The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art 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 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 the people are becoming more deaf at an alarming rate.

--Jean-Marie Straub, Interview, 1970

It has to be possible to think of a European film. To think of film in European terms. Without the consequence of a thoroughly watered-down Euro-film.

--Alfred Behrens, "New European Film and Modernity,", 1986

Sounding Off

From September 1995 to December 1998, I worked as the film programmer at George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography and Film, located in Rochester, New York. As programmer I was responsible for conceptualizing film series and securing film titles for several hundred screenings in the museum's on-site Dryden Theatre. One of the series I put together, "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture," comprised eight feature films on the subject of filmmaking and was scheduled over the months of May and June 1998. The choices were eclectic and based on a series of factors, including relevance to the subject, print availability and condition, and frequency of exhibition: The Big Knife (dir. Robert Aldrich, US, 1955), 8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini, Italy/France, 1963), Le Mépris [Contempt] (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy/US, 1963), For Ever Mozart (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland/France, 1996), La Nuit américaine [Day for night] (dir. François Truffaut, France/Italy/ United Kingdom, 1973), Stardust Memories (dir. Woody Allen, US, 1980), Venice/Venice (dir. Henry Jaglom, US, 1992), and Irma Vep (dir. Olivier Assayas, France, 1996). As is evident from the titles in the list, the series leaned heavily toward European art cinema, which has not only produced a high proportion of such metafilms, but has always been one of the mainstays of contemporary international film archive exhibition. As one would expect, the clientele for this and other film series at the Dryden Theatre was a mix of buffs and aficionados, professors and students, and regulars with relatively high amounts of cultural capital. ¹

On 7 May 1998, the museum received and passed on to me for response the following e-mail message from a member who lived in another state and had perused the May-June film calendar in both hard copy and on the World Wide Web:

Please tell me it's a typo in your calendar. You can't seriously plan on a DUBBED version of "Day for Night"!! Especially not as a 25th Anniversary special. I saw a lovely new subtitled print in NYC last summer; surely you can get your hands on that.

I had planned to tell my parents and brother to attend, as "Day for Night" is one of my favorite films. But I would tell everyone I can to avoid at all costs a dubbed version.

I grew up in Rochester, and spent more time at the Dryden than I can guess. For a real movie fan, the Eastman House is a treasure.

How can a film archive, dedicated to preserving films as originally produced, fall to such a level as this? If this is the real policy, I'll have to consider my membership and support of the Eastman House.

Please advise ASAP. (And, if it is merely a typo (though I checked your on-line calendar for corrections)), please accept my apologies for this rant.)

The person who wrote this message obviously had a deep investment in film culture (both as a museum member and as an attendee of screenings of art films elsewhere) and clearly felt strongly about the matter of a dubbed print of Day for Night, so I was careful...