A speaking silence: “universal language” and multilingualism in The Shape of Water

Abstract

Framed by Guillermo del Toro as “a love letter to the cinema,” the academy award-winning feature The Shape of Water (2017) speaks to one of the core debates in film studies: film’s status as a “universal language.” Paradoxically both propagating and critiquing this idea of universality, a vast knowledge of film history, cinematic techniques, and a desire to create what the director calls a “cinematic Esperanto”—or a globally legible film tradition—informs a film that celebrates the multiplicity of “languages” possible in film as a medium. Reading The Shape of Water as a series of films-within-films—fantasy within realism, black-and-white within color, and a silent film within a “talkie”—I reveal the myriad communicative forms accessible within cinema as a visual, temporal, and mobile medium. The foregrounding of “a speaking silence” in the interactions between the mute Elisa and the Amphibian Man, a pre-linguistic, but communicative, sea creature, acts as a set piece—a silent film within the larger film proper—that celebrates the universal language of gesture, while the situation of this nested narrative within a larger film tradition of “talkies” speaks to the ultimate displacement of the fantasy of universality by the adoption of the voice in film. Through a close attention to film stills, the formal composition of scenes, and the sparse, multilingual dialogue, I examine The Shape of Water’s critique of a monolingual “universal” filmic language and celebration of the radical multilingualism possible in the cinema.