Language in Exile, Language in Exile

Language in Exile is part of our long-term research on potential cinema. The main idea here was to open up a zone where characters from different geographies and cosmologies could meet through space and time, and talk to each other about their experience of exile, displacement, colonial violence, and their strategies of resistance. We wanted to give the subtitles and images a specific narrative flow. Isolating them from the films, we started “listening” to the spectres of history they were channelling.

Stitching the subtitles together, the idea was to produce a kind of collective enunciation that would let a whole extended family of films gather in an act of transversal conversation and storytelling. Developing a new work in collaboration with a Senegalese friend, we were watching a lot of films from the African continent but also from South America, Asia, the Arab World… Exile and displacement were a recurring theme and became some kind of conducting thread. But at the same time, we realised that the images conveyed more than what the subtitles could translate and we started looking at what emerged between the “silent” still image and the subtitle standing in for the missing voice.

The first step was to make a preselection of films. Then, each of us worked on their own to choose subtitles and images we found powerful, both in themselves and in dialogue with the other images. Certain phrases, gestures, the intensity of a gaze, the light in a landscape seemed already to speak to one another. Silvia had the idea to write down all the subtitles on strips of paper. We had around 1000 phrases, and we started organizing them into sequences that worked as dialogue, or monologues. Certain thematic blocks began to emerge, and we went back to the editing table to see how the images would fit together, making adjustments where needed. We wanted Language in Exile to feel like a collective journey moving between present-day reality, memory, dreams and spirits. In this “quantic” montage, we tried to subvert the linearity of the editing process, through digressions, echoes, shifts of intensity.

As we said, the film is part of a larger project on potential cinema that we have developed over many years in different forms. About ten years ago, we created the Dark Matter Cinema Tarot, an experimental tarot pack replacing the major and minor arcana of the Marseille Tarot with still frames from different films and which we use to make collective readings. We had this idea of what we call the “still moving image”, a still which continues to move somehow, harbouring a potential that the film it comes from cannot realise on its own. Another aspect of the still image that fascinates us is its quality of pure apparition, and the indeterminacy of suspension between movements. In Language in Exile, this feeling of betweenness and suspension gives an added political charge to what the characters say.

Since this is in some sense a silent movie, the question for us was how to give expression to the kinds of feelings that the images and subtitles were channelling and to the floating sense of spectrality they seemed to transmit, expanding and contracting the inner-time of each frame to give it a different sense of duration. As in all our films, it’s Graeme who does the sound design. The music is loosely structured in a series of movements that follow and sometimes anticipate the shifts in topic of the subtitled sequences. The whole process is partly inspired by a research we are making around endangered and disappearing languages. We found a recording of one song  in particular that Graeme sampled and processed to generate a series of ghostly sonic transformations that he mixed with a synthesizer programmed to drift microtonally between notes, like a musical language in exile.