Is it time to take the dubbed voice as se­ri­ously as we have taken many of the other tech­ni­cal and aes­thetic el­e­ments of transna­tional cinema his­tory? The busi­ness his­tory of media dis­tri­b­u­tion has pro­vided some tools for un­der­stand­ing cinema in a dy­namic of spa­tial origin and lo­cal­iza­tion. Like­wise with stud­ies of cul­tural re­cep­tion across bor­ders, but cinema does not get from one to the other with­out con­sid­er­able work. While that work might be his­tor­i­cally over­looked within some aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions or made in­vis­i­ble (far below the line) within the hi­er­ar­chies of large com­mer­cial media in­dus­tries, this dis­re­gard is not evenly ex­pe­ri­enced around the world. Be­tween the poles of dis­tri­b­u­tion his­tory and cul­tural re­cep­tion were net­works of per­former-work­ers, sound en­gi­neers, and man­u­fac­tur­ers of dub­bing equip­ment whose labor gave struc­ture, often con­spic­u­ously, to that vital prop­erty of the moving image: its abil­ity to cir­cu­late. At a moment when dig­i­tal forms of im­mer­sive dub­bing have trans­formed long­stand­ing norms in lo­cal­iza­tion, what can at­ten­tion to the early decades of dub­bing, in places far from cap­i­tal-in­ten­sive media cen­ters, reveal about the sonic labor of lo­cal­iza­tion?

Sound and voice stud­ies, es­pe­cially some of the es­o­teric sub­fields within, have more to offer than cinema and media his­tog­ra­phy has taken time to ex­plore. If we con­sider for ex­am­ple, as the schol­ars of vocal timbre en­cour­age us to do, the ways that col­lec­tiv­ity and dif­fer­ence are pro­duced through vocal timbre, then dub­bing pre­sents a stand­out object of in­quiry. The talk will follow a few cases of col­lec­tive voic­ing in the broad­cast-cin­e­matic cul­tures of 1960s Iran to their breathy and nasal ex­tremes.

Kaveh Askari is Pro­fes­sor and Di­rec­tor of the Film Stud­ies Pro­gram at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity. He is the author of Re­lay­ing Cinema in Mid­cen­tury Iran: Ma­te­r­ial Cul­tures in Tran­sit (2022), which was awarded the 2023 Kather­ine Singer Kovács So­ci­ety for Cinema and Media Stud­ies Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Before this he au­thored Making Movies into Art: Pic­ture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hol­ly­wood (2014) and co-edited sev­eral vol­umes in­clud­ing a spe­cial issue of Film His­tory titled South by South/West Asia: Tran­sre­gional His­to­ries of Middle East–South Asia Cin­e­mas (2021) and Per­form­ing New Media, 1890-1915 (2014). He also has col­lab­o­rated with cu­ra­tors and archives to pre­serve 16mm Amer­i­can am­a­teur films and sev­eral fea­tures made in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s.