Sign Language, Multilingualism and the Postnational Popular Screen: From La Famille Bélier and Marie Heurtin to La Révolution

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, the representation of multiple languages on French screens has increased significantly. However, an understudied element of this cinema is the growing corpus of films and series in French Sign Language (LSF). This chapter explores the evolution of multilingual French cinema in the twenty-first century. Placing Indigenous multilingualism within a broader translingual context, it focuses on the 2014 films La Famille Bélier/The Bélier Family (Eric Lartigau) and Marie Heurtin (Jean-Pierre Améris) and the 2020 series La Révolution/The Revolution (François Lardenois and Aurélien Molas) to examine the relationship between French Sign Language and French through a postnational lens. The chapter explores how these LSF texts challenge received norms of Frenchness, their connection to the French language and what ‘national language’ means for a nation that was always already multilingual. Show more