The Dub Economy in Cinema

The post-synchronisation of sound and voices has been a widespread practice throughout the history of cinema. Limited critical attention has been paid to these practices, and this is no doubt an aspect of the continued predominance of visual over aural regimes in film production and reception, a hierarchy that persists, arguably due to the historic primacy of silent over sound cinema (see Chion 1994). However, dubbing is a term applied to ‘any copying process that may occur in audio or video recording’ (Holman 2002, 199). The extensive post-production of voices, sounds and dialogue in cinema is curiously subversive of cinematic spectacle, and this perhaps partly accounts for the carnivalesque associations of dubbed cinema. Moreover, Ian Penman argues that a ‘certain dub effect can be heard everywhere in modern sonics’ (2001, 110), giving rise to a condition that we now inhabit, a dub economy of ‘echo logic’; and ‘echoellipsis’ (107).

Penman likens ‘dub’ to a haunting, the sonic uncanny, and speaks of dub as the death of language; as ‘tone, reverberating, never ending – and never fully present – echo’ (111). In dub: ‘the song rings as if it has come through […] from the other side’ (110). Penman is writing of dub effects in music but his echologic may well apply to various settings. The haunted and haunting associations of dub explored in this chapter concern the roles of Bo-Bo in The Irishman, discussed in the previous chapter, and Jedda (played by Rosalie Kunoth, credited as Ngarla Kunoth) in Jedda (see Introduction). Probing the decisions to dub these roles draws attention to shifts in cinematic practice and meaning over time. Bo-Bo and Jedda, the dubbed, also reference changes in the performance of identity in Australian cinema then and now. First, this preamble provides some context for the current status of reception of dubbed voices in cinema.

Dubbing, or ‘re-voicing’, is popularly associated with B-Cinema and especially with comic and carnivalesque inversion of drama. The prevalent association of dub with distortion, play and subversion belies that post- synchronisation of sound and dialogue is long-standing practice in film production, and that post- and pro-synchronisation have long influenced auteur practices.