Denis Villeneuve's multilingual cinema: Decentring space, time and language in Arrival

Abstract

In Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s multilingual films, the ability to manipulate peripheral and even marginalised languages is the key to unlocking oppressive structures and shifting power dynamics within them. This chapter analyses Denis Villeneuve’s multilingual, transnational cinema, in which characters not only speak multiple languages, but deploy them strategically to exert social power. Drawing on Bill Marshall’s vision of cinema and nation in Quebec National Cinema as a ‘very mobile spiral’ (2000: 3), it charts the progressive decentring at play in Villeneuve’s 2016 quadrilingual film, Arrival.