I was just wondering what the consensus is on the following quote. It’s taken from the New York Times.
Spaghetti westerns, however, possess no “original” language. They weren’t shot with any sound at all: Italian filmmakers, from directors of cheesy gladiator epics to Federico Fellini, often shot silently, synchronizing sound and dialogue in postproduction.
Is this accurate? I’ve always considered Italian to be the “original” soundtrack, but I’ve not seen many DVDs/Blurays in Italian with English subs.
Hmmm…That is an interesting question. I’ve always gone by the crew of the film, the major financiers, and the supporting and secondary cast. To me, if the majority of the cast and crew were Italian, the main producers and backers were Italian, etc., then I consider the film an Italian language production. Now granted many of the films made in the SW genre were Italian/Spanish/German co-production, but again I go by the director, the writers, and so on. The same goes for the Spanish and German Westerns as well. Arrow Video has done some SW’s on Blu Ray, and all of them include the original Italian audio with translated English subtitles. Many SW Blu Rays and DVDs from Germany include the Italian audio track as well, though the majority of them don’t include English subtitles. Because I’ve seen so many Italian language films since my College days, I have a basic understanding of the language and can watch them without subtitles.
This was a really interesting post, I always thought I was the only one on the forum who viewed the SWs as originally Italian language productions. Thanks.
But the fact remains that they were indeed filmed without sound and then dubbed for all marketa, including Italy. “Original” is relative, but the language of the original screenplay was likely often Italian and hence the Italian track is often closest to the writers’ intentions. Also, for the rare cases the actors came in and dubbed themselves, it was common place for even the Italians being dubbed by other (available) Italians
If nobody minds me going off on a slight tangent the fact that Italian films were shot in silence is one of the things I love about Italian cinema; I love how the soundtracks are like paintings where you know everything is there because the filmmakers and editors wanted it there. I know I’m a bit biased because I’m immune to dubbing which a lot of people aren’t and for them the dubbing makes it harder to get into but I find the whole process a lot more immersive.
But there is bad dubbing and unsuitable voice actors of course … It’s also worth mentioning that virtually all mainstream films including English language are ‘dubbed’, re-recorded, filtered etc …
Listen to the audio on headphones of any major film, and you will hear how lines of dialogue are pasted together … sometimes because of a weak recording, maybe with unwanted background noise … and that’s just the beginning. Every sound effect heard is added post production. So maybe dubbing snobs shouldn’t be so dismissive of international productions ?
I would think they Spoke (the Script) in Italian
And that the Sound wasn’t recorded
As so when they were dubbed (especially in Italian) it would at least look like they were speaking
But then Again I saw a old clip of I believe it was Corbucci (during the filming of “The Great Silence”) saying the actors just counted
I asked a question like this to Tom Betts recently, and he told me the actors often learned the lines of the characters they shared scenes with as well as their own lines. Barbara Bouchet said on the documentary about the making of Milano Calibro 9 that she and other actors often learned the basics of many languages since Italian cinema often employed performers from varied countries like America, Spain, Germany, France, etc. She also said that sometimes just remembering the basics of what your conversation in a scene was about was enough to be close to the script. Counting was usually done in rehearsals to ease actors into a scene, though sometimes actors who only spoke their own language and were aloof tended to do that on camera. Corbucci was kind of arrogant in my opinion, I think he liked shocking people and causing all sorts of uproar to sell his films.
Actors had varied methods of making sure to do their best with the varied languages spoken on set, the majority of them did tend to learn everyone’s lines as well as their own so they’d have the basics down.
