Dubbing is the unsung hero of the history of world cinema. By making the movies intelligible to world populations, a majority of which was illiterate, it contributed immeasurably to the spread of cinema as the most popular entertainment form. It also contributed to the rise of the national cinemas and film industries. And it introduced its own poetics and politics, which impacted how cinematic stories were told and were transformed. In Iran, dubbing was lynchpin of the hybrid production mode, and it took two chief forms. Dubbing involved an operation on foreign language movies by which Persian language dialogue replaced foreign language dialogue. Doubling involved an operation on locally made movies by which diegetic actors or voice doubles recorded the films’ dialogue in post-production sessions. The separation of the characters’ voices from their bodies broke the tyranny of sync-sound, which was the sound equivalent of invisible editing, the armature of classical realist cinema style. And it provided ample opportunities for a range of not only dubbing and doubling but also of duplicating and duplicitous practices, involving translations, mistranslations, substitutions, elisions, apparent losses, surprising gains, opportunistic accommodations, and censorship, contestation, and haggling of all sorts. As such, dubbing—the general term applied to both dubbing and doubling operations—is one of the most significant and signifying aspects of the pre-revolution Iranian cinema, during which it flourished.

Dubbing Foreign Movies
Ismail Kushan dubbed the first foreign language movie into Persian, but not in Iran. During World War II, he had joined the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin as producer and announcer of Radio Free Iran’s Persian Service and as voice-over narrator of Persian language German newsreels, and he had played bit parts in German movies at UFA, the giant Nazi movie factory. His pro-German and anti-British broadcasts prevented him from returning home, forcing him to relocate from Germany to Turkey, where using Iranian students there he dubbed into Persian Henri Decoin’s French comedy Premier rendez-vous (1941) under the title Runaway Girl (Dokhtar-e Farari). Kushan had troubles finding women willing to act as voice-over artists, but finally he engaged Nurieh Qavanlu to dub the voice of the lead actress, Danielle Darrieux. In Turkey, he also dubbed a second movie, a Spanish song and dance item, La Gitanella, which he titled Gypsy Girl (Dokhtar-e Kowli). He carried both movies with him home at the war’s end, when he was allowed to return. He screened Runaway Girl for dignitaries and the general public in Tehran’s Crystal Cinema starting on April 25, 1946. The film’s 200,000 tumans box office and positive media publicity about Qavanlu’s dubbing of the French actress’s voice was very encouraging.

Kushan’s Mitra Films released in 1948 the first Persian language talkie made inside Iran. Called Tempest of Life (Tufan-e Zendegi), it was produced, photographed, and edited by Kushan and directed by the German-trained theater director, Mohammad Ali Dariabaigi. Kushan surmounted many production, technical, and personnel problems, as in an artisanal fashion he performed not only these but also many other un-credited tasks for the movie. The result was a melodramatic, musical tearjerker in which true love won over arranged marriage, and hard work and perseverance transcended class inequality. The film was first shown in Rex Cinema to dignitaries such as Ashraf and Abdolreza Pahlavi (Shah’s sister and brother), preceded by a newsreel about the opening ceremonies of the Royal Social Service Clinic, headed by Ashraf, which Kushan had filmed. The novelty of the first Persian-language sound movie made inside the country brought many enthusiastic spectators to the theater.

The overall success of the initial dubbed movies resulted in a flurry of activities to establish new dubbing studios to take advantage of the public’s fascination with Persian language foreign sound films. Between 1949 and 1954 at least 8 dubbing studios opened in Tehran and other studios were opened in Italy, which had an advanced dubbing industry. Together, these studios helped bolster the Iranian film industry and cinema. Dariush Film Studio in Italy, headed by the Armenian-Iranian Alex Aqababian, made a specialty of dubbing Italian movies into Persian for the Iranian market. For his first effort, The Story of Miserable Feraidun (Sargozasht-e Feraidun-e Binava, Le Meravigliose Avventure di Guerri Meschino), Aqababian not only translated the Italian dialogues into Persian but also Persianized the proper names of the characters, including that of the protagonist in the title. Its screening in October 1952 in Tehran’s Diana Cinema was so successful than within a week Park Cinema also began showing it.

The bulk of the dubbing took place inside Iran which, as Jamal Omid reports, by 1968 boasted some twenty-five dubbing studios, 240 dubbers (170 males and 70 females), and a professional Film Dubbers Union, which had began operation in 1965.
Technical quality of the dubbed prints continued to be a problem as were some of the liberties the film importers, distributors, exhibitors, government censors, and dubbers took with the originals. Many of the technical problems were gradually overcome, but some of the aesthetic and ideological problems were exacerbated, leading to the emergence of certain poetics and politics. By the 1960s, foreign movie distributors and importers were providing dubbing studios with music and sound effects tracks that were separate from the dialogue track, allowing the voice-over artists to concentrate solely on their dialogue dubbing and the dubbed films to retain their original music and sound effects. Indeed, these voice artists became very proficient and prolific, the best of them specializing in dubbing the voices of several foreign movie stars. As a result of their success, the number of dubbed foreign movies shown in Iran continued to rise rapidly--56 films were dubbed in 1957, 119 in 1958, and 183 in 1959. By the end of the 1950s it was rare to encounter a foreign movie that was not dubbed.

Doubling Domestic Movies
Because of various production difficulties, almost all commercial features made in Iran were also doubled, that is, they were filmed MOS (without sound), with dialogues and sound effects both recorded and added in post-production. As a result, dubbing and doubling became lynchpins of the entire commercial film industry, impacting production, censorship, importation, distribution, exhibition, and advertising of the movies. The institutionalization of dubbing and doubling and their kin, lip-synching of actors to pre-recorded songs—as in Siamak Yasami’s Qarun’s Treasure (Ganj-e Qarun, 1965)—popularized commercial cinema movies and filmgoing and helped to improve both the technical capacity of the film industry and the construction of new moviehouses. However, it also had a profoundly negative impact on film production practices. One such consequence was that actors did not have to memorize their lines. This situation reinforced laziness, intuitive acting, spontaneous filmmaking, and the insidious idea that filmmaking was basically improvisational, requiring little preparation. Until the end of the 1950s, Iranian actors had doubled their own voices in post-production, but from the 1960s onward—the emergence of the hybrid production mode—most of them abandoned this practice in favor of professional dubbers (called dublor from the French doubleur) doing their voices. These Professional voice-over artists were both specialists and generalists and they were also prolific. Some of them specialized in dubbing the voices of only certain foreign and domestic actors, while others dubbed and doubled many different voices. They often indigenized (Iranianized) the foreign actors and stars by putting Persian language expressions in their mouths—continuing the function of live screen interpreters (dilmaj). This was particularly true of the comics and of the strong character types, such as cowboys, tough guys, outlaws, and romantic heroes and heroines. Sometimes, these efforts at indigenization were inappropriate, as when dubbers spoke Burt Lancaster’s lines in a Persian Turkish accent or that of Tony Curtis’ in a Persian Rashti accent—both of which carried very specific cultural baggage not in the original. Also, because each voice-over artist usually dubbed and doubled the voices of several characters, foreign and domestic, strange transnational crossover resonances and dissonances would be set up between dubbed voices and screen characters and between original and dubbed films, which served to undermine the spectators’ mirror-phase identification with the foreign characters. Thus, dubbing became, as Natasa Durovicova notes, the great equalizer, a “machine for processing differences.” Nonetheless, some critics, such as Amirhushang Kavusi, rightly condemned these efforts as fraudulent and unethical because they violated the “authenticity and integrity” of the original films. However, audiences, particularly those from the lower classes seemed to like such transformations and equalizations, as they would draw special pleasure from hearing John Wayne and Jerry Lewis use expressions that Iranian tough guys or comedians used. This sort of cultural hybridity, brought on by dubbing, on the one hand, subverted the original films and, on the other hand, endeared them to audiences whose film watching experience was thereby enriched. As a result, contrary to the pessimist culture industry critics, the “work” of these slippery and manipulative dubbing and doubling practices was highly ambivalent, ambiguous, and sometimes even counterhegemonic for instead of providing wholesale interpellation and identification with Western movies and cultures, they created new movies and an alienating sort of identification. In addition, however questionable some of the specific practices of the voice-over artists were, it is clear that by giving voice and personality to the actors and stars they brought them to life and provided incalculable service in popularizing cinema in Iran and in brining enjoyment to audiences. Unfortunately, their individual services oftenwent unrecognized by both critics and audiences.

Dubbing is an unrecognized dimension of the orality of the Iranian cinema—and of the hybrid mode—for the oral tradition was strong enough among some of the voice-over artists to drive their practices. Many came from radio, the most oral of the mass media, and some from the theater. The comic radio actors, such as Hamid Qanbari, transferred their various radio personalities into their film dubbing, imbuing foreign actors, such as Jerry Lewis, with a new Iranianized personality beloved to audiences, who spewed specifically Persian expressions, or even jokes that were then current in Iran and on the radio. Thus, Jerry Lewis was always haunted by his indigenized double. As in Persian art music and oral storytelling, sometimes, the composition and performance of dubbing occurred at the same time. Dialogue translators and voice-over artists, forced to work within the confines of a time-based art such as cinema, resorted to improvisation and to the efficiency of inserting tried and true expressions in the mouths of the actors, much like oral poets who stringed together blocks of known formula phrases. Such reliance on improvisation and formula phrases probably aided the development, and the longevity, of typage in Iranian cinema. Once a type had emerged, such as country bumpkin, foreign bride, tough guy, or dandy, the voice artists ran with it. They did so by turning a foreign character into a local one, or by imbuing a local actor with more character than he visually displayed on the screen, or by typecasting him into a familiar, endearing, or tiresome character. The development of all the key characters of Qarun’s Treasure—Qarun himself, Happy Ali, Hasan the Rattler, Ali’s mother Zinat, Shirin, and Qarun’s purported Indian son, played by Ali—all owe something to these dynamics of orality, dubbing, doubling, and typage.

Finally, any dubbing is a form of translation and mistranslation, not just in linguistic terms but also in cinematic, sociocultural, and political registers. Like song and dance sequences, dubbing served narratively and politically important functions in the commercial cinema, which was bridled by heavy censorship. It offered the directors a second chance to smooth over their films’ narrative flaws and rough spots or to tie up loose ends. By adding a few words of dialogue or expository speech, they explained away or covered up ellipses, missing scenes, missing persons, or extraneous elements left in the movie because of improvisational filming. It also allowed them to censor their movies, papering over immoral relationships or politically sticky points. In this process, names of characters, lines of dialog, story lines, locations, and character relationships were manipulated and changed to make the films both palatable to public tastes and to government and religious censors. Through drastic manipulations of this sort during dubbing, sometimes, a tragedy would be turned into a comedy. Dubbing also served the causes of Iranian nationalism by encouraging linguistic homogeneity and reducing heteroglossia and the “Babel effect,” so feared by religionists and ultranationalists. This is how Persian became the dominant language not only of national cinema but also of television, all of whose programming—a large portion of them imported—were dubbed.

After the Islamic Republic, dubbing of foreign movies became more of a politico-religious instrument for censoring films, consciously employed to cover up scenes that due to their perceived immoral Western content or incorrect politics were altered or removed, creating new story lines, character relationships, and politics. For example, through dubbing and cutting, the sexual relationship of unrelated men and women in foreign movies—illegal in Islamic Iran—would be changed to sibling or friendly relations. Verbally, the lovers would be called brothers and sisters or friends, and to avoid incest taboos, images that suggested sexual relations would be removed by cutting. Such changes would have major repercussions for the entire movie, requiring many other changes to make the story seamless and coherent. Without those fine-tuning changes throughout, the movies’ intelligibility would be compromised, which was the case in many instances in the early days of the Islamic Republic. Similar strategies were applied to change and to manipulate the films politically. Because of its vast possibilities, dubbing provides a rich arena for deciphering the tensions of hailing and haggling, and of selfing and othering.

Doubling of the Iranian movies decreased enormously within a decade after the Revolution, as the government began to encourage sync sound filming by providing more funds, or more raw stock at lower prices, to the filmmakers who took that option. As a result, most of the art cinema films were shot with sync sound on location, a practice that enhanced the realism of the postrevolutionary movies.

Hamid Nafisi is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Department of Art History, Rice University, Houston, Texas. He has Published extensively about theories of exile and diasporic cultures, films and media; and Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Third World cinema.
(The copy right of the article 'Dubbing, Doubling, ...' is held by its author.)

...It’s 6.30 pm as Ritu Sharma gets ready to leave her modest apartment at Paschim Vihar, West Delhi, in her smart casuals for another evening out. No, she’s not going out partying with friends. A car will soon ferry her, along with other colleagues to her new place of work, GE Capital’s sprawling communications complex in Gurgaon. The moment she enters the complex, she will turn, quite literally, into another person. Ritu will become Ruth, a customer-relations executive with an American accent. As the sun rises over the Atlantic coast of the United States of America and sets on North Delhi, Ritu, now Ruth, will start calling customers across the US, moving slowly towards the west coast, following up on credit card bills, mortgages, dues and doing the occasional tele-marketing.
“You wake up as Ritu, but answer to the name Ruth”
30 March 2001, Economic Times, New Delhi

On a global scale - awakening and exhaustion, love and grief, hunger and joy are all emotions that occur at the same time, in different places. When it rains bombs in Najaf, it is time to cook breakfast in Seattle. When someone ends a working day in an industrial suburb somewhere in the United States, the office moves, across the internet, to a location in Delhi where a new person occupies the virtual workspace that her distant colleague just left. She opens his file as he walks home. A call centre worker (called a Remote Agent in the Outsourcing Business, something which became an issue even in the US Presidential Elections of 2004) in Delhi cuts through ‘dead air’ with a definitely American nasalization in her voice as she closes a sales pitch.

One way of looking at computer screens in the work places of the new economy is to see them as glass walls that make up the architecture of a globe spanning urban cluster. These walls too have ears, and often words land on them, bearing news of emerging realities.

In a video, text and sound installation called ‘A/S/L’ (‘Age/Sex/Location’) we took the missives that emanate from the work places of the new economy as the basis for a performance about the labour of performance in the outsourcing business. For us, this was an opportunity to explore an allegorical mode of interpreting the everyday life of global connectivity through labour and electronic communication devices.

In this work, fictional call centre workers (‘remote client service agents’) and a couple of bots meet in a chat room where they dramatize the consequences of the relentless remoteness of agency on a daily basis. Speech as work, and IRC as play, foreground conflicting signals in the course of a work shift across call centres. A woman morphs from Sunita in Delhi by day, to Sandy in Jersey City by night, and to a chat handle called 2Far4U2C in between. Accents and identities, age, sex, and location, slip in and out of their selves as they work the trans-global beat.

In this installation (which also doubles as a piece of text based electronic theatre), transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked dialogue from the Upanishads, and video recordings of a spoken English class in Delhi.

A/S/L is a work that asks for a consideration on the accidents of history that produce millions of larynxes and tongues that can be shaped to speak the glossolalia of a global, accent-neutralized English. The cadence of this speech is the rhythm of the new global workplace, and it brings with it a strange new existential tension between the opportunities brought about by a sudden occupational and economic mobility, and the erasure of self, in turn underwritten by an insidious humiliation of a coerced masquerade that internationally outsourced call centre work often invokes in its worker. But when the call centre worker in India threatens the unwaged person who has defaulted on her credit history in the United States on the telephone, or is in turn abused by an impatient client, the certitudes of all our standard political cartographies of ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds scatter in the face of the storms in the networks.

The realities of one space underwrite the inequalities of the other. The map of the world is a grid of reflecting surfaces, and the call centre worker is a figure in this mirrored world, demanding a new understanding of the world; of what it means to labour, in a place, and across space.

The emergence of the global call centre industry, of which the city of Delhi is an important node, demands a new and incisive look at the intersection of networks, technology and culture. It signals a new kind of work, and a new kind of worker, whose invisibility (in the network) is mirrored by a rhetorical excess of ‘national wealth generation’, ‘new global work culture’ and ‘cheap labour’ that, in the end, renders the conditions that produce this work and the experience of the worker, equally invisible.

I. The Historical Location: The Making of a Productive Larynx
The new economy in our part of the world is cantilevered on a fortuitous accident of geography and culture, and a long history of reading and writing in the English language. It is important to remember that India contains the second largest pool of proficient English speakers in the world. The intensity of the education system is able to produce millions of English speaking young people from lower middle-class, and middle-class, backgrounds from the metropolitan cities and small towns of India. This is the legacy of a troubled and violent, complex and contradictory history of the last 300 years in South Asia, which has to do with the histories of colonialism, and the nation-building project. These are histories of the movement of ideas, technologies, goods and people, enforced and voluntary. From within this history has emerged a body, more specifically a larynx, which is gifted at learning - very quickly - diverse accents, styles and manners of speech in the English language. This historically constructed larynx is today a precious lode of raw material ripe for mining in the global economy.

The appropriation of English by a millions of people in South Asia, and specifically in India, mirrors an earlier moment in the history of linguistic transactions. For at least six hundred years until the middle of the 19th-century, Persian had been the language of administration, of the courts, of business and of much of cultured discourse in India. It also acted as an intermediary between different Indian languages, and as a via media between Indian and European languages. Knowledge of Persian then, like proficiency in English today, was a means to a better life, and to contact with the wider world. Naturally, various professional groups and castes in medieval India, Hindus as well as Muslims, made an intimate knowledge of Persian a key strategy in their quest for cultural capital, social mobility and economic gain. Precisely because Persian was an alien language for everybody, it allowed for the possibility that proficiency in it would mitigate the effects of hierarchies and differences in social status fixed at birth in a highly stratified society. Learning Persian made it possible for many people to re-invent themselves, as clerks, as poets, as story tellers, as merchants, as scribes and as intellectuals, even if they did not belong to the Persianized elite of the medieval court.

This historical context of the important precedence of a language from ‘elsewhere’ as a kind of bridging device within the diversity of South Asian/Indic cultures provides us with some understanding of the role that English plays today. English, then, becomes something akin to a technology, a software that one learns and works with, in order to operate the functions attendant to the fact of being present in a highly networked global economy.

II. The Networked Location: The Anxiety of Location
...Once, while working I got someone on the line who got really difficult to deal with. I was calling him to follow up on his credit card payment record. This guy knew that I was calling from a call centre, somewhere in India. So he said to me, “Do you even know how to spell CREDIT? I mean, C-R-E-D-I-T! Put me through to your supervisor, or some real American person…”
Anchal/ Anna, in conversation with Monica Narula

Paradoxically, the more ‘world class’ and globally produced the products are, the greater is the level of anxiety about their place of origin. The realities of contemporary trans-national capitalism require a global workplace, but the ‘else-where-ness’ of this workplace is always a problem. The fantasy that capitalism wants each of us to buy into is that of an endless circulation of materials and products across space, coupled with an unwillingness to accept anything but an adhesion or stickiness of people within space - something that functions as the sheet anchor of an increasingly unstable world. If you are a person who has defaulted on their credit card payments somewhere in the United States, it is unlikely that you will take seriously a voice that originates far away, especially in India, when that voice threatens you to send the credit sharks after you if you don’t pay. This claim to authority that call centre workers frequently have to deploy loses all credibility if it is seen as being made from a remote location. The same goes for an aggressive sales pitch. Proximity, thus, is the key to the blandishments as well as the rewards of capitalism.

As a client I must get a sense that the offer, or the threat, is ‘at my threshold’ for it to have an acceptable reality quotient. The virtual masquerade that underpins the work of the remote agent is based on a sense of what is viably ‘real’ in today’s world. The masquerade underwrites the invisibility of the worker and her actual location in space. It creates, instead, a new synchronicity and convergence between the ‘client’ and the ‘agent’ on a virtual terrain. It would be unwise to belabour the lack of substantive truth in this compact brought about by the delicate operations of the call centre worker’s larynx, the suspension of disbelief about the fact that English can be spoken with such felicity in far away places, and the exigencies of the global working day. Rather, it may be more productive to think of this performance as representing a new condition of being, and a new skill set, in a world where recorded messages tell us so much about who we are and what we may do next, and for which vocalization, pitch, tone, timbre and a certain degree of aural-cultural knowledge have become crucial navigating tools.


III. The Economics of Location: Not just ‘Cheap Labour’
Generally, when call centres are referred to, they are bracketed within the rhetoric of ‘cheapness of labour’. A critique based on this view expresses a ‘moral turn’ built into the larger rhetoric of ‘the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries’. These theorizations are over simplifications. They are signs of a deep inability to think about the political economy of the trans-national present. It needs to be understood that the benefits of the performance/masquerade are not translatable simply in terms of the much touted possibility of employing ‘cheap labour’ in a third world location. Every investment decision rests on a careful calculation of the cost per unit, within a framework of legitimate industrial activity and the larger political-economic stability of the space of production. Infrastructural capacity, the cost per unit of energy, taxation policies, interest rates, and the relative flexibility of labour laws are all elements in such a calculation. Further, when talking of labour, particularly in a global context, we often tend to forget that labour capacity is always calculated within pre-defined parameters of cognitive and operational skills. Hence, productivity, efficiency, bargaining norms and the normative concerns that mark the workplace (what management can do, enforce, get away with or even what it cannot do) are all crucial to the cost/benefit calculation.

It is critical to understand that socially necessary labour is required to reproduce any specific kind of labour. This implies a level of material, educational and cultural attainments that a given society can make available to its workforce and the drive towards labouring that it induces by offering a series of quantifiable wages or value-laden rewards. At present, many spaces within the territory of the Indian state seem to be favourable to the corporations who are constantly in search of spaces of production with the lowest overall cost per unit. It would not be unrealistic to visualise a future in which Call Centre Industry corporations based in India invest in creating remote agents in Bangladesh, Myanmar or Cambodia. To assume otherwise is to misread the faceless and placeless global nature of networked (C)apital.

Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is a group of media practitioners working in new media, installations, video, sound, photography and text. The collective is based in Delhi. Together with Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan, Raqs co-founded Sarai at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.