Silent Babel: Multilingualism Beyond the Soundtrack

Lisa Patti and Tijana Mamula

Monday, April 4, 2016, 4:00 PM

North Quad 2435

In this talk, Lisa Patti (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Tijana Mamula (John Cabot University) advocate the opening of film studies to a broader appreciation of the ways in which linguistic difference has shaped, and continues to shape, the medium’s history. 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 – this talk 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.
Patti and Mamula are the editors of the forthcoming anthology The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, Spring 2016).