This study discusses and analyses recorded/filmed speech, translation, and cultural identity in film discourses in early European sound film. The purpose is to frame these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives in order to highlight relations between media, speech and translation. The points of departure are 1. “universal language” vs. “linguistic diversity”, 2. “media transposition” vs. “language translation”, and 3, “speech as words” vs. “speech as body”. An important aspect in order to discuss these topics is the problem of “versions”, both different translated versions, and versions in different media of speech representation. The correlation of theory with a historical focus offers a contextualisation of translation as an issue of cinematic culture, and also sheds new light on topics that previously have been referred to as details (such as foreign accents in film) or as phenomena considered to be unrelated to “cinematic quality” (such as “filmed theatre”). The object of analysis consists of German, French and Swedish films, trade and fan press, and film theory from the 1920s and 1930s. The study begins with a theoretical and historical introduction, which addresses representation of speech in reproduction media focusing on early sound technology predominantly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chapter two offers a discussion of speech as signifier of differentiated ethnicity in relation to a utopia of universal language embodied in film and sound media. Chapter three addresses film speech as a multimedia issue revealing a problematic of version as a context for the various means of translating. Chapter four offers a general discussion of film translation in the period of transition to sound with a focus on dubbing, subtitles and inter-titling. The two last chapters deal exclusively with the multiple language version film, a translation practice based on re-making the same script in different languages.

Se pourrait-il que le cinéma ne se soit pas mis à parler parce qu’il avait quelque chose à dire, mais afin de faire parler la parole, de la mettre sur écoute, de renseigner les imaginaires discursifs qui configurent notre expérience commune ? Se pourrait-il que le langage soit ainsi inscrit au cœur du septième art, comme il fut au centre des savoirs de la modernité théorique ? Notre époque a inventé les moyens de reproduire techniquement la parole, mais n’a sans doute pas tout à fait pris la mesure de la révolution anthropologique induite par la visibilité exceptionnelle que ceux-ci lui donnent. Nous partons de l’hypothèse qu’il y a une pensée cinématographique du langage et de ses usages, un savoir (esthétique, rhétorique, poétique) qui s’ajoute à la parole dès lors qu’elle est représentée dans les films. Plaçant la parole filmée au centre de l’analyse de quatre fables cinématographiques — Fury (1936) de Fritz Lang, Fail Safe (1963) de Sidney Lumet, Salò (1975) de Pier Paolo Pasolini et Film Socialisme (2010) de Jean-Luc Godard —, ce travail donne à entendre quatre "leçons de langage", interrogeant les puissances et les infortunes de la parole dans un monde persuadé qu’il communique massivement. À quoi pensent les films quand ils parlent ? Entre autres choses, ils méditent la portée sociale et politique des actes de parole. / Could it be that movies did not started talking because they had something to say, but in order to make the speech speak, to overhear it, to inform the discursive imaginaries that shape our common experience ? Could it be that language is at the very heart of the art of film, as it has been at the centre of modern theoretical knowledges ? Our times have invented the means of reproducing speech technically, but we have probably not fully appreciated the importance of the anthropological revolution induced by the exceptional visibility that it provides to it. Our hypothesis is that there is a cinematographic thought of language and of its uses, an aesthetical, rhetorical and poetical knowledge that is added to speech when it is represented in films. Putting the filmed speech in the centre of the analysis of four cinematographic fables — Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1963), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) — our work proposes four « language lessons », questioning the powers and misfortunes of speech in a world convinced that we communicate massively. What do films think when they talk ? Among other things, they meditate the social and political significance of speech acts.