News From Home Chantal Akerman (1977) USA
Akerman’s early work, News From Home, is an experiment in homesickness and alienation while exploring personal growth.
Low budget but profound, News From Home is one of Chantal Akerman’s first works and yet it might be her most raw. Static shots around 1970′s New York City capture the oddities, the limbo, the many faces that overwhelm you on a daily basis. And like the abyss, the faces you stare into are capable of staring back.
In Akerman’s film, they do just that. Often the participants look directly into the camera as they take in that they are being filmed. Their faces are etched with curiosity as the people go about their day shooting around through underground tunnels at dramatic speeds. But this is what living in a city is about. People living on top of one another with little room to miss each other, and yet every shot is tinged with the alienation that also comes with being a foreigner in such a city.
I had to learn how to make gifs in order to do this blog post because there were none available. Watching News From Home transports back to a world where my father might have been alive and traveling around. The man in the shot above reminds me so much of him that I had to use it. Sometimes a film can speak to you directly and News From Home is one of those films. Seeing a ghostly apparition of someone that I loved only intensifies this feeling.
News From Home has no dialogue, but it is narrated by Akerman herself as she reads letters from her mother back in Belgium. Her mother is often bored as things rarely change for her and she often worries and wonders about her daughter. We never hear Akerman’s reply but we see her living her life away from home and we understand her loneliness without needing her words.
Like Akerman, at 22 I lived abroad where my native tongue was not the first language. The experience I have is similar to hers, the crushing isolation, the strange lights, smells, and sounds that seem profound only to someone with fresh eyes. In a world where everything is foreign, the only comfort is the news from home that you receive. Its consistency creates a time capsule where you can visit those you love despite the distance.
I don’t live in Berlin today but having the experience has impacted me forever. I often live my life as if I am viewing News From Home through my own lenses. I haven’t been home since I was a teenager and so every place I live now creates the same uneasy malaise of being in an unknowable place. Today I am in New York City where the flashing tunnel lights of the subway and the millions of strangers that I see leave me with the same feeling again. While my own father has passed away and is unable to write to me, seeing his visage allows me to visit him in that time capsule called home which now travels with me wherever I go.
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