Empty streets, cars and metro wagons going somewhere and nowhere, letters from a past read for a future; News from Home’s (Akerman, 1977) abstract representation of self and belonging creates a realm of intimacy and emotions. The reason I chose the title above is because it combines the more existential themes of the film (self, home, belonging, absence, existence), with its style (abstraction, contraposition, superposition, rhythm), and its form (spatial and temporal gimmicks).

Akerman’s voice-over, recorded in 1976 while she was revisiting New York after a couple of years being back in Belgium, reads her mom’s letters from approximately 1971 - 73, during her first stay in New York. The letters from a past that were written for Akerman who would eventually read them in a future, and reread them for a future, an artistic future, a personal future, a future as much future can be, if one is ready to abandon any symmetry in the dimension of time, and get rid of, once and for all, the burden of the arrow of time. Margulies (1996: 151) writes that “the letter collapses the dual temporality of autobiographical writing – a necessarily belated report on one’s experience of an earlier moment”.

But Akerman does the same with space, as she is travelling back to the place where she was when these letters were sent to her; twice dislocated letters, for a multi-dislocated self. Time and space become entangled, superimposed and ultimately merged, and this collapse of dimensionalities emits the most soothing sense of belonging, a sense of home.  Walsh (2004: 193) suggests that “this sensory space, [is] a space freed from the mournful nostalgia for and of home and the rootless vagaries of nomadism”, but whether intentionally or not, Akerman creates a new home for the vagabonds, who paradoxically yearn for something they despise.   

This sensory perception of space-time continuum is reinforced by abstraction. Akerman’s cinematography, with its long static takes of the mundane city life, distant framing, and the repetitive use of eye-level angle, strips the image from any cinematic additives, leaving it pure and reducing it to its fundamental essence. This constructivist approach “can be emotionally moving – literally, that … [it] can transport the viewer to a purely affective space” (Walsh, 2004: 192). Abstraction offers freedom, freedom offers the choice for subjectivity, and subjectivity is tightly bound to affect. That is why a film like News from Home can be personal to anyone.

The use of sound, both dialogue and soundscape, is another way with which Akerman manages to “[pervert] distinction between discourse and story, meaning and affect” (Margulies, 1996: 150). The way Akerman reads he mother’s letter is monotonous, detached, or even, alienating in the Brechtian sense (Margulies, 1996: 153). But strangely enough this iciness makes the words even more powerful and emotional. Is it because they were never really heard? Or because it was forbidden by the receiver to be touching? Or simply because the viewer is benefitted by the lack of emotional performance? City and mother/daughter sounds mingle and diffuse, with “rhythmic” and “chantlike” qualities (Margulies, 1996: 153), framed by abstract images. Sometimes noise and voice are interchanged, other times the soundscape performs spatial and temporal jumps, and the sense of now and forever, here and there, get completely lost.

As Tarkovsky (1987: 159) describes – as well as applies in his own work – the way a filmmaker uses sound (which can be extended to the use of image too) demands a truth of “the inner world which we try to reproduce on screen; not just the author’s inner world, but what lies within the world itself, what is essential to it and does not depend on us”. And this filmic affect emanated by Akerman’s style and form, is a universal one, it does not only reach mother and daughter, nomad and settler, but any viewer.

Filmography

Akerman, Chantal, News from Home, 1977. Film. France/Belgium 

Bibliography

Margulies, I. (1996) ‘Forms of Address - Epistolary Performance: News from Home’, in Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham, London: Duke University Press, pp. 149–170.

Tarkovsky, A. (1987) ‘The Film Image: Music and Noises’, in Tr. Hunter-Blair, K. (ed.) Sculpting in Time. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 104–163.

Walsh, M. (2004) ‘Intervals of Inner Flight: Chantal Akerman’s News from Home’, Screen, 45(3), pp. 190–205.