Polyglot Cinema as a Field of Intercultural Communication
Abstract
In contemporary reflection on film directed towards the question of globalization, transculturalism and transnationalism of cinema, there exists the theme of polyglot cinema. The language used by film characters is important not only as a marker of ethnic identity and the carrier of meaning that pushes the story along. It is also an element of the character’s identity, social and cultural belonging, with the entire baggage of symbolic meaning. Chris Wahl considers polyglot cinema to be a very specific film genre that belongs together with subgenres such as the episode film, globalization film, immigrant film, colonial film and existential film. He attaches a special meaning to this genre because it refers to both literary and metaphoric meanings of borders and limits in the contemporary world and human communication. Rutkowska refers to these concepts in her analysis of films such as Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) by Jean-Luc Godard, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), Alejandro Gonzalez Inämtu’s Babel (2006) or The Cuckoo (2002) by Aleksandr Rogozhkin. In her analysis Rutkowska aims to identify important artistic functions of this kind of “confusion of tongues”.
Keywords:
transnationalism, globalization, polyglot cinemaReferences
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Authors
Teresa Rutkowskakwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
Editor-in-chief of Kwartalnik Filmowy; translator. She is employed at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Film and Audiovisual Arts at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw). She publishes articles in Kwartalnik Filmowy and book reviews in the monthly magazine Nowe Książki. Her areas of interest include the film narration and the relationship between image and word in film.
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