Doppiaggio, sottotitoli e altre questioni linguistiche nelle recensioni cinematografiche, dalle riviste del cinema muto a Bianco e nero

Founded in 1937 within the activities of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia in Rome under the direction of Luigi Freddi, the long-lived monthly Bianco e nero seems to be an ideal case study to trace the interest of Italian film journals in the difficult relationship between sound and the moving pictures. Since its first issues, Bianco e nero paid great attention to film dialogue and the art and technique of dubbing (Paolo Uccello, “La tecnica e l’arte del doppiato”, Bianco e nero, 5, 1937). This is not surprising: in Italy dubbing had been born almost at the same time as sound film, as a series of Fascist laws issued in the 1930s and beyond prohibited the distribution of films containing dialogues in languages other than Italian. The articles and film reviews in Bianco e nero did not criticise dubbing as a “disagreement between sound and image” (Michelangelo Antonioni, Cinema, n. 107, 1940) or for philosophical or ideological reasons but focused their attention on cultural, linguistic and technical constraints, for instance those concerning adaptation and post-synchronization. This linguistic slant seemed to lucidly prefigure the editorials and reviews that appeared in Bianco e nero in the 1960s, especially Mario Verdone’s article on music and subtitles in silent films (3-4, 1967) and the special issue on “Linguistics and cinema” (7-8, 1966). Bianco e nero did not merely follow in the wake of structuralist and semiotic readings of cinema language of the time but looked at issues such as dubbing and subtitling from a more specific linguistic perspective, thus foreshadowing later debates on these topics in Translation and Film Studies.