Pictures began moving more than a century ago, but they didn’t learn to talk until much later. In the mid-1920s, the first sound films marked the slow but inevitable end of the silent film era. Talkies were problematic in particular for foreign productions. The audience quickly lost interest in the films since they couldn’t understand most of the dialogues. While silent films were still internationally comprehensible, suddenly outside help was needed to overcome language barriers. The profession of dubbing actor was born -- the topic of our
Goethe Media Space fall dxhibition "Faces behind the Voices" with large-scale portraits by Berlin photographer Marco Justus Schöler. Here's a look at the post-war history of dubbing & censorship.
1950 – Eliminating the supposedly unacceptable
At the beginning of the 1950s, for the first time there were more productions from the USA in cinemas than from local studios in Germany. Possibilities for ever-finer adjustment in the technology enabled film dubbing in ever-better quality. In the midst of the boom, however, the industry was not free from rebuke.
As in the past, the process intervened immensely in the content of films depending on their core message. Attempting to spare the German audience the supposedly unacceptable, films were rewritten and edited for whatever was considered unsuitable. During the era of Germany’s economic miracle, references to fascism and the Nazi era in particular were rigorously removed from dialogues and sometimes entire scenes were cut. Often such measures were not only condoned by foreign distribution companies, but were even initiated by them with a view to potential audience numbers. Two striking examples of such extensive interventions are Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock and Casablanca, which had not yet achieved cult status.
In the dubbed dialogue of Notorious, Nazis trading in uranium ore suddenly became international narcotics traffickers, which is why the film consequently was retitled White Poison. In Casablanca, the editors eliminated the entire Nazi portion of the plot and replaced it with a comparatively simple spy story about international agents hunting down the formula of a Scandinavian scientist.
It took more than a decade and a half until these not just technical errors of the early post-war years were rescinded. Dubbed anew with its original plot, Notorious – renamed Berüchtigt – was televised by ZDF in 1969, and Casablanca
in 1975.
excerpted and translated with permission from the article “Filmsynchronisation in Deutschland: Geschichte der Synchronisation”, 08/26/2018, courtesy of SprecherSprecher
image: Jutta Brendemuhl, Goethe-Institut
