Finessing the Multilingual World in Commercial English Cinema

Abstract

As a highly capitalised business, the film industry cannot afford to confuse its target audience with the plethora of communicative difficulties that exist in the world. Narrative exegesis demands that we get down to what is important or appealing expeditiously. A series of conventions have therefore grown up to simplify linguistic diversity, many of them obvious and scarcely claiming our attention. The most notable of these is the Hollywood convention that everyone, from everywhere, with or without a foreign accent, speaks English. Before the coming of sound cinema, it made little sense to talk of national cinemas and language communities. Since sound arrived, these have become dominant forms for categorising film content, and dominant ways that films are marketed and consumed. This article will start by focusing on the period 1927–1930 to see exactly what ground rules established themselves for representing the world. It will then look at the (often serio-comic) conventions of the Hollywood studio era, in such classic movies as Casablanca (1942) and Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), before turning to the emergence of a tentative self-aware internationalist cinema in the 1960s and 70s. Finally, I will review some recent developments in cinema and speculate on what a truly multilingual cinema might look like, what commercial realities would still be brought to bear but also see what possibilities might exist for its wider dissemination.