An Austrian in Hollywood: the representation of foreigners in the films of Billy Wilder

Abstract

This paper examines the work of Billy Wilder whose rich cinematic production frequently involves the collision of different languages as well as the clash of dissimilar cultures. As an Austrian living in the USA, the director had the privilege of gaining insight into his adopted culture from the point of view of an outsider – a bilingual ‘other’ who made 25 films in almost 40 years of working in Hollywood. His films recurrently depict foreign characters at which Wilder pokes fun whether they are English, French, German, Italian, Russian or even the Americans of his adopted country. More precisely, the paper offers an overview of the multi-modal portrayals of diverse ‘foreigners’, namely Germans, Russians, French and Italians, with examples taken from a small but significant sample of Wilder’s films. The subtitling of dialogue in the secondary language for the target English-speaking audience and the specific translation solutions are not within the scope of this discussion, instead we focus on the comic collision of two languages and more importantly, on the way Wilder implements humour to highlight the absurdity of cultural difference. In other words, our main goal is to explore two or more languages in contrast when they become a humorous trope.

Translating Foreign Languages and Non-Native Varieties of English in Animated Films

“…Actors voicing characters often play with their vocal performance and accents so as to recreate specific dialects and character types based on nationalities, areas of origin, or social class (see Wright and Lallo 2009;Lippi-Green 1997. This linguistic characterisation may be exaggerated and parodic, thus enhancing comedy (on the use of multilingualism as a vehicle of humour see Chiaro 2007Chiaro , 2008; Chiaro and De Bonis 2019;De Bonis 2014a;Dore 2019 among others).…”