2/12/2024 0 Comments Contraband police gavrilov![]() And its persistence after the Berlin Wall’s fall underlined the contradictions of the new capitalist order. The Soviet voice-over was neither an expression of a peculiar national character nor an instance of “cultural barbarism.” It emerged out of a specific technological and political context in the late 1950s. When he wasn’t narrating bootlegged blockbusters, Michalyov busied himself translating William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, and Truman Capote into Russian.Īnd despite the animosity of some, a wide audience in the former state socialist countries came to expect this kind of translation - even through the nineties, when American culture formally entered post-Soviet states’ economies. “The Polish people deserve better than these idiotic voices who invade films and characters.”īut these “idiotic voices” rarely belonged to idiots: one of the most famous voice-over artists, Aleksey Michalyov, graduated in Asian and African Studies from Moscow State University, spoke Farsi and English fluently, and worked in Iran and Afghanistan as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s personal translator. Izabela Cywinska, Poland’s former minister of culture, agreed: “It is a matter of laziness,” she said. ![]() Voice is a part of acting, and you completely lose this part of any show you watch. They have no intonations they have no feeling in their voices. This country was kept isolated from the West for 45 years, and many people want access to Western culture and languages. ![]() Polish journalist Maria Bninska hated the voice-over style: To some, it was grotesque - a form of cultural barbarism even. The practice soon became known as the Soviet voice-over. His businesslike performance showed complete indifference toward the actors’ genders and the characters’ emotions. Often, he recorded the track while watching the movie for the first time, which precluded lip-syncing. With the movie’s original sound somewhat muted, the narrator provided a spontaneous translation of the dialogue. Instead of dubbing the movies with the voices of Russian actors, they used a single, male translator. The entrepreneurs who imported this contraband faced the same translation problem as TV stations in Western Europe, but they came up with a new, rather odd, solution. In the late 1980s, a new product appeared on the Soviet black market: the American VHS tape. ![]()
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