Blurred lines

‘The Brutalist’ may win the Best Picture Oscar (I’m more than fine with that, it’s an excellent movie) in which case I’ll gladly withdraw the opprobrium I’m about to send the Academy voters.

The film’s leads, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, speak Hungarian, apparently effortlessly. I’m sure they were adept enough to fool me unaided, but, it appears, not good enough to convince Hungarian speakers, so artificial intelligence in post-production tidied up the edges and dead-headed the slips.

Some seem to consider this cheating - and yes, it may just be people whining on social media for five minutes – but it’s not clear what rules have been broken.

1975 Best Picture nominee 'The Conversation' was all about audio jiggery pokery

A hundred years ago, in Japan, silent movies would be accompanied by benshis, live narrators who performed the voices and sound effects, and described the unfolding drama. The most popular benshis drew a crowd. Talkies accelerated there in part because theater owners didn’t want to pay star wages for star benshis. That’s pretty much the last time the sounds heard in a cinema were made on the spot.

Now every noise comes in through a microphone and out through a loudspeaker and is subject to some rejigging on the way through. Basic editing or rebalancing or amplifying, or dedicated departments replacing dialog after the fact when background noise overpowered the actors.

Foley artists fool us with their manufactured sounds. Jack Foley, the original, gave the stars their signature footsteps - "Rock Hudson is a solid stepper; Tony Curtis has a brisk foot; Audie Murphy is springy; James Cagney is clipped; Marlon Brando soft"⁠ - and every studio hired a Jack Foley to build a library of slamming doors, whistling arrows, and rustling leaves. As big budgets and special effects took directors’ imaginations beyond the known palette, sound designers went with them.

Chewbacca didn’t sound like that. That was sound effects artist Ben Burtt blending four bears, a badger, a lion, a seal, and a walrus. The sound of stormtrooper blasters firing is Burtt hitting a guywire on a radio tower with a wrench.

Every sound in every Oscar winner is a more or less convincing fiction, manipulated this way or that to keep the spell intact. Marlon Brando earned his Best Actor award in ‘The Godfather’ with cotton puffballs in his cheeks – what a fraud! - and Christopher Nolan didn’t detonate an atomic bomb for sound authenticity in ‘Oppenheimer’ – damned cheat!

There are many lines that we will cross with AI but tidying up pronunciation, with the knowledge and permission of the actors, is not one of them.