Practices of Viewing VIII: Dubbing (video essay)

As cinephiles we pride ourselves to watch films in original versions only. Dubbed versions, on the other hand, we consider as a massive and thus unacceptable deviation from how a film is intended to be viewed. And maybe that is true. But what if the practice of dubbing, as disruptive as it might be, could serve as a form of productive defamiliarization? Dubbing puts into question our common understanding of what the „right“ voice and what the „correct“ language is, and instead it could make us think about all those other voices and languages spoken by those who are watching a film but are not represented by its images. This video essay is a personal journey through the languages that form me but which I do not master, allowing me to hear for the first time what was always already in those films I believed to know.