Title: News From Home
Foreign Title:
Year: 1976
Country: France
Language: In French with English subtitles
Awards:
Director: Chantal Akerman
Since its first survey in 1952, every ten years the British Film Institute’s internationally renowned magazine Sight and Sound has provided the film world with its famous poll of critics and filmmakers to appraise and name the 100 Greatest Films of All Time. Most recently, in its 2022 poll, it named Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles the #1 Film of All Time. (No other film made by a woman has ever even reached the top ten.)
If the principal character of that film was required to ‘adopt a highly restrained, rigorously minimalistic mode of acting’, it was because Chantal Akerman held herself to the self-same standards of directing. Highly restrained and minimalistic would also be two appropriate attributes of a type of film known in the ‘60s as “structuralist”, an avant-garde movement that emphasized a film’s formal properties (such as fixed framing and long takes) over traditional narrative and character development.
In News From Home, shot one year after the release of Jeanne Dielman, we see just such a method unfold its beauties across the streets and subways of New York. In a retort to an audience’s compliment that in such and such a film ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!”, Akerman maintained that this film was shot with an unusual intent – “to see time pass, and feel it pass.”
So what happens when a filmmaker removes traditional narrative and character development? In News From Home, what remains is a stripped-down vision of the “city that never sleeps”. Even before the first image of an empty street, a short series of credits informs us that this is a Chantal Akerman film, but the soundtrack is already signifying that the film has begun because we hear the sound of cars passing by. When the street finally presents itself though, there are no cars, it’s a deserted street, probably very early in the day. The “structure” has already been set: the soundtrack will be out of sync with the picture, the sequences will be out of sync with any expectation we have (except welcoming the unpredictability of what transpires in front of the camera at this moment in time). We see and feel time pass.
Yet the filmmaker is not satisfied with only random shots of empty streets or crowded streets, she is not weighing the appearance of unmoving passengers in a moving subway car or the odd pedestrian walking back and forth in a subway station because the people, the streets, the buildings of the city, the people of the city are not the protagonists in this film. And because the film lacks a protagonist, Akerman decides that the anchor of the “news from home” should be the content of the letters that her mother has been sending her while she’s been away.
In 17 separate voice-overs, Akerman reads the everyday concerns of a mother who wants to inform her daughter about the news from home while also wanting to hear Chantal’s news from her home, in New York City. The reading of the letters will not be a performance as we understand it; the fact that it lacks emotion, is flat and presented in a matter-of-fact way, complements the matter-of-fact presentation of the images. The content is l’autre, something else. Yes, it hints at unresolved mother-daughter issues, but I’m not sure how much of its effectiveness is in the intimacy of its content, not in the film’s form.
The film’s movement contrasts with “traditional narrative” by presenting scenes of random, inconsequential action and parallels “character development” by presenting her mother’s letters as a monologue of the protagonist.
Eventually, to prevent the distraction of any possibility of a plot and as a final gesture to the alienation suggested in the palpable concreteness of certain streets, brightly lit windows of a tenement building,
