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, principal lecturer in film and television at Bournemouth University, the “traditional, authoritative voice-of-God” documentary narrator has indeed become an endangered species, as audiences have turned against their “pretentious objectivity” in favour of more personal accounts. As Roko Belic, director of the 1999 documentary Genghis Blues, put it: “You’d hear some guy’s perfect English voice, [talking about] zebras in Africa, and you didn’t really feel like you were there. I wanted to know the whole story, and not just this one guy’s point of view.”
