In the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman lived in New York. She regularly received letters from her mother in Brussels, full of everyday concerns, maternal advice, and trivial observations. In the film, Akerman reads these intimate messages aloud, set against long, static shots and slow tracking shots of Manhattan: streets, subway stations, parking lots, fast-food restaurants, and building facades. The private tone of the letters contrasts with the distant, sometimes inhospitable image of the city. Over time, New York gradually comes to dominate the frame, while the words of Akerman’s mother fade into the background. News from Home is both a personal account and a time capsule of a metropolis in transformation.
“The vision of the self we see in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) is refracted through the words of others. By turns starving artist, creative genius, and absent daughter, Akerman’s portrait of the artist as a young woman is suffused with a melancholy air.”
Dylan Fugel / Bright Wall/Dark Room
,“It’s a stunning portrait of urban alienation and the way things change when leaving the nest of motherhood. Akerman has always been a filmmaker whose interests lie in contextual images, and her version of New York City isn’t a thriving, jazzy wonderland, but one of concrete, monolithic buildings and rising trash. The people she films are isolated from one another, each going about their own daily business in the city and more often than not expressionless and closed off. This is not the New York of Hollywood, but the New York she saw, which only makes her mother’s grief over not seeing her daughter all the more haunted, and moving.”
Willow Catelyn Maclay / Notebook
,“Mother writes of weddings and breakups, pregnancies and deaths, the struggle of the family store and the journey of a $20 bill, plus a grain of criticism: "I received your screenplay. It's well-written but you know my taste, I find it sad and gloomy." Akerman's reply is a procession of moving postcards, her loneliness and independence imprinted in every cavernous corridor and empty staircase.”
Fernando F. Croce / Cinepassion
,“By punctuating News from Home’s 16 mm footage of desolate cityscapes with her own voice reading her mother’s letters, Akerman creates the perfect combination of the personal and the formal. The film’s long takes (about fifty in total) add up not to a simple compendium of detached urban imagery but to a kind of autobiography.”
Michael Koresky / Criterio
,“Akerman frames New York with a beautiful sense of light, brought over from the earlier Hotel Monterey (1972), to create an Edward Hopper-esque aesthetic of low-lights for low streets.”
Adam Scovell / Celluloid Wicker Man
,“Chantal Akerman’s News from Home unfolds in a series of exactingly composed shots of New York streets in the 1970s, when Manhattan was a borough of bialys, not Cronuts; of decay, not decadence. This is cinematic beauty on an elemental level, with cinema as the recording of what will one day be gone and the beauty as a presence that announces its disappearance.”
Nicholas Elliott / BOMB
,“Without ever saying “I” or “America,” Akerman reveals so much about both.”
Nicholas Elliott / BOMB
,“News from Home is a film shot in New York. The images are of New York. The soundtrack is partly composed of letters my mother sent me from Brussels. They’re love letters. My mother was asking when I’d come back, giving me news of the family, telling me she’d been ill. Some of it, towards the end, outlines the daily life of Belgium and the critical status for Europeans of the ‘American myth’. When you see the images, you realise that New York has nothing to do with European ideas about it. The myth doesn’t connect at all with the reality of the city. One feels a huge disjunction between European life and the hope one finds in these letters from home, and New York life. In this sense my film is a real disaster movie – not like The Towering Inferno.”
Chantal Akerman / London Film Festival
,“As the screen flickers with images of bustling Midtown streets, graffitied subway compartments and lonely car parks wrapped in the blueish hue of fluorescent street lamps, the content of the letters adds an intimacy to the city’s anonymity.”
Phuong Le / Sight and Sound
