Thus post-synch, as mechanical superimposition of studio produced sound to the recorded image, subtracts from the image its oral and aural resonance, its psychophysical sonic witness to things and beings, to add instead, in Renoir’s words, an accompaniment, often a functional logocentric reading of the image that substitutes, or stands for/against, the symphony or cacophony of daily life. Moreover, as has been recognized ever since Renoir, a consequence of the use of post-synch is that almost every sound literally belongs and sticks, or is stuck to the image: has a source visible on the screen. Thus sound for the most part functions in a limiting way as a descriptive extension of the image.

This naturally restricts the possibilities of representation and falsifies the reality of live sound that travels invisibly in space and is present in the air without bounding attachments. Nailing every sound to identifiable objects and bodies, the soundtrack is standardized monologically to adhere to the image-track. Among the critics of post- synch in 1970s France, Dominique Avron puts it best, for him in post-synch “every noise is isolated like a note in classical solfeggio. The film functions as a score. Mixed noises have to be clear: no noise can be without a meaning, no noise can be undetermined” (in

Il suono nel cinema 83). Continuing, we might say that post-synch over-determines the

28 These observations become common warhorses when at the end of the 60s there was an open debate “against” dubbing, with the French film artists from Straub-Huillet, to Jean Loius Comolli and Dominique Avron on the radical oppositional side, see Juiller, Il suono nel cinema: storia, regole, mestieri, 83, Filmcritica “Sul Doppiaggio”,1970, Patalogo dello Spettacolo “Cinema/Italia/Il Doppiaggio” 1981.

135 audio-images. It fictionalizes and functionalizes all sounds and rationalizes the symphony of life where sounds co-exist indeterminately, simultaneously, and chaotically.

It avoids the snags of direct sound that can pick up random reality sounds and reveal both the world outside the screen narration and point at the recording process of the apparatus. Post-synch’s “perfection” thus disguises the filmic construction, following the norms of conventional narrative cinema -even as it makes it evident, pointing right at it with its studio “perfection” and the lip-synched recitation exercise. The neorealist drive to reality is lost in a segregated recording studio, and absorbed by the images.

Moreover these considerations force a redefinition of the notion of the use of non- professional actors as one of the main characteristics of neorealism, because they were post-synched and thus professionalized invisibly but audibly. What happens to their much praised veracity? We should, I believe, identify post-synchronization among the defining elements of neorealism, as national cinema, that in fact meaningfully differentiates Italy’s cinematic production from France’s, while evidently and significantly linking it to Hollywood practices.

Bazin’s Closed Ears

In What is cinema? (Volume 2) André Bazin praises and investigates what he calls the

“revolutionary humanism” of Italian neorealist cinema, creator of an “aesthetic of reality,” in possession of a “perfect and natural adherence to actuality” (20-21). Let’s

136 consider how the enthusiast theorizer deals with the issue of authenticity as it pertains to the soundtrack.

In the absence of technical equipment, the Italian directors have been obliged to record the sound and dialog after the actual filming. The net result is a loss of realism. However, left free to use the camera unfettered by the microphone such directors have thereby profited by the occasion to enlarge the camera’s field of action and its mobility with, consequently, an immediate rising of the reality coefficient. (29-30)

It is interesting to notice how in Bazin’s formulation Italian directors were

“obliged” to use post synchronization because of the absence of technical equipment.29

In light of this discussion on dubbing/post-synch, his statement can be reversed. First, as

Bazin well knew, the lack of sophisticated technology did not prevent his compatriot

French directors from using direct sound or from being vociferously against post-synch.

Reversing his argument, it was not the absence of technological equipment that favored and essentially determined a mode of sound production in Italy, but precisely its abundance. The widespread diffusion of post-synchronization studios, created during the fascist regime for the implementation of fascist cinematic laws, fashioned the

29 In his book Audio-Vision, Michel Chion comments on the general French passion for on location sound at any cost, and the Italian reluctance to use it at all. It is not Chion’s interest to investigate the economic, political and cultural aesthetic matrix of the different relations of the aesthetic interplay of sound and images, which are instead what this present work proposes. Chion also works more on art cinema and there his comment on the carefree attitude of Italian directors, in this case Fellini, towards post- synchronization, in The Voice in Cinema (1999) is exemplary. “Much Italian cinema, and Fellini in particular, synchronizes voices to body more loosely. In Fellinian extremes, when all those post-synched voices float around bodies, we reach a point where voices-even if we continue to attach them to the bodies they are assigned-begin to acquire a sort of autonomy, in a baroque and decentered profusion” (129). It is important not to miss the path taken—the passage through neorealist film aesthetics and techniques— to bring about such a liberated and poetic use of post-synch. Fellini compared it to a séance, to be used in films that ask from the audience a level of participatory abstraction and not mere subjective identification. The speech track does not function in a conventionally and reassuringly realistic way, but serves the imaginative and abstract qualities of the film that plays images and sounds together, and does not use sound as oral captions.

137 technological artistry, skills, and preferences of Italian directors. The common and acquired practice in post-synch studios was not abandoned or subverted after the end of fascism in a search for, and experimentation with new uncertain technological or aesthetic possibilities. Italian directors were investigating film time and space and directors like Rossellini were absolutely conscious of the camera’s freedom to move and linger when shooting with no strings attached, that is, no microphones. This is what

Renoir means when he talks about the Italian “disregard” for sound. They ignored the available if imperfect and problematic technology for direct sound recording, and thus excluded, probably with unawareness dictated by disinterest in the dialectics of sound and images, a possible measure of realism from their films.

It is remarkable that their practical and conceptual disregard finds an equivalent on the theoretical level in their biggest supporter and defender, André Bazin. He in fact glosses over the resulting quality and effect of a soundtrack that does not come from the streets and that attaches voices that do not belong to the faces and bodies on the screen. Such practice produces at least two evident and relevant breaks, the breaking of the unity of location with dislocated sounds and voices performed in a recording studio, and the breaking of the unity of the actorial persona and performance. Very often in fact the actors in the recording studios were not the same as the film actors. The facial and bodily gestures of the actor on the screen were spoken by the voice of a stranger, as in puppetry. Probably for neorealist films, given the frequent use of non professional actors who often could not speak Italian very well, post synchronization offered the resourceful possibility of filling their mouths with Italianized dialects but also, and very

138 importantly, camouflaging the truly living person/non-actor into an actor, creating a viable and intelligible performance that blended an authentic body with an actor’s voice and so allowing the filmic process and narrative to proceed smoothly, without any break in the conventions. The manipulative use of the non-professional actors evidently contradicts the realist intentions, as Bazin poses them.

Neorealist films were always a dramatized product of imagination that found inspiration and in the national social reality. Thus, non-professional actors provided the look of authentic physicality dramatized by the post-synch alteration. As Bazin himself observes about the general use of post-synch “the net result is a loss of realism.” But he is not willing to hold onto a statement that posits the significance of the soundtrack at the same level as the image track, integrated in and constitutive of the audiovisual message. Instead, for Bazin, the augmentation of the visual representation covers what one would logically assume to be a corresponding augmenting falsity rendered by standard post-recording. For Bazin, the exposed reality of the images qualitatively exceeds and surmounts the inaccuracy and falsity of recreated sounds. Bazin is willing to collapse all reality and reality effect into the images, images of the real, which are not for him diminished and rendered other than real by the attached artificial sounds. He celebrates the visual to the detriment of the sonic, so while sight is enlarged and sound falsified, for Bazin the reality coefficient can still raise. Expanding on this conclusion, I would only point out that the coefficient of sonic realism decreases proportionally to the increase of visual realism, and that since humans perceive reality, and for that matter cinematographic ‘reality’, as an audiovisual manifestation, the overall perceived

139 filmic realism diminishes. Bazin fails to pose the act of listening as a determining factor in the perception and cognition of the real.

Spatiality is understood through sound. Space is aurally connoted and sound manifests itself in space as propagating vibrations that humans then interpret and recognize as sonic/spatial distances and differences that orientate them. Moreover sound waves are reflected, refracted, and attenuated by their surroundings, and enclosing materials, which determine the intensity—dynamics and frequencies—of sound levels, thus human voices, noises, and sounds diffuse and propagate differently in open air, outdoors, in the countryside, or the city outskirts, and the city streets. Sounds vary according to the topographical and atmospheric conditions. Simply thinking of a familiar voice talking to you on a windy day at the beach, or the same voice in an urban traffic setting, or in different enclosed spaces, like a car interior, a big room, a tiny office, exemplifies how the materiality of the environment alters the transmission of the voice, its timbre and the energy required for its resonance, and this is similar for any sound whatsoever. Ultimately Bazin was willing to deny or forget that human ears are sensible to the soundscape that defines reality, and that they make sense of things, events, distances places and beings aurally.

A film packaged with an artificial soundtrack resounds of that fallacy and dislocates and reduces all radical realist intents to established realistic/cinematic representational conventions which determine the narrative expressive style and ideological implications of the filmic text.

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How Realist?

Roberto Rossellini was once forced to respond to Jean Rouch’s comments on his practice of post-synchronization. In an account provided by the French filmmaker and anthropologist—one of the founders of cinéma vérité— about his memories of neorealism, which he had discovered viewing Paisà and later Roma Città Aperta, we read how he questioned Rossellini about the famous scene of the arrest of Anna

Magnani’s lover in the latter film. Rouch noted: “When she shouts ‘Francesco!’ the scene was shot from higher up [bird shot], from a house close by, and the scream resounded in a ‘non realist’ way” (Farassino, Cinema Italiano 9). Thus he finds out that the scene was shot silent, and Rossellini responds “neorealism is fiction that becomes more real than reality!” (ibid) Clearly Rossellini’s answer avoids addressing the point of the ‘non realist’ effect perceived by the knowledgeable spectator and the decoupling/fracture of sound/image perceived by many more, consciously or unconsciously. He shifts the conversation on the conceptual terrain offering a definition of neorealism, while refusing to elaborate on his ideas on the role of the soundtrack, the way it is created and the outcome it produces. He takes the observation as a critique of post-synchronization tout court which he dismisses since he espouses post-synch as the mode of production of his films. Ignoring Rouch’s objection to the realist inaccuracy produced by the artificial soundtrack, Rossellini renders his underestimation of sound matters evident. Neorealist film directors never addressed the fundamental question of the interaction and integration of sound (and voice) and image in the filmic composition. Rouch affirmed how for the French directors post-synchronization was at

141 the times something scandalous, and “to understand that neorealism in its search for truth did better than what could be done with direct sound was for me a real discovery.

And actually all the following movements, and also the nouvelle vague practiced dubbing” (Cinema Italiano 9). That neorealism did better with post-synch than it would have with direct sound is a not a provable argument, while the choice, mostly because it was never discussed or articulated conceptually, indicates a lack of interest or explorative attitude toward the possibilities of the soundtrack. It was mainly used instrumentally, contrary to the visual track whose exploration lead, free of the concerns and the labor necessary for direct sound, to new and original results. Very different is the case of the profound consciousness in the use of sound, direct or post-synched, on the part of the nouvelle vague directors. Jean Luc Godard, for example, very much a militant director of sounds and images created films that only produce sentience, affects, and sense in sounds and images.

Neorealist cinema, as I am arguing, then, did not understand and produce much that was new through the soundtrack. Its use remained related to traditional practices without being open to reality’s suggestions. Often melodramatic and using carefree lip synchronization, sometimes it creates the effect of a dialogue floating around the image. The act of speaking is very loosely intended as characteristic of the characters, and for that matter of the film itself. It mostly provides recited transposition into words of the general plot so that it can advance. Recalling Bazin’s “reality coefficient”, how many degrees of realism are lost along the way?

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The neorealist dispensation with the soundtrack, in other words, was very much related to the habit of sound post-production which originated and was widespread in the fascist period. While shooting film without sound allowed greater possibilities for visual investigation, it also left the creative potential of the sonic and of the audiovisual unexpressed. Precisely because of the ease and flexibility with which sound could be added to the visual track, it was treated as a convenient addition to manipulate as necessary, and therefore maintained the connotation and significance of an addition.

The Musico-Aspect Critique

The melodramatic aspects and the resulting conventionality of neorealist soundtracks have found commentary only from a strictly musical perspective. Music scholar Sergio

Miceli for example, in La Musica nel film (1982), briefly addresses the Neorealist sound lacuna. Even if the author intends and refers to the soundtrack traditionally, collapsing it into the music-track, his comments are significant. His critique is that neorealism’s innovative visual style was not met on the level of the soundtrack; the music never attained contextual expressiveness beyond sentimental leitmotifs and dramatic support and mostly had nothing to do with the reality and combination of the images. Often triumphant and pompous, it was out of touch with the new filmic language which was perceived as “immediate and essential.” Miceli insists that, while at the level of the images, neorealism was able to capture and represent profound elements and motifs of a period, including its social, political and civic history, at the level of the music it was disconnected from that reality, rehashing a repetitive and exaggerated craftsmanship

143 that, as he puts it, did not even have any “ethnic genuineness” (261), or we might say cultural and imagistic resonance. The dramaturgic soundtracks sounded celebratory, echoing the fascist notion of cinema as the most powerful weapon, imposing a preposterous musical magniloquence over images of sub-proletarian life. There was in fact little consciousness of the soundtrack, as we learn from Alessandro Cicognini, a prolific film composer in Italy from 1936 to 1993 who scored films as diverse as Quattro passi tra le nuvole (Blasetti 1942), Sciuscia` and Umberto D (De Sica 1946 and 1952) to the popular adventures of Don Camillo and Toto` in the 50s and 60s. In an interview in the mid sixties he muses,

I wrote the music for Ladri di biciclette, Miracolo a Milano, and other films by Vittorio De Sica and I have to say that for some films I feel, with the different critical judgment of today, that the cohesion between the image and the musical language can perhaps generate some criticism. I have to remind you though that we, the musicians, participated in the neorealist movement without realizing what it really was with regard to the history of cinematography. Thus we continued in some way a tradition that changed gradually also according to the film (261).

This declaration clearly confirms Renoir’s opinion that Neorealist directors really did not care about sound, in the sense that they did not consider it equal to and participant with the images in creating the filmic text as a continuum of sound and images and as a consequence their works suffer from an unelaborated audio-visual conjunction where the audio is juxtaposed to the images. Italian cinema will have to wait for directors like Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni before music, and the soundtrack will become in Miceli’s words a “poli-expressive and

144 poli-metaphoric component” (262)30 of film that needs to be analyzed in relation to all the other elements that constitute the filmic text. With these figures the director and composer coauthor the film, as the film’s poetic narrative is developed through an audiovisual medium as audiovisual signifying.

Thus, neorealist cinema follows the conventions of cinematic articulation created by Hollywood which conceives of the soundtrack as the emotional and verbal explanatory glue for the visual track through the use of guiding commentary music and perfectly scripted dialogues. In an interesting article, “Music, people and reality: the case of Italian neo-realism” (in European Film Music) Richard Dyer points out a conceptual divergence manifested in the musical universe created in neorealist films which following Hollywood codification, continued to believe, or never bother to question the assumption that a musical commentary was needed to convey the inner meanings of the represented reality. After quoting at length Fernando Ludovico Lunghi, a supporter of the absolute necessity of music for film in the fifties, Dyer points out the underlying and unspoken neorealist belief that “the typical subject of neorealism cannot speak for themselves: music is needed to speak for them. But that music will not be their music.”(28) In fact, the repertoire of accompanying music — whether heroic, tragic, transcendent— never draws upon popular culture, and, for Dyer, this implicitly creates a formal and ideological rupture within the dramatic construction of the film

30 He is specifically discussing the work of Nino Rota with Fellini in Lo Sceicco Bianco (1952).

145 itself. If it is a given that the culture of the represented has nothing to do with that of the represent-ers, why would that be so plainly inscribed in the created filmic text? As I posited for the unquestioned use of post-synchronized dialogues with their artificial sometimes theatrical quality, a significant residual of paternalism, moral superiority and political certainty surfaces around the neorealist practice that imposes and juxtaposes the filmmakers’ and composers’ world, and views, on the lives and stories of their characters.

As a positive example of film that uses an organic soundtrack, close to the musical baggage and tastes of its protagonists Dyer mentions O sole mio (Giacomo

Gentilomo, 1946) built around a song title and its singer, Tito Gobbi. Dyer notices also how the film is “very sparing in its use of non-diegetic music, mostly just a few phrases over establishing shots and never behind dialogue. All of Gobbi’s numbers are diegetically motivated and never involve augmented musical tracks”. (29). Music plays in the film like it plays in real life. This film explored a new and realistic sound path which diverged from the established traditions both in a cultural and stylistic sense, recognizing the extraneousness of commentary music to an art form that aims at narrating quotidian existence.

Neorealist films instead will continue the practice of film musicking as it was before the war, thus maintaining uncritically the same cultural aesthetic and ideological coordinates, never removing from the screen the mystifying and partitioning filter of triumphal notes, expressive of bourgeois classical music superiority, so disconnected from the visually represented existential and phenomenological reality. One wonders

146 what real do the trumpeting orchestral scores capture. The reality is that most film composers had learned their spectacular lessons in the preceding twenty years and had to unlearn their style slowly—that is why Cicognini’s testimony is so meaningful—they had to learn how to represent reality with its sounds, not accompany and comment on it.

In this light, as noticed by David Forgacs (Rome Open City 55), the case of Renzo

Rossellini, in what is now the most famous scene of neorealism, the death of Pina in

Rome Open City, is glaring. He simply recycles his score from a battle sequence in The man of the cross (1943) one of Roberto Rossellini’s most ideological films of the fascist period. By listening to his scores it is clear that Renzo Rossellini’s production was essentially unchanged from the fascist period to neorealism and he continued in a similar vein, with the same values later for commercial films. Listening closely to Rome

Open City Richard Dyer catalogues the spectacular effects of the disconnected music, and it is worth quoting him at length given the rarity of this kind of close analysis.

The busy dramatic music of the opening sequence (as the Gestapo search the partisan Manfredi’s flat), and the tense music behind the boy Marcello and Don Pietro leaving the church on Resistance business, are both despite their emotional content, unemphatic, subordinated to ambient sound and speech. However, a searingly tragic majestic theme heightens the tragic heroism of the young boys making their way home after sabotaging a railway goods yard and then again, at the very end, after Don Pietro’s execution.

He also points out the traditional guiding and gluing function assigned to the soundtrack which follows closely the movement and minute emotional shifts within a scene,

There is also Hollywoodian underscoring for instance as Don Pietro and Pina leave the church carrying money for the resistance, they both notice someone

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off-camera but continue to walk apprehensively ahead, the music gradually slowing as they themselves do, until the person off-camera addresses them, at which point a stinger underlines the fear that this is a Gestapo officer; moments later, mounting staccato chords build up as the man takes out his pistol, but then the music ebbs away after he takes out a note indicating he is in fact a deserter seeking shelter: each moment in the sequence is precisely underscored in the soundtrack. In all these ways, the use of music of Roma citta`aperta is, like most music in neorealism, conventional in relation to prevalent practice. (30)

Alessandro Cicognini confirms how film music composers continued to produce music following the old criteria of emotional musical bombast established in commercial cinema in the 1930s where music sets the tone for drama, tragedy, joy, comedy, love, tension and struggle. Mentioning both the work of Renzo Rossellini and Alessandro

Cicognini, in his history of film music, Cinema e musica, Rondolino argues,

it does not seem that neorealism’s innovations, its authentic and unadorned character, true and quotidian, had found a sort of musical equivalent. The style remains mostly late romantic and crepuscular, more melodic in Cicognini, and more alert in Rossellini, only here and there it was conditioned by the images’ realism. And nonetheless despite the models to which they were inspired, there is at times the effort to purify the music from its redundant ornamentation, its easy melodisms, and also the need for silence, to leave the represented reality talk. (102)

Many other neorealist film composers did not have such inklings and never felt a necessity to abandon melodic or symphonic redundancies, and no director was asking them to, conceiving of the soundtrack as a channel of already established expressivity.

Rondolino mentions composer Carlo Rustichelli—remembered for his collaboration with

Pietro Germi—who, while never forsaking redundant classical forms, made use of a popular repertoire, thus composing his scores with a sort of referential authenticity.

Including the popular, as an element of the neorealist poetics, Rustichelli created simple, efficacious and popular soundtracks.

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Sergio Bassetti, continuing the discussion on film music and neorealism affirms that

The violent break exercised by the neorealist model on multiple expressive factors of film finds its element of maximum inertia in music: we find the same aesthetic-expressive — rather stale —tendencies of cinematographic music from before the war being contradictorily rerun, without apparent reflection or trouble, by the majority of the musical texts of that neorealist cinema that took its distance exactly from the pre war productions’ mystifying and ritualized models. And this non felt [absent] necessity to follow through on the musical line the renewals operated by neorealism is indirectly confirmed by the other cine- musicals macro phenomenon of the first and the second post-war, that is the transposition for the screen of lyrical operas, the opera-film, or film-opera . . . a vogue which looks at the past, and which will find popular consensus equal only to that of the contemporary trend of films canzonettistici [full of popular songs[.1] ] (“Continuita` e innovazione nella musica per il cinema” 325).

Cinema’s dramatic soundscape was vibrant, popular and uncontested. For

Bassetti the accusations of romanticism that can be leveled against neorealism find in its music their elemental cause, even as the music is commonly disregarded in critical discussions of the films. In his inquiry some change begins with Riso Amaro in

1949/1950, when Goffredo Petrassi’s score indicates “a cautiously innovative approach to comment and definition music” (ibid). Nonetheless, Bassetti severely judges how,

the compositional manners stay fossilized in an emphatic and luxuriant symphonic effusiveness. The delay—if not the incapacity—of expressive syntony and revision of the musical language in terms of the anti rhetorical orientations of the post war and Resistance cinema thus assumes the value of intimate contradiction and thin betrayal of the most original innovation of the new cultural neorealist path (325).

Despite Bassetti’s strong objections to soundtracks still impregnated with magniloquence, Philip Brophy, eclectic film director, composer and artist picks Riso

Amaro (Bitter Rice) in his selection of 100 modern soundtracks in a book by the same

149 title (100 Modern Soundtracks, the other Italian films are Germi’s Seduced and abandoned (1964), Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, Sergio Leone’s Once upon a time in the West, and Fellini’s Satyricon, all three from 1969). His approach is “focused on the sensorial, phenomenological and perceptual dynamism” (15) of the discussed soundtracks. The choice of Bitter Rice is interesting, as he recognizes in the work the intent of including and incorporating music within the thematic expressive filmic enunciation. With pleasurable poetic style Brophy describes the synergy that the film creates between the visual narrative and interwoven sonic “waveforms” (36), he points to the “sono-sexual lure” of the main character Sylvana and perceives a “sonar logic” (37) in the represented working field, the rice field which he says, is mapped as a “sonic score” . There is thus a profuse convergence of sonic and visual narrative and this is what fascinates Brophy most. Significantly composer Goffredo Petrassi uses folk and popular songs and themes circulating at the time, but also produces an abundance of commentary music that non diegetic, is in the tradition completely alien to the characters, emotionally urgent, symphonic, and rhetorical. The film dates from 1950, and even if Petrassi created an interesting score, the same year also sees Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film

Cronaca di un amore, which may be considered the real divide between a traditionally emphatic way of conceiving the soundtrack as provider of emotions, narrative and referential cues and the birth of a new linguistic expressive film sonority.

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“For a Viewer Who Listens Closely”, There Is Not Only Music

What is striking about the above commentaries is the complete lack of engagement with the dialogue/vocal part of the soundtrack. Formulated by music critics, the listening objective is traditionally musical, symptomatically confirming Michel Chion’s definition of the soundtrack as a “deceptive and sloppy notion” (Voice 3), a sort of catchphrase for all that happens at the aural level in the film which is then collapsed entirely into the music commentary. In his seminal work The voice in cinema, Chion deploys the human voice at the center of the conversation about the cinematic image, shifting attention from verbocentrism as functionalistic understanding of the voice as conductor of speech to vococentrism itself. The voice as instrument and technology, as body and character, as structuring element of the cinematic screen that in his Audio-Vision he posits precisely as audio-visual, engendering an audio-visual mode of reception in which image and sound, be it voice, noise, scream, music, combine inextricably modifying and mobilizing each other: I do not see the same thing when I am also hearing, and I do not hear the same thing when I am looking. 31 Chion opens the space for theorizing the fleeting complexity of sound-image relations, trying to expand the relatively unfrequented and primitive vocabularies and concepts available to allow an understanding of how the cinematic production of sense and its experience, as lived experience itself, is informed by the act of listening. 32

31 A propos it is interesting to remember Michelangelo Antonioni’s confession about his preference for listening CDs instead of live concerts, where the visuals would distract him. 32 Kaja Silverman’s The Acustic Mirror, extends feminist critique of Hollywood to the use of the female voice in the dominant construction of gender subjectivities that always posit the woman on the side of the spectacle and the man on the side of the gaze, thus Silverman opens her cinematic investigation to psychoanalytical issues of castration, projection, narcissism and melancholia. In her discussion she singles

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As we have seen, even in the cases in which the soundtrack was not considered fundamental for the creation of filmic meanings, the carefree attitude produced unwanted but symptomatic sense. The post-synchronized and recited voices of neorealist films —foreign intruders floating around the characters —determined a lack in the aspired realism. In the following chapters I focus on the awareness of listening that characterizes Italian art cinema directors, specifically Michelangelo Antonioni and

Pier Paolo Pasolini. I explore their endeavors in creating a soundtrack that, invariably through the use of post-synchronization, responds to a notion of reality, people and film that exist in an audio-visual dimension. Their soundtracks give characters and the cinematic representation a sense of interiority and a complex psycho-social texture.

With no realistic aim, the modern soundtrack participates in getting film to reach towards that which fabricates human reality, the mythical in Pasolini and the innermost of the inner space in Antonioni.

out Chion’s The Voice arguing how its discussion of the voice is circumscribed “within existing gender demarcations that it assumes much of the symptomatic value of a Hollywood film” (49). Nonetheless the book remains the most articulated and focused work on the subject of the voice at the cinema.

Chapter IV Michelangelo Antonioni: the Wind is Photogenic

The Post-Synchronization Regime

Listening to Italian screens, even after the neorealist endeavor, it becomes evident how post-synchronization can best be considered a national mode of soundtrack production which becomes a stylistic cipher, continuing with little critical questioning at least into the 70s, and the explosion of the Dolby System’s sound realism in the 80s (see Sergi and

Grainge, Brand Hollywood). Post-synchronization as foreign film dubbing, what I would define as the techno-political manifestation and application of the principle of covering, normalizing and anesthetizing the other, is still operating today33. Imposed and spread by the fascist regime it came to define also the soundscape of post-fascist Italian national cinema. This raises a question: is it so because, as Elias Chaluja affirms, Italian directors tend to “consider sound only a simple additive to the image”? Chaluja’s position condenses the opinions expressed by many film workers who strongly oppose dubbing/post-synchronization, including the uncompromisingly critical comments of

Jean Marie Straub (Filmcritica 1970). The highly political affirmation that Chaluja offers, in which he posits post-synchronization as the instrument that allows the language of the hegemonic class and dominant ideologies to conquer the screen, needs some attention within the trajectory that the present work is tracing. Chaluja discusses

33 The case of foreign film dubbing which colonizes all foreign cinema is beyond the scope of this work, but it represents an issue to which I will dedicate further investigation in the future, given its fundamental importance in the shaping of the mass cultural and political spheres of a nation still grappling with its own mono-cultural linguism, and which also degrades the quality of sound-images and the artistic labor of the actors.

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Italian film production of the ‘70s, specifically identifying its fascist origins and censorial purpose, indicating how the battle for linguistic purism embedded in the post- synchronization practice was never radically challenged even after the fall of the regime.

As we saw in Chapter III, the neorealist formal and pedantic ploy of “dialectizing” normative Italian, superficially satisfied the desire and expectations for realism by creating the impression of giving voice to the people and their language, all the while using professional voice actors to recite confected Italian dialogues which were attached to the non professional actors (real people) on the image track of the screens. Post- synchronization helped to create a language, vocal and linguistic, that existed only at the movies, a studio fashioned “doppiagese”, the dubbed language of cinema and TV

(Baccolini Bollettieri). Direct sound never entered the national cinematographic enterprise conceptually or practically (Storia del Cinema, vol. V).

While direct residues from both fascist and conventional film practice are detectable in neorealist films, the case of post-neorealist cinema must be considered differently. What needs to be taken into account concerns economic and socio-political praxis and interferences that discipline the screen, and which now, instead of originating from the fascist regime, come from production and distribution agents. The case of

Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (1978) exemplifies how directors, even 35 years after the fall of the fascist regime, had to cope with distribution contracts which deprived them of unfettered copyrights to their own films. The distribution company

Italnoleggio announced the dubbing into Italian of the film L'albero degli zoccoli which

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Ermanno Olmi shot in bergamasco, forcing him to assert openly and polemically that he only recognized the version that he shot and not the one remade into Italian:

there is only one version of the film that I recognize and it is the original one, that is the one spoken in bergamasco . . . In fact the film’s dialogues spoken in dialect are not (a puntiglio) an intransigent posture of aesthetic nature but an essential element of the story. Dialect was the only language that the farmers knew: they could not speak the language of the master and also for this reason they were marginalized ...With dubbing all of this will be lost and moreover the characters ‘individuality will be upset because they will be deprived of the natural sound of their language. (in Colonna Sonora. Dialoghi, musiche, rumori dietro lo schermo 112)

Olmi, here, is the victim of the post-synchronization regime which forces the hegemonic language into the mouth of every screen actor and impedes the director from creating his work according to his own criteria. What Olmi does in his film production, then, is to defy the impediments of the imposed technique in order to obtain the effect of direct sound in his post-synchronization work. Despite the fact that, at the time, creating the effect of on location recording in a studio was almost impossible, he fills the soundtrack with noises and ambient sounds.

Olmi’s experience represents a near perfect case of post-synchronization as imposed artistic and cultural limitation. The incident comes ten years after the legendary Manifesto di Amalfi signed in 1968 by almost all of the best known filmmakers representatives of Italian art cinema, including Pietro Germi, Luigi

Comencini, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Gillo Pontecorvo, Marco Bellochio,

Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Manifesto condemned the “systematic abuses of dubbing that repeatedly compromise the expressive values of film”, admitting only post-synchronization chosen by the directors

155 for its expressive value to an Italian cinema that would continue its creative and linguistic exploration of filmmaking (in Le Voci del Tempo Perduto 205).

In this chapter, and the next, I show how Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo

Pasolini complicate the firm ideological stance against post-synchronization playing with post-synchronization in participatory, ingenious, and innovative ways which allow for the creation of an authorial sound-image continuum. Thus discussing post- synchronization, we need to account not only for formal and external difficulties or impositions but also the relation of Italian directors with the soundtrack, rooted in a practicality which is also developed into style. Together with the economic agencies regulating and interfering with the work and use of the cinematic apparatus on the part of national directors, there is also something that resonates true in the affirmations of post-synchronization’s radical opponents: Italian directors lack any ideological commitment to and/or technological faith in direct sound. Because of their acquired technique with post-synch, Italian directors use it at their pleasure instead of considering it a limitation or an imposition, and thus they come to explore and expand the possibilities of maneuvering the soundtrack to increment creative and expressive outcomes.

I investigate this attitude by offering a reading of Antonioni’s filmmaking from a perspective of sound, an often post-synchronized sound, carefully crafted and absolutely innovative. Antonioni, while maintaining the habit of post-synchronization, abandons any traditional or mainstream, obvious and dramatic, theatrical and anti- cinematic use of the soundtrack. He moves film forward, into a modern and anti-

156 conventional space of an organic audio-visual creation that refuses to use music either as banal commentary or booster for the images, aiming instead at constructing a soundscape, a filmic space made of sounds-images. Antonioni discussed the role of sound, music, noise and silence in film extensively. Thus in the first part of the chapter I look into his meditations on the functions and the making of soundtrack, from his early film thinking into early film practice and the development of his own sound poetics, in collaboration with musician and film composer Giovanni Fusco. Elaborating on Pier

Paolo Pasolini’s ideas of a cinema of poetry, in the second part of the chapter, I show how complexly and poetically Antonioni articulates the audio-visual score of his films, specifically offering a close viewing and listening of scenes from The Eclipse (1962) and

Red Desert (1964).

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beginnings

In his battle against dubbing (presented in the first chapter) Michelangelo Antonioni understood the political interests and dangers embedded in the dubbing operations that allowed the censoring of any un-liked and unwanted verbal content. He also, with great artistic sensibility, understood the anti-imaginative and anti-poetic effects generated by the arbitrary elimination and substitution of a film’s original language and soundtrack. In a 1944 review of La battaglia per l’Ukraina Sovietica, he comments on its dubbing, stating “to mutilate *this work+ as has been done to some of its most beautiful sonic — thus poetic — effects is an extreme sign of ignorance” (in Sul Cinema 37). While focusing on the absurdity of dubbing from the aesthetic point of view he also points at the all

157 permeating fascist rhetoric and sound still uncannily current in Italy after the fall of the

Duce. It continued to circulate through the dubbers’ voices, timbre and style, which originally used to celebrate the Duce and Hitler in the LUCE newsreels and documentaries and was now resounding in the mouths of foreign actors in foreign films.

Antonioni notes scathingly how Guido Notari’s voice, spoken “with all the emphasis required by the superior hierarchies and with a total lack of sensibility” is still audible after the historical fall of fascism, still declaimed “with the same cadence, the same warmest faith that was fascist,” thus covering any other foreign spirit and substance.

Dubbing, Antonioni affirms, is a “nightmare” from which the Italians need to be liberated.

It is significant that the same man who most vociferously argued against dubbing will become one of the most radical innovators of Italian cinema soundtrack.

Understanding the absurdity of dubbing comes from an appreciation of the multisensory nature of human embodied communication and of the unbreakable unity of sound-image creation in the filmic process. Of course it is a matter of auditory sensibility. From his earliest writings Antonioni represented the conscious voice of a cinema of listening, where listening is to be understood as deriving meaning in the immediate auditory act but also in the figurative meaning of listening as openness and sympathetic acceptance which opens to an understanding of the other, exactly what dubbing denied and impeded to the nation as a whole.

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The Poetics of Sound-Film

In Cinema 107 (December 10, 1940) Antonioni announced the opening of the popular survey/referendum on dubbing due for the January 10th issue. In the following issue of the magazine, (December 25, 1940) he penned, together with Gianni Puccini, an article entitled “Due lustri di sonoro” (“Ten years of sound cinema”), an annotated history of the birth, modes of production, and art of sound film. Discussing Rotaie (1929),

Camerini’s film which was shot silent and then reworked to become the first Italian film to be post- synchronized, Antonioni affirms that, “the sound does not confer any expressive value to the film which was thought and made according to purely visual criteria”. For Antonioni the Italian production did not deserve any attention whatsoever given that the national cinematography did not excel in sound film. With the exception of Blasetti (chap III, 1860) “who demonstrates a peculiar sensibility to sound” the rest of

“our men” Antonioni affirms, lack “a theoretical study of this medium”, and even technically the filmic outcomes are mediocre.

In his analysis, the director-to-be sets forth the notion that sound needs to be conceived of as an organic component of the filmic creation and thus thought together with the images, not as an addition or juxtaposition to the images. Antonioni was deeply enmeshed in the ongoing debate about the art of sound film that started with the Soviet manifesto of sound film from 1928, signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrof. A call for a radical relation of sound to image in cinema, so as to liberate the screen from a literal and illusionistic sound/image matching and synchronism, the manifesto was in favor of a challenging audiovisual counterpoint that would constitute sound as another

159 element of film montage, introducing a new power and tension into cinema. The new approach to film sound would avoid the mainstream impulse to recreate for the screen a naturalist representation of real life while providing musically packaged and interpretive emotional responses for the audience.

In the debate Antonioni favored an anti-mimetic, anti-empiric and anti-parasitic idea of what sound can do for film. He writes:

Sound film has made considerable advances in the artistic use of its expressive possibilities, but the ‘poetic’ result can still be vitiated. It seems today that the right position is in the middle, in a certain, but fruitful, compromise, that allows us to accept sound in film as dramatic accentuation, as ‘discovery of the world of sounds’ (Balazs), as psychological underscoring.

This is a median position that mixes sound-explaining-image with a more poetic and imaginative discovery of the world of sounds, silences, noises as theorized by Bela

Balazs in his Theory of film. Later in the article after mentioning some of the enemies of sound film, like Chaplin, Fejos and Machaty, Antonioni notices how, despite their rejection of dialogue,

they were all in agreement with the balanced use of commentary music. It goes without saying that music constitutes one of the most welcomed and most typical elements of sound cinema. Even if the observation is true that in real life men find themselves in ‘musical situations’ generally much more rarely than happens in sound film!

This last comment hints at his future near total rejection of musical accompaniment in films. According to Antonioni, one should recognize the progress made by sound film at that time but also,

we must recognize that it is a progress restricted only to a minority of films. From 1935 onward the world production counts, in fact, many films where the sound is accurate and imaginative, but few are those where it assumes authentic plastic values in a poetical function.

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Among that minority he praises John Ford’s The Informer (1936) and Stagecoach

(1939), and mentions two of Renoir’s films La grand illusion (1936) and La bête humane

(1938) that will have a great influence on his cinema. He also comments on the good results of animation films: free of terrestrial constraints, whose “utopian musical flight” is perfectly and freely harmonized with the image. This is a measure not only of his anti- naturalist aspirations but also of the poetic drive to explore sound-image combinations.

Like Renoir, who was able sonically to weave “high metaphors” onto realist surfaces

(Michael Litle “The Sound Track of The Rules of the Game” 312-314) Antonioni textures expressionistically sounds and images.

A feature that characterizes Antonioni’s approach to sound-image relations, that will become a cipher of his audio-visual scores, is that verbal and visual language can collaborate well as long as “the word does not cancel the image’s expressive function”.

His film poetics is being formulated right here, showing how Antonioni since the beginnings, understood discourses of aesthetics in their interelations with technological possibilities,

the word has to be used seriously. Engaged, reaching a deep and expressive intensity without its sound disturbing the image, and as intense as the image that produces it. Thus interdependence and equality of value are the basis for an ideal sound film. Asynchronism is an excellent means to overcome the uniform agreement of sound with image. …. (La conzone di Ceylon, symbolic montage of voices). If the future offers the possibility of other hopes, they are perhaps to be related to a not easily predictable use of sound synthetic recording. (“Due Lustri di Sonoro”)

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“For a Film on the River Pò”

At this same time Antonioni was already thinking about his own first film. The year before in Cinema 68, 1939 (25 Aprile) he wrote an article “Per un film sul fiume Pò”

(“For a film on the river Po`”) where he describes a project of filmically narrating the life of the beloved river of his early childhood and the lives of the people who, living by it, become one with it, thus evolving, changing and becoming modern with it. What is interesting is that Antonioni raises questions about the documentary and fiction forms and their function in relation to the profilmic. He meditates on the rhetorical construction of the image, its relation to history, quotidian life, and national consciousness. Thus Antonioni engages, and anticipates the as yet undeveloped aspirations and discourses of neorealism. What is more, he advances them to a modern and complex conception of perceptual sound-image. He is already thinking beyond the notion of the simple marriage of camera and reality producing universal indexical images, and contemplating a more complicated and de-sentimentalizing abstract sound- image.34

In addition, he is refusing the canonical dramatic code of clear and linear representation and dramatization, considering the introduction of fragmentary moments and unnecessary audio-visual details as meaningful (soundful) parts of a broken and interrupted narrative. He proposes a film which flows as an attempt to capture an enfolding contingent reality, proceeds by eventfulness, and not narrative causality. Already in the film project, accompanied by nine images that indicate his

34 See Noa Steimatsky in her analysis of the aerial image as a reinterpretation of this trope of modernity in Antonioni’s films in Italian Locations.

162 poetic figurative style and express his fascination for the mysteries of the images and reality that the camera permits him to capture, Antonioni demonstrates how he is interested in altering any mainstream notion and practice of camera work. Artistic representation can never be, or pretend to be, straightforwardly objective or purely subjective, one-sidedly referential or one-sidedly mental and emotional. Representation will always oscillate between the two, and always in listening. For Antonioni, cinema as humanly operated mechanical apparatus must aspire to the creation of a holistic listening, part of a unified perceptual field, and must always work as an insightful abstraction from “the everyday life” — as in Lukacs’s definition of the “defetishizing” function of art — for the creation of a meaningful consciousness of the wholeness constituted by human beings and events (Luckacs Reappraised 184-185).

In this light Antonioni is one of the first directors who use noise and sound in the soundtrack to crystallize human experience and express the “intelligence” (Per un film) of the event, the place in the created aesthetic object. In his project “For a film on the river Po`” Antonioni imagines the sounds or sonic sequences that will construe the moving images, evoking sounds of place, sounds of change. The arrival of modernity on the banks of the Po` river, meant the material creation of a new industrial landscape that is also a sonic-scape. The construction of iron bridges over the Po` meant the passing of “clanging trains night and day”, and six story buildings with huge windows

“vomiting dust and noise”, mechanical and strident sounds. This can be interpreted as an aggressive replacement/re-sounding of an unspoken natural past harmony or taken bluntly as modernity’s scenic, sonic and perceptual change. In fact not referring to a

163 past harmony directly seems to entail a refusal of nostalgia for a bygone past, the refusal of a belief in a harmonious past, and rather a welcoming of the present which opens to an undetermined horizon. As Roland Barthes beautifully affirms, Antonioni’s concern with the world is “utopian” as his “perception is seeking to pinpoint the new world, because he is eager for this world and already wants to be part of it” (Dear

Antonioni 64). His way to be part of it is not ordinary and direct, or simply immediate, mundane, and materialistic, the horizon of lived events opens from the terrestrial momentary to a cosmic indefinite. These horizons are set in a blurred tension in

Antonioni’s cinematic poetics and the role of sound in his cinema is exactly that of opening the screen representation from mimesis to expressivity, from diegesis to significance, beyond the immediate sound-image and beyond the event, in Andrei

Tarkovskij’s words, into “the organic resounding of the world” (159).35

The perceptual, suggestive and symbolic power of sound in Antonioni’s work deserves an attention that it has not received yet, despite the fact that it constitutes a major element of his audiovisual poetics. “The organic resounding of the world” resonates beyond communicational, informational and even symbolic meaning, and it is here that Antonioni’s poeticity lies. In the following pages I trace a reading of his work that allows for a re-thinking of his cinema in light of sound, a sound that interlaces the images never explicitly or with direct functionality.

35 The Russian director, together with Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the few experimenters for the creation of a film language that uses sound poetically in all its potential for ambiguity and abstraction. The materiality of conventional reality and realist representation is blasted open into perceptual meanderings and sensual connections, blurring what is seen and heard with what is unseen and unheard but perceptible and sensed, changing the hermeneutics of traditional film sound, from explanatory closure to indefinite signification.

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The category of the “third sense” or of the “obtuse” as Roland Barthes poses it, as the sense that exceeds meaning and can be sharp and vague at the same time perfectly suits Antonioni’s audio-visual creation as it willfully defies interpretation, and obvious signification. For Barthes “the obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence” (Image Music Text 60) thus obtuse meaning cannot be explained or described, it “is a signifier without a signified … obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlocution” (61). Antonioni’s artistic and poetic style creates in his films, as Barthes puts it, “a great subtlety” his “art consists of leaving the road of meaning open and as if undecided” (Dear Antonioni 65). The resulting “leakage of meaning” disturbs any certainty while undoing all the “fanaticism” of meaning (67). For Barthes, Antonioni is the artist of the interstice, and in my view the function of the soundtrack in this art is exactly that of drifting meaning into indefinite sense, suspension, and hesitation.

The function of music and sound, then, is not affected and predetermined emotional cuing, but the creation of a musical “equivocal” which — to use Jankelevitch’s definition of music’s expressive regime — “bears meaning only indirectly and suggests without signifying” (73). In his seminal work Music and the Ineffable, Jankelevitch muses on the subversive power of music to hold contradictions (holding up Fauré’s music as exemplary). His comments open illuminating insights into the function of the soundtrack in Antonioni’s work. In his analysis music creates “a unique state of mind, a state of mind that is ambivalent and always indefinable. … Music is inexpressive in that it implies innumerable possibilities of interpretation, because it allows us to choose

165 between them … music is docile, lending itself to countless associations”. The listener is induced to “the most diverse interpretations … anything it pleases us to imagine” (74-

75).

Antonioni’s creative and poetic disposition generates films with a sound-image track that plays along the lines described above, using physical sonorities that open up into the subjective, the mental and the spiritually perceptible. Against analyses that have read his work in terms of alienation and its depiction, I watch and listen to his films as a generous attempt to represent untellable things about the fragile existential condition of modern men and women, where human fragility calls for an intimate pietas that suspends any judgment and listens to the inexplicable in life. Through a delicate and abstract polyphony of sounds and images, Antonioni explores the inscrutability of human being, human desires and their loss. Seeing his cinema as a cinema of incommunicability and laceration misses the poetic intuitions and endeavors of a director who is interested in the mysteries and beauty of what cannot be said but only experienced and perceived about reality. It fails to perceive his nuanced and purposeful exploration that admits how things can be absurd tragic and happy at the same time

(see Calvino on L’Eclisse, 1929). His socio-emotional narratives do not start from any fixed ideological stance. Instead they are founded in a deep human interest and a capacity for feeling that investigates human feelings while expanding the expressive possibilities of the cinematographic form used to investigate them. The abandonment of conventional narrative and structural artifices allows the camera to look at, linger, follow, frame and listen prolongedly to people, gestures, landscapes and objects,

166 according to the rhythms and sensations of a cherished interiority and participation.

Antonioni was a guardian of feelings; he observed and listened to them in their subtle evanescence.

His representation of emotional ephemerality and existence finds expression in a sonic modality. As Carlo Di Carlo first noticed: “Antonioni individuates a new method of musical analysis — which is the basis for music concrete and experimental music researchers — where he indicates noise as integration of the image itself, substantially as sonic object” (Michelangelo Antonioni 28). It is in the late 40s that music concrete and experimental music established a shift in the European classical mode of musical signification from a basically symbolic to an indexical mode thereby drawing physical and conceptual attention to the worldly materiality of music and its sources hence the musical materiality of the world. This phenomenological approach to the world of sounds exposes the infringement of modern existentiality into the created art music texture and vice versa. Listening then becomes a mode of existential exploration and a source of indeterminate knowledge. Listening to the sonic objects so frequently present in Antonioni’s audiovisual cinematic texts allows for a more complicated understanding of his work and for recognizing the importance of his innovative conception of the function and creation of sound for film.

Antonioni’s peculiar attention to the significance of the sonic text is already apparent in film reviews like La peccatrice (Amleto Palermi, 1940) where he comments on the carefully crafted soundtrack, of which he remembers “the water gurgling in the sink while the music tacet, and the woman washes her face, as if to wash away the

167 imprint of vice, which goes down the drain” (in Sul Cinema, 31-32). His captivation with and appreciation for the sounds of the real and the perception of the poetic and soundful effect and affect is evident in his comments on the use of noise in Visconti’s

Ossessione, pointing out “the value that he can give to a sound, (the siren on the pier in

Ancona)” (45). Perhaps, as to “the value” that Antonioni “can give to a sound” an anecdote from his youth can poignantly be read as encapsulating the director’s relation to sound as a material, real thing and as a foundational moment in the development of his sonic consciousness of the world, and of his own artistic formation. In his recollection,

Spectacle always interested me, since I was a child. One year, on holiday, with some friends, we built a little theatre and we created an absurd play. I must have been 12. My task was that of making the “thunder” by rolling some rocks in a gorge that was behind the stage. The rocks fell down with a roar that echoed in the gorge’s throat, at the bottom of which there was a torrent. I liked that mysterious and hollow rumble. I made it thunder for the entire play. (in Felloni 13)

Thus one of the first creative moments that the director remembers has to do with the creation of a sound for a spectacle, the material and inventive process to generate that sound, the fascination for the produced sound and the pleasure of keeping the sound going while generating and listening to it. We might well say that

Antonioni will never abandon this kind of material relation to sound that is then transformed into aesthetic elaboration and contemplation. What was the effect of the constant thundering for this first spectacle? He found pleasure in the simple production of the real sound of the falling rocks which was intended to imitate the sound of a thunder. The making of a textural sound expanded perceptions and emotions. “I made it

168 thunder for the entire spectacle.” The immediate signifying intention of the rolling rocks as a thunder was augmented from the factual mimetic sound of a thunderstorm to a mysterious enveloping sonic atmosphere, because of the psycho-emotional affect that sounds can produce.36 This sound-consciousness will mark the future director’s entire production.

In Film

The editing plan for N.U., Antonioni’s second documentary, which he wrote before the actual editing, shows the director’s precise ideas about the soundtrack “sharp and enthralling”, as Ermanno Comuzio points out in his “Ricordo di Giovanni Fusco”(1968).

Giovanni Fusco is the expert music composer who will become Antonioni’s alter ego for

36 For the sake of pleasure in alternative narratives that “aim at” (Deleuze’s phrase for neorealism “the real is no longer represented but aimed at”) capturing the subjective lived event and its meaning, there is also another version of the same story, evidently significant and transformative, as reported in Aldo Tassone’s I film di Michelangelo Antonioni. It is always Antonioni who is narrating his first encounter with the theatre, which happened in Novelli di Paullo, a little town by Ravenna. This description is more detailed but does not mention how the little Antonioni thundered for the entire spectacle; the encounter with sound is however “memorable” so much so that in the above version of the story it has to be prolonged and extended to the end of the play organized by a friend, son of a theatre and cinema owner: “the little theatre was on Paullo’s rock; the stage was located in front of two cliffs. My friend was the director and I had the job of doing the thunder: the ‘piece’, in fact, was a big drama with dark hues. There was a storm and the noise of the thunder was generated by a marble ball with a diameter of forty centimeters, a medieval cannon ball that to make it clear, I had to roll down one of those monumental flight of steps with low steps that allowed for horses to transit. We brought the heavy marble ball to the top of the steps and at the signal I started its slow descent. It was so heavy that it slipped out of my hand. After falling down all the steps, it plunged off in the cliff downhill. I was terribly scared but the thunder was fantastic. The friends who praised me did not want to believe that the ball had ended up in the gorge. My first experience in the field of the spectacle was truly memorable.” (7-8)

169 the creation of a soundtrack that refuses all obvious clichés, and asks that the film composer take his job seriously. The traditional role of film music composers, maintained in the neorealist period, as artisans of codified and non-original composition disappears, as does, in Comuzio’s analysis, the fabricated barrier that assumes a divide between the idea(l) of the musician’s “noble labor” for the art/concerts and the “labor for food” for the cinema. Composing for film will become an art, and the encounter between Antonioni and Fusco constitutes a paradigm for this new direction. With their collaborative work it will be clear that composing music for film requires creative

“noble” labor and all the engagement on the part of a composer who will renounce and abandon the easy practice of the violin leitmotif (string thematics) for love scenes and percussion for a dramatic turn of events to produce sounds that best suit and beset the images. The detailed description in Antonioni’s editing plan explains what kind of cooperation was asked of the composer and the director and what notion of soundtrack was circulating.

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1. Sul fondino (On the titles’s backdrop)

Black music, loud enough, but not too loud.

With black music I mean black chants from the plantations. A chorus of negroes would be perfect. Lacking it, the trio will play: piano, saxophone, and clarinet. Please, no spirituals, nothing mystic. A cadence of labor and toil. A slow music then, and strongly syncopated. The same motif even if arranged and varied will run/play during the entire documentary, when I say black music.

2. On the train shot, corresponding noise (without whistle). As the train’s noise fades away, one will listen to a distant voice doing the roll call. Only a few names will be discernable. Then synchronized, a stronger voice on the shot of the man doing the roll call. Then the voice fades out with the image.

It must be a voice different from the speaker’s voice [MA uses speaker in Italian, he means the voice over probably]. A vulgar voice, maybe aphonic. You will ask for the names from Bollini, who is from Vaselli. (. . . ). You will send thirty or so names to me and I will choose them. Names of real street cleaners. [a nice detail, concerning the search of authenticity]

3. Music starts again with the two men in front of the fireplace. The trio, with a preponderance of the saxophone. Classical music: Bach, prelude VIII. To the cross-fade of the young boy who wakes up in Piazza di Spagna.

4. Piazza Istria. City noises without music. Those of the two cars passing by, clear. It is a horn. The city noise continues in the shot with the girl who throws the garbage bag in the subsequent one. But in this one the deaf thud that falls into the puddle prevails. From here on music again. Piano solo. Typical silent film music. Melancholic. For the entire sequence until the shot with the gatherers who come out from the main door with the garbage sacks on their shoulders. The piano will start to syncopate here, then the other two instruments will come in; black music again. Very sad. Very black. Through all of the street cleaners meal to the street cleaner who is sleeping in the Gianicolo. In this shot and in the previous one it must be very slow, a sense of resting.

5. With the appearance of the feathered horses there will be a synchronized clarinet solo, livelier than the rest. But the motif stays the same. It will be only a very brief variation. Then it will be the saxophone time, over the boy who searches: blacker than ever (just to say that hoping that Fusco and Trovaioli understand what I am saying) in the shot with the masked man.

When the castle appears, the trio will start again. Same motif continues until the cross-fade.

6. With the evening, until the shot with the paralytic man, Bach played by the trio, or only by the saxophonist if he can do it.

When the street cleaner puts the sacks down on the railing, one will listen to a train shunting. Distant whistle bridging the last shot. Then black music, usual motif, stronger and stronger until the end.

N.B. The music must not be cumbersome, that is noisy. The comment must be quiet. Variations perceptible/ accessible even to incompetent ears.

Table 1. Scaletta di Montaggio (Editing Plan, Italics are in the original text) for Nettezza Urbana (1948) in Michelangelo Antonioni (9-10).

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Even to incompetent ears it is clear that something is changing at the level of the soundtrack. Attending Antonioni’s films, the inattentive spectator will comment on the disappearance of the soundtrack, and even a number of academic writings focus vaguely on the silence of Antonioni’s cinema. But of course silence “never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence . . . One must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence” (Sontag

11). A signifying silence and its relationship with noises and voices on and off the screen, synchronized or confused, isolated, intensified or fading, audible or inaudible, creating gaps, ellipsis and interruptions is foundational to Antonioni’s creation of new film aesthetic modes of saying, and a new way of investigating the drama of being.

Abolishing the formulaic musical plenitude and dialogue abundance of the traditional soundtrack influences the perception of the moving images loosening the degree of fictional realism and increasing the expressiveness and abstract signification of the film. The spectator’s consciousness of the cinematic experience changes as it exits the comfortable zone of the completeness and facile functionality of a straight narrative. Antonioni’s films gaze at the vulnerability of human psyche and the exposure of modern being to pain and precariousness, texturing such content in the form of non normative audiovisual broken linkages.

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A Cinema of Poetry

Pier Paolo Pasolini posits Antonioni’s work as exemplary of a new cinema that blurs representational codes. His theoretical work on cinema helps to understand better the kind of change in cinematic language that Antonioni produced. Pasolini’s semiotically heretical formulation of the signifying process and articulation of images to cinema offers key and interesting concepts that allow thinking radically about cinematic representation as simultaneously the inscription, performance, and recasting of socio- cultural reality. Cinema is, in his formulation, “the written language of reality” that writes reality through the enunciation of captured images — what he calls the im-signs that is, image-signs — of the existing world. Cinema proceeds and participates in the reformulation of reality through its codification of images in cinematic language which imagines and re-shapes the social, exactly like the written verbal language codified and transformed oral language and its articulation of reality.

At a distance of more than forty years from his essays on cinema and the ensuing debate, mainly with film theorist Christian Metz (Le cinéma: langue ou language, Film language)and semiotician Umberto Eco (La struttura assente 149-160) who dismissed the possibility of such semiotic parallel, Pasolini’s understanding of cinema as an apparatus of representation and a machine for the production and reproduction of reality, meanings and social and subjective image/values have become the basis for

173 much critical theoretical work on film, from feminist analysis to cultural studies.37

Pasolini’s theory from 1965 resonates close to a post-modern discourse of reality as spectacle as elaborated in Guy Debord’s seminal The Society of the Spectacle (1967) where new media change the human perception of the real world: Pasolini affirms that new media “write” reality. No longer graspable without interfering mediation (media writing) the real world is perceived as media images and media images are perceived as the real world, making life amount to an accumulation of spectacles. Pasolini’s essay on cinema as the written language of reality which recodes reality, does not proceed into the Marxist political denunciation of spectacle as total substitute for reality and as societal narcotics, even if his later work on media and television (Lettere Luterane) will definitely and passionately share, at least in part, such belief as he explores 20th century alienation from reality and the way reality is codified and reified.

In Cinema of Poetry Pasolini is interested in tracing the linguistic development of cinematic practices starting from the assumption that cinema as a language can find expression in poetic or prose forms. He affirms the oneiric, imaginative and subjective nature of film that derives from its visual foundation. If human vision is the mediation of existing reality by way of the optical perception of the exterior world, images also constitute the basic material through which we subjectively interiorize the world and experiences of the world in memories and dreams. Emphasizing cinema’s foundation in

37 For analysis in this direction see, Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Does-n’t (37-69), Rumble and Testa, Pier Paolo Pasolini: contemporary perspective. Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice.

174 images as products of the unconscious, Pasolini sees film as fundamentally subjective and poetic and believes that it should find its best expression in experimental forms of poetic language, that is, a language of polyvalent meanings, mysterious and ambiguous.

Nonetheless, as he observes, the cinematographic tradition which coincides with classical cinema, not including early/primitive cinema and the avant-garde, “after a few attempts which were immediately cut short” has developed into a “language of prose narrative” (41) founded on conventions of spatiotemporal continuity and narrative linearity. The essay proceeds to investigate how the poetic form is possible and how it is to be identified in the filmic.

Pasolini pursues his correlation of verbal language writing and cinematic writing: just like a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse, so does a film director, through the use of camera movements and montage (in Stack 145-154). Taking from literary theory the notion of free indirect discourse of the nineteenth century,

Pasolini posits it as the linguistic/filmic technique that allows us to identify and define the poetic in cinema (“Comments on free indirect discourse” 79-101, for a theorization of the indirect discourse see Bakhtin/Voloshinov Marxism and philosophy of language,

Chap. X and XI).

Direct discourse in cinema corresponds to the point of view shot, where the camera work and editing function as quotation marks in the written text. A shot or a reverse shot of the character establishes his or her perspective so that the ensuing or preceding scene shows what he or she is looking at, or imaging. A free indirect point of view, instead, blurs the point of view of the director and that of the character until they

175 are indiscernible. Pasolini defines cinematographic free indirect discourse as “the immersion of the filmmaker in the mind of his character and then the adoption on the part of the filmmaker not only of the psychology of his character but also of his language” (44). Total mimesis will be impossible given the specificity of film which would require an immersion into the character’s psycho-physical factuality, as with his/her actual way of looking at reality, seeing things and then expressing them through verbal language. For this reason, in Pasolini’s formulation, the filmmaker must fuse psychological, social, linguistic differences and gazes into a stylistic articulation which results in the creation of the free indirect point of view. In Pasolini’s words this causes the liberation of

the expressive possibilities compressed by the traditional narrative convention through a sort of return to the origins until the original oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality of cinema is found through its technical devices. In short, it is the “free indirect-point-of-view-shot” which establishes a possible tradition of the “technical language of poetry” in cinema. (47)

The free indirect subjective is a mode of film narrative that erases the discernible separation of the omniscient director’s point of view from the mimetic point of view of the characters. The film does not proceed via the traditional identifiable character’s vision and verbalization on the one hand and the guiding and external vision/narration of the camera/director on the other. Such a film blurs representational codes and voices, author and characters’ gazes and becomes an incommensurable fragmented text of split but meaningful connections, where there is no definite viewing subject anymore but a multitude of tangled and suspended gazes.

In Pasolini’s analysis, Antonioni’s Red Desert represents precisely the film in

176 which the director blends his own vision of the world with that of the character— here a neurotic protagonist—so that the scenes are always animated by a delirious aesthetic gaze which does not really belong to anybody: (the director) Antonioni’s vision becomes

(the character) Giuliana’s vision, and Giuliana’s vision becomes Antonioni’s vision.

Identitary and subjective looks become impossible, so that the film proceeds by irregularities, excluding possession of meaning and displacing it constantly. The point of view is free in the sense of being un-owned, un-attached and un-ascribed to a single character; it holds multiplicities and is freely expressive. The camera works against the normative and bourgeois film tradition of point of view identification, mostly construed through the use of continuity editing which hides the work of the camera. For Pasolini one of the characteristics of cinema of poetry is that of “allowing the camera to be felt”

(51), foregrounding the constructed and formal nature of the moving images.

Despite Pasolini’s general attention to discourses of orality and to cinema as an audio-visual medium, in his formulation of the free indirect point of view, or free indirect subjective he demonstrates the same visual bias embedded in general film studies, and semiotics for that matter. No mention of the soundtrack is present in his essay on the cinema of poetry.

I believe we can usefully expand on the notion of the free indirect subjective from the mono-sensory perspective of view/vision that Pasolini presents to one that complicates the optical with the auditory, as the filmic texture is not constructed only through viewing subjects, but subjects that are also speaking and listening subjects. As a result, experiencing films written in the language of poetry, the spectator does not

177 necessarily know anymore who is listening to what or whom. The question becomes: through whose ears is she/he hearing things? The film’s auditory perspective and account is just as blurred and confused as the visual. It is not a matter of the traditional cataloguing of diegetic or non diegetic music/sound/voice38 anymore, or voice over and voice off; the free indirect subjective is also aural, and as much unsettling and poetic as the visual that Pasolini presents, as it introduces an indeterminacy of perception without hope or prospect of resolution.

Expanding the cinematic relations of image and sound, the cinema of poetry puts the aural and the visual in what can be called a free indirect relation to each other, so that they do not, and do not have to, match anymore. Sounds do not belong directly to images, are not written tightly into the filmic text. Thus the matching process is loosened and aleatorically given up to the audience. As a result, it is not only the camera that is felt, as Pasolini put it, but the entire construction/trick of synchronizing sounds to images. The classical cinema audio-visual illusion is disturbed and undermined, that is, the human cognitive process at the basis of cinema viewing that generates ‘realistic’ visual-oral signification is interrupted and complicated. In cinema of poetry, the spectator is made aware of sound, and indirectly of the existence of the soundtrack per se, hence of the workings of sound in relation to the image-track. Nevertheless the process that Michel Chion terms synchresis, from the combination of the words and

38 See Claudia Gorbman’s chapter on narratological perspectives (11-30) where she traces the definition of diegetic and non-diegetic music/sound/voice to the Russian formalists and their basic distinction between fable, as the represented story, and subject, as the textual treatment, which was adopted by film theorists, firstly by Etienne Souriau. The diegetic in film is the inferred spatiotemporal world of the actions and characters on the screen, the non diegetic is all that does not originate from the perceived real world on the screen, while the metadiegetic refers to the representation of the characters’ imagination, as in dreams, flashbacks, triggered memories, which are formulated as images and sounds.

178 notions of synchronism and synthesis, continues to apply. With synchresis Chion indicates the coming together of a sound and an image when they occur at the same time, and the resulting mental unity in the moment of apprehension. Synchresis does not necessarily function in a naturalistic and illusionistic way. Sounds and images articulated or composed as an audio-visual score, now dissonant and expressionistic, influence and contaminate each other reciprocally, they modify and recast each other’s respective properties and meanings by projection and interference.

Throughout his works Antonioni plays with dislocated and disquieting sounds, intensified and amplified noises and ambient clatter that cover and make dialogues inaudible or shatteringly intelligible against the conventional practice of their primacy in the soundtrack. It is clear how the classical speculative distinction between diegetic and non diegetic sounds becomes unnecessary. The expressionistic and creative use of sound undoes the traditional film structuring that presupposes an evident separation of narrative/textual agency and film framed story to which non diegetic and diegetic sounds belonged respectively. In cinema of poetry the narrative technique as textual strategy becomes part of the story narrative. The use of non-traditional and non mimetic sound-image relations becomes instrumental in the creation of poetic and expressive stylemes, the smallest units of style which make up a poetic text (Stacks 154).

Adding the auditory to Pasolini’s exclusively visual definition of the free indirect subjective, the free indirect subjective becomes audio-visual. The film characters’ aural perception mixes with that of the director, thus assigning auditory stances and belongings ceases to be meaningful. With the auditory free indirect subjective, sounds

179 do not belong immediately to the events on the screen or off-screen, rather they constitute, in their free relation to the images, the cinematic poetic experience. The indeterminacy of sound serves to leave facts and discourses open, purposefully un- ended, subjects and subjectivity cease to be univocal and become porous, ambiguously resonant and polyvalent in open relationality to things and beings.

Antonioni achieves a non normative representation of visual and aural experiences through the use of non matching sounds in a poetically free montage. Very often the audience listens to (inter) subjective sounds of altered states of consciousness, which could seem to echo the statements about a cinema of poly-expressive symphonies and dramatized states of mind expressed in the Futurist Cinema Manifesto

(1916). Antonioni complicates the subjective by virtue of his interfering elaboration where the recreated aural perception is somehow independent from the immediate pro-filmic but also from the character. Sound-image-character synchronicity and character identification are not measures of the cinematic experience any more. Sounds are selectively altered, emphasized, dialogues presented inaudibly generating a sonic awareness of the simultaneous materiality, subjectivity, and abstractedness of the filmic sonic gesture. Moreover the rendering of sound shifts from the fictional real to a hyper- real, a real that is sharper, more present, affective and more unstable. It is wholly expressionistic, undetermined, and poly-significant. The soundtrack is used to articulate many kinds of sense relations and multiple meanings that resonate on the screen and beyond it.

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The effect is that of capturing the unrepresentable present-ness of phenomenal reality, which does not ask or allow for interpretation, but calls for, as Synder proposes, a “purified vision” (128) and I would add listening.39 Purposefully perhaps, as hinted by

Pasolini in his Cinema of Poetry essay, Antonioni often chooses unconventional characters typified by a lack of balanced and knowable self. Struggling with codified roles and norms of behavior they provide “access to an almost mystical vision of things .

. . becoming transparent ‘eyes’ in a Universe of light and energy, rather than ideology”

(Synder 127). They also become transparent ears in a Universe of sound and energy.

Antonioni’s cinematic output navigates in this sound-scape and his characters seem endowed with mystical hearing in a universe of sound. His filmic constructs ask for a sophisticated spectator, one who is willing to follow the cinematic experience in a dynamic and participatory way so as to fully enjoy its pleasures and cultural implications, and who, becoming immersed in the same experiential and sonic dimension as the characters and the director, needs to get actively involved in “purified” audio-vision.

39 The idea of “pure” non verbal interpretive approach to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni is well argued by Stephen Synder in his “Antonioni: Cubist Vision in The Red Desert” where he posits the work of the director as visual and cubist, calling for a visual apprehension and refusing the modernist assumption of the division of depth and surface, with its consequent cult of meaning residing under the surface which is very often used as paradigm for the analysis of Antonioni’s work. Against a logocentric approach for which it is pure thought that allows access to reality behind or beneath the surface, Snyder suggests a more complicated and holistic understanding of Antonioni’s represented world. His bias is in the strictly visual foundation of the reasoning. Snyder is also one of the very few scholars, together with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Kevin Z. Moorem, who refuse to read negative alienation as the paradigm that contains Antonioni’s representation of modern life.

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The Binomial Act Antonioni-Fusco

Giovanni Fusco, considered one of the fathers of modern film music, is the music composer for all the films of Michelangelo Antonioni40. The adjective ‘modern’ is used in same sense that Roland Barthes intends when he refers to Antonioni and describe his films, even if Barthes did not account directly for the participative role of the music and the composer. Modern is the key to a different understanding, or acceptance, of the

40 The uninvestigated musical tread of analysis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films and consequently the recognition of Giovanni Fusco‘s unique contribution, was chosen for the first time at a conference in Ravenna (May 21-22, 1999) organized by the University of Bologna. The conference documents are published in The sonorities of the visible. Images, Sounds and Music in Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema. Despite the promising title of the thirteen speakers only four discussed music. Michel Chion, who was invited, could not attend. He sent a couple of pages that are included in the publication, and briefly sketch the renewal brought to film sound by the duo Antonioni-Fusco, who create “symphonies of life noises”(95) with no intent of “musicalizing” them. Roberto Calabretto, (musical expert and author of Pasolini e la musica) discusses the musical evolution of Giovanni Fusco as a film composer who successfully arrives at a modern conception of film sound where the privileged musical object is noise. Fusco creates an idea of a “global sonic system” (61) for film that is fascinatingly audible in the cinema of Antonioni. Alberto Boschi presents some of the ideas expressed by Antonioni on what the soundtrack does in his films, and analyses the electronic music score of Red Desert composed by Vittorio Gelmetti who transfigures poetically and obsessively the noises of the world, as Antonioni desired. Ermanno Comuzio — the historical musical conscience of film in Italy, who collaborates with magazines such as Cinema, Bianco e Nero, Cineforum, La Rivista del Cinematografo, Quaderni del Cinema — offers a sort of evolutionary story of the technical possibilities of film music, form traditional musical accompaniment to the computer music turn. He sees the duo Antonioni-Fusco as fundamental to the changing language of film sound. The conference did not really generate a trend of listening to Antonioni’s films, nonetheless the book series Una Regione Piena di Cinema contains a volume dedicated to Michelangelo Antonioni, where two essays out of seven are dedicated to the musical/sound component of the director’s films. Roberto Calabretto, the musicologist presenting at the Sonorities of the visible conference, explores the use of music as language in Antonioni’s films. He emphasizes the break from traditional uses of music in film, and the creation of a very complex audiovisual system made of interesting interrelations in need of further investigation. The other essay focusing on sound is an extract from Paolo Giacomini’s undergraduate thesis (tesi di laurea) Al di la dell'immagine. Gli effetti sonori nel cinema di Michelangelo Antonioni. Giacomini analyses the last seven minutes of L’Eclisse as the film sequence which reflects best Antonioni’s inspiration for a soundtrack made of rough noises taken from the real world. He proceeds to exemplify how these noises and sounds are structured in a polyphonic form of rhythmic- syntactical links with the images which develop onomatopoeic or syncopated, corresponding, or dissonant relations. Both Giacomini and Gelmetti reject Chion’s idea (in Sonorita`) of the intentional non-musicality of the use of noise in Antonioni’s films. Giacomini sees the entire film L’Eclisse as deliberately organized as a musical composition, with a presentation of the theme (in noises), variation of the theme itself, and the conclusion; on the other hand he points out how recognizable places, objects and random people from the streets are shown in different moments in altered audio-visual forms, where noises are fully invested with the function of signs, more allusive than assertive.

182 non-understanding of the human condition under bourgeois capitalistic society that has undone previous and more stable formulations and codes of expression/being. Giovanni

Fusco provided a minimalist, complex, and delicate musical intervention that transformed the visual image of film into an audio-image. Film becomes an audiovisual score which needs to be perceived audio-visually. Fusco did so by abandoning

Hollywood’s provincial taste for themes, melodies and depersonalized orchestral scores, introducing and playing with abstract sounds, suspended musical phrasing and unresolved motif sketches. Against the descriptive, affective, simply emotional or coloristic function, the soundtrack acquires representative, reflexive, substantiating, and signifying value. Fusco operates a semantic redefinition of the soundtrack/text while exploring poetically the sonic expressive potential of object and ambient sounds and noises. Musical sounds and non-musical sounds are interrelated syncretically, eschewing traditional hierarchies and pertinences, in a play of sonic texture, rhythms, and gestures that exceed conventionality and standards.

Giovanni Fusco can be said to represent and embody the history and evolution of film music. Born in 1906, he started his career when he was a young boy, as his brother was an orchestra conductor who also performed in movie theatres crafting the soundtrack of silent films. Giovanni followed him as a pianist in the Roman movie theaters. He started working as a composer of original film music during the twenty- year fascist period, authoring the music for Il cammino degli eroi (1936) by Corrado

D’Errico, La contessa di Parma (1937) by Alessandro Blasetti, Il dottor Antonio (1938) by

Enrico Guazzoni, Pazza di gioia (1940) by C. L. Bragaglia. In 1948 his encounter with

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Michelangelo Antonioni, for whom he composed the soundtrack of N.U. (Nettezza

Urbana), was decisive for his entire professional career and the future of film music.

Until his death in 1968, he worked with Antonioni on all his films, becoming essentially his musical alter ego. Red Desert was their last film together. It is significant, I think, and more than mere coincidence, that after Red Desert, Antonioni’s film production changes tone, language, settings etc. To understand the fundamental significance of Fusco’s musical workings, it should not be forgotten that he also composed the music for two of the signature films by Alain Resnais`, one of the French fathers of modern film,

Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and La guerre est finie (1966). Shortly before his death in

1968, he created the soundtrack for Love and Anger, a film testimony to the years of the

Revolution of the sixties with shorts by Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Godard, Lizzani and

Pasolini. Thus Fusco’s mature work is perfectly inscribed in the modernizing and avant- garde current of cinema for which he created the sonic-scape. It is also worth mentioning that at the time there was, in Italy, a growing interest in electronic music. In

1955, in Milan, Luciano Berio together with Bruno Maderna founded the Studio di

Fonologia della Radio, dedicated to the production of electronic music; Henri Pousseur and John Cage where often guests there. The studio was an avant-garde outpost in

Europe open in all directions to musical explorations and elaborations, its studio housed various and numerous oscillators, noise/waveform generators, modulators, and a much envied tempophon (a time and frequency regulator that allowed changes in the duration of the recording while keeping the same frequency).What was, if any, the familiarity of the film music composer with this temple of modern music making and

184 experimentation is still to be investigated, but what is certain is that his sensibility allowed him to co-participate in the innovative music flux. 41

Music and the concept of what music is, was being revolutionized, and Giovanni

Fusco brought that change to the language of film music.

It is significant to note that in the realm of film music Giovanni Fusco occupies a particular interstitial position when compared to acclaimed, eclectic, and prolific Ennio

Morricone whose work, even if he superbly and at length collaborated with art cinema directors like Marco Bellocchio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo and Bernardo

Bertolucci, has always been inscribed in a more popular and Hollywood perspective.

Starting with the sound-score for Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti” westerns, passing via The

Mission, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (both nominated for the Oscar for Best

41 What might constitute an interesting correlation is the simultaneous appearance of Antonioni’s Red Desert and Luigi Nono’s La Fabbrica Illuminata, in 1964. Luigi Nono was a contemporary and electronic music composer associated with the Darmstadt School and a friend of Bruno Maderna at the Sudio di Fonologia in Milan who had encouraged him in the pursuit of a musical path. As an interesting coincidence while both Antonioni and Nono’s work share the subject explicitly referred to by the title of Nono’s work, the factory, it is the first time that Antonioni opts for a soundtrack which included electronic music. While Red Desert is generally celebrated for being the first color film by the director, it is also the first film to establish an expressive and creative connection with the contemporary European musical avant-garde. It is also the first film on which Giovanni Fusco worked together with a younger musician, Vittorio Gelmetti who composed the electronic music parts and was working at the Studio di Fonologia S2FM in Firenze founded by the pioneer of electro-acoustic music in Italy, Pietro Grossi in 1963 after his experience at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. Pietro Grossi obtained the first teaching position in Electronic Music at the Conservatory in Firenze. I have as yet not found sources which testify to how Gelmetti entered the work of Red Desert. As radical researcher of avant-garde music, and very experimental in the field of electronic music, he will later work for other films contributing his rare formal research imbued of political consciousness in film like Sotto il segno dello scorpione (1969) by the Taviani brothers or E di Shaul e dei sicari sulla via di Damasco (1973) by Gianni Toti where his open and critical understanding of image-sound relations allows for an extremely complex and polisemantic musical discourse. (see Rondolino, Cinema e musica).

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Music and both winners of the Golden Globe), Dario Argento’s The Phantom of the

Opera and many TV works, Morricone’s production occupies a wide spectrum of different film genres and though always recognizable cannot be labeled. While he received the honorary Academy Award at the 79th Academy Awards presentation on

February 25, 2007, “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music”(http://aaspeechesdb.oscars.org/icswpd/exec/icswppro.dll?AC=qbe_query&TN=

AAtrans&RF=WebReportPermaLink&MF=oscarsmsg.ini&NP=255&BU=http://aaspeeche sdb.oscars.org/index.htm&QY=find+acceptorlink+%3d079-26).

Giovanni Fusco inhabits the niche of avant-garde film and music, and probably the chronology of his life, which ended in 1969, did not favor an overtly public recognition of his artistic achievement.

From playing traditional piano music to accompany silent film and specifically, as

Antonioni put it, performing music in order to cover the noise of the projector (“La malattia dei sentimenti” 42) Giovanni Fusco arrived at the creation of soundtracks mostly focused on sounds and noise, poetic musical noise. Fusco gave “light” to the films of Antonioni, and gave him, as he wanted, music that was not created for the spectator, to induce a response to the images and create a relationship between the spectator and the film, but music that had, or was in, a relationship with the film. Music that was inside the image, not outside of it as booster or commentary on the side of the facilitation of the audience’s understanding. Story of a Love Affair (1950) won the Silver

Ribbon for best original score at the Cannes Film festival in 1951; L’avventura (1959)

186 followed nine years later with the same prize. At that time, in an interview with Marina

Magaldi, when asked about the necessity of music in film, Fusco answered,

You cannot make a movie without music. Duvivier tried and he failed. And nobody else imitated him. Music is the light, the soul of film. Try to subtract it and you will see that the film by itself does not hold. I would also like to say that every film necessitates music specifically created for it. (“La ‘musica per film’ si chiama Giovanni Fusco” 340)

Music, or the musical, becomes the component beyond grasp, like light or the soul, for the creation of the poetic language of cinema. The collaboration of Antonioni and Fusco determined a transformation of the making and the function of the soundtrack that is characteristic of a new cinema, a cinema that is written in the visual and sonic language of poetry which threatens predictable and established boundaries of textuality and subjectivity.

Gilles Deleuze, in his study Cinema, distinguishes between the “movement- image” in which movement defines the cinematographic time and the “time-image” in which movement is only one consequence of temporality, and introduces organically the sound dimension in the elaboration of the time-image. The movement-image is typified, in various forms, by the silent films and mainstream Hollywood cinema. The time-image is inscribed with time felt as cinematographic duration, “nothing happens . .

. and in reality something always happens because time passes” as Pasolini had beautifully put it (“Quips on the Cinema” 230). The time-image starts to appear with

Italian Neorealism and is best exemplified later in the work of Antonioni. The time- image insists on ellipses and is inhabited by sound. In Deleuze’s formulation the “new image” is constituted by “the purely optical and sound situation” (Time-Image 5) and

187 codified by “a principle of indeterminabilty, of indescernibility” (7) Sound, inscribed as a continuum, constitutes “the fourth dimension of the image” (235). Deleuze’s work largely recognizes Michel Chion’s speculative contribution to discourses of orality and sound in film, but it is also imbued significantly with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s theories of cinema, especially the essay on cinema of poetry (see in Cinema 1 the theorization of the perception image) and more broadly influenced by his poetic attention to matters of sound. Thus Deleuze, bringing together Pasolini’s intuitions, provides a cogent definition of the image that writes the cinema of poetry and that he calls the time- image, born with the second generation of the talkies and belonging to the films of, among others, Antonioni and Resnais. It is here that we should place the role of Fusco as modern film music composer. In the time-image “all the sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image” (Time Image 241) ergo the sonic elements possess the disruptive qualities of performing the image, giving it “light”, in Fusco’s words.

Often commenting on the function of music in his films, Antonioni grants direct interpretive keys for the understanding of his way of articulating the sound-images, as in the affirmation that the soundtrack is essential as far as “there is reciprocity of relationships. The image cannot do without the music, and music apart from the image does not have any value, no validity” (Fare un film 43). Here he is confirming Fusco’s idea of the impossibility of a film without music, together with the absolute necessity of having music composed specifically for a film. Antonioni was affirming the notion that the use of repertoire music had to be abandoned in favor of the creation of original film

188 music. To do so he needed to emphasize an unquestionable interrelation of sound and image and the uniqueness of the resulting film/sonic relationship. He reaffirms this throughout his career, as in his declaration that “the only way for music to become acceptable in a film is to disappear as autonomous expression to become an element of a unique sensory impression” (“L’idea mi viene attraverso le immagini” 134). Images do not need to be “musicate”, the soundtrack does not have a different status from the images, images music and sounds have to be indissolubly intermingled. This aesthetic concept and the resulting work anticipate the definition that Gilles Deleuze gives of the time-image as a sound-image continuum. Starting from these premises the status of film music has developed a creative autonomy and a cultural significance of its own, and as such it can be valued. Today the minimalist and expressive musical pieces composed by

Fusco for his films are available as commercial recordings, in particular on a CD which was released in 2006 by an esoteric reissue label from California, Water

(http://www.dustedmagazine.com/labels/666) which has collected together much of his work.

Antonioni’s Post-Synchronization

To the question posed to Antonioni by Pierre Billard in an interview in 1965 “Do you prefer shooting with direct sound or post-synchronization?” the director replied,

When I can, I prefer direct sound. The natural sounds, noises and voices captured by the microphone have suggestive power impossible to obtain with post- synchronization. Moreover the majority of professional microphones are much more sensitive than the human ear; often sound recorded on location is enriched by thousands of unexpected noises and sounds. Unfortunately we are not sufficiently advanced from a technical point of view to be able to use this

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modality of sound recording always. Outdoors it is difficult to obtain good sound quality. Post-synchronization and dubbing offer other advantages. I believe that sometimes the transformation of a noise or a sound is indispensable to attain specific effects. In the same way, in some cases it is necessary to change/alter the human voice. (“L’idea mi viene attraverso le immagini” 133)

Interestingly Antonioni’s response reveals his open and non ideological or purist approach to the workings of the soundtrack. For him, as for Italian directors in general, as we have seen, the use of post-synchronization does not constitute a sin of any kind, and on the contrary it offers creative and expressive possibilities which are otherwise unattainable. Despite his appreciation for the specific qualities of direct sound, the malleability of post-synchronization seems to constitute a plus. Thus Antonioni’s struggle against foreign film dubbing has not lead him to the rejection of the post- synchronization technique per se. He is cognizant and cunning, and mostly interested in the transformation of the traditional soundtrack so as to bring it to a different level of expressivity, as he stated in another interview a couple of years before (“La malattia dei sentimenti” 41-42). Starting with his first five films, the use of music is very sparse, exception made for Le Amiche (1955) where music plays for forty minutes of the film, which is anyhow limited if we compare it with the common and constant use of rhetorical music overflowing images in films at that time. Already, in these early films, the soundtrack is not fitted to the narrative exigencies of the filmed story and orchestrated to coordinate and direct the viewing and understanding of the images.

Rather it intricately interacts with them, creating new meanings and interpretive perspectives, becoming the expression of a soundful poetics of voices noises silences and music that contribute to render the film an open text. In fact, Antonioni says:

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I believe that films do not have to be understood, one does not have to ask the images to explain only one content. To a film one must ask much more, or something different. Thus to the cinematographic spectator one must ask an unusual thing: to modify his/her own perceptive faculties, to learn how to construct his/her own vision, sound and idea, in a unique experience that allows him/her to enter into the entire film and to enjoy it: being there by his/herself. (“Michelangelo Antonioni: Al cuore del senso” 15).

In L’avventura (1960), music becomes even more discrete, leaving space to evocative and ineffable ambient sounds and noises. It creates a unique audiovisual score

(“Parole di un tecnico” 173) (Carlo di Carlo Michelangelo Antonioni 28) made of sonic objects, in the sense imagined by the theorists and practitioners of music concrete and experimental music who placed their attention on the materiality of existent sounds.

This approach culminates in Red Desert (1964) where real sounds are transfigured electronically, and noises and music become one thing, indiscernible from each other.

In a 1960 interview for Cahiers du cinema with André Labarthe, responding to a question about his idea of the sound-image relation, Antonioni affirms:

The soundtrack has enormous importance for me and I try to dedicate a lot of care to it. With soundtrack I mean natural sounds, more than the music. 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 which constitute the film’s soundtrack. In my opinion it is the music that best fits the images. It is rare that music fuses with the images, usually it serves to put the spectator to sleep, to impede him/her from appreciating clearly what he/she sees. All things considered I am against “musical comment”, at least in its present form. I find something rancid, old, about it. The ideal would be to construct a wonderful soundtrack made of noises and have it directed by an orchestra director…Even if, in the end, the only person capable of doing it, would be the director. (“All’origine del cinema” 127)

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Stating his uncompromising interest in new sound expression for film against the old and stale music-track tradition, Antonioni reveals his intention to take what he likes and can use best from on- location sound recording and then to recreate and reformulate real world sounds into innovative musical compositions. His desire for an orchestra director to arrange “natural sounds”, points to his non mimetic and naturalistic interests in sound per se but as potentially musically and expressively significant. Again talking about L’Avventura, Antonioni states how his use of sound, music and noises has no realistic (or plot descriptive) intent; the musical moments of a story are those in which it is necessary to “get separated from reality, to force it. It is then that music has its own function, at other times, you need to utilize noises, not in the spirit of realism, but rather as sound effects, naturally with poetry.”

(“L’Avventura”241)

These notes bring to mind the sonic treatment of The Eclipse (1962), the film that concluded his trilogy of feelings. Coming out of a relationship, starting, and probably ending a new one, the protagonist Vittoria (Monica Vitti) experiences reality charmed by apparently meaningless details and little events, and as in Calvino’s analysis

“always with an attitude that is both suffering from the ugliness of things . . . and at the same time ready to enjoy the taste (the poetry) of what is there, of what exists.”

(“L’Eclisse di Antonioni”1927) Ready to experience the poetic signs of modern life, its uncertainty, silences, empty spaces and suspended locations; the EUR district where she lives is mapped as a construction site and a playground.

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The noise/sound score plays a suggestive part, while it seems to come out of the city landscape it also projects a sense of Vittoria’s way of interiorizing and playing with reality, to the point that the sonic surroundings seem filtered through her uncommon sensitivity. It reveals the motives of reality and her conscience. The character’s perceptiveness finds a moment of uncanny revelation, in a dark night when walking the streets in search of a neighbor’s dog. Enveloped in the dark quietness, the rhythmic sounds of clinking poles call Vittoria’s attention. Almost mystified, she walks toward them, and stares, in a moment of soundful and undecipherable contact. The only other audible noise is that of her steps, while she moves uncertain and contemplative among the sounds that jingled her sonic awareness. In the next scene we are in front of her house, where her previous lover, wanting to talk to her, forcefully tries the metal front door. The resulting effect is that of a sonic match, with his hands shaking the door handles, he creates a sound with a rhythm and materiality similar to that produced by the poles, only faster and more vigorous. A linear interpretation of this sonic connection, would give to the sound that captured Vittoria, almost a visionary power.

But the poignancy of the scene surpasses elucidation, makes sounds say things that words cannot express and opens the horizons of the experience beyond the quotidian into some indefinite sensory space.

The same bafflement characterizes the very famous final scene (7 minutes circa) of the film. Much has been said about the open endings of all of Antonioni’s films, but this one is particular for its interruption of the private story that opens into the bigger world, through cosmic suggestions. Its eerie use of sound and the disappearance of the

193 characters create a sense of other-worldliness —also the case with Blow Up, which ends with the imaginary sound of an invisible bouncing tennis ball and the erasure of the character from the field/screen.

In the final of The Eclipse, the ordinary world of the EUR district in Rome is transformed into a repository of secret life and living objects through the work of the investigating and lingering camera, and the absence of human sounds, except for the joyful sounds of kids playing with water, in the soundtrack. Very discreet piano music intersperses the sonic narrative made of almost (sur)realistic sound details, diminished or emphasized according to the camera distance or expressively: the breeze in the trees, the water spraying from the sprinkler, running water, cars and bus noise. The score creates the sense of a hearing presence that is not mundanely human and belongs more to the order of the metaphysical. The sonic focus displaces the viewer in a hyper- sensorial awareness that transforms alienation from the world into deep contact. The scene anticipates Giuliana’s dream in Red Desert where all things within life sing, produce sounds, and music. It is also reminiscent, ante litteram, of the Zone, in Andrei

Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) where all surroundings are imbued with sacrality and mystery, everything is alive, and generates sound. It projects the listening of another world that talks to us in the quotidian which is banal only if we do not listen to it. The ear acts as the perception organ of interconnection, and Antonioni in the flow of images, also offers a close up of an old man’s ear, then his eye, and finally his whole face.

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Even if Vittoria, The Eclipse’s protagonist, is absent from the scene, the outlook is informed by her subjective gaze and ear, metonymically represented with the piece of wood, she always played with, navigating in the bucket, one of the objects of her attentiveness for details. In these seven minutes all the meaningful objects and sounds that have made up the film and Vittoria’s story, are represented invested with meanings and sounds larger than the story and the character’s undetermined existential search.

The sonic emphasis opens new ways of perception so that sounds and noises surpass mimesis and subjective listening, becoming evocative symptoms of a real charged with extra meaning.

As Roland Barthes says, Antonioni works to make meaning subtle as a form of

“secondary political activity, as is any attempt to deplete disturb and undo the fanaticism of meaning” (Dear Antonioni 67). He does so also using silence, noise and music. The noise-track, in one brief but significant segment of this ending scene of The

Eclipse, works to focus the attention on the written words of a newspaper that a man getting off a bus is reading. With a frontal shot the Espresso’s front page titles are clearly pointed at the audience to read: “The dirty bomb of Krushev,” “Krushev helps the

Pentagon”, “Nuclear arms Race”. If such titles were not obvious enough, in a reverse shot the camera follows the man from behind showing the title of the page he is reading: “A fragile peace”. The tension/suspension created by the soundtrack finds a less ambiguous printed correlative that serves to reinforce and augment with detailed meaning the noise. The private story of the protagonists is left suspended in the forceful suggestions of planetary microscopic and micro-phonic mysteries and the human power

195 of self-destruction. The intensity of this scene comes from sound laboring the image and vice versa, and from Antonioni laboring film with his sonic awareness.

I want to emphasize that his sonic awareness is also technical. To create sonic colors, atmospheres and abstractions he does not ignore the practical process of recording. He has been aware of it since his first meditations on sound film. In the

1940’s article Words of a technician, he affirms how the poetic functionality of sound film is unquestionable and “in direct correlation with the perfecting of sound technology” (“Parole di un tecnico” 172). The poetry of cinema and the progress of the cinematic apparatus are tightly interrelated. To this end discussing the recording process he notices how it will be important to understand perfectly how the technical instrumentation works, what is the directionality of microphones and musical instruments, and how it will be necessary

to know the characteristics of noises’ modulation and how each noise is deformed during the recording, how it reacts with the various construction materials of the scenes, how it transforms itself cutting the high frequencies etc. practically to give noise its plastic value. (173)

In the same article Antonioni offers detailed comments on the necessity to consider the complex and expressive richness of the human voice both from the actor’s and the recording engineers’ point of view. The voice, just like any other instrument, needs to be studied so that it can find and carry its best expression on the screen. These notes offer a further insight into the multifaceted and articulate process of creation of the acoustics for the soundtrack in Antonioni’s films, they also point to his interest in technology as an instrument of possibilities.

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There is a scene in Red Desert where the main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti) together with her husband’s friend Corrado (Richard Harris) is walking by a construction site, they are looking for a skilled worker. The worksite is spectacular, a high technology scaffolding cut into the sky and presented in a low angle shot which slowly descends to the ground level then a long shot of the workers and finally Giuliana in a closer shot.

When she asks the worker what is the purpose of the stunning structure, the answer is that the entire structure belongs to the University of Bologna and is there to “create an antenna which can listen to the noise of the stars.” This scene can be read as a declaration of the love that Antonioni has for technology as always carrying the potential for imaginative and holistic openings.42

He also has a great fascination with stars and what they do out there. In his Story of a Love Affair (1950), there is a long scene where a couple meets in secret in a cine planetarium where the audience in the film and the audience of the film listen to a lecture about how many stars are in the firmament, how many are visible, “less than one would think, 3000, 3500 in all” and then a demonstration of how the stellar firmament would look that night if there were no clouds in the sky over Milan is announced. In this film, his first feature film, it is already interesting to note how

42 The scenes in the child, Valerio’s bedroom are worth noticing, it seems that Antonioni wants to emphasize how for children playing with technological toys has a pedagogical function. In one scene, the father Ugo explains to his son how his plastic toy disc can stay in equilibrium because of the gyroscope which serves also as ships stabilizer, all the ships that we see navigating in the port from the windows ( framing/screens) of their house. To remember here is the fundamental importance of gyroscopes in filmmaking practice. Antonioni shows how Valerio’s toys are all robots, like the one that he leaves on in his bedroom while he is quietly sleeping. The robot walks back and forth in the room and produces a constant noise which in the silence of the night becomes uncanny, so much so that this scene coincides with Giuliana’s awakening in a crisis. Everything that is explainable in technological terms, even in the kid’s bedroom, holds at the same time an eerie significance if considered in its indefinite inter-relation with humans.

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Antonioni is using the speech-track, at moments brutally juxtaposing voices to confuse the intelligibility of what supposedly, and traditionally, matters more for the plot: the conversation the couple is having. The stars on the contrary, are foregrounded with the voice track’s emphasis given to the lecture about the firmament. Thus in Red Desert we have found the aural counterpoint to stargazing, with the antennas extending majestically into the sky to listen for and capture the sound of the stars. The antennas do not receive radio emissions from Jupiter and Mars, which would have probably resounded with science and research. Antonioni poetically humanizes the listening of the antennas, emphasizing how technology can connect us, span the universe, and bring humans together and closer to the talking of the stars.

Listeninig to Red Desert

Red Desert explores the industrial landscape and sound-scape of Ravenna, following the physical and mental meanderings of the confused Giuliana. It is Antonioni’s first film which uses electronic music extensively, after a first trial with the score for the titles of

La Notte (1961) which mixed electronic sounds and urban noises. Electronic music uses technology to make sound art that, altering sounds in ways that obliterate or remove them from recognizable sources (musical and/or environmental), alters the auditive experience and breaks cognitive boundaries. Created through mechanical devices and electronic instruments, and later intangible digital software, it has the effect of radically re-inventing sounds relations and sonorities, de-familiarizing and inter-subjectivizing sonic space. It results in suggestive and uncanny effects, and invokes imagination,

198 becoming profoundly related to abstract ideas. Red Desert can be seen as a, fairly early, filmic exploration of how electronic music as a conceptual art re-interprets and revives the acoustic surroundings, mediating ideas of the natural, the artificial and expanding the human perceptible. It is used in the film to give sonic grain to the industrial environment of Ravenna. Against a simplistic and bleak treatment of industrialized reality as degradation and desperation, Antonioni explores and transcends the sites, neurotically and poetically, mixing Giuliana’s and his audio-visual perceptions. Ravenna becomes the epitome of modern living that needs to be taken account of and negotiated, in order not to fall prey to an impossible sense of attachment/detachment as with Giuliana, or, on the contrary, a sense of complete impenetrability fostering a non critical indifference as with her husband, the industrialist engineer Ugo (Carlo

Chionetti). Like the ending of the film suggests, it is existential re-familiarization that can save her.

The film’s credits are composed of out of focus panoramic images of trees, industrial chimneys interspersed with fixed blurred frames of industrial complexes in an indistinct landscape powerfully articulated as a sound-scape composed of a song without words, performed by a female voice, human and divine at the same time, that follows, isolated from and immersed in, a mix of industrial noises. The only traditional musical and melodious instrument in the piece is the voice, which undulates the dissonance produced by the electronic sounds. The indeterminacy of the images is swelled by an ambiguous, deep, intriguing and heterogeneous combination of noises, the piece is called Astrale. This synthesizer and choral piece is “Radiophonic style . . .

199 reminiscent of Delia Derbyshire at her finest” as a review of the CD Giovanni Fusco

Music for Michelangelo Antonioni puts it (http://www.boomkat.com/ item.cfm?id=23688), or more archeologically “reminiscent of futurist concerts where traditional instruments are replaced or accompanied by the sounds of technology”

(Dalle Vacche, “Antonioni’s Red Desert” 327). It is a composition that connotes the industrial landscape and expressively encapsulates Giuliana’s subjective alterity, her uneasiness with the socio-emotional life and moments of an existence which she cannot bear. Thus the music marks the images with her subjectivity, and vice-versa.

Paraphrasing Deleuze, who is writing about speech, we can say here that what sound

“utters is also the invisible that sight sees only through clairvoyance” (Time Image 260).

Astrale becomes the sonic presentation of industrial Ravenna and a short-circuit to

Giuliana, soon to appear in the images: a neurotic, with a different kind of consciousness and deeper perception of realty, things and beings. As she will voice, it is her love for everything that makes life unbearable. Antonioni is known to have been fascinated with the study of psychopathologies, and in this film there seems to be a perceptible blur of romantic thinking about clairvoyance and the neurotic person.43 Thus the feminine protagonist of Red Desert, lacking a “centered self”, as Stephen Snyder says about Antonioni’s characters in general, provides access “to an almost mystical vision of things” with her “transparent eyes in a Universe of light and energy rather than

43 See Carlo di Carlo “Il Colore dei sentimenti” (22) in M. Antonioni Il Deserto Rosso 1976 for his elaboration on the discoursive correlation of the metalinguistic use of color and Giuliana’s psychic characteristics.

200 ideology” (The Transparent I 127) And we can add, a mystical and clairvoyant hearing with her translucent ears in a universe of sound.

The use of electronic music compositions breaks with narrative illusion and mimesis, establishing an abstract relation with the images which are formally created to suspend ordinary spatiotemporal understanding and representation of places and beings. The recurring use of the out of focus, “cubist” framing of humans and objects, detailed close ups of industrial components, frames within the frame, abrupt shifting of point of view, interrupted gazes, or impossible representational perspectives, all result in a breaking of the subject’s, and the viewing subject’s certainties. Giuliana’s uncertain perspective and feelings inform the entire filmic enunciation made of discordant audiovisual concurrences, improbable chromatic solutions and apparitions, bloated sounds and inaudible dialogues. Exaggerated noises and the non naturalistic acoustic aspect assume, like the electronic music component, a signifying function which is instead overtly denied to verbal signification, as dialogues are inundated and covered by sound.

Imposing and undetermined sounds allude to Giuliana’s subjective perception even in her absence. They also function as a non descriptive autonomous expression, an abstract and elaborated voicing of the industrial scenery beyond the profilmic, the characters and the story, thus not directly anchored to the images. Nevertheless it is impossible not to perceive how there is always a sonic thematic link between Giuliana’s psyche and the industrial environment which results in an objective-subjective doubling.

To posit how Red Desert reaches this register of double expression it is useful to return to Pasolini’s notion of the free indirect subjective identified as the discursive and stylistic

201 practice for the writing of cinema of poetry against the conventional codes of representation which clearly differentiate objective (the film, the director’s) or subjective (the character’s) actions, vision, enunciations. And we must add auditory experiences through a laboring of the soundtrack post-synchronized in the studio, creating, recreating and editing sound. Millicent Marcus arguing for the narrative loose ends in Red Desert interestingly follows some sound cues, she notes “…the spectacular effusion of steam and noise that envelops Ugo and Corrado as they talk outside the factory is left unexplained. Ugo apparently offers an explanation to a bewildered

Corrado, but we cannot hear because of the noise” (Italian Film in the Light of

Neorealism 196). As spectators, we are led to assume that the characters themselves are able somehow to hear what they are saying. So it is us, as an audience who cannot participate in their conversation but become enveloped in a bloated sound-scape.

Antonioni used this styleme repeatedly in La Notte, so the sound-scape often overcomes the screen story. The effect though, is not that of formally confirming the audience in the listening condition of an audience. Excluded and abstracted from the on screen event, often involving a conversation, the audience is moved to a different sound plot that is complicated by a shift of perception, a suspension of a mimetic point of audition and here in Red Desert a short-circuit to Giuliana’s interiority via the director’s interpretive filmic gesture. This sequence can be considered as one of the most illustrative of the free indirect auditory subjective.

That the film images, and the sounds, represent/cross-refer to the mental condition of Giuliana becomes clear in the episode of the island, where like in a film

202 within the film, images and sounds follow Giuliana’s invented fable for her sick son

Valerio. Generated by her fantasy, they are filmically guided by her voice over. At the same time they are so richly figurative that they hold a status of their own, pointing to their own aesthetic status and creation. So does the accompanying singing voice and the narrative voice over which relates the fable in a way that a child cannot really follow.

Here again there is a doubling of the register of enunciation, indicating the power of the character to invest the entire film, to become the director and vice-versa, and signifying the power of sound to express inexplicably, to say more than words (Music and

Emotion).

In the fable that Giuliana narrates to her son Valerio, the peaceful island and its seaside are inhabited by a mysterious and enigmatic voice, a disembodied chanting voice that the young adolescent girl, the only human being living on the desert island, wants to locate. She searches for it all over, so pervasive is the voice, now close, now distant. It seems to come from everywhere; from the rocks that almost become fleshy with its sweet sound. But who is singing? Everything is singing- Giuliana says. In the filmic narration this fantasy starts with a visual-sonic close up of the waves, the chanting voice comes with tides which erase and smooth all things. The voice resounds as an act of desire which liberates Giuliana’s imagination and liberates her from reality. Thus the fable that she invents, or the film within the film that she creates, uses sound as therapeutic and redemptive. Almost immediate is the reference to the mermaids’ song but here the enchanting mythical singing seems to function positively as the breathing

203 into space of fantasized total harmony or total desire to overcome reality, suffering and history. And after the fable ends, Giuliana’s son, who was sick, is cured. Giuliana is not.

Pasolini calls this the “dream sequence”, a free indirect subjective, the filmic writing in technicolor of the comic-bookish idea that a kid has of a tropical beach (Heretical

Empiricism/Cinema 179). While he is making the child participate in the creation of the film fantasy, he does not consider the utterance and singing-act significant at all. It is worthwhile, instead, to underscore the poignancy of the presence of the voice, and the organic, human nature of the voice that circulates on the heavenly island, versus the electronic/industrial music and noises that inhabit the industrialized harbor of Ravenna and which can be said to make up the sonic equivalent of what Angela Dalle Vacche calls with Peter Brooks “the text of muteness” of Red Desert when she discusses the director’s use of color (Antonioni’s Red Desert 324).

If we consider the fable sequence as belonging to Giuliana, more than her son, as

Pasolini suggests, then we can draw the parallel between color and electronic music as a sort of muteness, a lack of words, the non verbal element that says the feminine of

Giuliana, and the speechless condition that she embodies in the technological world that so much disorients her. When Angela Dalle Vacche writes:

By honoring a certain madness of vision, and by celebrating the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images, and by expressing intense emotion through coloristic impressions, the baroque in Red Desert underpins all the pieces of the puzzle: Giuliana’s illness (325).

We could simply add the word sounds to images in the above quote and we would complete a fair description of what happens in the film if considered as an

204 audiovisual score. Often music is said to paint colors, musical colors, cold and warm, as notes and rhythms paint lines. I am suggesting a cross reading of the two different languages operating in the film, to see how they function correspondingly, and accent the soundscore.

In this film, his first color film, Antonioni literally colored reality to have it appear on the screen as through the eyes of a neurotic. The gaze on the industrial landscape is filtered through Giuliana, whose eyes struggled and hurt in front of the disappearance of nature. Her fantasy about the island is one of crystalline waters clearly opposed to the polluted waters that stagnate noxiously leaving dead fishes along the shoreline of

Ravenna. The chanting voice can be opposed to the mysterious cry that Giuliana and her friend Linda probably heard in the seaside cabin where they were conversing and partying with a group of friends. The cry represents a different enigma from the melodious chant, as Millicient Marcus proposes, possibly associated with a mercantile ship, perhaps a carrier of an unknown contagion (Italian Film 196). Firstly the cry can be said to encapsulate the psycho-physical power of sound which informs the entire film, from the perspective of the audience and the characters as well: as in the previously discussed scene, where high intensity sounds erase the conversation for the audience and impede communication, or render it difficult for the characters themselves. The above cry becomes a sound-object of discussion in the film narrative itself. There is in fact in the cabin, a debate among the party participants about who heard the sound and if that matters at all. It is Linda, the lady who is always reading, who comes up with this cry which nobody else heard except for Giuliana who later intervenes to say that indeed

205 she did hear it. Did she really, or is she simply making it up? Did the audience hear it?

The hearing function and the fleeting nature of sound is openly questioned, and only with a DVD player can the audience go back and check if the sound/cry is there. At the movie theater, for which the film was intended, the audience inevitably participates with the characters in the debate about the reality of the cry on the screen. In this scene we, as an audience, are part of the conversation and we can take sides. Who heard the cry? Does the cry matter, as Giuliana says, or does it not, as Corrado brutally states?

Why, as Giuliana asks, does Linda then agree to say that probably the cry was in the novel she is reading? And how is a cry in a novel, how is a sound a written word? The cry, heard/not heard in the cabin, was mysterious, probably an expression of disease, as the boat it possibly came from was waving a white handkerchief, readable as traumatic sign of some history of distress, injury, infection and/or death. This is the reason for which Giuliana was so scared and wanted to leave, and attempts to commit suicide for the second time in front of everybody. The function of the cry here is hurtful as supposedly curative is the signing voice on the island.

Moreover we can perceive a sound analog for the images of dirty waters in the electronic sound-score of the city, ‘dazzling, disorienting and in surplus’ (as colors are) while the crystalline waters of the too beautifully and serenely colored island find a correlative voice in the acusmatic chanting act. There is less color and sound hallucination on the island than in Ravenna, or it is a different kind of hallucination. The singing voice works as colors do. Dalle Vacche comments about the island:

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The pink sand and the blue-green sea recall the perfect pictures advertising a hidden paradise for a vacation in a travel brochure. Since the island cannot quite belong to the mediocre present, but only to a mythical past, it can only deceive humans, soothing them with a certain longing for a primitive origin that was never entirely their own (327).

The melodious singing is the arcane vocal projection of an imaginary bliss, of humans organically fused with nature and all the elements. As Giuliana says in her description, “everything was singing.” The voice might represent a sonic key to the malaise that Giuliana suffers from. Her incapability of being in the scattered present is made incurable by her romantic desire for perfect unity with things. So we can go back to the same vocalizing that appears in the credit sequence that opens the film, where it sings without words to the blurred industrial landscape and is immersed in a mix of industrial noises. We have then the sonic correlative to Giuliana’s interior condition, and an autonomous filmic and sonic statement. The titles undo the Manichean schematization that makes Giuliana sick, the separation of purity on the island with its chant, and the roughness of industrial Ravenna with its electronic soundings.

The titles with this sonic arrangement thus assume a structural and structuring function for the film and for a redefinition of the role of the sonic text. Using modified ambient sounds for their unique expressive value in syncretism with the voice rethinks hierarchical aesthetics and judgments, puts the melodic chant in conversation with noises, and opens up a plurality of interpretive paths for the polisemantic sound-music- image relations.

Talking about Red Desert, Antonioni says, in French, that it is a film that needs to be “senti”, which is “sentito” in Italian. The verb does not have an exact equivalent in

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English, the French and Italian, sentir/sentire in fact comprises two English verbs and meanings: to feel and to hear, to listen (Comolli, “Deserto Rosso”). Films need to be felt/heard. The statement invites us to share a human understanding that accepts and aspires to the ineffable; it is by feeling/listening that we feel/hear the ineffable. It is in his stylistically articulated and ephemerally expressive use of sound-images that

Antonioni says what kind of different understanding he wants to generate. He refuses the absolute rationalistic mind-set that firmly believes in science while does not know what to do with human desires and needs and clings to antiquated human morals.

Antonioni believes in the necessity of a new attitude toward things and beings, perhaps more mystical, suspended and more willing to accept indefiniteness and contradictions.

As he comments on Red Desert, the film is “Nothing difficult, nothing mysterious. In any way nothing more difficult and more mysterious than the life we all live” (ibid). Nothing difficult once we gather the necessity to feel/listen to his films, to enter personally in the psychological, existential and even metaphysical dimension of his films and characters immersed in the artist’s holistic attempts to creatively express the world of sight, sound and emotion as it is experienced by uniquely human subjects.

Chapter V

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Thousand Notes of Contestation

To trace the peculiarity of the Italian use of post-synchronization, from fascist control to creative subversion, in this concluding chapter, I illustrate how this technique, part and parcel of Italian art cinema production, constitutes a fundamental feature in the radical filmic work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. His treatment of films as audiovisual texts deserves particular attention in that it is necessary to fully understand the significant intricacies and provocations of his creations which use the soundtrack effectively and affectively.

Through Pasolini’s writings and interviews I show how he developed, in the making of his film aesthetics, his ideas about the use of post-synchronization. I also show how an analysis that listens carefully to his film work changes critical coordinates. Specifically Le

Mille e una Notte offers fascinating material to bring the present work to a meaningful conclusion.

Pasolini was among the signers of the Amalfi Manifesto against dubbing, which did not entail being against post-synchronization tout court like the radical opponents from beyond the Alps. The Manifesto was written against the ruling of the production companies over directors’ artistic choices about the soundtrack. It had none of the severe overtones, expressed, for example, by Jean-Marie Straub, which are condensed in this declaration, part of an interview on direct sound published in 1970 in Cahiers du

Cinema:

Dubbing is not only a technique, it’s also an ideology. In a dubbed film, there is not the least rapport between what you see and what you hear. The dubbed 208

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cinema is the cinema of lies, mental laziness, and violence, because it gives no space to the viewer and makes him still more deaf and insensitive. In Italy, every day people are becoming more deaf at a terrifying rate. (“Direct Sound” 150)

Her argument makes considerable sense when applied to the use of foreign film dubbing, where her position sounds much like a repetition of the arguments that

Antonioni was making in his articles in Cinema in the fascist 40s. On the other hand the ideological rejection becomes extreme and “deaf” itself in relation to the case of post- synchronization when practiced deliberately, for creative and poetic expression. The focus of this work has been to chart the history of the technical and stylistic process of post-synchronization, how it embodies the institutional national history from its fascist imposition to the subsequently developed, transmitted, and maintained mode of production. As any technology, post-synchronization becomes a shaping tool while at the same time it is shaped according to the social, political, economic and cultural discursive realities in which it is embedded. Thus it does not simply make Italians deaf, it can also, as explored with Antonioni, open their ears to a different kind of film listening.

In the hands of creative filmmakers, it allows for the creation of a soundtrack that undoes conventional practices and conventional listening. It is by listening carefully to the soundtrack without a dogmatic approach and considering it in its labor with and for the moving images that it is possible to comment on its functions and effects.44

44 The basis of this work has been a complication of the general definition of dubbing itself. I use dubbing to indicate the inter linguistic practice that substitutes national voices to the voices of the actors performing in foreign films, practically the enactment of the fascist imposition of the modality of film translation for mass fruition that mutilates the film, still today. Deriving from it, post synchronization is instead an intra language process that can also operate inside authorial discourses.

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If we listen to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s soundtracks it is evident how they respect the cultural politics and poetics of his filmmaking, where his ideological awareness informs the stylistic experimentation that often brings together radically different texts and dissonant modes of writing, unsettling the categories to which they supposedly belong and subverting conventionally accepted values. His audiences, far from being deafened, are asked to listen in complex and transformative ways. Pasolini methodically challenges their assumptions, forcing them to listen and actively make sense, or simply question his provocations which entail a disruption of well known textual and social structuration of meanings and values. He uses the soundtrack as counterpoint, to conflict, and reorient, the images and narrative. Post synchronization has thus come full circle, only now the purpose is to expand rather than contract and control social, cultural and political horizons. In the unsettlement of musical, cultural and narrative codes, Pasolini’s intent is always that of disturbing fixed notions and relations to create a different socio cultural awareness. In the trajectory that the present work traces about the specificities of

Italian cinema’s relation with the soundtrack, it is important to emphasize that he does so subverting the founding ideology of control and censorship that embraced post- synchronization in the first place.

Pasolini’s relation with the soundtrack, differently from Antonioni who is a pure filmic artist, is that of an ideologically committed intellectual, poet and writer who in the middle of his career, decided to “change language”, as he frequently put it, to go from writing to filmmaking, because of his “passion for life, for reality, for physical, sexual, objectual [oggettuale+, existential reality around” him and because cinema “expresses

211 reality with reality” (Stacks, 29). It is worth highlighting how these statements do not entail any intention or desire to equate film and reality, but express Pasolini’s belief in the materiality of the pro-filmic and the experiential reality of the filmed.

While becoming a filmmaker, Pasolini also worked on the elaboration of a film semiotics that could specify the grammar and attest to the different system of signs that constitute film as a language. His essay “The written language of reality” is a study of the detailed syntax with which cinema “writes” reality, like writing “writes” the oral. Cinema is the written moment of lived reality, thus life is cinema in nature, as orality is writing in nature, or in action: pure existentiality without the consciousness that the abstract process of writing casts over them, translating them into a set of cultural relations and complications. With this formulation, cinema allowed Pasolini to “write” reality and, as the poet he was, to poeticize reality. His polemics against naturalism and mimesis, in cinema and literature, begin with his declared poetic and mythological (mitico) love for reality that, he believed, can be grasped and lived as transformative and significant only if exposed in its profound cultural stratifications and ambivalences. Reality is protean and polysemic, and its writing (filming) must reveal and revere its nature, mythically and poetically.

Despite the fact that in positing the birth of a cinema of poetry Pasolini subordinates it to the use of the free indirect discourse which he presents as stylistic technique only from a visual perspective, for Pasolini , cinema, as the language of reality, is audiovisual. As a poet, he focuses on the importance of sound. Exploring this dimension in the essay “Cinema and Oral Language” (Heretical Empiricism 264-266)

212 where he discusses the importance of music and words in cinema, in particular of words as poetic expression, for their “contrast between ‘meaning’ and ‘sound’ which cannot be eliminated. Poetry as Valery put it is … ‘une exitation prolongee entre le sens et le son.’ ” (ibid 264, Pasolini specifies that he is quoting Valery quoted by Jakobson)

Cinema’s polysemy, its “polyexpressiveness” and “semantic expansion” comes from the orality of its words, which can be despised only because “Now, for centuries we have been used to making aesthetic evaluations based exclusively on the WRITTEN word. It alone seems worthy to us of being not only poetic but also simply literary.” (Ibid 265, emphasis in the original) Pasolini is reclaiming oral poetry which is part of the poetic in cinema construed as an “audiovisual” system of signs where “as a historian of religions would say, image and sound are a ‘biunity.’” Pasolini concludes the essay personifying an artist who responds to such semiological observations on cinema:

What a marvelous opportunity! Making my characters speak instead of a naturalistic and purely informative language, only prudently endowed with touches of expressiveness and vivacity — making my characters speak the metalanguage of poetry instead of this language, I would bring oral poetry back to life (which has been lost for centuries, even in the theatre) as a new technique, which cannot fail to force us into a series of reflections: (a) on poetry itself, (b) on its destination. (ibid)

The reflections we are forced to make about poetry and its destination bring us to the use of the dialogue-track and post-synchronization that Pasolini as film director makes the unambiguous destination of his oral poetry.

Against naturalism, and to elevate his characters beyond it, post-synchronization offers him the possibility to articulate the language of cinema complexly and to do much more than he could have with direct sound. His observations are diametrically opposed

213 to the dogmatic position of Jean-Marie Straub (above) and underscore his employment of the technology of post-synchronization for artistic ends. He is unambiguous about his position and its application in his answer to the survey on dubbing made by Filmcritica in 1970:

Film is a complete reconstruction of the world so it is not naturalistic. . . . When, let’s say, Proust thinks of a character, he never thinks of a real character, he will never portray you; if Proust, taking a character, described him, as a real character, the way he is, he would be attempting naturalism that, among other things, would not be feasible. Characters are always multiple. When a writer creates a character, he always composes from the memories of different characters; it is a synthesis of human experiences that he produces. And so too does cinema. When I create a character I do not want to catalogue him, attach him to a naturalistic moment, I build him through montage; through all the stylistic instruments at my disposal . . . there is no law [against post-synch+ … I dub them all. (268-269)

“There is no Law against Post-Synch”

Pasolini affirms how he uses post-synchronization as a form of writing cinema in its oral/vocal/sonic component. The soundtrack is not conceived to function as the recording track of reality out there, but as the destination of oral poetry against societal common sense notions, expectations, and linguistic homologation, to which mass media and cinema contribute enormously. Pasolini subverts the function of the post- synchronization technique imposed by the fascist regime to control cinema’s soundtrack and regulate its cultural linguistic production. Since fascism, cinematic spoken language was modeled on a conventional written language, which abolished oral mutability and regional differences creating a bureaucratic average Italian. Pasolini works the soundtrack to break this inalterable linguistic code and open it up to oral expressivity

214 and polisignificance, inextricably linking the soundtrack to the creation of cinematic rhythm and style. Among his arguments for the use of post-synchronization he includes his rejection of the stiffened Italian language created in schools and academies and imposed by the fascist regime: a linguistic style that was commonly learned by actors and perpetrated through cinema. In his view professional actors, even if gifted with a charismatic presence, often become “talking cadavers” (Filmcritica 269) when they start speaking the lifeless standard Italian, alienated and alienating. Thus he prefers the

(common) dialectal Italian of so many non professional actors. This position, and his innovative application of the technology— aesthetically, poetically, politically and socially— overturns the ‘original’ or historically grounded purpose of the use of post- synchronization opening to alternative sonic horizons for filmic enunciations.

Pasolini is interested in the actor in his/her function for the film which he articulates as an audiovisual score, paying particular attention to both dialogue and music track for their poetic and aesthetic valences. His use of the soundtrack responds to his conceptualization of the functions that it absolves in film as an agent of inexpressible transformation of the significance of the images, because as he said, sound “derails, deforms, propagates the meaning by other roads.”(“Cinema and Oral

Language” in HE 265) Post-synchronization is used as a form of sonic montage.

In the liner notes for an LP of Ennio Morricone’s music for his films, Pasolini theorizes at length about the ineffable dimension of music in his films; referring to its practical utilization he specifies how he identifies two different “applications” of music to film.

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There is ‘a horizontal application’ and ‘a vertical application’. The horizontal application happens on the surface, music goes along with the images in their flowing: therefore it is a linearity and a succession applied to another linearity and succession. In this case the added values are rhythmic values which give a new, incalculable, peculiarly expressive substantiation to the silent rhythmic values of the edited images. The vertical application (technically done in the same way), even if it follows the images according to their linearity and succession, in reality has its source somewhere other than the principle; it has its source in the depth. Therefore more than on rhythm it acts on sense itself. (Calabretto 314)

We might say that the horizontal application is the one conventionally used in mainstream cinema, where music follows the linearity of the flowing images, accompanying them without interfering complexly with the sense they produce visually.

The vertical application belongs more to art cinema and conceives of music as part of the vocabulary that writes cinema, imbues it with life, poetry, space and time.

Cinema is flat, the profundity into which a street gets lost, for example a street toward the horizon, is illusory. The more poetic the film, the more this illusion is perfect. Its poeticity consists in giving the spectator the impression of being inside of things, in a reality, in a real profundity, not flat (that is illustrational). The musical source—that is not identifiable on the screen—and is produced in a physical ‘elsewhere’ for its nature ‘profound’—breaks the flat or illusionary profound images of the screen, opening them to confused and unlimited profundities of life (ibid).

It is clear from his comments here how Pasolini’s notion of, and work with the soundtrack is different from that of Antonioni who rejected music almost immediately and was parsimonious, exacting, and focused concerning its use in his film production.

Pasolini’s approach to the soundtrack starts with an acceptance of the musical score which he conceives as structural in the creation of the fourth dimension of cinema. His view is close to Eisenstein’s theorization of sound-image relations and his elaboration of a vertical montage. In his explorations of narrative strategies Eisenstein identified not

216 only the temporal arrangement of joining or opposing various film frames into sequences (the horizontal montage) but also the synchronous combination of the various aspects within the frame, and the productive amalgamation of film-image and sound. Eisenstein developed the idea of the vertical montage from the fundamentals of the musical pentagram, where each instrument’s part is written graphically in a horizontal sense while it presupposes a vertical structure that unifies all the different parts in a unitary time.45 If Pasolini’s audiovisual theory resonates back with Eisenstein, it is itself present in that of Deleuze. In the latter’s formulation, modern cinema sound is inscribed in a continuum made of indiscernible optical and sound situations where sound creates spatial and temporal effects and constitutes “the fourth dimension of the image” (Time Image 235, 262-280), precisely Pasolini’s sound-depth dimension. Thus

Pasolini is one of the architects of profound change for modern cinema in its practice and also theoretical elaborations. His use of post-synchronization is not ‘deafening’, as in the accusations posed by its radical opponents, but deliberately defiant and culturally challenging the status quo. The post-synchronized soundtrack becomes the site for artistic growth and an imaginative elaboration of ongoing cultural disputes against its fascist origins in suppression and homogenizing social practice.

45 On Eisenstein’s contribution to the theorization of cinema as audiovisual see Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual (2009). A composer and filmmaker Robertson offers a comprehensive take on Eisenstein’s multifaceted writings on cinema highlighting their relation with the creative works of other artists, like Bach, Baudelaire, Klee and Joyce. The music montage is the fundamental element for the creation of film as organic unity, elaborated in dialectical audiovisual counterpoints and synaesthetic moments that synchronize the senses and perception.

The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema

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Sound, a Relation that Grows

One of the ciphers of Pasolini’s filmmaking is his taste for pastiche and contamination the outcome of a refusal of the natural which informs his filmic and literary production at the level of the linguistic, the iconographic and the oral text (Rumble, Rumble and

Testa). His treatment of the soundtrack with regard to the specifically musical component follows his penchant for disorienting creativity. If, mostly at the beginning of his film career, Pasolini did not renounce the use of music as a sort of film commentary in the soundtrack, he rendered the comment absolutely provocative. His use of Bach,

Vivaldi, Mozart serves to interrogate the images, it calls attention to the music per se and its modifying relation to the images. Paraphrasing him, when he posits one of the measures of a cinema of poetry “*a+llowing the camera to be felt” (“The Cinema of

Poetry” in HE 183), Pasolini allows the music to be felt, in a sense that a traditional soundtrack would not want or attempt to. Music works in his cinema of poetry to complicate the sound-image interplay, adding sacredness to the profane, universalizing the particular, dissolving or ridiculing the dramatic in musical gestures that are conceptual, aesthetical and ethical at the same time. It is worth quoting him on his use of Bach in Accattone (The Scrounger, 1961) which at the time generated some debate concerning his ‘sacralization’ of the proletariat,

In Accattone I wanted to represent the degraded and humble human condition of a character that lives in the mud and dust of the Roman borgate [slums]. I felt, I knew that in this degradation there was something sacred, something religious in an undefined and universal sense of the word, and so I added this adjective, “sacred”, through the music. I said that Accattone’s degradation is, yes, degradation, but a degradation somewhat sacred, and I used Bach to explain my intentions to a vast audience. (Bianco e Nero 1967, 22)

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In an interview with Jean Duflot, Pasolini specifies the twofold function of music in his films,

one is aesthetic, and sometimes arbitrary, merely ‘aestheticizing,’ the other is didactic and ‘functional’. For example, Bach’s Matthew’s Passion, in the moment of the brawl in Accattone, assumes first of all the aesthetic function. A sort of contamination between the ugliness, the violence of the situation, and the musical sublime produced. It is the amalgam (il magma) of the sublime and the comic of which Auerbach talks. (Il sogno del Centauro 108)

Such style of counterpoint mixing of trivial and sublime is constant in Pasolini and he clearly explains his use and the deliberate and ground-breaking effect he wants to achieve for his soundtracks

It is what Auerbach calls magmatic writing, that is a writing generated by a blending of styles. On my part, I look for this blending of styles that contributes to break the convention of musical underscoring present in the majority of realist commercial films. In Edipo Re, I inserted some Rumanian folklore arias: ambiguous arias where one can recognize Slavic, Arabic, Greek influences … and that have the function to transcend the story and to blur historical localization. In this specific case the music becomes a-temporal and augments the indefinable mystery of the myth. (ibid)

Worth noting here are not only the structural and evocative use of music in

Edipo Re, but also the cultural musicological operation that Pasolini performs through the use of post-synchronization, opening up the screens of his cinema to eastern

European music, commonly ignored by the public of 1967 (Calabretto 472). The music catalogue of his soundtrack is not only heterogeneous but also culturally authentic;

Pasolini was in fact traveling in Rumania, where initially wanted to shoot Edipo Re, but if the landscape was too modern for the location he imagined for the film, he discovered and loved its popular music (Pasolini su Pasolini. Conversazioni con Jon Halliday 114-

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115). These musics become part of his magmatic writing made of his existential search for alternative cultural solutions to capitalist structures of domination, revealing his constant ideological flirtation with subaltern cultures.

As he points out his use of music always absolves two functions, aesthetic and didactic. The acoustics of Edipo Re articulates its indefinite space-temporal dimension and creates a suspended atmosphere through noises, silences and the “strange” music that mysteriously fills the desert’s horizon and instills “pleasure and terror, makes the long trait of road in the desert, small and immensely bigger at the same time, more familiar and more inhuman.” (Pasolini Il Vangelo, Edipo Re, Medea, 389) The strange music expresses a need for and the existence of an elsewhere, it re-narrates the myth, while creating a mythical perception of reality.

Pasolini’s pedagogical filmmaking opens spaces for questioning and rethinking socio cultural hierarchies and relations. Through the use of layered sounds-images and audio-cultural suggestions he calls the spectators to watch, listen and elaborate as he explicitly states about Accattone,

For example, in the scene in Accattone mentioned above, it [the music] addresses the spectator and cautions him, makes clear for him that he is not watching a brawl in neorealistic style, folkloric, but on the contrary he is observing an epical battle that flows into the sacral and religious. (Il Sogno del Centauro 109)

This is precisely what Adorno and Eisler theorize in their 1947, Composing for the films, a use of music that abandons the mainstream narcotic exploit, which functions as an antidote for the power of the image and the ensuing thinking. Film music should

220 meaningfully illustrate and genuinely contrast the images, materialize hidden tensions, polyphonically.

In the same interview Pasolini illustrates his process of growth in relation to the soundtrack. He declares how he became absolutely conscious of the fact that the musical comment is “an artifice from conventional cinema” and that he used it when he started making films like any beginner would, to sustain the images, dissimulate stylistic weaknesses and perhaps cover technical flaws. However, since Porcile (1969) his use of music is sparse and often the musical fragments are sung directly by the protagonists.

What is interesting to notice is that even in this film Pasolini resorts to the use of ethnic musics, mingling Spanish arias with cantos jondos, a vocal style in flamenco, and

Andalusian folk music with Irish melodies. The effect displaces and divorces the audience from any simple relation to the film, demystifying its innocence and forcing reflection on both the story and the filmic enunciation. While he suppresses the traditional role of musical commentary (glue for the eyes, and the visual track), as cover for the work of the apparatus, he integrates the music in the audiovisual film score as a determining factor of its signifying composition. He borrows from all registers of expression and cultural belongings and makes post-synchronization the technique that allows him to juxtapose and pastiche, classical and ethnic music, dialects and classical/filmic recitation, calling for a critical confrontation and reassessment of socio- cultural and class relations. Pasolini’s cinema can only be read along the lines of contaminations that he can create with audio post- production, thus, the originally fascist technique of dubbing voices is an absolute necessity for Pasolini, he states:

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Dubbing deforming the voice, altering the correspondences that link timbre, intonations, inflections of a voice to a face, a kind of behavior, confers an extra of mystery to the film. With the fact that very often, if one wants to obtain a determined relation between sound and image, a rapport of precise values, one is forced to change a voice. Having said that, I like to elaborate a voice, combining it with all other elements of a given physiognomy, behavior… To amalgamate…Always my inclination for the pastiche probably! And, the refusal of the natural. (Il Sogno del Centauro 111)

He complicates and sophisticates his characters adding, as he says for the dubbed voice of Jean Pierre Leaud in Porcile (Pigpen 1969) which is spoken in poetry,“a touch of the inexplicable, ambiguous and mysterious that I could not have reached through reality” (Filmcritica 270 ): the reality of direct sound and Leaud’s voice. In

Medea (1969) he scandalously dubs Maria Callas, because he thinks that her Italian with a Balkan and Veneto accent would distract the audience. Almost to defend himself, he affirms, “Sometimes famous voices hide behind a more or less unknown face (or the opposite) . . . the writer Girogio Bassani dubs Orson Welles in La Ricotta . . . Christ’s voice in the Gospel is Enrico Maria Salerno’46s etc.” (Il Sogno del Centauro 111) Pasolini’s dubbing preferences are perfectly inscribed in his poetics of contamination, thus either he chooses non-professional and proletarian dubbers, mostly for the dialectal parts, or

46 Interestingly, at the same time, Enrico Maria Salerno, renowned theatre and cinema actor, was also the voice of Clint Eastwood in the Italian version of Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, this detail points to the spectral relation that Italian film spectators, knowingly or not, had and have with actors and voices, as voices have the power to personify so many actors at the same time. The same voice can be, and possess with actorial variations, so many bodies. The suspension of disbelief required to the Italian spectator coexists with the acknowledgment of the cinematic manipulation, evident in the voice’s recognition. Salerno worked as a “dubber” since the beginning of his career thus inhabiting the cinematic vocal imaginary of the nation: he gives the Italian voice to Richard Emory (Phil) in Singing in the Rain (Stanley Donen e Gene Kelly 1952), and is the vocal Farley Granger (Franz Mahler) in Senso (Visconti 1954). He will work again with Pasolini in Medea (1970) where he dubs Laurent Terzieff (il Centauro Chirone) and continue as a voice actor until a few years before his death, memorably being the narrative voice over in Bernardo Bertolucci Il tè nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky, 1990; Voci d’Autore, p.130, and the artist’s official website, http://www.enricomariasalerno.it/doppiaggio.htm )

222 artists and intellectual friends like the poet Dario Bellezza, the actor and playwright

Eduardo De Filippo, or the painter Renato Guttuso, to name a few.

In his essay on the cinema of poetry Pasolini did not include himself in the list of poetic directors, as he did not consider the aural dimension in his formulation of the free indirect subjective. Nevertheless in his practice as a director he uses the soundtrack complexly for the suspension and addition of sense it creates, be it through its vocal or musical component. He invests the soundtrack of a purely poetic function. Analogous to

Antonioni, though in a completely different style, and perhaps more radically, Pasolini shifts post-synchronous sound from its pedantic, and deafening history, into the realm of creative style and audiovisual poetic signification. To demonstrate the extent of this poetic and textual shift and its significance in Pasolini’s creations, I close here with a close listening of one of his most controversial films.

Listening to the Arabian Nights

Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte (Arabian Nights 1974) is the concluding film of the Trilogy of Life, the cinematic triptych that Pier Paolo Pasolini, dis-enamored with what he calls

“true reality”, that is bourgeois and consumerist unreality, filmed in the key of

“lightheartedness”, as he defines it, an ideological lightheartedness, in that “the ideology is indirect, hidden, implicit” (Pier Paolo Pasolini: il cinema in forma di poesia,

103). The conclusion of the trilogy derives from The Thousand and One Nights, and follows its narrative model in that it is unlimited and does not really conclude at all. It calls for continuing narrations, as the epigraph to the film, taken from the text,

223 emphasizes: “The truth is never in only one dream, but in many dreams.” Not devoted to a search for some unified or a-historical philosophical truth, Pasolini he was interested in the complexity of vital socio-economic, cultural and poetic connections. He was not satisfied with the cognitive act as he was seeking to illuminate an existential epistemological dimension (Interviews with Oswald Stack).

Il Fiore delle Mille e una Notte is a transposition in moving images of the book, which in the West, has come to symbolize the sensual and a-historical fascination for an orient, little more (or less) than an aphrodisiacal spectacle to enjoy, consume, and appropriate in totum. This is banally demonstrated by the widespread belief that The

Thousand and One Nights constitutes a unitary and mono-cultural work instead of a collection of various and different medieval tales from Persia, India and Egypt.

I propose to think this film in the frame of a postcolonial discursive analysis that accounts for what Edward Said (2002) calls the sexual orientalism (here homoerotic) that makes of the East the geographical undetermined space of fantasized unbridled

Eros. I argue that in Pasolini’s elaboration, the question of the desired, feared, objectified Other is complexified by his multiple visual, pictorial, purely acoustic, musical and verbal framings that constitute the filmic text as inter-textual. Moreover the placement of the film within the Trilogy of Life - a celebration of liberated and liberating sexuality, already idealized, mythicized and ideologized in the two previous films of western literary memory from the 14th century, the Decameron and I Racconti di

Canterbury - shift the coordinates for critical analysis, problematizing the question of the western gaze that makes of the orient a pansexual paradise.

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Only by appreciating (and listening to)the complex and destabilizing dissonances of Pasolini, artist, intellectual, poet and filmmaker who made subversion and oxymoron his identifying ciphers can we find spaces for a re-orientation toward the film and its subjects. By doing so we find that his production cannot be resolved under the label of third worldism or orientalist exoticism. If we look at his work in light of his theoretic elaborations on “a cinema of poetry” and “mythical realism,” we perceive the syndrome of a visceral opposition and indocile rejection of the status quo. A subversive urgency pervades all of Pasolini’s artistic creations; his poetics is in the key of shock. This subversion begins with the central ideological position that subtends the joyful and irreverent filmic narrative of Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte: the representation of sex has nothing to do with an imaginary of Eden, or polymorphous perversion, as it becomes an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist statement and provocation, antithetical also to modern sexual liberation that Pasolini defines as falsely liberal.

Before entering a close listening of Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte, I want to single out Pasolini’s unsettling use of the close up in the trilogy. Think of the close up’s intrusive and outrageous power to shock, its capacity to generate tension, fear, pleasure, its intensity created by the psychophysical involvement of the spectator who seems to get closer and closer to the screen. The close up produces an effect of optical and spatial intimacy, the represented object exceeds the edges of the screen and enters the private space of the beholder. Pasolini uses this figure of the cinematographic discourse to offer a close up of genitalia, specifically the phallus. He invades the private and protected space of the spectator, a subject controlled by the male bourgeois politics

225 of interdicted sexuality that legitimates only heterosexual sex and is generally translated in films through a desiring camera/gaze exposing the woman as object. Pasolini unsettles the sexual trope of the west appropriating/possessing/penetrating the east which is implicitly heterosexual. He unleashes the phantasm of homoerotic desire that threatens occidental male subjectivity. As a homosexual other himself, Pasolini plays with discourses of masculinity under the sign/close up of the phallus while he re- connects them theoretically to cultural discourses of sexuality, race, and class within the political economy of capitalist modernity. Instead of following psycho-biographical readings of the film that use his homosexuality as a guiding, and resolving, interpretive key (a fatality for the entire opera of Pasolini) I find the radical potentiality of Pasolini’s sexual politics well expressed in his own elaborations, that posit the body as the natural site for anti-hegemonic subversion. Thus the body is not on show to promise sexual fulfillment but a non negotiable resistance. One might say, in fact, that there is nothing erotic in Pasolini’s cinematic representation of the body, the camera gaze is always cognizant, still and more impassible than titillating, showing what decent morality forces to hide and proceeds to exploit. 47

The phallic close up constitutes one of the discursive spheres of the trilogy,

47 The volume Postcolonial, queer : theoretical intersections offers a range of “queer” positions that try to address the subject of post-colonialist erotics, from a critique of the ingrained homophobia of much postcolonial discourse, starting with Said’s analysis as conspicuously inscribed in a heterosexual interpretive framework, to the depreciation of gay/lesbian studies as white and elitist, precisely the frame of condemnation unleashed against Pasolini in the biographical normative critiques which miss his culturally hybrid project for a politics of resistance and read it as irresponsible. For a variety of perspectives on Pasolini’s relation with the East, see Luca Caminati’s Orientalismo Eretico, Pasquale Verdicchio’s Pasolini's The Savage Father: Colonialism as a "Structure that Wants to be Another Structure." Murizio Viano on the Trilogy in A Certain Realism, and Joseph Boone’s “Framing the Phallus in the Arabian Pansexuality, Pederasty, Pasolini” in Translations/Transformations.

226 where sex comes into sight, emerging on screen as a subversive and irreverent political act which undoes the dominant modes of aesthetics and pleasure. The celebration of the body, and of the physical reality of the body, whose vexillum is sex and its joys, becomes ideology: the ideology of sex, against all moralizing decency, and mediocre decorum, and works as a provocation on all fronts for the middle class and conformist audience. In Tetis (1974), the essay he wrote during the editing of Il fiore delle mille e una notte, Pasolini affirms:

in order to enlarge the expressive space that society has conceded to me in order to represent the erotic relationship I have even arrived . . . at a representation of sex in detail . . . to augment even further the possibilities of the representable . . . Why have I arrived at the exasperated liberty of the representation of sexual gestures and acts, even . . . the representation of the sexual organ in detail and in close up? . . . In a moment of profound cultural crisis (the last years of the sixties), which has caused (and causes) us, indeed, to ponder the end of culture (and which in fact has reduced itself, objectively, to the conflict . . . of two subcultures: that of the bourgeois and that of the contestation of the bourgeois), it seemed to me that the only preserved reality was that of the body. (in Rumble and Testa, 245-246)

Thus framed Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte does not have as subject the Other to be looked at voyeuristically, but as a possible human and cultural figure. The Orient becomes a symbolic place of cultural representation and exploration, not the unreal and inaccessible site of polymorphous and illicit pleasures. Desire and transgression carve and rearticulate a space for non-alienated humanity and sexuality, where the genital act has nothing to do with obscenity and impurity, and the body does not know moral restraints and gender belongings: it does what it wants with whom it wants, without impediments. It is the humanist body celebrated by Bakhtin, and Montaigne, a body without inhibitions, in a dramatic utopia of senses and sensations.

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Regarding the film, Pasolini declares that he was not interested in “representing, not even indirectly, the Arabian culture, the Syrian culture, etc., but let’s say a dramatic and fantastic form of popular culture.” In his formulation, the polemics he created were against “the culture of the dominant Eurocentric class” (Il Cinema in forma di poesia,

162).

Cinema offers to Pasolini the perfect medium to polemicize, shake-up, and move people to thought. When Deleuze says that the artistic essence of the image is realized in moving images which produce “a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly”, and so claiming for the cinema a power wherein the masses “cannot escape the shock that arouses the thinker” in them (Time-Image 156-157, emphasis in the original), Pasolini’s work seems to find its perfect exegesis.

Voices

Edward Said’s use of the term worldiness (301) to indicate a notion of existence that has nothing to do with an already given fixity or construction, well serves to qualify

Pasolini’s filmic work. We can think of what happens in Le Mille e Una Notte at the level of the worldiness of the language, the spoken words, the voices, and the dialects, elaborated and possible only through the use of post-synchronization. The film starts with a foreshortened city street, introducing the viewers to a lively bazaar filled with faces which soon start talking. It is here that the already fixed is shaken, and does not recall anything ordinary, or even magic.

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The contamination/distortion, operative in the visual referential field (the renaissance perspectival code of classical cinema is augmented and contaminated with takes created on the model of Rajput and Persian miniature paintings, so as to alter any fixity) is elaborated also in the aural, where contamination is perceived in a more direct and immediately uncanny way. The faces and heads covered with turbans, the bodies wrapped in burnouses, dressed in tunics and abayas, the oriental clothes —clothing being one of the most important cultural means to articulate and territorialize human corporeality— are de-territorialized through the spoken language. The characters’ mouths are spoken by the most diverse dialects of Southern Italy. At first this maneuver would seem to inscribe the film in a discourse of neocolonial appropriation, of phagocytizing and eating the Other —a literal silencing and exclusion of the voice and words of the Other. But there is more to what meets the ear.

Pasolini’s operation is surely controversial, and this is precisely the point. If we take a look at his actorial body, it is mixed and diverse, as it is composed of people/actors that Pasolini painstakingly searched for and selected, traveling on purpose in Eritrea, an ex Italian colony, home of old and new Italians, transnational contractors, teachers and diplomats. There he met Ines Pellegrini, an Italo-Eritrean, who plays Zumurrud. In Asmara, walking through the city, visiting bars and shops in the different neighborhoods, he found two women who then become Dunya and Zobedeia.

Zaudi, who plays the part of Zobedeia, was the wife of a friend with an Italian father and

Eritrean mother. At the stadium, during a soccer match of the Ethiopian league championship, he saw a couple of possible candidates for the part of Harun, and he met

229 another one in a restaurant in Cheren. The characters he found in the place, work with the actors-friends Pasolini took with him from Italy: Ninetto Davoli who plays Aziz,

Franco Merli in the part of Nur-ed-Din, and Franco Citti playing the demon. Thus in the film there is a promiscuous, non-specific mix of faces and subjects, rendered even more suggestive by the embodied reality of the double Italian/Eritrean belonging that adds the sense of authenticity of the corporeal hybridism rooted in colonial history. Everyone in the film is dubbed and speaks highly accented and dialectal Italian.

The anomaly of the listening experience becomes part of the “affabulazione”

(narration). If Le mille e Una Notte are tales of magic and realism, of fate that takes unpredictable trajectories, of surreal and oneiric encounters, Pasolini uses post- synchronization to cross direct(ions) even more. We are not faced with any exotic and erotic mirage, no magical Orient offering the gifts of an impossible sexuality in Europe.

The real, the vulgar, the popular, the rural, transforms the dream as soon as it starts.

The cumbersome vocal occurrences and the language of the linguistic battle – the dialect — against the bourgeoisie, question all fanciful expectations. What occurs is an ideological and sensorial short-circuit: the listening breaks its coherence with the viewing, as an objective anchoring to reality. Orality, which for Pasolini is on the side of the subjective and the imaginary, works in the film to baffle the certainty of the image, which becomes indeterminate. Here it is useful to turn to Merleau-Ponty in his

Phenomenology of Perception, dear to Pasolini. He reminds us analytically how the different senses communicate and inform each other, and how music, or what happens in the space of the non-visible “besieges, undermines and displaces that *visible+ space”

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(Phenomenology 262). In the moment when the worlds constructed and re-presented by the visual and the aural do not coincide, given their appeal to being “all at once,” the subject is destabilized as the synaesthesia of perception has been interrupted. Language and dialect, as both linguistic space and purely sonic space, are constituted in a perceptual and intellectual synthesis for the subject, who does not recognize them as separate (268). The short-circuiting of images of an Orient that speaks the dialects of southern Italy is together sonic and linguistic, hence ideological.

Any ethnographic residual or documentary-ness of the image is abolished together with the fable and the fabulous of the Orient. There is no appropriation, or desire for authenticity in the representation, also the physiological reality and truth of the dialects and accents spoken and figured by faces and bodies dressed in oriental garments against oriental settings is compromised. All indications and rights of the language as identitary belonging are abolished. We cannot say that the Other is being spoken by the Italian dialects, or that the Other is speaking the dialects, as if the dialects could maintain their authority and integrity, simply by being spoken, as they are being spoken by anOther. Pasolini’s post-synchronization creates estrangement and vacillation, on the optical and aural level, reciprocally. Inside of the filmic construction, the language does not know its speaker and the speaker does not know the language.

The attention that Pasolini dedicated to the discourses of orality, sound, verbal and non/verbal communication in the cinema and in life, indicates the necessity to attentively consider its use as a conscious strategy and modality of signification. In his films Pasolini elaborates and plays with the voice and sound symbolically and

231 ideologically. In his essay Il cinema e la lingua orale he writes “It is the sound (spoken out loud…) that derails, deforms, propagates the meaning by other roads” (“Cinema and

Oral Language” 265).

Through sonic variations and vocal expressivity, Pasolini is interested in the unveiling of difference to open up meanings and augment what is thinkable and utterable. From his desire to widen the possibilities of communication, derives his theorization of a cinema of poetry whose expressive function is polysemic and polyphonic. Spoken words are immeasurable sources of meaning, sense, feeling, and sound. Moreover dialect is for Pasolini the oral language par excellence, it takes us back in time and is constituted as a category distinct from any langue and any parole

(Saussure) which belong to a cultural sphere that is intellectualized, industrialized and oblivious. For Pasolini, the most important characteristic of spoken language is that of

“conserving a certain metahistoric unity through the continuous stratifications and survivals of every language.” He continues: “No ‘oral substratum’ is lost: it is dissolved in the new spoken language, amalgamating itself with it, and thus representing continuity concretely” (“From the Laboratory” 59).

His choice to have an Orient which speaks the dialects of southern Italy has an extra-localizing and exotopic intent that inserts his tale in a human continuum, where the existential, formal linguistic, and sociological break is constituted paradoxically in an interpretive union - through the encounter and fabricated blending. Pasolini variously repeated how his philosophy, and his cinema as the praxis of his philosophy, is removed from any naturalism, in that naturalism excludes the ambiguities of the metaphoric.

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Hence, his poetics and practice of representation is resolutely opposed to mimesis. His love for reality is “mythical” and “reverential” and here his dialectal post- synchronization elevates the characters beyond contingency and naturalism into a human continuum that spells the impossibility of non-reciprocal involvement.

In The Cinema of Economic Miracles, Angelo Restivo uses Benjamin’s dialectical image to define Pasolini’s audio-visual images that allow the beholder to position herself consciously in history, gazing at traces, residues, fossils and ruins “that contain the lost utopian impulses of earlier epochs.” Thus,

when a painting or a poem sets in motion a dialectic between object and the failed dream of the past, we become conscious of our immersion in history, not simply as dead weight, but as a redemptive future project (54).

History is cultural and collective, and made of indirect connections to be deciphered. As with any cultural phenomenon functioning as a sign in a semiotic net, the social, economic, geopolitical relations to be considered are not immediately visible.

The dialectical image is an instrument for cultural analysis that shows things critically, in light of what is absently present. Pasolini fills his images with references unthinkable and inaudible if not in a frame of dialogical - never mono-directional - exploration.

Mixing places, people, bodies, objects, sounds and voices, he uses cinema as a detector or indicator of interconnections that opens up the possibilities of intelligible discourses, and a “mythical realist” understanding.

In the physiological encounter of body/voice that he creates between the Orient and the south of Italy there is no intention to appropriate and eliminate the specificities of the Orient, or to establish any identification with it which would offer a linear

233

interpretation. What Pasolini does is to create a dialogical tension that opens to the

unexpected. The other is continually constituted and reconstituted as we/other, in what

Bakhtin would call a process of “motivated agreement-disagreement” that stimulates

and deepens understanding, that makes the word of the other more resistant and

autonomous, and does not allow reciprocal dissolution and confusion (Bachtin 1988).

The active agreement-disagreement starts an interpretive process of critical elaboration

that interrogates prefixed and pre-constituted points of view and listening.

The Trilogy of Life can be inscribed in a project of redemption of the human

community from the western capitalist bourgeois monologism that operates to define

and delimit the frames and figurations of possible subjectivities and viable narratives.

Responding to the critiques of disengagement concerning the films that compose the

trilogy, Pasolini insisted that they are, instead, the most ideological films he ever made.

The thematic choice of the sexuality of the body and of oral language/dialect allows him

to create a “fantastic humanity” which he wanted to populate, and live in his cinema.

Only in cinema, such humanity could be said/viewed, created through the language of

“the poetry of cinema”: oneiric, irregular, aggressive and visionary (“The Cinema of

Poetry” 167-185).

48 Pasolini’s taste for pastiche, and impudent, uncanny contaminations drives his

audio-visual creations toward the realization of a humanist project that aims to go

beyond fixed national identitary coordinates and to work for that community to come

48 Discussing dubbing, dubbed actors and actresses, Enrico Ghezzi (in Il Patalogo Tre 108), defines them respectively as the technical modality and physical embodiments of the principle of the double, of duplicity without an original, a diabolical inconsistency that belongs to the sphere of the fearful, creepy, strange, that provokes anxiety and fascination and so relates them to the Freudian uncanny.

234 that re/articulates forms of hybrid subjectivities. He uses pastiche as a strategy of estrangement that interrupts, suspends, subtracts interpretation from the conventional grids and bestows different functions and articulations to the signifiers at play.

Attentive to orality, and the sounds of human environments, Pasolini creates a filmic spartito (score) as a continuum of sounds and images. The traditional soundtrack disappears to become what Deleuze calls the fourth dimension of the visual image made of voices, words, noises, sounds and music,

they rival, overlap, cross and cut into each other, they trace a path full of obstacles in visual space, and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen, for themselves, independently of their sources, at the same time as they make the image readable, a little like a musical score (Time Image 235).

The sonic resides in the image and it fills it up with what is invisible and unseen, the beyond the screen, discreet and specific presences. Pasolini realizes what Carmelo

Bene (1995) calls the “optical objective of the oral” that is the creation of imagistic- sounds, sounds that talk to the eyes, hence of totally audiovisual images, listened/heard images.

Le mille e una notte is a unique film for this reason. The sound that characterizes it plays the human variations and combinations that Pasolini listened to and imagined. A polyphony of different sonorities, from different belongings, shifts the sound beyond the traditional musical score. As with the visual score, where the oriental miniatures, architecture, decorations, and garments are undone by the manifold gaze of the camera, also with the sonic score, instrumental motifs, popular chants and musics — that Pasolini himself recorded during the shooting in Arabia and Nepal —are re/contextualized into a new listening experience. His is not a colonial hearing of the

235 ethnic other, driven by a documentary, or possessive, desire, rather the camera/microphone enters into a free indirect discourse that does not assign a point of view/listening but suspends it (recording the musical notes of the streets and the people, the utterances of children, the ululations of women, the streets musical ensembles, the infinite melopee.) Pasolini says: “I let the profilmic world flow, just like dreams and reality flow… a camera…cannot but be contemplative” (in Rinaldi 282). In the contemplation of sounds and images, Mozart’s strings surface layered with Ennio

Morricone’s compositions for organ which echo Stravinsky’s popular, the insieme evokes other, protean, and eloquent spaces. The listening registers are undone and mingled, complicated within the narrative conundrums and symbolisms.

For the creation of the sonic milieu of Le mille e una notte, Pasolini consulted and worked with Elsa Morante, and his historical collaborator, composer Ennio

Morricone. He used his own music library, and his personal on location recordings, constituting what Roberto Leydi, founder, together with Diego Carpitella, of modern

Italian and European ethnomusicology, calls “the other music.” Pasolini’s serious interest in this emergent field of musicology is worth noting, he was in fact present at the very first conference of ethnomusicological studies held in Rome in November and

December of 1973 (Calabretto 185-187).

In Pasolini’s literary writings we find interesting descriptions of various and different musical encounters, as he is a sensitive and passionate music collector. In

Petrolio he offers a remarkable account of his musico-wandering in Nepal

I was in Kathmandu, and I was there because among my ‘hobbies’ is that of collecting popular music. I did not know that, during those days in Bhadgaon,

236

there was a big popular religious celebration. . . . instead of having in my hand an ordinary movie camera, I had in my hands a *[white space in the text indicating a word Pasolini had yet to insert] slightly less common, that is a great Nagra. In the piazzetta (little public square) there was unusual liveliness. And one could hear distant chants and musics, an absolutely normal thing in Nepal towards the evening, because people gather in the temples’s little rooms to sing accompanied by two or three ancient instruments. But those chants and musics that sounded at times close by and at times far away in the piazzetta in Bhadgaon had something special . . . all over, all around, there were different groups of men, and young men who played instruments simultaneously. Some groups were poor and meager with coarse archaic instruments and the inevitable rustic drum, other groups, instead, were numerous: real bands. And they had modern instruments, even violins and trombones, although they were playing their old motifs. Not always however, some motifs sounded to me to be European: probably English, assimilated and elaborated during the colonial domination. That many groups of people played together here and there, in that square, was in itself, as I said, for me an extraordinary and exalting thing. . . . All the groups. . . sent down along the street toward the countryside. I mingled with them . . . the crowd began to meet another crowd that was returning (I still do not know from where); and this crowd, too, was made up of groups . . . playing instruments . . . I walked, pushed here and there by the throng, holding high my tape recorder. Musics arrived, encountered one another and disappeared. (445- 447)

Pasolini utilizes these recordings to narrate the places and human realities of his film in a disruptive and musically authentic manner, exposing the rhythmic complexities and dissonances of the heard and reproduced local sonic syntax. In Le mille e una notte the sonic space is materialized in the images through the constant recurrence of scenes of vocal and instrumental performances from the profilmic reality that Pasolini filmed and recorded. Musicians sitting in front of their houses, choirs of women, men, and children beating drums and sistri, festive dancing and rituals, human and animal ululations, and the intense and noisy clangor of Buddhist gongs and bells reverberate and underscore the images in an indefinite musical and poetic flow. Music is needed to break “the flat or illusionary profound images of the screen, opening them to confused

237 and unlimited profundities of life” (Pasolini in Calabretto 314).

In the film, ethnic chants and musics function as realism balancers and profound poetic revealers of Pasolini’s cinema of poetry. Pasolini’s interest in popular and “other musics” is also inscribed in his ideological anti-bourgeois discourse of orality against false progress and musico- cultural homogenization, represented in Italy, in his analysis, by the commercially popular and vulgar television programs like Canzonissima. Hence to vertically connect the Orient to the south of Italy popolare (of the people), in a real

(versus the homogenized) musical way, Pasolini uses an ancient classical Neapolitan song Fenesta ca ‘lucive that he had already used in Accattone and in the two other films of the trilogy. The music scholar Calabretto, in fact, defines the song as the trilogy’s leitmotif - in Le mille e una notte it accompanies melodically the episode of Aziz and

Aziza, evoking the distant Neapolitan culture.

Aziz (Ninetto Davoli) is also the singing subject of a blatant and estranging linguistic and musical pastiche. After the death of Aziza, and the beautiful funeral oration, Aziz starts drinking. Forgetful of everything, he sings happily, dances, and jumps about the town streets heading towards the garden of his mysterious new girlfriend. His song is a local popular song that Pasolini recorded and then attached to Aziz in post- synchronization. Apart from the fact that the dialogue track of the entire film is in

Italian, so that everyone only speaks dialectal Italian, here Aziz is not only singing a foreign tune but the singing voice is clearly not his. The sung lyrics are bracketed by his roman accented conversation, and emerge from what is clearly another ambience; specifically its sonic imprint belongs to the depersonalized and localizing sound-scape

238 that Pasolini created for the film through the use of his street recordings in Arabia and

Nepal. The effect is spectral, not in a lugubrious but an enigmatic sense. Thus, Pasolini disorientingly reveals the double registers constructed in sound postproduction, and the stylistic/aesthetic and cultural variations of the dialogue and sound tracks that open up our audio-visual perception. The entire film’s soundtrack is construed in a double variation of sonic fields, juxtaposing the ethno music-scape from the streets with the freely synched Italian/dialectal, almost ostentatious dialogues. Here with the merging of song and dialogue they are irreconcilably collapsed. Post-synchronization is used to make us responsive listeners. We, as audience, in fact perceive the sound as suspended because of its language shift and its physical non belonging. If by audiovisual convention we should attach it to Aziz’s mouth, it really does not fit; hence the song floats on the screen detached from the immediate image. Should we conceive it as the chant that

Aziz is listening to in his mind? This operation on the part of Pasolini is complexly combinatory; it mockingly demystifies the work of the apparatus while it poetically transcends it. It excludes any possibility of a standard, linear or mono-logical interpretation as he displaces the topology of the subject, and cinema, in the unlimited space of difference.

He repeats the eerie post-synchronization trick with the gardener in the episode of Princess Dunya, where twice, right after speaking with his accented Italian, he starts singing a beautiful and melodious ethnic tune that voices simultaneously cultural difference and belonging. In the episode of Aziz with Budur, their love story ends with the punishment of his “lightness”. Before graphically exposing his castration, performed

239 by Budur and an ensemble of local women with their faces traditionally covered with veils, the women arrive ululating their strength, rebellion and power as a group. Here too the two registers of the soundtrack are immediately juxtaposed. While Aziz and

Budur speak (Italian) among them, the women say not a word, their presence is made

(of ) sound, the ululation that localizes and differs.

Similarly, following his ordering principle of uncompromising agreement- disagreement, Mozart’s themes from the Andante of the String Quartet in D minor, nr

15 (K 421), and the Adagio of the String Quartet in B flat, nr 17 (K458) — in their western conceptualization and abstract structured expression — redefine the filmic narrative and its anti-realistic sonic textuality, accompanying ornamentally, lyrically, and tensely, the tales of the protagonists. Counter-punctuating the events involving the Christian man with blue eyes in the story of Zumurrud, Mozart’s quartet suggests his westerness, and extraneousness in a deliberately referential gesture. The Andante of the String

Quartet in D minor, nr 15 (K 421) slowly textures with melancholy the Christian man’s kidnapping of Zumurrud, and later it accompanies his capture and crucifixion. The

Adagio of the String Quartet in B flat, nr 17 (K458) evoking a chase, had followed

Zumurrud’s escape from the den where she was shut up, and her horse riding through the desert to the entry in the castle of Sair. This music, extraneous to the screen story but structurally inserted in the filmic syntax, contaminates it with western alterity.

The musical, linguistic and cultural trajectories — popular and classical, western and eastern, dialectal and standard, etc.— are incommensurably con/fused, and the intended meaning seems to be not in their specific referentiality, but in the factuality of

240 being together in the filmic score, heterogeneously disseminated and juxtaposed, creating and opening multiple linkages. The film’s creative formulation offers an abstract sonic interpretive key for the understanding of the ideas of subjectivity and identity —including that absolute binary of western and eastern — made of lacks, absences, isolations and exclusions. Thus subjectivities and identities are to be re- conjugated in the plural —plurally— against the established obligatory social and cultural conventions, in the key of ineffable and relational encounters that can only bring change, or a change of consciousness.

The musico-visual pastiche of Le mille e una notte brings forward and destabilizes the dichotomy East/West and offers a stylistic, ideological and semiotic alternative that Pasolini himself defines as “magmatic” (Calabretto 302), a proliferation of spaces and sounds, disconnected-in-real-time, the time of the audiovisual moving images. Pasolini makes the screen the multidimensional space of the cultural unconsciousness in metamorphosis.

A visual-listening, with re-tuned ears, of Il fiore delle mille e una notte, does not necessarily exclude any of the possible collusions, unexpressed here, in the intellectual and aesthetic re-presentation of the Orient by a westerner, rather its focus is to show the complicated, multifaceted filmic score that appears only in the moment of participatory, empathetic audio-vision, and to call attention to the infinite and ambiguous possibilities of the narrating/narrated subject to participate within, co-exist in, and re-shape diverse cultural discourses.

Pasolini’s poetic and ideological attention to issues of oral languages and dialects

241 as expressions of cultural struggles and negotiations, and music as repository and praxis of stylistic and expressive notions always in need of questioning, finds in the technique of post-synchronization the instrument for the realization of his audio-visual elaboration of diverse possibilities. In a linguistic pun, possible only in the Italian language Le Mille e una Notte (where notte is night) is modulated along mille e una nota, a thousand and one notes, that call for careful and critical listening. Against its institutional imposition for the realization of a fascist agenda, with Pasolini, post-synchronization becomes the distinguishing trait of a modern audio-visual filmmaking that re-writes reality to resist and re-shape the status quo. It assigns poetic voices and foreign languages to bodies thus made hybrid on the screen, it plays with a-synchronism and demystifies the technique in significantly irregular shifts of codes and tones. The imposed discipline becomes undisciplined, polyvalent, open and at the disposition of the artist, and contributes singularly to the making of modern Italian cinema.

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Filmography

Antonioni, Michelangelo. Gente del Pò. Original Music, Mario Labroca. Artisti Associati.

(1943) 1947.

---. Cronaca di un amore. Original Music, Giovanni Fusco. Villani Film. 1950.

---. Le amiche. Original Music, Giovanni Fusco. Trionfalcine. 1955.

---. L’Avventura. Original Music, Giovanni Fusco. Cino del Duca.1960.

---. La Notte. Original Music, Giorgio Gaslini. Nepi Film. 1961.

---. L’Eclisse. Orginal Music, Giovanni Fusco. Cineriz. 1962.

---. Il Deserto Rosso. Original Music, Giovanni Fusco, Electronic Music Composer, Vittorio

Gelmetti. Film Duemila. 1964.

Blasetti, Alessandro. 1860. Original Music, Nino Medin. Società Anonima Stefano

Pittaluga, 1933. Ripley’s Films, 2007. Edizione Speciale 2 DVD.

---. Quattro passi tra le nuvole. Original Music, Alessandro Cicognini. Società Italiana

Cines. 1942.

264

Crialese, Emanuele. Nuovomondo. Original Music, Antonio Castrigano. Rai Cinema.

2006.

De Sica, Vittorio. Sciuscià. Original Music, Alessandro Cicognini. Società Cooperativa Alfa

Cinematografica. 1946.

---. Umberto D. Original Music, Alessandro Cicognini. Amato Film. 1952.

Garrone, Matteo. Gomorra. Sound Editor Daniela Bassani, Music Supervisor Giovanni

Guardi. Fandango. 2008.

Gentilomo, Giacomo. O Sole Mio.Original Music, Ezio Carabella. Rinascimento Film.

1946.

Olmi, Ermanno. L’albero degli zoccoli. Sound Effects, Italo Cameracanna and Aldo

Ciorba. Radiotelevisione Italiana RAI. 1978.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Accattone. Music Director and Coordinator, Carlo Rustichelli. Arco

Film. 1961.

---. Edipo Re. Music Coordinator, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Composer, Luigi Malatesta. Arco

Film. 1967.

---. Il fiore delle Mille e una Notte. Coordinator Pier Paolo Pasolini in Collaboration with

Ennio Morricone, Original Music, Ennio Morricone. Produzioni Europee

Associate. 1974.

Righelli, Gennaro. La Voce senza Volto. Original Music, Cesare A. Bixio. Juventus Film.

1939.

Rossellini, Roberto. L’uomo dalla croce. Original Music, Renzo Rossellini. Continematl

Cine. 1943.

265

---. Roma: Città Aperta. Original Music, Renzo Rossellini. Excelsa Film, 1945.

---. Paisà. Original Music, Renzo Rossellini. OFI, 1946.

---. Francesco Giullare di Dio. Original Music, Renzo Rossellini. Cineriz. 1950. Medusa

DVD 2004.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Stalker. Original Music, Eduard Artemyev .Gambaroff-Chemier

Interallianz .1979.

Visconti, Luchino. La terra trema: Episodio del mare. Original Music, Willy Ferrero.

Sound Engineer, Ovidio Del Grande. Universalia Film. 1948. Ripley’s Films, 2006.

Edizione Speciale 2 DVD.