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Why a fascist law is still deciding what Italians hear
The director's date is exact. In 1930 the Italian government, faced with the arrival of sound cinema and a flood of American talkies, required that films shown in Italy carry Italian dialogue — initially by banning foreign speech on the soundtrack altogether. Distributors cut the dialogue out and inserted captions, which ruined the films, and then an industry grew up in Rome to replace the voices instead. The law is long gone; the industry is not. Italian dubbing is a career with its own training, its own prizes and its own dynasties, voice actors are matched to foreign stars for decades at a time, and the death of a doppiatore is reported as news. The practical effect for a learner living in Italy is that films in lingua originale are a minority programme in large cities and absent elsewhere. The second fact in this dialogue is the one that surprises people who have been taught neorealism as documentary. Italian cinema shot without live sound into the 1980s: dialogue was recorded afterwards in a studio, which is why Italian films of that era have a particular acoustic flatness, and why directors could cast fishermen, bricklayers and passers-by with no lines learnt and no accent problem. Visconti, De Sica and Fellini all worked this way; Fellini sometimes had actors count aloud on set. Note the point the director ends on, which is a real argument rather than nostalgia: the realism of those films is in the faces and the places, and it was assembled in a dubbing studio afterwards.