Nurith Aviv: Langue sacrée, langue parlée (2008)

Nurith Aviv in conversation with Ofer Dynes, Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, and Moulie Vidas.

For centuries, Hebrew was the language of Scripture, liturgy, and rabbinic commentaries. Then, by force of national and political will, it was reborn as a language of daily life in the early 20th century. Writers and artists from Israel explore their intimate, often conflicted relationship with Hebrew’s layered past, reflecting on what has been forgotten or repressed and what needs to resurface. Their confessions overlap and part, as the film allows no single version of this history prevails.

Since I finished From One Language to Another, in fact without knowing it, I have been working in a sort of upstream, as if on the progressive expansion of a remnant. The film, if I manage to find the financing to make it, will be called Sacred Language, Spoken Language. The poet Haviva Pedaya already announced it in a certain way when she says: “Hebrew is two languages. The Hebrew that I knew through my grandfather, and the Hebrew so full of Zionist sediments.” At the heart of the next film is the question of how Jews became Israelis and, above all, how a sacred language becomes a spoken language. It is not historical research but an attempt to question those who dive into the depths of the language, the poets and writers, on the tensions that exist in the language itself. Gershom Scholem wrote to Rosenzweig in 1926: “Isn’t this sacred language which we feed to our children an abyss that will one day open up?” I am looking for the traces of the sacred language in life and in today’s language, the gaps left by its secularization, and the remnants of the religious world in the modern universe. I also believe that modern and seemingly secular Western languages ​​are all built on deep religious sediments, but the case of Hebrew is particularly telling.

FULL CALENDAR

A four-day tribute to Nurith Aviv presented jointly with Fordham Center for Jewish Studies, Fordham Center for Religion and Culture.

Tuesday, April 22, 7:00 pm

Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue

Traduire (Translating) [1h10m] (2011)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv with Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, James Redfield

Wednesday, April 23, 7:00 pm

Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue

Langue sacrée, Langue parlée (Sacred Tongue, Spoken Language) (2008) [1h13m]  

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv with Ofer Dynes, Aviya Kushner, Jacques Lezra, and Moulie Vidas

Thursday, April 24, 6:30 pm 

Bookhouse, 15 West 16th Street, 6th floor

Words That Remain [52m]  

Bruly Bouabré’s Alphabet [17m] (2005)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Cynthia Madansky, James Redfield, and Moulie Vidas

Friday, April 25, 10:00 am

Bookhouse, 15 West 16th Street, 6th floor

D’une langue à l’autre (From Language to Language) [55m] (2004)

Allenby, Passage [5m] (2001)

Post-screening conversation: Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Yemane Demissie, Cynthia Madansky, and Richard Peña

TICKETS

Tickets are free for Fordham University’s and Centro Primo Levi’s subscribers who order them before April 17th and pick them up at the door 40 minutes before the beginning of the program. Tickets for the general public will go on sale on April 18th and can be purchased online or, if the screening is not sold out, at the box office on the nights of the event. 

$15 General Admission

$10 Students and Seniors

All programs are held in English and the films are subtitled.