(Un)Learning Language
french and cinema
I am learning two languages—le français et le cinéma. I have been wondering what it means to “learn” a language? One can learn the rules of grammar, the conjugation, the twelve different tenses, the genders of a thousand nouns, the syntactical structures of complex clauses—and still, learn nothing at all. Over the last couple of years, I have struggled immensely with trying to “learn” French. Despite all the grammar I know, I still make basic mistakes equivalent of saying “I is” in English.
In this process, I am slowly realising that one can never really learn a language in its entirety at all. The humility induced by the fortress of French I cannot yet enter (this is a metaphor I most associate with learning a language) has made me watchful of my transactions in language elsewhere—it has illuminated my very precarious hold onto what I thought were languages I already knew. Just yesterday, I wanted to ask another person where they came from. I fumbled at least twice in asking this simple question. Another day, as part of a Punjabi reading group on campus, I sat down with Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and saw myself painfully struggle (shouldn’t painfully come after struggle?) in reading a language I call my mother tongue.
I watch myself speak with my friends to realise that I do not speaking “properly” in even one language—it is a strange mixture of a metropolitan English with traces of a non-English upbringing along with spatters of vulgarised Hindi. The silences are all inelegant—forcefully filled with filler words of either variety. Spoken language, I am slowly realising, is utterly fragile. I have been thinking about what would happen if I forever lost language. If I spoke a tongue no one understood. What an isolating terror would that be? Quelle horreur !
And yet, my second language expedition—a more recent one—might say that it wouldn’t be so bad. Thanks to Payal Kapadia, I resolved a few weeks ago to teach myself, “learn” some cinema. Only by watching. I watched Perfect Days (2023) by Wim Wenders and Le Lycéen (2022) by Christophe Honoré. The former is about an old man in Tokyo; the latter about a young boy in Paris. The old man lives alone, follows a set routine every single day of his existence and cleans toilets. The young boy is grieving the loss of his father who he suspects died by suicide—a thought his family does not let him entertain.
In both films, although more so in the Wim Wenders film, there are shots that capture, in silence, the raw intensity of human emotion. In the last scene of Perfect Days, our old man is on his way to work, as usual, when suddenly, his face is overcome, overwhelmed, undone, by emotion. He wants to cry, scream but he doesn’t. He attempts to smile but is unable to. Language fails—utterly—in this moment. I do not know how to describe it. Similarly, in Le Lycéen, the grieving boy attempts suicide and is rendered mute—devoid of language—in its aftermath. He smiles occasionally—a smile that hides or betrays one knows not what. A memory, a joke, a grief become comical, a glance at a loved one. Silence emerges as an important component of the language of film. Light and sound or their absence evoke bodily, mental, emotional, psychic responses that language simply cannot.
I am learning from and with French the radical impossibility of inhabiting a foreign linguistic soundscape that refuses to let you in. And at the same time, I realise the foreignness of all language including that I call my own. I am tempted to say that film is different—in some measures, it of course is—but it remains similar insofar as even our bodily movements and facial expressions are never fully our own. In the last instance then, we are all alone in this foreign world.
Feature Image: A still from Perfect Days (2023) by Wim Wenders | MUBI.