The Sonic Object of Italian Cinema: from the Ideology of Dubbing to the Audio-Visual Images of a Cinema of Poetry
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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 © Copyright 2010 by Antonella C. Sisto 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 audio- visual 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. iv To my family, and Peter v 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, 1 2 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