Once, no serious documentary could be without its authoritative voiceover in perfect English.
But film-makers are now rejecting the whole idea.
Are social media and post-truth politics to blame?At the 1990 Academy Awards, the nominations for documentary featured a surprising number of actors.
Dustin Hoffman lent his voice to a film about the Aids memorial quilt, Joe Mantegna told the tale of one US county’s crack epidemic, while Gregory Peck narrated a biography of chief justice Earl Warren.
Fast forward to this year’s ceremony and the actors had gone quiet.
With the exception of Riz Ahmed’s dubbing on the English-language version of Flee, the shortlisted films had no booming star narrator.
In fact, they had no traditional narrators at all.This could, of course, be a quirk of the Academy’s ever-changing preferences, or an anomalous year.
But, says Dr Catalin Brylla, a lecturer in film and television at Bournemouth University,
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