In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home,
an unseen female reads a series of letters received from her mother in Belgium,
while we watch a series of long takes of New York City, and that’s it. We glean
easily enough that the recipient has moved to the city, that her mother
constantly worries about her, but much basic information is absent (it must
also often be lacking in the recipient’s responses, given the mother’s regular
comments about their brevity and absence of hard facts). One might correctly
guess that the voice is Akerman’s own, that the places we see (predominantly
far from postcard-worthy, much of it transit-related) reflect Akerman’s own
time in New York, but it wouldn’t be as apparent that the letters and images
are separated by several years, the latter gleaned on a return trip. It amounts
to a strangely moving representation of absence and unknowability, the letters
consisting largely of mundanities, but occasionally referring to life events (her
father’s illness; the closure of part of the family business; the purchase of
land to build a new home) which as lived events were no doubt virtually
all-consuming. Akerman’s reading hardly distinguishes though between the
monumental and the ephemeral, her voice often barely audible over the noise of
the subway or the traffic, on occasion getting drowned out altogether. Most of
the people observed in the film either don’t notice the camera or seem barely interested;
in one strangely gripping exception, a man draws himself up and stares in its
direction almost as if about to charge, before withdrawing and retreating far
into the background, a small sign perhaps of cinema’s power, even in this minimal
mode. Another comes from the final shot, taken from a ferry traveling away from
shore, the skyline and the film itself receding in unison, the sense of
absenting deepened now by the pre 9/11 presence of the twin towers.
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