Academic Film Collaboration: Filming The Multilingual Pleasures of English with Richard Scholar

Creating an academic film collaboration is always an opportunity to slow down and really listen—to engage with ideas not just as concepts, but as textures, rhythms, and forms that can be translated visually. 

The Multilingual Pleasures of Englishis a short film I made with Professor Richard Scholar, a writer, translator, and academic based at Durham University. It explores the hidden stories behind familiar French words that have become part of everyday English, drawing on Richard’s book Émigrés: French Words That Turned English, published by Princeton University Press.

As a documentary filmmaker, I’m always drawn to projects that sit at the edge of disciplines—where language meets identity, and where scholarship can be made accessible to wider audiences. This academic film collaboration was filmed in my studio in Newcastle and offered a thoughtful, lyrical script full of subtle observations about power, culture, and the long history of linguistic exchange.

Richard’s book examines how English has always been shaped by its borrowings—especially from French. Some words, like restaurant or ballet, are so thoroughly absorbed that we forget they were ever foreign. Others, like je ne sais quoi, à la mode, or raison d’être, retain a performative Frenchness that reminds us of their roots and suggests deeper layers of meaning. These phrases often signal sophistication, aspiration, or irony in English—but they also hint at colonial histories, cultural ambivalence, and a constant negotiation of identity.

This academic film collaboration allowed me to explore those ideas in visual form. Filming in my Newcastle studio gave us a quiet, controlled space where we could focus fully on the tone and delivery of the script. I kept the setup minimal—just enough lighting to shape the image, a fixed camera to let the voice take centre stage, and a few carefully chosen graphical flourishes referencing the “visual emblems” designed by Princeton for each French word in the book.

Richard speaks with clarity and insight about how certain words—caprice, naïveté, ennui—exist in the English lexicon as cultural artefacts. They carry emotional weight and nuance that’s difficult to replicate. Figures like Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses use these words for comic effect, but also to gesture toward something aspirational: a kind of stylish, improvised cosmopolitanism. These are the moments when English reveals its porousness—its openness to other influences, even as it resists them.

Through this academic film collaboration, I wanted to highlight how these borrowed words are not just curiosities—they’re deeply entangled with power, class, and history. Richard explores how words like à la mode once referred to fashionable black silk in 17th-century Britain, while today in North America, the same phrase means “served with ice cream.” A single word can hold multiple lives and meanings depending on where and when it travels.

Crucially, the film touches on the idea of creolisation—a concept shaped by Caribbean thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Stuart Hall. Richard argues that English, as a global language, has been shaped by a creolising process: a mixing of languages and cultures often formed under unequal relations of power, particularly through colonialism. Many of the French words that have “turned English” carry with them traces of this entangled history.

This academic film collaboration also brings into focus a compelling idea: that our vocabulary is incomplete without words of foreign origin. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, who explored the key words of English cultural life, Richard suggests that there’s a missing category in that catalogue—keywords of conspicuously foreign derivation. These “émigré words” give English speakers new expressive possibilities, often allowing for elegant distance, emotional subtlety, or layered irony that native equivalents can’t always deliver.

As a documentary filmmaker based in the North East of England, I’ve worked with many researchers at Durham University and other institutions. Each academic film collaboration is different, but they all share a goal: to make complex ideas accessible without oversimplifying them. What I love about working with academics is the depth they bring—their long engagement with questions that often go unasked in public discourse. My job is to create a space for those questions to resonate beyond the university.

Filming The Multilingual Pleasures of English felt like a conversation between disciplines—Richard’s research on language history meeting my practice of visual storytelling. We weren’t trying to explain every idea, but to invite the viewer in, to encourage curiosity. These kinds of academic film collaborations are about more than just documentation—they’re about interpretation, exchange, and connection.

The phrase “a new idea for the new normal” runs through the script like a quiet refrain. In the wake of COVID-19 and Brexit, Richard suggests we reassess our relationship with other languages and cultures—not with suspicion, but with openness and appreciation. His call is simple but powerful: let’s celebrate the multilingual nature of English and use that awareness to nurture a more connected and compassionate global outlook.

Making this academic film collaboration reminded me of the quiet power of words—not just as tools for communication, but as windows into the histories and values that shape us. Whether it’s ennui, caprice, or naïveté, the words we borrow are doing more than filling gaps—they’re creating new dimensions of meaning.

The Multilingual Pleasures of English is just one example of the kind of creative collaboration that bridges academic research and film. If you’d like to watch more of my work exploring ideas, knowledge, and the people behind it, you can explore my academic films here:

👉 https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/academic-films/

And if you’d like to watch more of my work exploring community stories, creative resilience, and diverse subjects across arts, heritage, and the environment, you can explore all my films here:

👉 https://alanfentiman.co.uk/films-by-alan-fentiman/