Watching so many French gangster films recently has made me aware of how many of these films one thinks of as ‘French’ were actually European co-productions, often with Italy — Maigret tend un piège, Maigret voit rouge, Le tueur — sometimes even with the US: e.g. Le clan des Siciliens. I’d not given it much thought until seeing Llanto por un bandido (Carlos Saura, Spain/France/Italy, 1964) which is known as La charge des rebelles in French. I’d bought it as a Lino Ventura film — a mistake, as he’s only in the first twenty minutes or so – and not realising that it was the French version of the celebrated Spanish film Llanto por un bandido.
Seeing it made me realise that the price of hearing Lino Ventura in French was not hearing co-star Lea Massari in Italian, and worst of all, not hearing one of the most glorious and expressive voices in the cinema, the sound of Francoist Spain, not just in its pejorative and critical aspect, but as expressed in that deep hoarse voice, a sound produced by smoke, wine, sun, and the punishment of a lifetime of pronouncing a j with a Castilian accent, the sound of clearing your throat after a cold, the sound of cleansing your respiratory system so you can breathe through all the bullshit of Francoist culture, the sound of pain, and feeling and love too. All of that is missing from the French version. All of that is the sound of Paco Rabal’s voice.
Llanto por un bandido in French makes one weigh aspects of filmmaking. On the one hand, we must be grateful, because without the financing made possible by co-productions, these films might not have been able to be made. On the other hand, the loss of actors’ voices, particularly great actors with great voices, is not negligible.
To make you aware of the price we pay when these voices are erased by co-production agreements, I wanted to show you four distinctive instances of Rabal’s voice, the first in a landmark film of the era, where Rabal plays a radio announcer and sounds like the archetypal one (I’m afraid I could not get sub-titles but listen to the sound); then half a decade later as an embodiment of changes in Spain for Buñuel in Viridiana; much later, in the late 80s, for Almodóvar in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, his voice having deepened and made more expressive with age, and the director making full use of it and also what Rabal then represented for Spanish audiences; in the middle of this period, in 1967, again for Buñuel, this time in Belle du jour but in with Rabal speaking his own broken French, mixing it in with Spanish phrases and adding to the general seedyness of his character, Hyppolite de Murcia. Finally, an exchange with Lino Ventura, where Ventura speaks with his own voice and we realise all that is lost when instead of the sounds we know so well, that voice comes out of Rabal’s mouth, in French. It’s a sadness.
Historias de la radio (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, Spain, 1955)
end of Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, Spain/Mexico, 1961)
Rabal and Abril in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (Pedro Almodóvar, 1989)
Rabal speaking French with his own voice in Buñuel’s Belle de jour (France/ Italy, 1967)
Ventura, Rabal and others in La charge des rebelles (Carlos Saura, Spain/Italy/ France, 1964)
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After writing this post, Melanie Selfe directed me to a superb piece in Camera Obscura entitled ‘The Name above the (Sub)title: Internationalism, Co-production, and Polyglot European Art Cinema’ (Issue 1.46 pp. 1-44). There, Mark Betz begins by citing Jean-Marie Straub arguing in 1970 that ‘
Dubbing is not only a technique, it’s also an ideology. In a
dubbed film, there is not the least rapport between what you
see and what you hear. The dubbed cinema is the cinema of
lies, mental laziness and violence, because it gives no space
to the viewer and makes him still more deaf and insensitive.
In Italy, every day the people are becoming more deaf at
an alarming rate.
Betz then roundly refutes that argument and goes on to explore how :
European art films have thus been left free to carry on as
signifiers of stable national cinemas and identities or as gleaming
expressions of their auteur’s vision, somehow not blurred by
the quite specific determinants of cross-national cooperation that
leave their marks everywhere on the film, from its budget to its
shooting locations to its cast to its sound track.
My viewing over the last month highlights all of those marks and substantiates Betz’s arguments and the underlying multi-layered and complex relations that underpin co-productions in general and the art cinema variant in particular.
I’d add also the more personal understanding that, whatever the pleasures of what is gained, here that of the work itself, one always yearns and desires that which one loves and seems lost. For me, in this specific instance, the aspect that relates to sound, and specifically the sound of Paco Rabal’s voice.
José Arroyo