The Multilingual Screen

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 mediums history. Moving across a vast array of geographical, historical, and theoretical contextsfrom Japanese colonial filmmaking to the French New Wave to contemporary artists moving imagethe 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 phenomenonmanifested through polyglot dialogues, or through the translation of monolingual dialogues for international audiencesThe Multilingual Screen traces some of its unheard histories, contributing to a new field of inquiry based on an attentiveness to multilingualisms work beyond the soundtrack.