In her own time

I'm speaking here of what we call documentaries. In all these so-called documentary films, there are always different layers. These are just people waiting for a bus, but they still evoke other things. They may evoke the lines in the camps or in wartime. In Sud [South, 1999], a tree evokes a black man who might have been hanged. If you show a tree for two seconds, this layer won't be there--there will just be a tree. It's time that establishes that, too, I think.

MR: Another characteristic of your films lies in the musicality of the languages. Not simply the reading of letters, say, or the very written dialogues, but the sound of your voice. In French, in English, in Hebrew with the installation Bordering on Fiction: D'Est [1995], and now in Spanish with From the Other Side. I get the impression there's a whole story there as well.

CA: Well, this is the story of the mother tongue, which one either has or doesn't have. I'm first-generation Belgian. My mother arrived from Poland when she was ten. There's a certain music in the Polish language that lurks behind her French--increasingly so, as she gets older. She drops articles like le and la. For example, she now says, "I am going to doctor," as you would in Polish. I was also raised with Hebrew, with the songs and prayers, and when I write, there's something of a chant about it.

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MR: I heard it while reading and rereading your novella Une Famille a Bruxelles [A Family in Brussels, 1998]: The syntax is very spare, and all of a sudden I realized that it's like biblical Hebrew, with the repetition--and, and, and!

CA: And God said ... and ... and ... and. It came out that way, yes. When I was small, it was a mixture of my mother's French and the synagogue, because my grandfather took care of me, and he didn't speak French and we always went to the synagogue.

MR: Do you speak Yiddish too?

CA: Well, I understood it, but I've forgotten almost all of it. I forgot it because I was taken out of the Maimonides School at the age of nine, when my grandfather died. Nevertheless I think that I was definitively marked by Hebrew, Yiddish, and all that.

And then my language is very poor; I have a very restricted vocabulary. Deleuze explains this very well when he speaks of Kafka's language and minor literature. There are no big car accidents, no big effects, everything is very, very, very, very tight.

MR: I think if you scratch the surface a little, almost everyone is minor.

CA: Not in France.

MR: Yes, in France, precisely. If you scratch.

CA: There's an enormous amount of people who are not border dwellers, first of all. There are still people who belong to this quote-unquote "land" and to this language. There are still "French people."

In the United States--in New York, in any case, and in other places, too--there are people who come from countries all over the world. You don't feel bad speaking bad English. Whereas in France or in Belgium--for example, on my first school paper, the teacher wrote, "colloquial." I went to a "high-class" high school, and I never felt like I belonged. I was made to feel that in various ways, and particularly because of my way of speaking. In New York, everyone knew that I came from France or from Belgium, but I felt at ease.