Toward the end of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016), linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has a breakthrough encounter with the Heptapod aliens come to save humanity and finally understands the nature of the tool/weapon/gift they have been trying to bequeath it: ‘The weapon is their language...When you learn it, you begin to perceive time the way that they do... But time, it isn't the same for them, it's non-linear’. A little while later, Banks dubs Heptapod ‘the universal language’, in an instance of post-cinematic atavism that aligns with Villeneuve’s overt positioning of cinema as a still wondrous audiovisual medium and his nostalgic, reference-heavy coding of Banks' encounter with the aliens as an encounter with cinema (the Heptapods are nicknamed Abbott and Costello, they appear in black and white, they communicate with Banks through a cinema-like screen in a cinema-like space, mostly visually, and so on). In this paper, I argue that Arrival reflects on cinema's relation to multilingualism by repurposing not only film theory's early investment in the ‘universal language’ thesis—including the idea that cinema teaches us to see and experience anew—but also the aesthetics correlated with that thesis, in particular the insistence on close-ups, temporal manipulation and various expressions of an avant la lettre haptic or embodied visuality. This anachronistic operation further implicates language in the film's fetishistic erasure of the future in favour of a return to the past, substituting a potentially multilingual paradigm with a deeply monolingual one and suggesting a refusal to envision a (post-)cinematic model capable of accommodating rather than eradicating linguistic difference. Yet it is precisely through this web of atavistic disavowals that Arrival inadvertently, or in spite of itself, invites us to ask how a future cinema might both formulate and formalize its response to a truly, and post-anthropocentrically, multilingual world.

中文翻译：

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丹尼斯·维伦纽夫，电影理论家；或者，电影进入多语言世界

在丹尼斯·维伦纽夫 (Denis Villeneuve) 的到来 (2016) 接近尾声时，语言学家路易丝·班克斯 (Amy Adams) 与前来拯救人类的七爪怪外星人进行了一次突破性的相遇，并最终了解了他们一直试图遗赠的工具/武器/礼物的性质： “武器是他们的语言......当你学习它时，你开始以他们的方式感知时间......但时间对他们来说并不相同，它是非线性的”。不久之后，班克斯将七爪怪称为“通用语言”，这与维伦纽夫将电影公然定位为仍然奇妙的视听媒体以及他对班克斯遭遇的怀旧、大量参考编码相一致。外星人作为与电影的邂逅（七爪怪的绰号是 Abbott 和 Costello，它们以黑白相间的形式出现，他们在类似电影院的空间中通过类似电影院的屏幕与银行进行交流，主要是视觉上，等等）。在这篇论文中，我认为 Arrival 不仅通过重新利用电影理论对“通用语言”论文的早期投资（包括电影教我们重新观看和体验的想法），而且还重新利用了与此相关的美学，从而反思了电影与多语言的关系。论文，特别是对特写镜头、时间操纵和先锋文学触觉或具身视觉的各种表达的坚持。这种不合时宜的操作进一步暗示了电影对未来的拜物教擦除有利于回归过去的语言，用深度单一语言的范式代替潜在的多语言范式，并建议拒绝设想一种能够容纳而不是消除语言差异的（后）电影模式。然而，正是通过这种返祖否认的网络，《降临》无意中或不由自主地邀请我们去问，未来的电影如何对一个真正的、后人类中心主义的多语言世界做出反应，并将其形式化。