Bloomsbury Multilingual Screen, The: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference

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 geographic, 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 phenomenon manifested through polyglot dialogues, or through the translation of monolingual dialogues for international audiencesThe 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 cinemas 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. Review As earlier with sound, the study of linguistic difference in cinema is gradually emerging from the shadows of Anglophony and into film theorys 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. --Nataa Durovicová, Editor of publications of the International Writing Program, The University of Iowa, USA, and co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational PerspectivesSmart, comprehensive and geographically wide-ranging, The Multilingual Screen delves into the material conditions that give rise to cinemas 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 About the Author 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).