Horizontes (Jan 2012)
Alienation and desire in the filmic representation of dubbing as a job
Abstract
In the early 20th century, at the dawn of cinema, human labor in industrial society had already been shown as a factor of reification and alienation in films such as Metropolis (1927), by the Austrian-German director Fritz Lang, and Modern times (1936), by British director Charles Chaplin. More recently, human labor in different areas still presents itself as a theme in several films. Although we are living at a later stage of post-industrial society and control mechanisms have been changed in our technological information society, the process of reification and alienation seem to be still in force in certain work environments. In this paper, I will discuss how alienation and desire are conveyed in a movie that portrays the work of voice artists and oral translation as its theme. Thus, I will focus on the representation of these issues in dubbing for TV in the film Dias melhores virão (1989), by Carlos Diegues.
