Video

Brother Tongue / Langue Fraternelle

Daniel Cockburn

2006, 15:46 minutes, colour, English with French Subtitles

TAPECODE 209.16

An apocryphal story goes like this:
Of two twin brothers in the womb, one foetus was the stronger and absorbed his weaker brother in utero. The parents never knew that they had briefly had two children; only a single child was born, with an out-of-place artifact (maybe a fingernail in the scalp, or perhaps a tiny tooth embedded in his femur) the only remnant of the sibling he had eaten.

As an Anglophone living in Canada I sometimes feel as if the English language –- my language -- is that stronger brother. I receive a French email and respond in English (my French is not up to scratch), assuming that the sender will be able to default to English – and they do. Phoning someone in Montreal or Tokyo, regardless of what language they speak when answering, I immediately launch into an English conversation. I do this because it almost always works – everyone is willing and to some extent able to accommodate me. I can see my language absorbing all the others, literally as I speak, and I wonder what fragments will be left when it’s done eating, what scraps of all the missing others lodged in my victorious tongue.

My videos are almost always monologue-based and heavily language-oriented. I have shown them internationally – Germany, France, The Netherlands – and not once been asked to provide a subtitled version. This has carried me thus far, but I was not in good conscience able to continue this way in making a video for a Toronto/Montreal video artist residency. My guilt in this situation finally caught up with me; my position as a monolingual citizen of a supposedly bilingual country finally became untenable.

This is not just a matter of political correctness or even, for that matter, politics. Even if English were the only language on Earth I would still have qualms about sticking to it; I would always wonder what patterns of thought my single language confines me to, what possibilities it excludes. My videos thus far have expressed a wariness of language’s traps, but they have done so (as I am now here doing on this page) via an obsessive (English-)language-immersion.

It was time for me and my videos to escape the traps, exit the monolingual room –– and, ultimately, to stop the flow of words and bring on the silence.

Rental and Sales

Single Screening Rental

$190.00

Educational Purchase DVD (Bluray +$15)

$260.00

5 Year Educational Streaming License, Digital File with DVD Circulation Copy

$550.00

Gallery Exhibition and Installation, complete Media Request form for quote

Institutional Archival Acquisition, complete Media Request form for quote

Curators and programmers, please contact distribution@vtape.org to receive a login and password to preview Vtape titles online.

Screening and exhibition rentals and archival acquisitions include public performance rights; educational purchases or licenses include rights for classroom screenings and library circulation. When placing an order the customer agrees to our general online terms and conditions. Payment (or a purchase order number) and a signed licensing agreement must be received before media can be shipped to the client.