Overview

The Multilingual Screen is the first edited volume to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the place of multilingualism in cinema, investigating the ways in which linguistic difference and exchange have shaped, and continue to shape, the medium’s history. Moving across a vast array of geographical, historical, and theoretical contexts—from Japanese colonial filmmaking to the French New Wave to contemporary artists’ moving image—the essays collected here address the aesthetic, political, and industrial significance of multilingualism in film production and reception. In grouping these works together, The Multilingual Screen discerns and emphasizes the areas of study most crucial to forging a renewed understanding of the relationship between cinema and language diversity. In particular, it reassesses the methodologies and frameworks that have influenced the study of filmic multilingualism to propose that its force is also, and perhaps counterintuitively, a silent one. While most studies of the subject have explored linguistic difference as a largely audible phenomenon—manifested through polyglot dialogues, or through the translation of monolingual dialogues for international audiences—The Multilingual Screen traces some of its unheard histories, contributing to a new field of inquiry based on an attentiveness to multilingualism’s work beyond the soundtrack.

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9781501302879

Table of Contents

Reviews

As earlier with sound, the study of linguistic difference in cinema is gradually emerging from the shadows of Anglophony and into film theory's spotlight. The Multilingual Screen will be among the volumes instrumental for this turn. Conceptually original, genuinely plurilingual in its reach and research, catholic in its methods, the volume maps not only the terrain of languages as such but, more surprisingly, the tectonic force of split-language-consciousness on cinematic forms. Natasa Durovicova, Editor of publications of the International Writing Program, The University of Iowa, USA, and co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives Smart, comprehensive and geographically wide-ranging, The Multilingual Screen delves into the material conditions that give rise to cinema's many languages, including its own particular visual grammars and vocabularies. Transnational Film Studies has been waiting too long for a collection like this. Kay Dickinson, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University, Canada

As earlier with sound, the study of linguistic difference in cinema is gradually emerging from the shadows of Anglophony and into film theory's spotlight. The Multilingual Screen will be among the volumes instrumental for this turn. Conceptually original, genuinely plurilingual in its reach and research, catholic in its methods, the volume maps not only the terrain of languages as such but, more surprisingly, the tectonic force of split-language-consciousness on cinematic forms. * Natasa Durovicova, Editor of publications of the International Writing Program, The University of Iowa, USA, and co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives * Smart, comprehensive and geographically wide-ranging, The Multilingual Screen delves into the material conditions that give rise to cinema's many languages, including its own particular visual grammars and vocabularies. Transnational Film Studies has been waiting too long for a collection like this. * Kay Dickinson, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University, Canada *

Author Information

Tijana Mamula teaches film studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. She is the author of Cinema and Language Loss: Displacement, Visuality and the Filmic Image (2013). Lisa Patti is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA. She is the co-author of Film Studies: A Global Introduction (2015).

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