2/12: The Function of language In film

I recently read a New York Times article about the British film Out of Darkness, a Stone Age thriller set forty thousand years in the past. The camera follows a small band of early humans, on the run from an unseen threat, doing what it takes to survive — while speaking entirely in a fictional language. I couldn't shake this detail, splashy in the lead paragraph but mentioned only briefly in the body of the article. How much of our experience in a visual medium like film depends on the language of delivery? Is language so auxiliary, apparently, that an entire film could be made, in a language that no one on Earth speaks, and still deliver stone-cold psychological thrill? 

The director, Andrew Cumming, told an interviewer that since the actors aren't speaking in English, "you’re not worried about the words, you’re only worried about the intent". The work that usually goes into carefully shaping the audience's experience through the dialogue, choosing each individual word and phrase, instead shifts into the musicality and rhythm of the words, their tone and inflection, and the actor's delivery, which then takes on even more weight. The words are judged for their pure sound, entirely detached from meaning. 

This is far from the first instance of a movie detaching itself from language: The history of film begins with silence. With no roots in spoken language, silent films developed their own set of narrative and emotional techniques. The art of a silent movie is built around the silence. We can't simply consider them as modern movies with a piece missing — they aren't meant to be improved by the addition of speech. It is exactly this limitation of speech that constructs silent films as an art form. 

So what of Out of Darkness? It's up against not just a limitation of speech, but an almost total limitation of understanding. I haven't seen the film myself, so I can't definitely say whether it is this limitation that makes the film artistically successful. Yet it seems possible: using the complete limitation of linguistic understanding not as a built-in disadvantage, but instead as the artistic force behind a piece of media. It would be like turning on an episode of a tv show in a language you don't speak, without subtitles, and trying to experience it fully, rather than as an experience missing its most fundamental part.

But most pieces of media aren't meant to be consumed by an audience who doesn't understand them, linguistically. Most media is created in one language, and presented to people who speak that language. So this little experiment would most likely just be an exercise in confusion. We have developed forms of media that seem to rely entirely on full linguistic understanding.

Historical movies like Out of Darkness are one class of movies that suffers from what we might call the problem of language: because of course Stone Age nomadic groups from 40,000 years ago didn't speak English. The Spartans in 300 didn't speak English. Why is an Austrian governess in the 1930s singing to her children in English? And so on. This problem doesn't end in the past, though; any movie set in the far future suffers the same fate. Whatever societies may or may not exist hundreds or thousands of years from now won't be speaking a language that resembles the ones we speak now. And space-faring alien civilizations won't have independently developed English, or Japanese, or German, or whatever language the movie takes place in. But in order to understand the movie, we have to understand the language, right? 

Here is where we arrive again at the importance of language, juxtaposed with the importance of understanding. What happens if the Sound of Music is Der Klang von Musik? Or if the Enterprise crew members speak in a language unintelligible to us? Does the emotional value still strike the intended audience? If language is just the medium to tell a story, does any realistic sense of accuracy of which language they were speaking matter? 

The problem with making monolingual movies for a monolingual audience is that the world is not actually monolingual. Even in a sheltered-off, English-centric arbitrary American box, life is multilingual: the employees at a store speak a different language behind the counter; you call your mother and speak to her in her first language instead; one of your friends speaks with an accent that holds another language underneath. This means that the language problem is not limited to history and science fiction: it's a question for every modern movie made today, right now. 

Given the multilingual world we live in, I'm interested in whether it's possible to take this potential multilingual-ness of a movie's story, or more broadly to take this limitation of understanding between the character and the audience, and to use it not as a weakness, but as a strength. If, like silent films, the genre of multilingual movies didn't rely on subtitling or the superfluity of certain scenes from the plot as crutches, and instead created art around this potential lack of understanding, what kind of films would we be creating?

There are already films and tv shows that take multilingual experience not as an inherent weakness, but as a reality and even a strength: Tokyo Vice and Drive My Car have been suggested to me as examples. And at least in the American cine-sphere, as more diverse directors and stories have made it to the screen, the diversity of languages portrayed also grows.  Of course, this is a complicated history, intertwined with the history of film and media in general, the globalization and language bias in media creation, and much more; if you want to learn more,  seek out an MCM course! But this Stone Age film and its fictional language opens up a world of questions about how we portray our multilingual world in media, telling historical and future stories, and an open question: What is the necessity of language, and understanding, to storytelling?

For more, check out this more technical paper about multilingualism in films, this overview of the evolution of language in films, and any of the films mentioned above. If you know of any films that make use of multilingualism in an interesting way, please send them our way to language_ambassadors@brown.edu !