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 pre-war history of dubbing & censorship.
1930 – A challenge for actors and audiences
The first dubbed versions of movies were created not least to improve their chances in the market; however they initially suffered under the technical conditions of the age and were not received well by audiences.
It wasn’t until the 1930s when the dubbing quality, especially in terms of picture-sound synchrony, reached a level that satisfied audiences. They also had to get used to the fact that their former silent movie heroes could suddenly speak, and in German at that.
“It’s a cultural learning process in which, in a way, viewers have to be able to forget that the person speaking is not the same person they see on screen.”, according to Joseph Garncarz, a film and television scholar at the University of Cologne.
Nevertheless production companies were convinced by the box office results and their position on the German market, especially since film dubbing was a much cheaper alternative to a method that was also being tested at the time to market films abroad: For multiple-language versions, or MLVs, the same movie was shot multiple times with performers from the respective target countries. Films were also produced this way in Germany for the international market. The costs and effort, however, were out of proportion to the box office results, so that around 1931 the production of MLVs was almost entirely abandoned in favour of using dubbing actors. Multiple-language versions were only sporadically taken up again in later years. By the end of the 1950s at the latest, MLVs were given up altogether. This left two ways to prepare films for the foreign market: dubbing and subtitling. Smaller countries or those with multilingual populations usually opted for the latter solution. In Germany, however, film dubbing prevailed early on as the widespread solution.
excerpted and translated with permission from the article “Filmsynchronisation in Deutschland: Geschichte der Synchronisation”, 08/26/2018, courtesy of SprecherSprecher
