The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference

Description

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. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Tijana Mamula and Lisa Patti Notes Works cited Part I Theories 1 Translating the Academe: Conceptualizing the Transnational in Film and Media Masha Salazkina The translational turn in film and media studies Discourses of circulatory networks Transnational translation Institutional challenges Notes Works cited 2 Seven Types of Multilingualism: Or, Wim Wenders Enfilms Pina Bausch David Gramling Radical research in the Schwebebahn Seven types of (whose) multilingualism? Conclusion: dazzling but distant Notes Works cited 3 Post-anthropocentric Multilingualism in Contemporary Artists’ Moving Image: An Interview with T.J. Demos Tijana Mamula 4 Cinephilia as Multilingualism in Th e Artist (2011) and Blancanieves (2012) Mary Harrod Notes Works cited Part II Aesthetics 5 The Gift of Languages: Notes on Multilingualism in Experimental Cinema Érik Bullot Idiomaticity Lability Linguistik slapstick Notes Works cited 6 Exile and the “Languages” of Color: 1960s European Cinema, Multilingualism and Ontological Hesitation Paul Coates Languages of color and country Antonioni: color on the far side of language Godard: multilingualism, color and hesitation Skolimowski: color and unspoken desire Postscript Notes Works cited 7 “The Word in Pasolini’s Cinema” Gian Piero Brunetta Introduction Notes Works cited The Word in Pasolini’s Cinema Notes Works cited 8 West African Francophone Cinema and the Mysteries of Language: From Ideological Struggle to Aesthetic Shudder James S. Williams The Babel of the postcolony The politics of voice and language The open frame: voice, language, mystery The language of abstraction: sound, silence, eroticism For a plurivocal aesthetics Notes Works cited Part III Histories 9 Language in Motion: The Sign Talk Films of Hugh Lenox Scott and Richard Sanderville Brian Hochman Notes Works cited Filmography 10 Poorly Timed Campaigns: Versions, Dubbing, Subtitles Juan Piqueras Introduction Notes Works cited “Poorly Timed Campaigns: Versions, Dubbing, Subtitles” 11 The Multilingual New Wave Alison Smith Notes Works cited 12 Language and National Identity in New Tunisian Cinema: Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace (1994) and Férid Boughedir’s A Summer in La Goulette (1996) Robert Lang Language, literacy and modernity Tunisia: a “mediterranean” society “We mustn’t say we’re only Muslims. We are a lot of other things as well.” Notes Works cited 13 Cinema of Reindividuation and Cultural Extraterritoriality: “Chinese” Dialect Cinemas and Regional Politics Victor Fan Dialect cinemas before the 1960s Theorizing multilingualism in “Chinese” cinemas From theory to practice From extraterritoriality to individuation Notes Works cited Part IV Politics 14 Empire, Language, and Nationhood: Japanese Colonial Cinema in Korea and Manchuria Kate Taylor-Jones Colonial Korea Imperial Manchuria Notes Works cited 15 Star Talk: Anna May Wong’s Scriptural Orientalism and Poly- phonic (Dis-)play Yiman Wang Scriptural Orientalism: the palimpsest of agency Linguistic cosmopolitanism and poly-phonic performance: from (dis)play to dis-play Becoming the audience for the dis-play Notes Works cited 16 Out of Many, One: The Dual Monolingualism of Contemporary Flemish Cinema Jaap Verheul The historical development of the Dutch language The Dutch and Flemish dialects of the Dutch standard language Toward a monolingual Flemish cinema The Dutch-Flemish remake cycle and the limits of a Dutch geolinguistic identity Notes Works cited 17 Multilingualism and Indigenous Cinema in Northeast India: The Case of Kokborok Language Films Mara Matta Multilingual films for a multivisionary world Talking back: indigenous cinema as a language of grassroots politics Notes Works cited 18 Programming Latin American Cinema in the United States: An Interview with Carlos A. Gutiérrez Lisa Patti Contributors Index of Names and Titles