Thursday, November 26, 2015
Why do people in old movies talk weird?
Boing Boing: How Stuff Works explains the "Transatlantic Accent," a cultivated accent that people in the United States affected in an attempt to trick others that they were in some way affiliated with the British upper crust.
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14 comments:
This is so interesting! I've heard of this before, but never got much explanation for it. The funny thing is, when you're watching a movie from the 30's or 40's, or listening to a song, or watching a TV show with characters from that time period, you tend not to notice. However, if for some reason it isn't there, like if there's an actor who isn't using the accent, it's totally noticeable! You almost think, "Why do they sound stupid?" because the voice just does not match what they're wearing or where they are or what they're talking about. I imagine this is a very important part of many speech/dialect coaches' jobs, to ensure that people from the right time period are using this accent. The other really interesting part of this, I think, is that teachers were actually instructing their students to use this accent. The way it was presented made it seem almost the way we learn how to write in cursive in the 3rd grade: just something that you do, and may or may not use. I do wonder what the motivation was for teachers to stop teaching it in schools, though, other than just the war ending.
I find it interesting how much people care about words being pronounced “correctly” and how much pronunciation has to do with class. This seems to be a really extreme case of that, given that there are so few accents that nobody learns to speak growing up, but it is instead taught. That is a lot of time and effort that went into sounding a certain way. That makes sense for actors, since being able to speak with a lot of accents is part of the job, but I can’t imagine having grown up speaking one way my entire life, and then, like everyone else, needing to re-learn how to speak. Though, I suppose they would’ve started teaching this accent very young, so maybe it would’ve felt natural. What I still don’t understand is why no one ended up learning to speak in the Transatlantic Accent, unless people only “put on” the accent in certain contexts.
I think the most interesting fact about the Transatlantic accent was that it was acquired and not developed. That makes me think of the accent as being locked within a very specific period, a sort of fad that faded in and out with the times like we would say of crimped hair or, more accurately, a Valley Girl accent or a surfer dude accent. Sometimes I hear some of the actors practicing their pronunciations for their Voice and Speech class, and it's very interesting to see the blend of American and English within their voices. It's very true that having that sort of accent makes you sound smarter and more aristocratic -- you sort of want to listen to someone who has an English accent, but at the same time you feel familiar in the hands of someone with an American accent. I also definitely understand the need for a Transatlantic accent in regards to listening to the radio, because if you couldn't hear the person on the radio it sort of renders everything they're communicating null and void.
This is a pretty cool thing that I didn’t really know. I knew that people talked weird on movies in “the old days” but I just thought it was a difference in audio quality or something. I guess it must have been confusing to people at the time who knew what their voices sounded like but heard it differently on the television. I think it is a little weird that people would put on an accents just to sound more proper but I guess the people of Hollywood had to be of a higher class than the commoners who would watch their films. I wonder when and why this accent faded out of style. Did people across the country try to talk like their favorite celebrities? There are a lot of questions I have about this topic and I know the video was meant to be short but there it could have gone into a lot more depth.
This is so interesting! Growing up, I watched a lot of movies from the 40's and 50's (my dad's idea) and while it never stood out to me, I instantly recognized the accent when I watched the video clip at the beginning of the video. I had no idea it was such a phenomenon, or that it was actually taught in schools as the proper way to speak. It makes me wonder if there's any such accent today-- not necessarily something this dramatic, but just a way that we talk when we want to sound professional and educated. I think pronouncing T's sharply is still generally associated with well-educated people, but dropping R's is definitely not in vogue anymore. The more I think about this, the more I realize that I associate this kind of speaking with the grainy black and white movies of the 40's, but I don't think I would have ever connected the dots if I hadn't seen this video.
This video answers a question that I've asked myself every time I've watched some of my favorite Hitchcock films. It is a bit curious that this developed and fell off without anyone really noticing, and it seems as though resources confirming its origins are few and far between. I, for a long time, had pinned this "accent" on possibly poor sound recording technology that was available for the creation of radio shows and movies. It seems a bit silly in retrospect however, but I kind of just assumed that I wasn't really able to hear their speech properly or people just payed more attention to "proper" pronunciation of words in the 30's and 40's than they do today, which was somewhat confirmed in this video. I don't think I ever would have caught on to the fact that people actually tried to speak that way had I not watched the video.
What makes tools like the Transatlantic accent so valuable in denoting time period in theatre, film, and television is that the choice falls somewhere between acting, directing, sound, and perhaps even other areas of design. The pairing of the accent with physicality, wardrobe, scenic design, the proper sound adjustments (depending on how an accent which was utilized to cater to certain long ago technology affects the technology of today), and directorial choice could be an extremely delicate process, and requires an overall awareness of its implications by everyone involved. More so, the placement of the accent in different settings could imply different things to an audience, and change the perception of all the other choices which have gone into creating the production. I think more awareness of little details and historical references like this could improve the quality of the productions we know and love today by a million-fold, on campus at CMU and elsewhere. The use of such complexities could give a whole new meaning to dotting out i's and crossing our t's.
I had always thought that that particular accent and sound was an effect of the film of the time, not the actors. Older film shows people moving very quickly in a very unnatural manner because of the type of camera used, so I always assumed that the "old timey" voice was caused by a similar distortion in recording. It's minimal presence today is likely due to its use as an affectation signifying rank more than it's use as any sort of colloquial communication. I wonder if there are any type of learned affectations used today, besides the example of the refined British accent, of which we are unaware. The english language is full of dialects, so It would be interesting to look at the various learned and affected ways of speaking and see how they relate back to society at large. This is a rather interesting idea for actors to think about when learning a part-- not only are regional accents in play, but also ones that people use to display a certain societal rank and position.
I found this article a interesting way to view the social norms of the early to mid 20th century. While many would wish to view this time period as the golden age of cinema, some element of the film industry still held onto the deep-seated insecurity (and dare i say inadequacy)m that America seems to have when it comes to all things posh and British. I'd like to say that the trans-Atlantic accent is simply a projection of the insecurity well-to-do America at this time may have had concerning our lack of monarchy and grand tradition. Of course, nowhere in this article does it say anything of the sort, so at this point I'm just wishing for this sort of thing, However, my argument, as tenuous s it may be, is supported by the fact, yes fact, that this accent fell out of favor after World War II, when america really got to play the savior, perhaps obliterating that age-old inferiority complex (that may or my not be a total figment of my imagination) which we may have been burdened with since the days of the revolutionary war.
There's an episode of SNL in which Zooey Deschanel plays a temp in an office, set in the 40s. The other two workers constantly speak in a Transatlantic accent to each other and to her (which they play up as part of the gag.) A character will give a very long monologue of fast paced words, the camera will go to Zooey, and she will be extremely confused and ask what the heck they just said in "normal speech".
It's always been really funny the way language changes throughout time. Unfortunately, we can only REALLY tell from eras that had recording equipment what they really spoke like. Any time period before that is guessing, most likely. But it's interesting to see how language is affected by politics and by things such as social class.
I always wondered this actually. And I figured it came from radio.
I omce had to play Amelia Earhart in a role, and to get total accuracy with how she sounded, I listened to a bunch of long radio recordings with her. And here was this country woman from the middle of Kansas sounding like a Kennedy. I was like "Is this just how everyone- even people from the middle of nowhere spoke?"
But, I didn't learn this specifically, but I did learn that there was a standard for speaking publicly and speaking on radio and in film. In a way it highlighted the way these figures, like Earhart and others who spoke that way, like FDR, and people in film and on television were larger than life. Not to mention that they were the first homogenizers who were heard all over the world. It just shows how things have changed in media and in entertainment since. Rather than desiring something larger than life, or rather than believing what we are told, like not knowing that FDR had polio, our mass media is so upclose there's no room for illusions like an accent, and with celebrities and entertainment we crave reality and bein gup close, including naturality of speech.
This video was very interesting to watch. Last year, I studied classical hollywood cinema so I had to watch a bunch of films from the 1920s all the way to the 1960s. When I first started watching the films, I just assumed that that was how people used to talk back then. After watching so many of these films, I don't even notice their accents now - I would notice if they didn't talk with the transatlantic accent. Language is constantly evolving, but the process of evolving is usually shaped rather unconsciously by how we communicate every day (ex: internet slangs). It's so interesting to see a form of language that is intentionally created only for film/radio in a specific time period that's preserved so well although it's no longer used. Unlike theatre, film is recorded and can be replayed over and over again no matter how much time have passed. Theatre, on the other hand, is fleeting. I wonder what the language was like in theatre during the early 90s.
This is so funny because I recently watched a movie with a friend for her film studies class, Sullivan's Travels. It's an oldie filmed in the 40's. The first thing I noticed actually, was how fast and different the actors sounded. But what amazed me even more was that was that understood each other perfectly. The way they stressed and unstressed certain words and syllables made me think they were trained enough in this form of speech that it was because they spoke like this off camera as well. I'm pretty sure that this form of speech fell off due to the amount of immigration and how other cultures influenced the way American's spoke. With much more calm and understanding than the jibber jabber of old hollywood. Next time someone tells me to slow down my speech, Ill just say I'm channeling an old hollywood film actor.
I heard about the Transatlantic accent a few years ago in the midst of surfing the web, but it never occured to me that it was a completely contrived accent. This video was very interesting. I admire the accent; I feel it sort of encapsulates the culture of that time. I'm sure that's why it was and is used in film, TV, theatre, etc. What better way to portray a cultural period than use a classic accent? Since speech is so personal to all of us, I can only imagine the psychological and emotional effects of using different accents. Something that I'll definitely have to research further.
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