Insee Thong
When watching one of the Insee Daeng movies — or any other existing example of popular Thai cinema from the 1960s — it’s possible to see a separate story being told in the countless pops, skips and scratches that riddle the severely weathered and damaged available prints, much as you might see a story in the lines etched in an aged human face. And that story, depending on how you look at it, can be either a sad one or a happy one. On the one hand, those wounds and blemishes speak of a unique part of world popular cinema that is on the verge of being lost to history — the ragged condition of each surviving film testifying to the many, many more that have ceased to exist entirely. On the other, as with a child’s threadbare teddy bear, that conspicuous wear and tear serves as evidence of just how much these movies have been loved and enjoyed by their intended audience, thread over and over again through projectors — be they in urban cinemas or makeshift outdoor screenings in small villages — until there was little left of them to thread; in short, loved by their audience to the extent that today they have been virtually devoured.
#1 by Braineater on June 7, 2008 - 10:02 am
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Wow — so they used live actors in the theaters to provide the voices? That sounds like a whole new art form.
I can think of something even more disconcerting, though: when I was in Poland a few years ago, all the movies I saw were neither dubbed nor subtitled. They had a narrator flatly reading out the translated dialogue over the movie… for characters of either sex. It was stultifying.
#2 by lyzard on June 7, 2008 - 4:58 pm
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When I first saw Die Augen Der Mumie Ma at a Cinematheque screening, turned out their print didn’t have English intertitles after all….. So they dug out some poor schmuck who spoke German – kind of – and let him loose on us.
Did you know that “um” is the most commonly-used word in the German language?
#3 by Todd on June 8, 2008 - 10:47 am
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The Thai movie Monrak Transistor has a scene depicting this practice, and it’s just one guy doing all the dialog. But he still tries to do all the different voices, including the women. This is at a makeshift outdoor screening at a fairground. The impression I got from the materials I read is that, back in the day, they would generally have more than one actor to do this – at least for the theatrical screenings. It is kind of a mind-blowing concept, especially given that these movies are pretty dialog heavy.
#4 by KeithA on June 8, 2008 - 11:48 am
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Most of the DVDs of those1960s Russian fantasy films that were released a couple years ago (all well worth owning) have an option to watch the movie dubbed into English, and the dub is just a narrator telling you what’s happening and summarizing what’s being said. So this is apparently not an entirely rare practice.
#5 by David on June 8, 2008 - 3:45 pm
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I doubt that the Thai narrators were quite as disrespectful of the source material, but in Australia there is a comedy group called Double Take who used to take old films, strip them of their sound and stand at the back of the theatre and re-dub the movies live. I saw them (over ten years ago now) doing one of the Hercules films and Astro Zombies. It was hilarious. It seems they have taken the age old practice and twisted it to their evil ends.
They even took their stage version and turned it into a film called Hercules Returns, which was a great deal of fun, but lacked the spontaneity and the atmosphere of seeing a live performance.
And the tradition continues. It looks like they’re back with a new production called Horror Hospital.