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).

*With generous cosponsorship from: the Department of Comparative Literature, the Sheldon Cohn Fund in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of History, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, the Department of American Culture, the Institute for the Humanities, the Rackham Graduate School, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.