Dorothy Feaver

Andrew Gillespie

Dorothy Feaver

Andrew Gillespie

Dorothy Feaver

Andrew Gillespie

Andrew Gillespie

Along the way there’s plenty of music, from easy listening to transpacific harp improv to a molasses-ized version of Show Me Love which is no less brilliant for having been a piece of piss to make. There’s also a bunch more easy-themed music in the Spotify playlist linked to on the right. Sit back and enjoy (or, in the case of the more ‘difficult’ selections, don’t so much enjoy as, like, submit to the flux and superflux of noise).

Subscribe on iTunes

Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Wire – The Other Window
• Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori – Transparent Things
• Dusty Springfield – I Had a Talk with My Man
• The Slits – Heard it Through the Grapevine
• AIDS-3D – Showmelove
• Memory Cassette – Last One Awake
• The Shaggs – Why Do I feel?

Back in the 1850s, Seismologist Robert Mallet studied earthquakes by illuminating pools of mercury and logging the ripples’ intervals. His ‘seismoscope’ anticipated sonar and oscilloscopes and the thousand other screen-based interfaces that would be developed over the next 170-odd years, and there’s still something compelling about its conjoining of light, liquid and information – so elegant and easy and appealingly frictionless. A good interface is, of course, meant to be user friendly, to mediate complex processes in such a way as to make them easily apprehensible or controllable.

The iPhone is the latest in a string of C21st Apple gadgets that have levied mass popularity by emphasising the qualities I like about Mallet’s seismoscope – pearliness, luminescence, simplicity, organic forms. With its liquid crystal touch screen, the iPhone promises – and, up to a point, delivers – ‘transparency’ and ‘hands on’ immediacy. As with Windows (a brand name now so familiar that it’s weird to think metaphorically equating interfaces and real-world objects like ‘windows’ and ‘desk tops’ was once innovative) you’re not really looking through something into a space however; you’re looking at and onto a screen. The literal manipulability of what you see and touch and the way in which images mercurially flow and realign in response to users touching or tipping the device may be intuitive and temporally immediate but it’s also highly mediated, a complex representation. That ease of use is determined by all sorts of factors and processes you can’t see or influence.

This is by no means necessarily a bad thing, but it’s still important to acknowledge the trade-off. In terms of functionality and ease of use Myspace is leagues behind Facebook, but the ability to get (a little way) behind the interface and code aspects of the page directly enables instances of lurid, migraine-inducing maximalism that are way more interesting than the pristine sub-Mac aesthetic  of Facebook (it feels sort of apt that Myspace’s afterlife has been as a place to stream otherwise unavailable music. Its kludges, glitches and clashes suit a decade that’s seen stylistically mutant scenes and genres like grime, noise, new rave and wonky proliferate).

The idea that things should and will become easier, cheaper, faster is one tech companies want to promote: a current Samsung mobile ad declares “impatience is a virtue.” This rankles with me for two kind of connected reasons. One is the way this rhetoric downplays the fact that even wireless, mobile, lightweight gadgets require very material servers and power plants and R&D labs and factories. The other is that I’m just generally suspicious of things that seem too easy. Taken too far, that sort of mindset ends in masochism and ascetism for their own sake. But there’s more virtue in the idea difficult things might be worth doing than there is in impatience, whatever Samsung say.

The prospect of instant, speed-of-thought information and gratification relies on the notion that we know what we want and what we think. Reading Artaud recently I was struck by how committed he is to undermining this idea. For him (and, admittedly, this is a guy who divided his latter years between recieving electroshock therapy and boning up on Celtic magic) it was important to acknowledge that thinking isn’t always easy or even voluntary. It’s an embodied process – sometimes agonisingly so – but it can bear fruit, making new things communicable and doable. Artaud’s texts bear traces of their own difficult gestation, glimpses under the bonnet that suggest how interfaces (including books) always screen and limit activity even as they mediate and facilitate it. They also demonstrate that difficulty and friction can prove energizing and generative.  Strained pears are lovely but teething probably turned out to be worthwhile.

When my baby was five weeks old, I left his dad & went and lived in a women’s refuge – the German word is Frauenhaus. It was full of fucked-up women with stuff missing: teeth, skin, self-esteem. There were girls in there from Turkey, from Poland, from Slovakia, from Russia, from Kenya, from Chile. There were girls there from Germany, too. They were pretty scary, actually, the Germans, to be honest. I was pretty scared of them, anyways.

We used to have a weekly house meeting and a weekly mother’s meeting. The house meeting was on Monday and the mother’s meeting was on Thursday.

So, one time, at the weekly mother’s meeting, the social worker, Agnieska, told us how we should react when we caught our children masturbating. She said we were not to shout at them, swear at them, tell them they were going to hell, hit them, hit them with sticks or bind their hands behind their backs and make them sit in the corner for two hours. Instead, we were to say, in a calm, neutral voice:
“Oh, that feels nice, doesn’t it? But that’s something we do when we’re on our own, not in front of other people.”

The Turkish girls who could speak German, i.e. the Deutschtürkinnen, all covered in gold, gold hair, gold chains, gold earrings, had to translate for the Turkish girls who couldn’t speak any German, i.e. the import brides and the old grannies in headscarves and pyjamas.

The room exploded.

There were women laughing, screaming, thumping the table. Some of the girls were crying with hysterical laughter. Agnieska tried getting us all to concentrate, but minutes passed before the table-thumping stopped.

“Is that really what German people say to their children when they catch them doing that?” One Turkish girl asked, shaking her head in vague disbelief.

“That is the correct, healthy thing you should say to your children – if you want them to grow up normal.” Agnieska replied sternly.

At the word normal we all started giggling a bit, and the Turkish girls started arguing amongst themselves in Turkish, and Agnieska got all pissed off again.

“Once, I saw a man touch himself there,” said a Russian girl. “In the street, he showed me what he was doing.”
“The Germans are always touching themselves there,” answered another Russian girl, knowingly. “My man was always doing it.” Then she glared at Agnieska accusingly, only Agnieska didn’t notice.

One of the old grannies in headscarves started speaking in Turkish, bitter, angry, loud: it sounded like a prayer, or like she was cursing us all. I couldn’t tell what she was saying but you could tell she didn’t think much of Agnieska’s advice concerning masturbation.

“What’s she saying?” Agnieska asked Dilek.

“She says she would rather kill herself than tell her children to touch themselves there.” Dilek translated.

Agnieska looked a bit put out. I felt a bit sorry for her. She was, after all, only trying to be helpful.

“Of course,” she said, finally, when the old granny stopped her prayer-like cursing, “if you feel very strongly about it then it doesn’t really matter what the healthy, normal, correct thing to say is. Because, as parents, we always have to be honest to our own value systems. But, really, children who masturbate should not be threatened with physical violence. And, you know, ladies. You don’t come to a women’s refuge for no reason. All of you have got, let’s be honest here, fairly disturbed and mentally imbalanced children.”

After that, we discussed Lena, who had been allowing her children to stay up in the TV room past nine o’clock and not giving them any breakfast before school. All the women told outrageous stories of horrific neglect, and Agnieska took notes.

“I think she has some Nesquik and sterilized milk in her bedroom, though,” I said. “I think she gives them a cup of chocolate when they get up.”

Monika looked at me, raised her eyebrows and sighed, spiteful and exact. “A cup of chocolate,” she said, “is not breakfast.”

Next we discussed how we should explain to the kids that we ended up living in a women’s refuge. Agnieska said we should show them our wedding photos and tell them how happy and grateful we were to marry our husbands, but that it then, unfortunately, didn’t work out.

But Monika went off on one about the burnt toys.
“How do I explain to Lukas and Simone that their daddy burnt all their toys?” She demanded, arms folded, eyeing us all viciously. When I first arrived in Berlin, I knew this Palestinian boy whose girlfriend had made him go to the cinema to see Titanic fifteen times. “Am Ende, Jack immer tot,” he used to say. Jack always dead in the end. It was like that at the mother’s meeting every fucking Thursday. In the end, the toys always ended up getting burnt.

And I got sick of these women, pale and grey, phoning up their mums to tell them when their Hartz-IV money – the German social security payment – was in the bank. I got sick of the social workers, so desperate for us to hate each other. I got sick of the alcoholics, who turned up every Friday, and left Sunday night. I got sick of living with losers, and being like them, being one of them. But most of all – I was sick of Monika, sick of her white, fluffy face and greasy, heavy hair, sick of watching her waddle past me in her tracksuit bottoms, sick of listening to her shout at her kids. But most of all I got sick of hearing about her stupid fucking burnt toys. I imagined them: old, plastic dolls, with the eyes poked out and their mouths full of ash. Brown and discoloured, black and empty.
“I think you should just not mention it,” I suggested, helpfully.

After the mother’s meeting was over I went into the kitchen and put water on the stove. Marina came up to me, nuh. She said she was going back to her husband, but didn’t want to tell the other girls, nuh, because they’d despise her.
“You’re the only one I’ve told, nuh,” she said. “You can have my handbag, nuh, it’s Esprit, nuh. Because I owe you one cleaning Dienst, nuh?”
“But Marina,” I said. “I thought he wanted to kill you.”
It wasn’t like I cared. I just thought it kind of polite to mention it, in case she’d forgotten or something.
“You know how it is,” she said. “Between a man and a woman. There’s conflict. There’s rows. There’s fighting. And then, afterwards, you go away. You’re hurt, you’re angry. And then maybe there’s a bit of exaggeration. Men exaggerate, women exaggerate. You’re hurt. But you know. There’s always love, nuh. There’s always love.”

“So you’re gonna drop the charges, then?” I asked. “I don’t need the handbag, it’s okay.”

“It’s the easiest thing in the world, nuh,” she said, “going away, leaving the man you love, who loves you, and why? You know what I mean? I mean, why, nuh?”

“You’ll have to drop the charges,” I said. “Or you’ll get grief from Social Services.”

“He’s the father of my baby,” she said. “Doesn’t every child have the right to a father’s love?” She touched her belly briefly. I put the baby bottle in the pan and nodded.

Sometimes I look back on those days and I know why, I know exactly why those social workers hated us so much. It’s because we were so fucking stupid.

Forget Holocaust guilt, traffic-light prudence and a heavy reliance on medicinal suppositories. The biggest culture-shock that Anglophone expats have to face in this country is the German love of dubbed films. Ben Knight meets the purveyors of the understated art of dubbing and asks, why do Germans like it so easy?

Nothing maddens the foreign movie purist more than the thought of a whole civilised country getting into James Bond without once hearing Sean Connery’s thick-lisped accent, or audiences being charmed by The Seven Year Itch without ever appreciating Marilyn Monroe’s smoky intonations. But the Germans can match this nostalgia with their own. Their love of old movie-stars is no smaller for being filtered through displaced voices – instead Germans reserve a quantum of extra patriotic sentiment for that unseen German actor in the studio. By tradition and practice, German audiences have been primed to conflate a separate voice and face into a single person.

And for many Germans, subtitles are the more imperfect way to translate a film. “I don’t go to the cinema to read!” one film-fan and dubbing-script writer said, “Film is a visual art-form – the cinematography has been carefully composed. Those big fat white letters on the screen are a lot more destructive than a foreign voice. Besides, for reasons of space, a subtitle-script has to be a lot shorter than a dubbing-script, so you lose a lot with subtitles.”

To enhance recognisability and to fortify the dubbing-illusion, it has long been standard practice to get the same German voice to shadow an American actor from film to film. And so whole German careers rise and fall on the backs of their Hollywood originals. Christian Brückner has built an illustrious four-decade career on being the German voice of Robert De Niro since 1974’s The Godfather II. While his ability to keep the voice is based on his own considerable power as a voice-actor, De Niro’s prolific career clearly helped him achieved this status.

Not everyone can pull this off – Al Pacino has been dubbed by at least seven different actors over the years – but Klaus Bauschulte, head of production at Berliner Synchron, a major German dubbing studio, is candid about the role that chance plays, “The actor who gets the voice of Brad Pitt or Leonardo diCaprio has won the lottery, obviously.”  So spare a thought for Dietmar Schönherr, the original and only voice of James Dean.

The identification of a Hollywood face with a certain German voice is so ingrained that when a well-recognised voice is suddenly switched, swathes of the German audience tune out – confused, bored, feeling cheated. The only American analogy could be the poignant episode of the Muppet Show that followed Jim Henson’s death. Kermit just wasn’t Kermit anymore.

The emotional indignation among audiences can get particularly heavy when a voice is changed for any reason other than death or serious illness. When the voice of Robert Redford was switched for the 2007 film Lions For Lambs because Redford’s regular German speaker Rolf Schult was reckoned as past it (he was 80, Redford 71), internet forums erupted with outrage. There was a homely affection for the ‘German’ Robert Redford, and the anger was exacerbated when word got out that the decision had been made by a representative of the film’s American production company.

Officially titled ‘creative supervisors,’ these representatives are sent to oversee the dubbing of foreign versions of films, and their input is not always appreciated by the public: “So once again someone has decided they have a clue when they don’t… it’s enough to drive you up the wall!” said one disgruntled forum user. Another chatter gave a more sober judgement: “I hate supervisors. I want continuity.”

The figure of a dark corporate drone being sent from the USA to interfere and make decisions that rob German audiences of their beloved voices hangs over the entire German dubbing industry. But it is not especially accurate. The supervisors are always proficient in the target language, native in the original language, and they are often close to the post-production teams of the original films, and so have some insight into the creative intentions involved.

Alexander Löwe, a prominent dubbing-script writer, says, “I’ve never understood colleagues who complain about the creative supervisors’ influence. For me, they are always a help. That’s what they are there for. It doesn’t matter how well I speak English, there will always be things I don’t understand. As for Robert Redford in Lions for Lambs, I swear no-one could really tell the difference.”

But Löwe has seen a pernicious American influence coming from another source: the director. Löwe still rankles when he thinks of how Wolfgang Petersen, one of the major German directors in Hollywood, decided to choose a new German voice for Brad Pitt in Troy. “It was a crime against the German audience. It was totally unnecessary,” he says.

Many independent directors oversee the dubbing of their own pictures: Tom Tykwer directed the German track of his 2002 movie Heaven, Michael Haneke did the same for his 2001 film La Pianiste, substituting the regular voice of Isabelle Huppert along the way. If their German is not so expert, some suspicious auteurs, like Jim Jarmusch with his movie Broken Flowers, will have the translation of their script re-translated into English to check for errors.

Hollywood’s jealous concern for the foreign versions of its movies is as old as talking movies. In the 1930’s, Laurel and Hardy resorted to re-shooting entire movies in stumbling French and German for their overseas markets. But once technology had developed enough to allow separate sound and visual tracks to be recorded, the new dubbing industry was born. Shortly after World War II, when America’s influence in Europe was at its most benevolent culturally and most generous financially, film-dubbing boomed in Germany. Divining the potential market of a war-weary Germany, large Hollywood studios effectively established a kind of cultural Marshall Plan, and funded the creation of professional German dubbing studios. They also demanded that German stars speak the roles of American stars, and made credit sequences that credited them too.

Throughout the 50s and 60s German dubbing studios refined the art of dubbing – creating their own sound effects, experimenting with different soundstage constructions to achieve different voice effects – until the art of it became, in the unforgiving phrase of dubbing director Erik Paulsen, “totally abstract.”

Today, actors almost always record their roles on their own in a dark room, with the film on a screen in front of them, a cutter at their elbow checking synchronicity, and a director and a sound technician somewhere behind giving instructions through microphones and a pane of glass. The pleasure of acting with another actor – that is, recording dialogue simultaneously – is usually only a luxury the older ones remember. This is partly for technical reasons – if you have all the actors on separate tracks it is a lot easier to synchronise the voices to the lips – and partly the result of perceived time pressures on productions. But there are exceptions. Susanna Bonasewicz, dubbing director and regular voice of Isabelle Huppert (among many others), says she always prefers to have her actors recording together.

One dubbing scriptwriter speculates why: “I remember sitting in on a dubbing session of a film about the artist Modigliani – it was an emotional scene, a group of people around his deathbed – and I looked up and saw all the actors with their arms round each other crying. I just thought, you have to be able to hear that.”

PROFESSION: DUBBING ACTOR

Dubbing actors, unseen as they are, insist that what they do is real acting. There is a lot of technical skill required – speaking fast and clearly under pressure, synchronising, mimicking intonation patterns – but there is also emotional involvement. “You need good actors, you can’t just have good speakers, or you could get newsreaders to do it. Theoretically they have to be able to play the roles themselves,” says Bonasewicz.

Brückner, the voice of De Niro, is also sure that there is more to his peculiar expertise than a technical craft. “You have to be able to work fast and speak precisely, but you also have to be able to invest a lot of imagination in it, so that you don’t just convey the scene but the whole life and environment of the character.”

Brückner is credited with creating a new dubbing style in the early 70’s – one that was better suited to the new independent style of American film-making – the histrionic diction that grew out of German theatre was left behind, words were occasionally allowed to be slurred – in short, naturalism emerged.

PRESSURE ON THE DUBBING INDUSTRY

But since around that time, by Bonasewicz’s estimate, the meticulous energy invested in the illusion of dubbing is coming at a higher and higher cost. The avalanche of imported American TV shows has swelled the market for dubbing, but has increased the time and budget pressures on studios, and quality has suffered. While cinema releases still get high-standard dubbing, there is evidence that corners get cut here too. Visual dubbing, for instance, where onscreen letters or signs are re-made and re-shot in different languages, hardly ever gets done anymore.

Hollywood’s determination to beat online pirating of major films has resulted in global release dates, which means that foreign versions are sometimes made while the films are still in post-production. In extreme cases, translators wrestle with different versions of scripts, and new cuts of films have to be re-dubbed.

The defining intercultural tension of dubbing is also the main artistic one: the Hollywood studios, represented by their cultural supervisor, and the dubbing studios spend their time hammering out a compromise on what is authentic and what they think a German audience will accept. It is a perennial struggle to stop gaps and cheat the urge for perfection, but whatever compromises the two sides have to accept, for Germans, it will always be better than reading subtitles.

This article first appeared in EXBERLINER magazine in February 2009.