FINDING WORDS
 | The unadorned, humanistic documentaries of Nurith Aviv

FINDING WORDS 
| The unadorned, humanistic documentaries of Nurith Aviv

Nurith Aviv’s documentary cinema adopts the most unadorned form imaginable, allowing people to speak in static medium shots. This is by no means fashionable in contemporary documentary filmmaking. Whilst many essayistic works unfold their reflections through commentary, montage and image-sound dichotomy, Aviv relies on the power of conversation, on bodies that express themselves through speech. Her camera observes thoughtfully – and listens. In calm, static shots, she allows language to become an event – as the bearer of memory, history and identity.

Born in Israel in 1945 and living in Paris since the 1970s, Aviv is France’s first trained female cinematographer – and perhaps even the world’s first, as she herself cautiously suggests. Following close collaboration with female directors such as Agnès Varda and Ruth Beckermann, she developed her own body of documentary work, which consistently explores the social and cultural imprints of language in all its facets. Whether it is the blank spaces in Jewish life and language in post-war Germany (VATERS LAND), the search for a new linguistic home in D’UNE LANGUE À L’AUTRE, the stories of first names in PRÉNOMS, sign languages in SIGNER, or the silent gazing in SON PORTRAIT, MON PORTRAIT: Aviv is always interested in people who have things to say and bring them up. It is precisely in its formal simplicity that her cinema unfolds a form of radicalism – a quiet GEGENkino.