There are people who leave and long to go back. And then there are people who leave and have no desire to return. In News from Home (1976), Chantal Akerman seemingly confronts her own ambivalence toward “home,” inviting us to contemplate what that word might mean.
Across its 88 minutes, the film accumulates long, meditative shots of 1970s New York City. Side streets, restaurant windows, cars moving toward and away from the camera, strangers brushing past on sidewalks. The everyday is observed in its simplicity, its rhythms, its cadences. The subway outside rush hour is not as cinematic as we might imagine; its very banality makes us look closer. The way people walk, stand, glance.
Akerman positions herself as a foreigner among foreigners, a newcomer marvelling at the city’s quotidian ebbs and flows. Her approach is direct, almost confrontational. In the subway she sets up her camera dead-centre, holding the aisle in symmetrical composition, as though testing her own place within it. Station after station, she keeps filming until we fall into the monotony, the ritual of daily transit.
The film is punctuated by Akerman’s voice reading her mother’s letters from Brussels, written between 1971 and 1973 while the young filmmaker was living in New York. Akerman was 20 years old when she left. The letters’ frequency seems arbitrary. Sometimes separated by long stretches, other times they are almost back-to-back.
The contents are affectionate but insistent, full of reminders and small domestic worries: has Chantal received her summer clothes? Why doesn’t she write more often? Does she need money? The repetitive nature of these letters becomes both a tether and a burden – sediment from a relationship that is loving, but also overbearing.
Sometimes Akerman’s reading voice is swallowed by the clamour of life. As if the city itself were resisting her mother’s intrusion. An exquisite artistic choice, as it visualizes the ennui of absent-mindedly reading a letter. The film is as much about what we hear as what we see. The soundscape of a city alive with the mechanical noise of cars and trains, ever humming their restless tune.
Against this backdrop, we start to sense what it might mean to be alone in a new place, negotiating both the world outside and the world within. It is a very intimate moment of self-discovery and isolation. These feelings are often coupled with guilt, homesickness as well as alienation.
To leave is to reinvent oneself, to slip into a new character, and to grow. This also means having to endure the loneliness of detachment. Akerman’s replies to her mother’s letters are withheld from the audience, emphasizing that the film is not about dialogue but about reception and introspection.
Considered one of her most personal films, News from Home carries an elegiac aftertaste and invites multiple readings. More than a slice-of-life documentary, it resists conclusion, refusing to settle on a singular subject, and leaves the audience with an ambivalent sense of intimacy with Akerman’s inner life.
