Speaking in Foreign Tongues: Nationally Anatopic Language in Cinema

By Matthew Chan

In Bong Joon-Ho’s now iconic Oscars acceptance speech he remarks that: “Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” This adage instantly flooded the annals of vaunted film publications, Twitter pages, and novelty t-shirt websites. Yet, this call for an expanded cultural palette is a sentiment that has created a tangible impact within both America’s film industry and its mainstream film-watching culture. In the past few years more American productions have embraced multilingualism, spurned both by a desire for cultural authenticity and a recognition of the changing tastes of audiences. This is especially visible within films made by American filmmakers with East Asian heritage likelike Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Minari (미나리) (2020) and The Farewell (别告诉她) (2019). These films feature dialogue that smoothly alternates between multiple languages and dialects, to both economic and critical success. Albeit, this trend is not without a few hiccups, as Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (미나리) was controversially shut out of the main categories at the Golden Globes, and instead, was awarded ‘Best Foreign-Language Film’, raising a multitude of questions regarding what language we can truly consider American. The short answer is of course: English. 

Yet in macro, this growing acceptance of non-English films is not exactly a new phenomenon but more so reflective of the cyclical trends Hollywood moves through. It was the post-World War 2 era that brought in an influx of foreign films, as a result of the 1948 Paramount Supreme Court Decision. This decision barred studios from monopolizing theater chains, which eventually led local theater operators to import international films which proved to be cheaper to play than big budget domestic productions (Mettler 48). With the waning of the Hays Code, a set of industry wide self-censorship guidelines, and the establishment of art house theaters across the country, there was an increased success of foreign language films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese-language Rashomon (羅生門) (1950) and Vittorio De Sica’s Italian-language Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) (1948). These films could fulfill the post-war audience’s desire for brutal authenticity–something domestic releases could not [achieve](Mettler 49). But frankly, we truly are living in unparalleled times, where non-English films, that used to hang on the fringes of popular culture and previously regarded as inaccessible or too ‘highbrow,’ have now fully penetrated the mainstream. It’s a reality where a 3 hour, Japanese-language Haruki Murakami adaptation, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) (2021), with an astoundingly sophisticated story structure which most mainstream viewers would deem “complicated,” can be nominated for Best Picture and a film like Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (ドラゴンボー超スーパースー パーヒーロー) (2022) can top the domestic box office. 

However, it is imperative to assess how Hollywood and other parallel film industries have tackled the issue of non-native language in the past. As with most industries, the advances made in the present are not something to be celebrated as much as they are overdue corrections for numerous, long standing issues. In the context of American productions, a perennial trend has been to set a film within a non-American country but have the dialogue entirely in English, no matter how ill-fitting. It would be fitting to describe the language in these films as anatopic, which is defined as: a person, thing, or idea that is represented, for example in a book or movie, being in a place where they do not or did not really exist, with usual reference to geographical dislocation, a variation on anachronistic which instead suggests a chronological discrepancy. (“ANATOPISM”) The cynical answer as to why this happens is that Americans are too lazy to read subtitles or are unwilling to accept the language of another country.  If you were to take this argument to its logical end, you may end up somewhere like Daniel Mann’s The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), a film about America’s occupation of Okinawa which egregiously features Marlon Brando in yellowface as the Japanese man, Sakini. If the aversion to a foreign tongue is a consequence of xenophobia then the next step would be to remove Asian actors out of the equation entirely like the aforementioned film. However, perhaps as pernicious are the contemporary prestige pictures that choose to replicate the facade of a foreign culture down to the last detail, except their language. This is the case in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) which is set in Japan with an all Asian cast, many of which are not fluent in English. The reason Marshall gave for this creative decision was that if the cast were to speak in Japanese he would not be able to properly direct them or understand the nuances of each scene (Horn). This reasoning, though seemingly pragmatic, speaks to a certain imperialistic arrogance–a desire to enrich cultural exchange but only in a manner that panders to a narrow Western audience and worldview. As per Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 hypothesis of “The End of History,” Marshall’s film gestures towards a uniformity in the world: a globally recognised default as dictated by America and the West, where nuance ends and English takes over (3). 

It is also important to note how much power language can hold.  The adoption of a language, specifically English, can be viewed as a direct consequence of colonialism and imperialism. For many languages, their connotation is inseparable from their use, and the imposition of a certain language in a certain context can form a direct act of violence. This is the exact dichotomy S.S. Rajamouli uses in his recent crossover hit RRR (2022), where the unstoppable Telugu-speaking nationalist heroes are placed in opposition to bumbling English-speaking administrators of the British Colonial Empire who overreact and twist their words for maximum cruelty. In Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s 1969 manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema,'' they suggest that in Neocolonialist countries, culture has effectively become bilingual and dependent on the aesthetic models produced by imperialist expansion with most intellectual discussion expressed in Western languages by default (2). This insubordination to Western imperialist forces has made it so that Hollywood is the model most overseas commercial film productions follow (Solans and Getino 4). The formal construction of a film, as such, can project an ideology in of themselves, with the fast paced nature and brisk length of studio films being reflective of the cut throat values espoused by United States capitalism (Solanas and Getino 4). The erasure of language in non-US territories and imposition of English within American films like Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), can be seen as a form of cultural imperialism, as the product is eventually shipped throughout the globe, proliferating the norms of one country to another. As such, the sheer act of forcing a populace to adopt the language of another country, albeit in a controlled and constructed environment, is nonetheless reminiscent of the harsh enforcement of a foreign tongue by colonial rule. This act unnecessarily relitigates historical trauma in the name of advancing a global cultural hegemony and homogeneity. 

However, the widespread nature of English in art can also be construed in a slightly more positive light as articulated by Chinua Achebe in his influential 1965 essay “English and the African Writer.”  In this essay he assesses the multitude of African writers who write in English, a common language bestowed upon by decades of colonialism. Achebe describes English as a great unifier among the multitude of regional languages and dialects that populate every corner of Africa. This is the same reasoning that led Nigeria to adopt English as their national language (Achebe 345). To Achebe, English is not to be blindly adopted but continuously wrestled with to fit into a new national context and communicate the nuances of specific cultures as a universal medium (Achebe 347). It is this eye towards a widespread global reach that led Steven Spielberg to make his Polish-set, Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993) in English, believing that his film’s message–a global plea to learn from the atrocities of the past–was too important to dilute, wishing not to turn away viewers because of a language barrier. In a similar vein, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), which traces the entire life of the last monarch of China, Puyi, was stipulated, in a rather shrewd move by the Chinese government, to be filmed entirely in English so as to enrich an understanding of China’s complex history within a potentially ignorant global audience (Glasby). 

However,  it is impossible to avoid the truth that for many investors, no matter how nonsensical, questions of language will always revolve exclusively around the bottom line and preconceived notions of accessibility. How else is one to explain that, despite the fact that the Mandarin-language Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) (2000) was the highest grossing overseas production in America at the time of its release, the Netflix-produced sequel Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) was filmed and released in English…? 

It is important as well to explore how nationally anatopic non-English languages are used in non-American productions, and the ideas behind their implementation are largely similar: they revolve around questions of accessibility and mainstream market appeal. Yet the incongruity of their execution can open up further discussion about authenticity and thematic intent. One curious example is that of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated film Persepolis (2007), an adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel, which is a personal memoir of her time growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran and her subsequent feelings of displacement as she’s shipped off to Austria as a teenager. Satrapi’s graphic novel was originally written in French and the adaptation follows suit. All of the film’s scenes within Iran are in French as opposed to the native Farsi and the animation was produced by a small studio in France. It is unfortunately because of its linguistic choices that the film’s potential lasting impact is effectively stymied. Simply put, by making the film in French, Satrapi blatantly announces the audience she wishes to court. In effect, she is not making the film for the Iranian people, as a work that uplifts and continues the call for mass structural change, but for a complacent European audience. On a pragmatic level, it was probably a decision made on behalf of the animators to streamline their workflow, as a well as a business decision in order to attach big names to the film like Chiara Mastroianni (who voices Satrapi’s mother) and Catherine Deneuve (who voices Satrapi’s grandmother). Yet the great irony that comes to consume the film is that as much as Satrapi thumbs her nose at the multitude of Europeans in Austria who abused and mistreated her, because of the choice of language, those are the types of people who will be watching the film, many of whom stem from the Western countries that directly or indirectly caused Iran’s present instability.

If the film is shown in Iran, in its unadulterated form, the people there would not understand any of what is being said. Although its revolutionary potential may appear through dubbing, the fact that Farsi is not the film’s primary form speaks to Satrapi’s priorities. This change becomes even more egregious when examining what Satrapi excises from her novel, with most mentions of her immense privilege, such as owning a Cadillac and a 10 year old slave, entirely removed. In effect, the experience is one that is smoothed over. The exhibition of the film is reduced to a voyeuristic recount of loss and bloodshed for people lucky enough to live far away from the conflict, lacking the personal contradictions that originally grounded the narrative. It seems counterintuitive to make a film that yearns to capture the reconstruction of a nation whose fraught history has been instigated by a multitude of duplicitous Western forces, especially in a Western tongue whose legacy is inextricable from years of colonial subjugation and exploitation which continues still today. Though, one can argue that the language of the film represents Satrapi’s own identity crisis: a struggle to reconcile her past as an Iranian citizen, where she has physically barred herself from returning to, and her current life in France. This is frankly a notion that the film itself does little to gesture to, carrying absolutely no weight when assessing the actual content of the film.

In a sense, Persepolis is indicative of a larger, unfortunate trend within world cinema and the art house as a whole. In the case of cinema from traditionally underrepresented territories, it is predominantly the work that panders to Western sensibilities, whether through overt stylistic flourishes or the adoption of a recognisable language, that become canonized and paraded around Western festival circuits. Persepolis  was honored with the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. However, an interesting thing to note is how previous Iranian award circuit mainstays, like Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, have managed to sidestep many of these trappings with films that share little in common with Persepolis . This again suggests that the sensibilities of Satrapi’s film fall in line more with contemporary French cinema than Iranian. While perhaps being a slight generalization, most well recognized African films, such as Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), both of which are from Senegal, are well regarded as they are because they are in French, and because they adopt the aesthetics of European cinema that preceded them. In their case, the language of these African films are not nationally anatopic but a direct consequence of colonial rule, something Sembène was duly cognisant of when he made his followup to Black Girl, Mandabi (1968) in the Wolof language. As he came to the eventual realization that many in Senegal could not understand French but could understand Wolof, he extricated his film from the colonial gaze that consumes language and dictates culture in a post-colonial state (Pfaff 16). This is perhaps an instructive incident as it further develops the notion that the language of a film is not just beholden to the immediate context of its creation but can be a deliberate creative decision on the part of the filmmaker and directly representative of the audience they aim to reach. 

Perhaps a more effective use of an nationally anatopic language can be seen in Ann Hui’s Boat People (投奔怒海) (1982), a Hong Kong production thats dialogue is entirely in Cantonese despite the fact that it is set in Vietnam. This film portrays a Japanese photojournalist as the protagonist and features no Chinese characters whatsoever. At first glance, it appears that the language of the film places it in similar problematic territory with Chinese actors playing the primary roles of the Vietnamese people. There is an added uncomfortable wrinkle in that Hui produced the film with the input of the government of the People’s Republic of China, which was fresh off the recent end of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. This imposition of language appears to be a pernicious act of imperialism: an aggressor state forcibly imposes their own cultural norms on another. Yet, it is in this web of contradictions that Hui manages to produce a work that is both wholly personal and undeniably impactful, perhaps at the expense of the Vietnamese, with many critics suggesting that Hui presented a one sided view. In the process of viewing the film, it becomes clear that Hui’s intention was not just to faithfully replicate Vietnam’s recent history but to also covertly critique the Chinese government. Through images of widespread poverty, starvation, and increasingly decrepit living conditions, Hui alludes towards similar hardships encountered in China’s Great Leap Forward, such as the persecution of political dissidents, implementation of self-criticism sessions, and creation of re-education camps. With these references, she relitigates the recent nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. Language becomes a key to making these parallels explicit, because, as much as the audience is supposed to be watching the struggles of a modern Vietnam, on a purely auditory level, we are hearing the cries of China’s past, and perhaps future. This film alluded to potential political strife as it was made after the announcement of the handover of Hong Kong back to China from the British. To Hui, there is no differentiation in the bloodshed that comes with the establishment of a Communist state, so the act of recreation with Chinese actors turns into an act of speculation as well. Based on this speculation conveyed in Hui’s film, perhaps Hong Kong could soon suffer the same fate at the hands of the Chinese government. The film's choice of language, as such, becomes imperative to its larger thematic considerations. 

Further examining  Hong Kong cinema, a lighter example of the use of a nationally anatopic language can be found in Sammo Hung’s Wheels on Meals (快餐車) (1984), a wacky action comedy featuring Jackie Chan as a food truck operator in Barcelona. A curious twist exists in that every Spanish actor in the film has been dubbed over in Cantonese. Conceptually this places the film within the realm of a multitude of comparable American comedies, like Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) which takes place in South Korea during the Korean War but focuses exclusively on the perspective of American outsiders stationed at a hospital. Yet in Hung’s film, the presence of his leads not just consumes the visible focus of the film but also the auditory landscape of its surroundings, leading to amusing incongruities like viewing former Miss Spain Lola Forner converse in perfect Cantonese. Again, the choice of language was made more so to appeal to the primary market of Cantonese-speaking moviegoers in Hong Kong. The choice of filming location proved to be more incidental than anything for Hung, as he moved production to a country whose government was more cooperative than that of Hong Kong. An additional draw was Barcelona’s less saturated streets and filming locations as compared to Hong Kong whose film industry was at its commercial peak (Logan). Placing it in this context, when Hong Kong cinema was conquering the screens of East Asia, the act of dubbing Spanish in function became similar to the use of English in non-native settings in American films. This act can be seen as an assertion of a commercial hegemony for Cantonese films. However, it also becomes an act of defiance towards the Western domination of the film industry and an assertion of the creative advances in Hong Kong cinema which far outpaced their Western counterparts at the time. Hung’s film consciously parodies specific tropes of Western cinema. He casts himself as a bumbling Columbo-esque private investigator, adopting the fast pace of Hollywood cinema, and further, he ends with a swashbuckling castle rescue similar to Errol Flynn film. In that sense, the imposition of language in Wheels on Meals (快餐車) holds little adverse historical or colonial implication and instead serves to transform the film into a very distinct form of cultural expression: a warped vision of the West through a defiantly Hong Kong lens. In this manner, the audience can view how the use of a nationally anatopic language can be construed as a national triumph. The adoption of language in this specific case represents a refusal to conform to the previous linguistic mores imposed by imperialism and colonialism, making a mockery of the cinematic models peddled by Hollywood. 

Language indeed has power, and the imposition of it into the mouths of non-native speakers can be used for both unrepentantly destructive and restorative ends. In the current film landscape, the audience’s demand for cultural authenticity has all but triumphed. There is higher scrutiny towards productions that employ nationally anatopic languages and those that cast actors to play a role of a different race. Though there are indeed cases where non-native languages can be used to great creative and conceptual effect, it seems like a complete rejection of the practice has become the modus operandi of the film industry moving forward. In this increasingly interconnected world, the next step for cinema may not just be a respectful consideration of a country’s language, but also the embrace of a more complex multilingualism, an example of which can be gleaned in Rysuke Hamaguchi’s aforementioned Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) (2021). The main section of Hamaguchi’s film revolves around an experimental staging of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, where actors are cast to speak exclusively in their native tongue, ranging from Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Bahasa, and Korean sign language. The intention, slowly revealed by the play’s director Kafuku, is to reduce the body into a purely expressive conduit for creative expression; the essence of Chekov’s work, communicated through the linguistic vessel each performer is most comfortable working with, transforms the dialogue into an almost instinctual, wholly authentic reaction. In the context of cinema, this can influence a future where, through embracing a multilingualism, productions can work to become further unburdened by the weight of colonial and imperial histories and the creatively-restrictive demands of Western markets and festival circuits. But in returning to Achebe’s argument for English as a global unifier, in Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) the language the actors primarily communicate in English. English, as such, becomes a medium of connection and mutual understanding, but, most importantly, is not the only acceptable form of expression. 

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer.” Transition, no. 75/76, 1997, pp. 342–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2935429. Accessed 6 Sep. 2022. 

“ANATOPISM | definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary.” Cambridge Dictionary, 9 November 2022, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/anatopism. Accessed 14 November 2022.

Boat People. Directed by Ann Hui, Bluebird Film Company, 1982. 

Drive My Car. Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, C&I Entertainment, Culture Entertainment, Bitters End, Nekojarashi, Quaras, Nippon Shuppan Hanbai, Bungeishunjū, L'Espace Vision, The Asahi Shimbun Company, 2021.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16, 1989, pp. 3–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184. Accessed 6 Sep. 2022. 

Glasby, Matt. “How the Last Emperor Opened Doors for More China Co-productions and Offered a Balanced View of Its...” South China Morning Post, 4 Feb. 2022, www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3165586/how-last-emperor-opened-doors-more-c hina-co-productions-and. 

Jones, Nate. “The Golden Globes’ Minari Controversy, Explained.” Vulture, Vulture, 23 Dec. 2020, www.vulture.com/2020/12/minari-golden-globes-2021-controversy-explained.html.

Horn, John. “Uniformity, so to Speak.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 27 Nov. 2005, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-ca-geisha27-story.html.

Logan, Bey “Wheels on Meals, Audio commentary” Disc 1, “Sammo Hung interview” Disc 2 (DVD featurette) (DVD) Hong Kong Legends, UK, 2001. 

Memoirs of a Geisha. Directed by Rob Marshall, Columbia Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment, Amblin Entertainment, Red Wagon Entertainment, 2005.

Mettler, Meghan Warner. “SAMURAI AT THE SURE SEATERS: 1950s ‘Highbrow’ Japanese Movies in the United States.” How to Reach Japan by Subway: America’s Fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945–1965, University of Nebraska Press, 2018, pp. 45–68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8j5tw.7. Accessed 9 Sep. 2022. 

Persepolis. Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Celluloid Dreams, CNC, France 3 Cinéma, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, Région Ile-de-France, 2007 

Pfaff, Francoise "The Uniqueness of Ousmane Sembene's Cinema," Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 11 , 1993 Article 3 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/3 

RRR. Directed by S. S. Rajamouli, DVV Entertainment, 2022. 

Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “TOWARD A THIRD CINEMA.” Cinéaste, vol. 4, no. 3, 1970, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41685716. Accessed 9 Sep. 2022. 

The Teahouse of the August Moon. Directed by Daniel Mann, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. 

Wheels on Meals. Directed by Sammo Hung, Golden Harvest, 1984.