The semiotic implications of multilingualism in the construction of suspense in Alfred Hitchcock’s films

This paper aims to shed some light both on the role that multilingualism plays in Alfred Hitchcock’s films and on the semiotic implications it has in the construction of the distinctive feature of his filmography, namely suspense. Through a diachronic analysis of the evolution that multilingualism undergoes from the director’s early production of the 1930s to the end of the 1960s, when the universally acknowledged “master of thrill" directed Torn Curtain (1968), his most well-structured multilingual film, three main functions of multilingualism in Hitchcock’s films will be identified and discussed: realistic rendering, conflict, and confusion. If realistic rendering is intended as a means to enhance viewers’ perception of the reality depicted on screen, particularly if the story has an “international” setting with characters coming from different parts of the globe, conflict as well as confusion of languages and lingua-cultural identities both become strategies to produce the distinctive feature of Hitchcock’s films: suspense. The presence of so-called “secondary languages” will also lead to the analysis of the different translational solutions and techniques used to handle them in the original version of the fourteen films taken into consideration in this study.