Why dubbing, minimal location sound recording, and a magnificent score make for an interesting soundscape.
Suspiria is a 1977 film by the great Italian filmmaker, Dario Argento. Suspiria is loosely based on an 1845 essay written by Thomas De Quincey. The film is a supernatural horror film that features an American ballet student (Jessica Harper) who transfers to an international dance academy that she soon discovers is shadowed by supernatural conspiracies. The film is famous for its use of lighting, score, and controversy surrounding the decision to dub most of the movie.
So why was most of the film dubbed?
To answer this question let's first discuss the history of dubbing in Italian cinema.
Dubbing first became popular primarily in Italy and Spain during the 1930s as movies began having synchronized sound. During this time Mussolini was in full control of Italy and found that manipulating foreign films through dubbing could prove useful in changing any dialogue that was unflattering to Italy. Mussolini also supervised more vigorously that foreign films be dubbed into the standardized national Italian language in an effort to stop different regions from speaking their own dialects. Even after the second world war, many European countries, namely Italy, still fully dubbed films because at this point it was an established practice.
Dubbing a film meant that all of the actors could speak their own language on-set, whether that be English, Italian, German, Spanish, etc.
This takes us back to Suspiria in 1977 when the large majority of films were still being dubbed in Italy and this was no different for Dario Argento when making Suspiria.
Watch this short scene from the film.
As you can tell the dialogue was clearly dubbed in post-production. For many people, the solution to this would be to watch the film without the dub and put subtitles on, but for this film that isn't an option. There is no version of the film that doesn't at least have some of the actors dubbed because many of the actors are speaking different languages. For example, Jessica Harper is American and was speaking English on set, so many of her scenes are not dubbed, yet still some are.
This brings us to a very interesting question if all of the actors were dubbed in post-production through ADR (Advanced-Dialogue-Replacement), then did any of the sounds on the set matter?
According to the lead, Jessica Harper, the answer is no.
Fascinatingly, Harper recalls hearing stagehands hammering away and doing other work on sets for different movies while Suspiria was shooting. This is so interesting because as soon as movies had synchronized sound, the image that the popular culture assumes when thinking of shooting a movie is a very quiet setting, with a boom operator trying to capture the dialogue to the best of his ability. For this film though, none of that was the case.
The dubbing and post-production ADR elements of the film have invariably brought up a very intense discussion within film and audio communities. Should films be dubbed to avoid reading subtitles, or should reading subtitles make up for lips being out of sync?
While researching the dubbing nature of the film, I read many people online arguing that dubbing the actors doesn't enhance the visual elements of the film, in contrast, it makes the dialogue come across as cheesy, like something from a soap opera. Others were saying that the Suspiria dub is particularly well done, and isn't noticeable (although you can tell from the short clip earlier that it is definitely noticeable). Someone else chimed in saying that the film is so visually interesting that Argento doesn't want viewers distracted by reading subtitles. This could take us down a long and hotly debated rabbit hole regarding subtitles, but we won't go there now.
The entire discussion around the dub of the film, I believe, is related to how visual and auditory messages relate and combine. Are the visual elements of a film more important? Does anyone even pay attention to the sound effects of a film? These are the core questions that we need to answer.
I think that one of the elements that people do pay attention to that is built through audio messages but relates to visual themes, is a film score.
For Suspiria, the film score is primarily composed by the Italian, prog rock band, Goblin. The score also saw help from Argento, who believes that a film score is a key part of a film.
This is the epitome of a "perfect" film score. It is suspenseful, it is loud, it is in your face, it is dark, and it is entrancing. One of my favorite parts of the film score for Suspiria is you can never tell whether it is diegetic, or non-diegetic. Because of the narrative of the film, many components of the score could easily be heard in the world that the film is taking place.
You can hear in the trailer the main theme for the film, and its light and whimsical celeste and bell motif. I believe that this score laid the groundwork for many horror scores to come. It's repetitive drum sound for the 70s is astonishingly modern sounding, as is the rest of the elements in the score.