Event

Translation Trouble 

A Film Series presented by Penn Humanities Forum in collaboration with Cinema Studies and International House Philadelphia with Cinema Studies and International House Philadelphia

An international and multimodal art form from its very inception, the cinema has always been intimately bound up with translation. Our 2017 series presents films in which this founding involvement with multiple systems of meaning is heightened and intensified to an extraordinary degree. In these films, translation is a strange and even dangerous process, as disturbing as it is exhilarating. 

Windtalkers (2002, dir. John Woo, 134 min.)

This World War II epic centers on the battle for Saipan and the Navajo Indians who were crucial in America’s victory there. Known as “code talkers,” they spoke a secret code devised by the military that was based on their native language. It was the only code that the Japanese were never able to break during the war.

Introduction: Tim Powell, Director, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, Library of the American Philosophical Society.

To register: www.phf.upenn.edu