The Multilingual Screen

By: Tijana Mamula, Lisa Patti

ISBN-13: 9781501302879
ISBN-10: 1501302876
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published date: 2016-06-16
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 geographic, 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 explores some of its unheard histories, thus contributing to a new field of enquiry based on an attentiveness to multilingualism’s work beyond the soundtrack. Bringing into critical dialogue original essays, translations and interviews that reexamine canonical film theories and film-producing regions and others that excavate rarely discussed film histories, the collection provokes a re-evaluation and re-invigoration of the question of cinema’s relation to language. Contributors: Gian Piero Brunetta, Érik Bullot, Paul Coates, T.J. Demos, Victor Fan, David Gramling, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, Mary Harrod, Brian Hochman, Lisa Jarvinen, Robert Lang, Mara Matta, Juan Piqueras, Masha Salazkina, Alison Smith, Kate Taylor-Jones, Jaap Verheul, James S. Williams, Yiman Wang.