Multilingual Screen

The Multilingual Screen is the first 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, the essays in this collection address the aesthetic, political, and industrial significance of multilingualism in film production and reception. Attending to multilingualism's force beyond the soundtrack, the contributors bring into critical dialogue essays that reexamine canonical film theories and film-producing regions and others that excavate rarely discussed film histories. The Multilingual Screen employs numerous theoretical frameworks across a multitude of international case studies and includes an interview with Roman Polanski, whose filmography affords one of the most intriguing and theoretically fertile negotiations of the perceptual dynamics of linguistic displacement. Each of the contributors provides an important perspective on the study of both regional and transnational cinemas and commercial and experimental films, provoking a re-evaluation and re-invigoration of the question of cinema's relation to language.