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An extremely distracting aspect of Tarkovsky's cinema is something he shares with most Soviet cinema, which is that all sound is recorded and mixed in during po
by legerdemain 6y ago
An extremely distracting aspect of Tarkovsky's cinema is something he shares with most Soviet cinema, which is that all sound is recorded and mixed in during post-production. All environmental sound is accomplished through foley work. All lines are dubbed in, sometimes by completely different actors. There are no mics on set whatsoever. It makes his movies (as great as they are) feel like Looney Tunes cartoons.
Amazingly, this approach to cinema did not end with the fall of the USSR, and most Russian movies continue being recorded the same way.
Tangentially, neither did the tradition of dubbing foreign films by just having a single guy read every character's lines without even removing the original audio track, but just trying to talk louder than the actors' original audio.
- gerikson 6y agoI can’t say I’ve noticed that - I saw most Tarkovsky movies in the late 80s before I knew about these details. When it comes to Stalker (which I recently rewatched) I’d imagine the sound would add to the strangeness.
- Arech 6y ago> Tangentially, neither did the tradition of dubbing foreign films by just having a single guy read every character's lines without even removing the original audio track, but just trying to talk louder than the actors' original audio. There's another reason for that I think. The first movies pirated to USSR were dubbed in "underground" conditions by enthusiasts (and their translations were in many cases more exact, closer to the original than "official" ones made later). Some people get used to that style and really prefer a single voice, but proper translation with much of an original sound, intonations to a hollow "official" "professional" dubs.
- hardwaregeek 6y agoItalian films recorded dialogue after as well, no? I'm not sure whether it's all sound, but you can clearly tell that the dialogue is dubbed. In Truffaut's Day for Night, the Italian actress Valentina Cortese mentions that with Fellini, the actors would recite numbers instead of lines. The most egregious instance is Antonioni's Red Desert, which stars Richard Harris, who I'm pretty sure did not speak fluent Italian with a perfect accent.
- maest 6y ago> did not speak fluent Italian with a perfect accent Speaking of which, here's an American production where Schwarzenegger's voice was dubbed over, for what I assume are similar reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p3nmyTICo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p3nmyTICo0 The IMDB plot synopsis is pretty great: Hercules is sent to Earth where he finds true love and starts a promising career in the bodybuilder business.
- Blackthorn 6y agoI suppose this is the benefit of not knowing Russian and having to watch it subbed. It ends up being hard to notice (I certainly didn't).