News From Home Is Another Reminder of Chantal Akerman's Brilliance as a Filmmaker

Here's a first; there apparently isn't any poster for News From Home, this cover to a DVD containing Notes From Home, among other Chantal Akerman works, will have to do.

News From Home is not a traditional motion picture. There is no overarching narrative to be found here. It simply consists of footage of various New York City locales, which are usually captured via extended single-takes, set to audio of the film's director, Chantal Akerman, reading aloud letters that her mother has written to her. Such letters concern Chantal's mother talking to her daughter about how much she and her husband miss Chantal as well as everything that's going on back in Chantal's home of Brussels, Belgium. Babies are born, marriages are formed, tragedies strike the family, all the while the footage on-screen makes it clear that New York City keeps going along. This world is one of relentless business that waits for no human being.


The juxtaposition between the letters and the footage is as much of the crux of News From Home as jokes are in a comedy or scares are in a horror movie. Most notable among the dissonance between these two elements is how the footage of New York City typically shows people in isolation. Human beings walk to work in clusters unaware of the person next to them, they're too wrapped up in their newspapers or to-do list's for the day. A prolonged scene set at a subway station similarly emphasizes how many of the people on the platform are just alone, their isolated nature emphasized by how dwarfed they are by the expansive subway platform they stand upon.

Akerman's choice to capture the New York scenes in wide shots is critical to appreciating this particular visual trait of this subway sequence. Utilizing this shot format throughout the rest of the movie helps to further cement how the New York scenes are supposed to convey the idea that the people we see are as distant from the people around them as the camera is from the subjects it's capturing. Interestingly, it never feels like Akerman is judging or bringing some sort of condemnation of New York through this method, one doesn't get the impression she's condoning the city. Rather, this method of filming is simply used to emphasize that this bustling city is vastly different yet sometimes similar to the home she came from.

These differences and similarities are deftly captured through the aforementioned juxtaposition between the visuals and audio in News From Home. Whereas the camerawork communicates the idea that New York denizens are wrapped up in their own individual lives, the letters from home frequently talk about how intertwined the life of Akerman's mother is with the people around her. In both New York and Akerman's home of Brussels, Belgium, nobody is ever truly alone. But the voice-overs reading these letters aloud and the on-screen visuals make it clear that this lack of loneliness manifests itself differently in each location. You can never escape a crowd of strangers in New York while in Brussels, Belgium you can never escape the eyes and concern of your neighbors.

The voice-over work is also exceptional at injecting a sense of warmth into the proceedings. It's not an immensely pronounced element in News From Home but the letters from Akerman's mother still warmed my heart. The way care for her daughter comes through even in moments where her mom won't stop asking Chantal Akerman to send home a photo of herself. Though the camerawork is intentionally designed to place distance between the viewer and the human subjects it captures, the voice-over work in News From Home still ensures that a sense of humanity seeps its way into the proceedings. This element also wiggles its way into News From Home's closing sequence, which manages to subtly reflect the perspectives of both Chantal Akerman and her relatives.

Closing out News From Home is an extended single-take of the New York skyline that starts as a close-up of the side of a skyscraper before gradually panning out to a wide shot of the entire skyline immersed in fog. The starting point represents Chantal Akerman's point-of-view. We're close up to the buildings, we can see every crack and crevice in these entities just as Akerman herself would since she lives here. She gets the chance to be up close and personal to these towering man-made creations. By the end of the shot, though, we see New York as her relatives do in regards to it being the home of someone they love and miss. Here, New York is a vaguely defined jumble of shapes that are close enough to see yet always out of reach. It's a bittersweet conclusion that reinforces how masterfully News From Home uses quiet and steady camerawork to reflect differing human perspectives.