Which titles to use for international co-productions?


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PeplumParadise
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Which titles to use for international co-productions?

Post by PeplumParadise » 10/08/2022, 20:40

I think we need to decide on a definite policy of which titles to use when posting entries for international co-productions, but I don't really have any ideal solutions to offer.

When I first joined the forum I was told that we should use the Italian titles, excepting in the cases of international co-productions where the director, leading actors and main crew were foreign, in which cases the title from the country most prominently involved in the production would be used (so, for instance, we would use "Esther and the King" rather than "Ester e il re", because the director, stars, producers and writers are all American or English). At that time though Agustin Bescos was our only international actor, so keeping it Italian was quite straightforward.

Now that we have many more foreign actors, and particularly Spanish, it is becoming more complicated. With many Italian-Spanish co-productions having the cast and crew split 50/50 it is often difficult to determine which should be the prominent country and which title to use. It's also hard to decide if listings for the "Spanish" actor topics should favour the Spanish titles and "Italian" actor topics use the Italian titles, but then unless both titles are listed it makes title searches pretty impossible.

The only idea I can think of would be making a definitive list of co-productions which would be used to determine which title should be the "official" one to be used in the forum (which could also solve an associated problem of films that were released in Italy under multiple titles).

This would be a rather complicated undertaking, so if anybody has any alternate solutions or suggestions…..

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Cinema Italiano
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Which titles to use for international co-productions?

Post by Cinema Italiano » 11/08/2022, 12:30

I fully agree with you on what you wrote: we are a small community and it would be nice to have some common rules to follow but this does not happen always (for example some forumers write credited or uncredited and others do not). Referring to international co-productions, on the rare occasions that I have explored this aspect with many sources, I have found that on the "Imdb" site they have never made a mistake (unlike the titles of the films or the actors). If we wanted to follow what was reported by "Imdb" in the case of the film: "Una sull'altra" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065148/?ref_=ttrel_rel_tt we read that this is an Italy / France / Spain co-production so we should post: Una sull'altra aka Perversion Story aka Una historia perversa (1969). Making a second example for the movie "Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067396/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 we read that this is a Spain / Italy co-production so we should post: La mansión de la niebla aka Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba (1972). This is obviously just an idea and I hope my poor English is sufficient to be understood.

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Which titles to use for international co-productions?

Post by PeplumParadise » 11/08/2022, 12:58

Cinema Italiano wrote:
11/08/2022, 12:30
I fully agree with you on what you wrote: we are a small community and it would be nice to have some common rules to follow but this does not happen always (for example some forumers write credited or uncredited and others do not). Referring to international co-productions, on the rare occasions that I have explored this aspect with many sources, I have found that on the "Imdb" site they have never made a mistake (unlike the titles of the films or the actors). If we wanted to follow what was reported by "Imdb" in the case of the film: "Una sull'altra" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065148/?ref_=ttrel_rel_tt we read that this is an Italy / France / Spain co-production so we should post: Una sull'altra aka Perversion Story aka Una historia perversa (1969). Making a second example for the movie "Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067396/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 we read that this is a Spain / Italy co-production so we should post: La mansión de la niebla aka Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba (1972). This is obviously just an idea and I hope my poor English is sufficient to be understood.
Regarding the credited / uncredited, as long as I have been on the forum the policy has been that we write if an actor is credited in the individual posts, but don't write anything if an actor is uncredited (but do put "uncredited" in the filmographies). I assume this is because originally the forum dealt almost exclusively with generici, who tend to be uncredited in 95% of appearances, so it was only really worth noting if they were credited. Obviously with the addition of more "lesser known actors", "character actors", "stuntmen" and "leading ladies" this is no longer the case, so the policy maybe needs re-assessing, though it would be a major task to go through the topics of every generico adding "uncredited" to every post.

With international co-productions I agree that it is probably best to note all the various international titles from the production countries in the individual film posts - that way at least they would come up in a search for any titles. This is not really practical in the filmographies though, where the titles are entered alphabetically so we really still need to decide which is the definitive title - which your suggestion of using the first country/title from IMDb would be a solution. Again it would be a major task to go through updating all previous posts, so would probably be something that can only be applied to new posts.

Plenty to think about, hopefully some others will add their opinions.

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