Nurith Aviv: filmer la parole. Edited by Claire Buchbinder, Marianne Dautrey, and Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs. Exils Éditeur (2025). Translated from the French by Yuval Jonas and Marin Diz (revised by Emanuel Fiano) and published by permisison of the author.
A new book celebrating Nurith Aviv’s films has just been published in France. It will be available in New York at the Albertine Bookstore and at Anthology Film Archives on the 22 and 23 of April. We have translated a few exceprts for our English language readers.
An interview by Hélène Molière, Myriam Leibovici, and Pauline Goudot (March 2024)
Why choose to make an entire film about a single letter of the alphabet, the consonant R?
Even as a child, the sounds of the letter R troubled me. Around me, people spoke a multitude of languages with very different accents. I heard the R in the middle of my first name, Nurith, pronounced by each in a thousand and one ways. I couldn’t imagine that it was the same letter of an alphabet I didn’t yet know. I felt that to pronounce this R, the body, the mouth, the tongue were more involved than to pronounce the N or the T in my first name; it was more sensual, more carnal. The R sometimes even has an animal quality, a roar, a purr, a snort. According to linguists, it’s often the sound whose pronunciation children acquire last. I think there’s no other letter that wanders like this inside the mouth: rolled on the tip of the tongue or coming from the back of the throat, hard, soft, or barely perceptible. In German, the language my parents spoke to me in, you often don’t hear the R at the end of the word. For me, for example, the word Oper (opera) sounded like opa (grandfather). I remember trying to play Scrabble with my parents. I didn’t know how to write German, I wrote it phonetically, and I can still hear their bursts of laughter elicited by a missing or extra letter. In Portuguese, the R is trilled—pronounced gutturally—at the beginning of the word, and rolled in the middle. I remember the rolled R of my father’s Russian friend, and I can still see his tongue beating endlessly against the roof of his mouth. Or the Hungarian R of my uncle, my aunt’s husband, whose sound was so strange and fascinating. I realized much later, in 1983, while I was in China shooting a film, that there is no R at all in Chinese. And that in Asia there are millions of people who speak languages in which the R sound doesn’t exist, for example Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others. Opera singer Laurent Naouri explained to me that in the world of opera singing, there are different opinions about how to sing the R in French, with the trilled R or the rolled R. He himself distinguishes at least four possible pronunciations. Already in my first film on languages, From One Language to Another, in 2003, the poet Agi Mishol recounted how, at the age of five, she had spent hours in front of the mirror to lose her Hungarian rolled R and adopt the Israeli guttural R. This guttural R probably comes from Yiddish, the mother tongue of those who renewed Hebrew at the very beginning of the 20th century. Another friend, of Argentinian origin, described the exact same scene in front of the mirror. I then thought it was a subject worth exploring. But it took making my latest film, Words that Remain, in 2021, for me to understand how to make this new film on the sound of the R. In Words that Remain people recount childhood memories linked to words from languages they don’t or no longer speak, and which have remained stuck in their ears.
These are Jewish languages that, for the most part, are dying out. In Errant Letter, I also embrace childhood memories, but this time around the sounds of a single letter, the letter R. The R is perhaps the letter whose sound most resists the passage from one language to another. More than that of any other consonant, the sound of the R retains the trace of a first language, the one we call mother tongue or language of origin. Its pronunciation betrays an accent, an elsewhere, a strangeness.
In this sense, the R functions like a shibboleth. In the Bible, this word, unpronounceable for the Ephraimites who were trying to cross the Jordan, served to denounce them to the ears of the men of Gilead. The Ephraimites pronounced it “sibboleth” instead of “shibboleth” and were massacred. Haitian writer and theater director Guy Régis Jr. speaks of a massacre perpetrated in 1937 on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Haitians were required to pronounce the word “parsley,” perejil in Spanish. If they pronounced it the Haitian way, with a soft R, they were massacred. The pronunciation of the word becomes a matter of life or death.
I am convinced that the persecutors were inspired by the biblical story of the shibboleth. I am astonished by all the childhood stories and reflections that have been confided to me around the sounds of the letter R. Even more surprised by the unexpected, subterraneous links between these stories told by people who each have a different first language: Norwegian, Japanese, Russian, Persian, Arabic, and Creole. In the film, we talk about filiation, migration, exile, resistance… But I did not expect to be in tune with the times with regard to the question of gender, raised by both Luba Jurgenson, of Russian origin, and Amel Chaouati, of Algerian origin. They both testify to the fact that the rolled R is considered masculine in each of their languages. The linguist Iván Fónagy, in his The Pulsional Basis of Phonation, confirms this hypothesis. He writes that the hardness of the apical, rolled R is associated with combat and violent actions. The phallic character of the R is found, for example, in the fertility ceremonies of the Aruntas in Central Australia: this rolled R was an integral part of the ritual, just like the handling of magical tools. The phenomenon of accent presents itself both as a mark of difference and as a universally shared linguistic reality. In one place in my oral cavity, the intimate, the collective, and the political come together.
Lettre Errante begins with rather intimate stories and takes on a more collective and political character as the film progresses. At the end of the film, Guy Régis Jr. defends the great diversity of accents with which we create the world. The R is a world-letter. Let’s talk about cinematic choices and the relationship between sound and color. My previous film, Words that Remain, ends with a sound poem composed and performed by Anat Pick, one of the film’s protagonists. It was she who introduced me, years ago, to Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, composed between 1918 and 1932. Errant Letter opens with a short excerpt from this work. Ursonate takes the classical sonata form and treats it with humor and derision. It’s one of the first examples of what would later be called “sound poetry,” texts whose sonic character takes precedence over meaning and syntax. In the film, the formidable performer Jaap Blonk performs a short excerpt in which the sound of the R is stretched to the extreme. His voice accompanies the entire film.
In the prologue, I evoke my own synesthesia when, as a child, I associated the colors and sounds of the letters of the alphabet. Each word corresponded to a color based on the letter it began with. And the only sound for which I couldn’t pinpoint a color was the sound of the R, because it was constantly changing. It was only consonants, unlike Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Vowels.” This sound-color relationship inspired the film’s grammar. It is composed of six chapters, each corresponding to a protagonist in the film. Each chapter opens with a sequence shot of flowers, associated with a color. I enjoyed filming flowers for hours and hours with my phone. This allowed me to get close to them, almost touching them, in a more sensual movement than a conventional camera would have allowed. Jaap improvised at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), under the direction of Georges Bloch, on moving sequences of flowers, trees, and grass, which sway in the wind. Georges suggested that Jaap improvise using only his voice on the theme of air, breath, respiration, and wind. In Hebrew, wind, breath, is “ruakh,” a sound in which you can hear the wind blowing. “Ruakh” also means “spirit.” This combination of color-materials of close-ups of vegetation with sound materials improvised by Jaap, into which the voices of the protagonists are blended, seems to me to give a carnal dimension to the whole. The act of connecting sound and visual sign lies at the origin of the invention of the alphabet. According to researchers, it took place in the Sinai Desert, in a turquoise mine…
