What is Hollywood and should it be the cinema of the world?

ahalpert said:
Sound changed things too. Before talkies, everything was just intertitled and so you just cut out the original French inter titles and swap in an english set and there is no extra barrier to understanding a french film over an english film.

The french had a huge role in early cinema. Lumiere brothers. Melies. And according to that article I linked to, fully half of the films shown in the US pre-WW1 were european.

But even after talkies - Europeans just watch dubbed american movies. we may be watching dubbed chinese movies in short order
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Blame it on the wine but...those memories of watching that on a 5" B&W T.V decades ago, if I may be so bold-> :) //actually looks better in B&W as I remember watching it. More contrasty and I have to think it was meant to be filmed that way in B&W. Somebody hit a nerve there. Sorry hahaha.
Gérard Depardieu was everywhere back then also in the french movies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gérard_Depardieu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastassja_Kinski
 
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Talk. What. I gotta wait for 24 hrs to get a response? No. Just fkn talk. I'm havin beers here. I hate this silence ****. Please and thank-you. I don't understand and I'm sorry. Please get back to normal? :)
 
ahalpert said:
This is a thorny and age-old debate, isn't it? Because the sound of the original language/dialogue is also an integral and carefully crafted part of the audiovisual medium that was created. And also, if you have to make a translation that roughly matches the mouth movements of the actors, it's probably a lot harder and less likely to make an accurate translation. I think I come down squarely in favor of subtitles. But I'm a fast reader, which helps. And it's easy for me to see the other side of the argument, because the reading is distracting and often covers the image, subtly changing the effect of the composition.
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My problem with dubbed dialog tracks is that most of the time (and I do mean MOST!) the sound production and voice casting seem to me to be quite inferior. The sound has a sort of artificial, "dead", sound booth quality to it that, coupled with voices that don't fit the bodies/characters and spoken words that don't fit the mouth movements, forms a barrier between me and the story. However, a couple nights I caught some episodes of a couple Netflix series--I don't remember what they were--and listened to the English dub, and I was VERY, VERY IMPRESSED with the dubbing: the voice casting, voice acting were top notch, and the sound production was AMAZING. It actually sounded like it was the original production audio.

I much prefer to listen to the original language audio, because I feel that the vocal performances are an integral part of the whole work, and it helps me get closer to believing that I'm seeing/hearing "real people" on the screen--that is, getting drawn into the story. But then again, sometimes subtitles can be a lot of work, especially if the original dialog is in a language that is spoken very quickly and/or takes a lot of English words to translate. There may be times my choice of movie to watch depends on whether or not it's in English.
 
KMR said:
My problem with dubbed dialog tracks is that most of the time (and I do mean MOST!) the sound production and voice casting seem to me to be quite inferior. The sound has a sort of artificial, "dead", sound booth quality to it that, coupled with voices that don't fit the bodies/characters and spoken words that don't fit the mouth movements, forms a barrier between me and the story...
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I've been harping on this forever. The problem is that the original voice recording is not "live" either, as budget geared Euro films usually only do scratch audio live, with the real production track done as you described it. The worst example of it may have been in what is otherwise one of my favorite films, Stalingrad (1992). The German infantry is battling the Russian tank riders, with the explosions, machine gun and cannon fire everywhere, screams of agony from both sides ... an an absolutely perfect voiceover from the actors.

PS. Without boom mics, it does allow for a different shot framing, which certainly made a lot of sense for the budget of the battle scenes. But then you'd think they'd do high class Foley and ADR ... but they rarely budget for that either.

PPS. The other problem is that the top voiceover actors are in demand, so the same person might be doing Leo DiCaprio, Edward James Olmos and Bruce Willis in various roles and in various films.
 
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