That reminds me of watching Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida in the cinema and being very conscious of how unusual it looked—despite black-and-white Academy ratio being the near-universal cinema format for the entire first half of the twentieth century, and the fact that I wouldn't remotely think that anything made back then looked unusual.knives wrote: Wed Jan 21, 2026 3:57 pm 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.
(It's like Borges' Pierre Menard story, in which a twentieth-century Frenchman takes it upon himself to write a novel that's textually identical to Don Quixote in every way, but also utterly different, because... well, for starters, why is a Frenchman writing in early seventeenth-century Spanish?)
Absolutely. Shakespeare didn't write Othello or The Taming of the Shrew in Italian, and it's the use of language rather than the (usually second-hand) story that really matters.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.
Although East German fairytale films are arguably more accurate than many Western adaptations of the same stories, if only because the Brothers Grimm originals were also in German. And even if the Grimms weren't the source, it may well have been in French, so the English version will be a translation regardless.