A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019)

[knives]

One of my closest friends is an expert in neo-syriac Aramaic which is where the biggest confirmation comes from. Also, as part of learning to read Palenstinian-Aramaic (what the Palestinian Talmud is written in) it becomes necessary to learn a few of the spoken quirks.

[Mr Sausage]

Why did you learn to read Palenstinian-Aramaic?

[knives]

To read the Palestinian Talmud which I read because I want to.

[Noiretirc]

But why did you want to?

Anyway. Does anyone have a problem with Conspiracy (2001), about the Wansee Conference, all in English, with the natural accents of the players?

Edit: I did some Conspiracy reading about the forum, and I'm not seeing any language complaints. Why does A Hidden Life get singled out for this?

[Brian C]

It's being "singled out" (wildly overblown description of the conversation here, by the way) by one person who joined the forum two years ago, little wonder that they haven't posted about a film that apparently hasn't even been mentioned here in over a decade.

[Noiretirc]

Nah. I see posts starting on page 4 / 2019 about this.

[Soy Cuba]

(especially since the Aramaic was very poorly pronounced)
Honestly even Malick provides evidence why using a character’s actual language doesn’t automatically create authenticity with The New World. My understanding is that the native language spoken in the movie was written entirely as a woman would speak it which for those in the know was a distraction.

It seems to me that complaints about using the authentic language are really complaints about the audience members’ own ability to engage with the text. This might not be true of anyone here, but certainly many who complain about these things don’t speak in the language in question and would be pacified with, in this instance let’s say, German sounding gibberish.

German sounding gibberish would at least be better than an accented English.

This is the problem I had with Chernobyl, I could pick up all sorts of Northern English accents and other English accents. If they were speaking Polish, it would still have been inaccurate, but I would probably have not known any different to if they had been speaking Ukranian, thetrefore enjoyed it alot more. But as it was my brain knew it wasn't historically accurate. Ignorance is bliss.

As I say, this is a very individual, petty problem I have, that I wish I didn;t have!

[flyonthewall2983]

Accents are a tricky thing. I wonder how often someone who is perceived to be using a bad accent, is actually speaking in their own voice.

[Soy Cuba]

Accents are a tricky thing. I wonder how often someone who is perceived to be using a bad accent, is actually speaking in their own voice.

Indeed. I despise the film 'Locke'. Couldn't get past Tom Hardy's abhorrent 'Welsh' accent. Sounds like Russian and is one of the worst attempts I have heard in modern cinema.. Most people I speak to didn't notice it though.

In the same way I wonder how many British actors that do USA accents are fine for me but sound awful to Americans. Josh O'Connor for instance in the recent film 'Rebuilding' is one.....it didn't really bother me but was noticeable some of the time when his accent slipped into England.

[pzadvance]

I have the German Blu-ray of A Hidden Life and this conversation has got me curious how the German dub is. I recall reading somewhere it's the actual cast dubbing themselves.

[knives]

Accents are a tricky thing. I wonder how often someone who is perceived to be using a bad accent, is actually speaking in their own voice.

Indeed. I despise the film 'Locke'. Couldn't get past Tom Hardy's abhorrent 'Welsh' accent. Sounds like Russian and is one of the worst attempts I have heard in modern cinema.. Most people I speak to didn't notice it though.

In the same way I wonder how many British actors that do USA accents are fine for me but sound awful to Americans. Josh O'Connor for instance in the recent film 'Rebuilding' is one.....it didn't really bother me but was noticeable some of the time when his accent slipped into England.

This is definitely true of myself, but something I’ve noticed in general as well is that Americans just don’t care unless the accent results in a really weird voice or is terribly inconsistent. After all, we can accept JCVD as being born in the USA.

[Mr Sausage]

Funnily JCVD’s movies always felt compelled to explain his accent. There’s always some line revealing he’s cajun or quebecois or something. It’s Schwarzenegger that not only goes unexplained, but gets to sport names like Joseph P. Brenner (don’t ask what the P. stands for…).

[flyonthewall2983]

My threshold on this is English actors trying to replicate a southern US accent but instead sounding Australian.

[Never Cursed]

I'm sure I've said dumb things about this on the forum at other times, but I'd rather a performance feel right than be strained in attempting a direct imitation. Josh O'Connor's American accent in The Mastermind, for instance, was mostly good even if specific words were off in spots, but he was ultimately a good fit for the character and played it well. I would usually rather the Conspiracy approach than the K-19: The Widowmaker one, where Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford are doing pathetic Russian accents. (Note: I would have loved to find a clip from the movie to illustrate my point that was not a TikTok, but whatever.) The only thing that usually gets me is in English-language period pieces set in France where most everyone is doing an English accent. The biggest offenders on this front I can recall have been the Tom Hooper Les Miserables and the video game Assassin's Creed: Unity, both of which used Cockney accents for the Parisian working class. It does effectively communicate the class distinction, but it's so wrong for the setting because of the Anglo-French enmity that it bothers me nevertheless. (When I briefly played Assassin's Creed: Unity, it actually bothered me so much that I think I hacked the game to play the audio in French, but with English subtitles, as by default I think the game only lets you change the languages on everything.)

This is also weird to bring up for this movie in particular, as the problem here as I remember it was not the accents, but the language of the performance - namely, why assemble a cast of mostly German actors and then largely have them speak in English, with German dialogue reserved for villains and curses hurled at the pious lead characters?

[Brian C]

No examples immediately off the top of my head, but my impression has always been that a southern accent was the easiest American accent for English actors to handle, and that it was ironically American actors who struggled the most with southern accents.

But, American regional accents in general are fading out these days.

[Altair]

This is also weird to bring up for this movie in particular, as the problem here as I remember it was not the accents, but the language of the performance - namely, why assemble a cast of mostly German actors and then largely have them speak in English, with German dialogue reserved for villains and curses hurled at the pious lead characters?

I would imagine it might be connected to the financing of the film - having it in English might have made it easier to secure backing.

[Finch]

I would have liked to experienced what Malick's dialogue would have sounded like in German recorded live on set. I actually wonder if the German cast had to go back and redub themselves into German for the localized version. FWIW, I also liked the film's original/working title, Radegund, better.

[MichaelB]

Accents are a tricky thing. I wonder how often someone who is perceived to be using a bad accent, is actually speaking in their own voice.

Robert Donat's natural Manchester accent can only be heard in one film, the ultra-obscure 1949 regional comedy The Cure for Love.

And James Mason's natural Huddersfield accent can be heard in the rather better known Georgy Girl, but it's so un-James Mason-like that it sounds distinctly odd at first.

And if you haven't heard an American trying to do Geordie (the mad fool), get a load of this.

(For reference, this is what the people of Newcastle actually sound like.)

I would imagine it might be connected to the financing of the film - having it in English might have made it easier to secure backing.

Absolutely. Making a major US TV series in subtitled Ukrainian and Russian would have been a complete non-starter from the get-go.

We all know that Robert Eggers would gladly have made The Northman in a combination of Old Norse and Old Slavonic, but even he knew better than to try to actually pitch it as a serious proposition.

[Mr Sausage]

What do the more purist of you do with Shakespeare productions? Has anyone ever actually been bothered that no one in Othello is speaking Italian, or that the people Antony and Cleopatra sound nothing like Romans and Egyptian Greeks, but quite a lot like Renaissance Londoners?

[MichaelB]

There's a theatre company called Northern Broadsides that specialises in classical theatre performed in northern English accents—on the reasonable grounds that Shakespeare's own Stratford accent would have been a fair bit closer to that than to the perfect diction of someone London-born and RADA-trained.

Here's a sample of their As You Like It.

[Soy Cuba]

We all know that Robert Eggers would gladly have made The Northman in a combination of Old Norse and Old Slavonic, but even he knew better than to try to actually pitch it as a serious proposition.

That is everything wrong with the industry though isn't it.

Profit over artistic integrity and accracy.

[MichaelB]

Yes, but "accuracy" is a hopeless pipe dream.

People mock Mel Gibson's accent in Braveheart, but the real William Wallace would have been totally incomprehensible to modern ears, even Scottish ones—and there's no reliable way of accurately reconstructing what he sounded like. And, come to think of it, what the music of the late 13th century would have sounded like, because I guarantee that it was nothing like what James Horner came up with.

And while The Northman was at least conscientious enough not to blindly (or deafly) go along with the convention that any historical epoch can be appropriately scored in a broadly 19th-century orchestral idiom, Eggers and his composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough had no real idea of what ninth-century music actually sounded like. How could they have done? And had they made the film in Old Norse and Old Slavonic, how could they possibly know to any level of accuracy what either language sounded like back then?

People fixate on accents and anachronistic dialogue because it's easier to spot when films "get it wrong", but even if those pass muster a period drama is guaranteed to be riddled with subtler howlers elsewhere. I laughed out loud when I heard that Ukrainians like to hold "traditional folk weddings" in the style of the one in Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, because Parajanov basically made it all up. And while Barry Lyndon is often praised for its "accuracy", one of its most famous scenes is scored to music that's not merely wildly anachronistic in terms of its musical content, as Schubert wrote his piano trio in the 1820s, decades after the mid-eighteenth century, but it's performed in a modern style on modern instruments.

I've always been fond of this quote from Richard Combs' defence of Hugh Hudson's Revolution because it sums up just how absurd this nit-picking is:

And of course, there is nothing like an accent, a 'funny voice', to put a critic on guard, especially with screen acting, where the performer is just supposed to 'be', his or her technique invisible. So [Donald] Sutherland is 'wrong' in the first place for having an accent at all, which is then turned into the jibe that he has obviously, ridiculously, got the accent wrong. This is more than just a slur on the actor's powers of vocal mimicry, it actually excludes the possibility that he could get it right: the very idea of Sutherland doing such an accent is itself the criticism. And the force of the criticism derives from an absolutely unshakeable, absolutely inaccessible assumption: that there exists a perfect, generally accepted model, a final reality test, for what an eighteenth-century army sergeant, born in Yorkshire then having done service round the world, would sound like. Like all such appeals to reality, its conviction is that it is so completely implicit, undemonstrated and undemonstrable. Its idiocy only becomes apparent when it is made explicit, when a film like Quest for Fire can be praised for the 'realism' of its portrayal of pre-historic life.

And of course there's the famous story of how Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance in the title role of Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle was so dead-on accurate (it was based on recordings of the real Dorothy Parker) that it proved actively off-putting to test audiences, who thought it sounded too weird for them to be able to empathise with her in any way—so her entire performance needed to be revoiced. You have only to look back a mere 95 years at an early sound film to recognise that people talked fundamentally differently to the way that they do now, and so it's a racing certainty that if you went back another 95 years to, say, 1836, people will sound weirder still. Were it possible to achieve such a thing, an absolutely vocally authentic adaptation of Oliver Twist would be fascinating to scholars and the linguistically curious, but it certainly wouldn't pass muster as mainstream entertainment. And neither would an 1836 performance of a Shakespeare play in the vocal stylings of the turn of the seventeenth century—or the twenty-first.

So what exactly do you mean by "accuracy"? And is that even especially desirable when dealing with creative products?

[Mr Sausage]

As a bit of illustration for what you’ve been saying in these excellent posts, MichaelB, here’s a great youtube video of a guy delivering a monologue while slowly transitioning from Old English to modern English through all the varieties in between, so you can pinpoint when spoken English becomes comprehensible to you. It was shockingly late for me considering I was taught to read and pronounce Chaucer’s middle English.

You’re right as well to put “accuracy” in scare quotes because it’s not really accuracy we’re talking about, but a kind of mindless literalism. Borges has a perfect story about this, where the quest to make the most “accurate” map possible of this one town ends up producing a map the exact size of what it’s illustrating, rendering it pointless. Turns out a representation of a thing shouldn’t actually aspire to become what it’s representing.

So long as a movie isn’t proposing people actually spoke a different language than what we know they spoke, it’s fine if it wants to represent the presence of one language with the use of another. And then the audience, if not caged by their own literalness, can just use their imagination.

[MichaelB]

It’s slightly weird watching Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh and seeing ancient Egyptians speaking Polish, but they didn’t speak English either.

Ironically, Kawalerowicz’s Quo Vadis, while also in Polish, is more linguistically accurate than the Mervyn LeRoy version, because while neither features people speaking Latin, the Kawalerowicz version does at least quote directly from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s source novel, whereas the LeRoy version had to translate it into English!

[knives]

A further element of this is the accuracy of experience. We talked about this in the Shakespeare thread, but period accurate casting wouldn’t have a period accurate audience reaction because an all male cast was something audiences naturally adjusted for at the time whereas nowadays it would have a Brechtian function.

Going back to language if an artist’s goal is audience comprehension then it makes more sense to have the characters even in modern set stories speak in the audience’s language because accuracy is not the point. For example, I adore the East German westerns which are spoken in German because the makers assumed that only Germans would be interested in these films. The movies would make no sense to their popular audience in English even though that would be more accurate.