Screen Music and Multiple Versions. Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Approaches and Challenges

Abstract

When films transitioned to sound around 1930, translation methods such as dubbing and subtitling did not develop immediately. It was in this context of experimentation that the first systematic audiovisual translation strategy of film history emerged: the multiple versions, a mostly European-related phenomenon. Multiple versions were intended to make films accessible to different national and linguistic audiences. In this article, we focus on an aspect that has been largely neglected up to these days, namely the role of music in the process of adaptation of multiple versions to their respective cultural contexts. We argue that this popular phenomenon ought to be analysed also in regard to the musical component of the films and go through the challenges of such research. We plead for a comparative audiovisual approach to the topic with transdisciplinary methods and theories, transnational source research, and a wide variety of archives.