{"id":6431,"date":"2025-04-15T19:21:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T19:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/?p=6431"},"modified":"2025-04-17T03:48:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T03:48:35","slug":"nurith-aviv-on-her-film-lettre-errante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/nurith-aviv-on-her-film-lettre-errante\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurith Aviv on Her Film “Lettre Errante”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nurith Aviv: filmer la parole<\/i>. Edited by Claire Buchbinder, Marianne Dautrey, and Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs. Exils \u00c9diteur (2025). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A new book celebrating Nurith Aviv\u2019s films has just been published in France. It will be available in New York at the Albertine Bookstore and Anthology Film Archives on the 22 and 23 of April. We have translated and published with the author’s permission a few excerpts for our readers (translation by Yuval Jonas and Marin Diz).<\/p>\n

An interview by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Moli\u00e8re, Myriam Leibovici, and Pauline Goudot (March 2024)<\/p>\n

Why choose to make an entire film about a single letter of the alphabet, the consonant R?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even as a child, the sounds of the letter R troubled me. Around me, people spoke a multitude of languages \u200b\u200bwith 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\u2019t imagine that it was the same letter of an alphabet I didn\u2019t yet know. I felt that to pronounce this R, the body, the mouth, and 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\u2019s often the sound whose pronunciation children acquire last. I think there\u2019s 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\u2019t hear the R at the end of the word. For me, for example, the word Oper<\/i> (opera) sounded like opa<\/i> (grandfather). I remember trying to play Scrabble with my parents. I didn\u2019t 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\u2014pronounced gutturally\u2014at the beginning of the word, and rolled in the middle. I remember the rolled R of my father\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 millions of people speak languages \u200b\u200bin which the R sound doesn\u2019t 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<\/i>, 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<\/i>, in 2021, for me to understand how to make this new film on the sound of the R. In Words that Remain,<\/i> people recount childhood memories linked to words from languages \u200b\u200bthey don\u2019t or no longer speak, and which have remained stuck in their ears. <\/span><\/p>\n

%0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nurith Aviv: filmer la parole. Edited by Claire Buchbinder, Marianne Dautrey, and Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs. Exils \u00c9diteur (2025).  A new book celebrating Nurith Aviv\u2019s films has just been published in France….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nNurith Aviv on Her Film "Lettre Errante" - Printed_Matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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. 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