The
title of Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amerique:
Food, Family and Philosophy points at the film’s duality – a promise of conviviality, served up by an outsider. The film isn’t conventionally warm - the
camera serves throughout as a fixed, direct spectator – but Akerman’s humanism
prevents it from morbidity or oppressiveness. For the most part, the film
consists of direct-to-camera English-language testimonies from American Jews:
they’re not identified by name or period, but appear to belong at least
primarily to the 40s and 50s, to lives recently brutalized by relatives lost in
the camps or otherwise separated by exile, and before that by progroms and upheavals:
even when the stories are primarily accounts of happiness and success, they
always incorporate lurking shadow, the impossibility of ever traveling entirely
into the light. Akerman intersperses these with humour of the “the food here is
terrible and such small portions” variety – the often-mournful quality of the
punchlines all the more plaintive for the surrounding figurative darkness. Not
just that: Akerman frames her participants (actors doesn’t seem like the right
word somehow) against urban nightscapes, only yielding to hazy daylight in the
final scenes, as the film starts to play with its own artifice, bringing its
people together and reshuffling their assigned identities. For the most part
though, it's suffused in profound loneliness even as it illustrates the
power of community – it examines memory both in its glory and its burden. One
of the closing testimonies, by a young man preparing to kill himself, is
additionally chilling now for the knowledge of how Akerman ended her own life,
after a last film – No Home Movie – which
while being closely aligned to this one, sheds its elaborations and mannerisms.
It gives Histoires d’Amerique an eerie
quality of premonition, as if to finally confirm its recurring sense of how
events may become hopeless, even if not entirely serious.
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