I’ve mentioned late Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s “News from Home,” here, several times (see below) since first discovering it in about 2012. If you’re not familiar, “News from Home” is an avant-garde documentary of a sort wherein the director reads letters aloud from her mother that were sent to her during a period in the early `70s when Akerman was living alone in New York City for the first time. This mournful, one-sided correspondence is delivered over a lulling montage of scenes from the New York City of 1976, made hauntingly distinctive by an overall feeling of glossless desolation.
The reason I’ve mentioned it so many times, I think, is because it fleetingly becomes available for viewing on YouTube, only to be inevitably yanked down again. I did a quick check, and the entirety of the film is currently up, so should you be curious, check it out now…
In any case, in pretty much every one of my previous posts on the subject, I’ve suggested the notion of revisiting Akerman’s original concept with a shot-by-shot tribute in contemporary New York, although the resultant effect, I’d imagine, would be markedly different.
New York in 1976 was obviously an exceptionally different place than the New York of 2024. While I do not doubt that one can still feel abjectly isolated in the downtown Manhattan of today, that’s probably in more of a figurative and emotional sense than in a literal one.
Unlike in the cityscapes captured in “News from Home,” today's city seems impossibly more crowded than it’s ever been. It’s hard to conceive of being able to capture an elongated shot of an abandoned alley or a deserted corner or an empty subway platform for longer than a few seconds before someone wanders into the shot. It seems very difficult to ever be fully “alone” in New York, anymore.
Anyway, while not a shot-for-shot tribute, I did recently stumble on the video below, which takes pains to break down the specific locations from the original Akerman film in a “psycho-geographic map.”
It’s a bit ummmm ... out there, but it's worth your time, if you’re invested….
Meanwhile, should you give a crotte enflammée, you can read my previous missives on this film below…
Home is Where the Heart Is: Re-Exhuming “News from Home”
Recent Comments