As has often happened in the course of my cinematic research on language and languages, once again, I understood only afterwards that this new film was concealed in the previous one.
Thus, LETTRE ERRANTE (WANDERING LETTER) began with a childhood memory of having attributed a colour to the first name of my friends, a colour connected to its first letter. The same film ended with the story of the probable invention of the alphabet in a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert – the same desert where, the Bible says, God gave to Moses the Tables of the Law.
In PRÉNOMS (GIVEN NAMES) I had the idea of meeting with friends from today to ask them to tell me the story of their first names: their given names. Carrying a bouquet of flowers in one hand and my camera in the other, I find myself in front of a door that opens onto a smiling friend. I pronounce her or his first name. Later, in exchange for the bouquet of flowers, a bouquet of words. It was, in the beginning, like a game. For each letter of the alphabet, I chose the first name of a friend. I didn't find 26, only 22. Rather than a film, I initially had in mind an installation with 22 tablets that are like playing cards. But what began as a game turned out to be a cinematic adventure in which friendships were explored and deepened. I
n these desperate times these encounters were moments that enabled me to continue thinking and to go on. The friends remembered, recounted, embroidered, interpreted, and translated their given names, often from other languages. It all went far beyond what I could have imagined. These intimate, astonishing, and singular stories, which were so different from each other, were often linked to major events of our time: colonisation, the Shoah, May 68, Tiananmen 1989 and also Egyptian cinema.
Still more unexpected were the subterranean relations between the various stories. I have the impression of approaching what the poet and philosopher from Martinique, Édouard Glissant, calls ‘le tout-monde’: the network of trembling encounters between languages and cultures in all their diversity.
Nurith Aviv
