Is the dubbing of films into Chinese, allowing huge local audiences to watch movies in their mother tongue, on the wane after the heyday of the 1980s?

According to experts, the answer is "Yes," the golden era for dubbing houses has long since past -- but opportunities may continue to linger as the sector has undergone amazing change.

Members of the public were shocked after Tong Zirong, a renowned dubbing artist, gave an interview on local television last month, revealing the disturbing situation that the much admired artists have been encountering over the past years -- their opportunities and incomes are declining.

It aroused the public's attention to the situation of film dubbing, a long ignored sector in the struggling Chinese film industry in the face of a more competitive market and demanding audiences.

"The rapidly changing trends and patterns in the market of audio and visual products in China have taken China's film dubbing business to the crossroads," wrote Xinmin Weekly columnist and film critic Hu Zhanfen.

"To change and to change quickly are life-or-death issues being imposed on those State-owned film dubbing studios."

Past bloom

In the 1950s, the State-owned Changchun Film Dubbing Studio in Northeast China's Jinlin Province and the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio in the country's largest metropolis were established.

The studios enjoyed a golden era in the early 1980s when China began its reforms and opening up to the outside world.

At a time when people were freed from the relatively isolated period of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), reading the "Scar Literature" -- which recounted many people's sufferings and ordeals during those stormy years -- reciting the experimental and sentimental "Obscure Poetry," and watching dubbed foreign films became the hottest fads.

Among the most popular dubbed foreign films were Hamlet, directed and acted by Laurence Olivier in 1948, Jane Eyre, directed by Delbert Mann in 1970, Zorro, starring French actor Alain Delon, the British-French film La Grande Vadrouille, directed by Gerard Oury, the film version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, Death on the Nile, directed by John Guillermin, and the Japanese action/adventure Cops and Thugs, directed by Kinji Fukasaku and starring The Japanese Clint Eastwood, Ken Takakura, just to name a few.

The love of dubbed films only led to the hearty admiration of film dubbing artists, who assumed key roles in the well-received films.

"The film dubbers at that time almost had the same volatile star power as that of today's Hollywood megastars and popular Hong Kong singers and actors," said Nan Ni, a middle-aged writer who watched Jane Eyre countless times as a university student and was so obsessed with the heroine that she memorized and recited most of her lines in the film.

"These lines are thought-provoking, moving and encouraging and expressed my own feelings when I was a young girl trying to recognize myself as a mature and independent-thinking woman."

Nan was not alone. In the 1980s, mimicking film voice-overs became a hobby for many and a main course for variety shows.

Many Chinese knew such famous lines such as "To be or not to be, that is a question" and "I should make it as hard for you to leave me now as it is for me to leave you."

The boom led to the birth of more State-owned dubbing studios in the late 1980s.

Among them were the dubbing studios belonging to the Beijing Youth Film Studio and the Beijing Film Studio, which is now part of the China Film Group Corp, the Beijing August First Military Film Studio, China Central Television, Guangdong Provincial Television and the Guangdong Provincial Drama Troupe.

Sharp decline

Although many still love to watch dubbed foreign films and one can find many chat rooms, online message boards or audio files of the old dubbed films, the 1990s saw a sharp decline in the business of State-owned film dubbing studios.

"On the one hand, these studios suffered great economic losses and were hit by a brain drain. On the other hand, they had many new competitors in the market -- self-employed dubbers, private film dubbing studios, run by both locals and people from Taiwan and Hong Kong," said film researcher Li Ershi with the Beijing Film Academy.

The studios struggled to find enough dubbing contracts from film and TV production companies to keep afloat.

Over the past two years, 17 of the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio's 29 staff members have quit to start their own businesses.

All other State-owned dubbing studios have simply been forced to close down in recent years.

According to Li, the dubbing studios have only got themselves to blame.

Instead of limiting themselves to foreign feature films, they should have looked at covering a wider variety of audio visual products such as TV drama series, audio books, TV commercials and even electronic games.

In contrast, self-employed individual dubbers and private groups find themselves too busy to look at other opportunities.

"I get up at 6 am and go to work till about 10 pm," said Feng Junhua, a self-employed dubber from Shanghai.

Since October, she has been engaged in a heavy workload of voicing-over about 200 TV drama episodes before her January 1 deadline falls.

Still, an increasing number of Chinese film-goers, especially the younger generation, who mostly watch films on VCDs and DVDs in their home instead of going to cinemas, which are mostly poorly-equipped, poorly-managed and offer a limited number of film options, are embracing imported films with subtitles.

Original soundtrack

The future of State-owned dubbing studios and whether the sector can survive have become hot issues over the past few years as many younger Chinese and "white-collar" workers, which make up a huge chunk of the movie-going audience, have shown their desire to watch imported Western blockbusters like The Matrix, Harry Porter and popular TV drama series such as Band of Brothers in the original versions.

"Watching a foreign film in its original soundtrack can be both entertaining and an effective way for us university students to improve our foreign languages," said Cui Nanan, a Nankai University student. And many others agree.

Random surveys conducted by portal websites, whose main users are reportedly young Chinese, have shown that a majority of young Chinese are opting for original instead of dubbed films -- especially English speaking films.

And many fans of unadulterated imported films have pointed out the "original sins" of dubbed films.

First, "in dubbed films, much of the information, particularly the rich sound effects, get lost and films become less appealing," says Guangzhou-based film critic Zhou Liming.

Second, as most older generations of film dubbers were trained on the stage of drama schools, "their exaggerated treatment of the voices and the use of dialectical Chinese phrases make the voices of the foreign actors sound awkward."

Third, the practice of one person playing several roles in a film and delivering different characters' lines in almost the same voice has also heavily soured the taste of foreign films, Zhou said.

However, some experts say, dubbing will never die as so many people do not speak foreign languages.

"Even if you can speak one or two languages, you can't speak them all. In the years to come, dubbing will still make great contributions to promoting cultural exchange between people from different backgrounds. It is just that people have more diversified choices and dubbed films will never regain their popularity to be compared with the past," said renowned film dubber Ding Jianhua.

"What the Chinese dubbing outlets should now do is push for reform and reach out for opportunities instead of waiting for them," said film researcher Li Baojiang.

The dubbers may not be regarded as popular stars, like they used to be, but dubbing experts -- who can churn out quality films with their ability to translate them and make them a piece of art -- will always be respected and remembered as real artists, he concluded.

(China Daily December 19, 2003)