The art of asynchrony : a study of Cantonese dubbing in Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

The employment of asynchronous voices for screen actors in the Hong Kong film industry emerged in the late 1960s, peaked in the 1980s, and then declined by the late 1990s. Spanning almost the entire golden era of Hong Kong cinema, this voice- dubbing phenomenon that lasted for three decades has since been criticized for creating a notorious style-mark of Hong Kong movies due to the awkward discrepancy between the real speech of the actor and the dubbed voice of another.

However, it is precisely this arbitrary disjunction between the bodies and the voices that makes the films produced during this period special. This has given rise to a unique form of art in filmmaking - the combination of the visual performance of screen actors and the vocal performance of voice artists. While the former has always been the center of attention, the latter has also played a significant role in the history of Hong Kong cinema but has not been thoroughly studied. With movie stars providing visual performances on screen and voice artists lending their voices to the visuals off screen, Hong Kong cinema has surpassed the limits of realism and created an illusionary world full of wild imagination and vibrant creativity. By breaking free from the belief that sound and image must be inseparable, the dubbed voices were able to detach, juxtapose, and reattach to different images with flexibility, resulting in a dynamic audio-visual interplay.

This thesis examines the art of cinematic asynchrony, with a special focus on exploring the Cantonese voice dubbing practice that marked the distinctive characteristics of the Hong Kong film industry in the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that the use of voice dubbing cannot be oversimplified as crude, unsophisticated, and vulgar, but rather, it carries its own distinct aesthetics and cultural imprint of the time.