1 . Your Letters Are So Important To Me
“I will add but a word. We are all very near despair.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., quoted in The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Just don’t forget about us. 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. Sweetheart, at first you wrote so often. This is a constructed self, a self whose dimensions are being formed by the nostalgia of a director operating at a level of remove from her younger self, whose cinematic portrayal is informed by the nostalgia of her parents who miss her terribly. News from Home is slice-of-life cinema in the truest sense—it presents a year (crucially, a year five years in the past) in the life of the director. You still haven’t sent pictures. But all of this is inextricable from the sense that film, as an art form, is only capable of reconstructing, re-making paths that have already been trod, of showing scars but not soothing the wound, of hearing from home but being unable to change the fact it took you a long time to come back. I dream about you and hope you’re happy.
By now, most of us are aware that the word ‘nostalgia’ has its roots in nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain), but News from Home is a film trembling on the precipice of despair. The longing that settles, fog-like, throughout the film stems from not only her parents, adrift across a vast ocean of distance, but Akerman’s refracted self, adrift across an ocean of time. Don’t be sad if I ask when you’re coming back. I can’t help it. Shot in 1976, three years after the Brussels-born Akerman left New York City where she’d moved in 1971 as a 21-year-old, News from Home contains a series of slow shots of mid-70s New York City, as Akerman reads imploring letters her mother wrote to her during her absence. The result is a film filled with spectral images and the ghosts of selves who are not present.
Akerman had already made Je, Tu, Il, Elle and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, having established a reputation as an avant-garde director of note. Yet, News from Home immediately transports us back to a time before this success, returning her to a mirrored figure in the doors of the 1 train, waiting for it to pull into Canal St. I’m worried about you all alone there. We see her as she must have been five years ago, a person alone in a new city trying to make something of herself, with all the boundless possibility of the future before her. There’s a certain wistfulness to the images in the film—a presentation of urban life as a formative experience for the young filmmaker, who got to see the wide variety of life and expanded horizons of 70s New York City and used it as artistic fodder. What do you do in that restaurant? This wistfulness is accompanied by the perpetual, despairing reminder that such formative experience required, if not a complete schism, then at least a clear breaking of the bonds between family and the artistic self. It’s terribly quiet over here.
Why, then, does Akerman choose to include these heart-rending letters from her mother in News from Home? The relationship that we see reflected on screen is not one that necessarily bathes Akerman in the golden glow of storybook parental bonds. Rather, it presents the more quotidian problems of two people who are terribly far apart. What happened? I wrote back immediately and included $20 dollars. Akerman ignores messages, forgets to call, accepts that $20 dollars without saying thank you; she exists as an entity composed by the voices of her loved ones. Yet, in this way, she is able to more directly invoke the reality of her own 1971. There is no directorial stamp to the dialogue. The words, quite literally, are not her own. I know you’re busy, but try and write. It’s all I have left.
In using the epistolary form to mark the passage of her time in New York City, Akerman makes News from Home a monument to nostalgia—both for her younger self and for the family whose pain and despair in her absence is so prevalent throughout the film. The letters create the story, and that story is of a Chantal Akerman who is beloved by her family yet voluntarily remains a distant presence in their lives, whose glittering career is still to come, even as she reminisces on its passing. The memories blur and the emotional fog grows denser. When Dad hears you’re doing well, all his fears vanish. All paths are open, and she still has time to choose the one that will lead her to make this film, despair and memory interlaced as she looks toward the past. This is what nostalgia is—to want to experience what once was, even if it comes with inherent pain. Everyone was there but you, I’ll send pictures.
News from Home is an effort to recreate the past out of thin air, yet Akerman knows this is an impossibility. All a film can do is create a reproduction, a copy of a period in one’s life. You still haven’t said how long you’ll stay there. The final coda of the film is a long shot filmed from a boat as it leaves the harbor, Lower Manhattan receding into the distance as landmarks of New York City (the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers) tower in the frame. Soon all that’s left is the plaintive cry of seagulls, the picture beginning to fade as the boat moves further and further out. Clouds move across the sky, the city becomes one pulsating mass of distant gray whose edges shimmer as the camera moves out to sea. I find it sad and gloomy. We leave 1976 New York behind, and with it, 1971 as well. Perhaps Akerman is referencing another adopted New Yorker by choosing to end the film from a boat moving against the current—borne back ceaselessly into the past—or perhaps she was just watching her own self-portrait, her creation of the city and people she loved, returned back to its rightful place in the nostalgia of memory, as if in a dream. Your letters are so important to me.
2 . By Definition, Full Of Strangers
“The stretch of Hudson St. where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet.”
—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The first thing we see in News from Home is an alleyway. Then a car. Then a second car, turning the corner and moving towards us. We hear the motor putter as it turns again, out of frame. In the background, three workers are carrying boxes down the narrow alleyway. Streets intersect, as the dizzying steps of nearly 7.5 million residents are implanted upon them. The city is immediately brought to life. How can we preserve this moment in time?
In 1961, writer and activist Jane Jacobs wrote her magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A treatise against what she saw as the devastating consequences of Rationalist architecture (that is to say, architecture which sought to “solve” the problems of urban living by a reasoned approach that did nothing to engage with the actual fact of living in a city), Jacobs’s work celebrates the “intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other mutual support” in New York City streets, and champions it against any effort to make the city devoid of variety and personality. She saw the city as a living organism, a conglomerated mass of people whose diversity uplifted and refreshed city areas and gave them a continual source of energy and safety. She also believed that that organism was being crushed with each successive year.
To talk of something as a living organism is to imply that one day there will be a passing, and it is that passing that further informs the nostalgia we see in News from Home. Of course, Akerman feels tethered to memories of her existence in the city, but she is also mourning the New York she once knew, a place that must have already undergone massive changes in the five years since she lived there. At times, News from Home feels like an effort to capture the boundless future of the city itself, and the vibrancy of the people who inhabit it. After all, it is in this mass of people that Akerman was able to find artistic fulfillment, and it is through the peculiar nature of the New York City architecture so beloved by Jacobs that the “many, many little public sidewalk contracts” that characterize urban living become possible.
It is unsurprising that one of the longest shots in the film is of a train station. In the middle of News from Home, we sit static across a crowded train platform for over ten minutes and watch as people filter in and out, catching trains, barely missing trains, adjusting their shirts, noticing the camera, and participating in the day-to-day existence of urban living. Rationalist architecture, according to Jacobs, was incorrectly founded in some part on that premise that “city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order, and quiet,” and it’s clear that Akerman has a similar fascination with throngs of people.
I can’t claim to know that much about Brussels, but I think we can see the traces of nostalgia in Akerman’s foregrounding of one of the epicenters of the densest cities in the world: the train. The ability to easily get places, to be able to move freely around city neighborhoods that have attractive and varied uses, is one of the defining features of New York City, but it is a living feature that feels itself being constantly in danger of being sanitized and destroyed. It’s no accident that Akerman chooses to show us the parts of New York City that would have been considered ‘artistic’ (in the derogatory sense) or seedy at the time: St. Marks Place, Times Square, and Hell’s Kitchen are all present and accounted for, without a Wall Street in sight. What remains in Akerman’s memory are the artistic beacons that dragged her to the city in the first place, the centers of culture whose footprints loom large in the sidewalk ballet. Spectral figures again create a deep nostalgia in the film, not for younger Akerman herself, but for the vivid city she once experienced.
There are almost no isolated faces in News From Home (the one exception being Akerman herself, reflected in a train window). New York City becomes a communal experience, one whose specific energy is conducive to the creation of art. The faces that we do see form part of the fabric of Akerman’s story, but they don’t do so in isolation. They are romanticized figures, people whose lived experience possibly mirrors that of Akerman, but whose essential ‘New Yorkness’ is a nostalgic construct of the filmmaker. Even as we are charmed by the city tableaux, we cannot forget that Akerman chooses to include these moments—tributes to the lineage she feels a part of.
Once again, we find the nostalgia of Akerman’s masterpiece intertwined with the fact that this can only ever be a reproduction of the past. Jacobs, early in her book, paints a beautiful picture of the “cast of characters” who make up her block: “Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart,” “the children for PS 41, heading to the east,” “Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen.” She knows and loves them all. Jacobs’s images almost border on the pastoral, an oasis of community paradoxically formed by the density in which all these people live. “The sidewalks are more interesting,” Jacobs says at one point, and we see a reflection of that in the film—Akerman shows us a scene where young children are playing stickball in the street with a homemade bat. (Is this not what we dream of when we dream of the city?) But these kids were not there when Akerman was there. They were toddlers. This is not ‘reality.’ New York is in the past, and its future doesn’t have Akerman in it. But as it helped form her, it retains pride of place, in all its messy glory, in the nostalgic recesses of Akerman’s mind.
3 . I Dream About You
I first watched News from Home in April 2020. For obvious reasons, nostalgia was on my mind. I watched it as someone who emigrated from Germany to New York at age 21 to pursue art. For other obvious reasons, I consider it an incredibly moving film. What little ‘plot’ you could say the film has amounts to this: in a city filled with 7.5 million people, a mother wishes to connect with just one. You don’t have to forget to call your parents across the ocean to relate to this, but it certainly helps. Yet even as Akerman shows us her relationship to her mother, she also shows us the city that required her presence. It must loom large, so as to justify the melancholy that her mother suffers. We give the city the grandeur of nostalgia, so we can more firmly justify the decisions that led us here.
All of News from Home is shot from the first-person, looking through the lens of the camera and out into the city. It feels as if you’re in some sort of virtual reality, composed of things that no longer exist, though traces of their ghosts remain in the places you’ve walked, the streets you’ve passed. If you’re a romantic at heart, it’s hard not to want to be swept up in the cityscapes you’re seeing, to be a part of the artistic lineage that flows from Akerman, through St Marks and Hell’s Kitchen, and finally, possibly, despairingly, to you. “Here again is togetherness or nothing,” Jacobs writes of the Rationalist architectural principles – the mistaken belief that city neighborhoods must be homogenous so as to create the sense of order that city residents absolutely do not want. Taken another way, Jacobs highlights the contract that binds the generations of a city: that we are together, that we have chosen to exist in this place. Nostalgia is not a one-way current. As Akerman feels for herself, so too does Akerman for New York, and I, in turn, for the New York that Akerman once inhabited. There must have been something better here. There must have been something whose possibilities still remained entirely unbroken.
“Within the limits of a town or village, the connections among its people keep crossing and recrossing,” reports Jacobs, thinking of New York as a place whose value lies in the way that all areas of it are open to you. The city is nothing but “mixed-use areas,” where a multiplicity of offerings meet the needs of a multiplicity of citizens. The long shots of the subway we see throughout the film contain an innumerable amount of desires. We can safely assume that in these shots we’ve seen people on their way to work and heading back home, about to go on a great date (we hope) or just coming back from a terrible date (more likely); sad, happy, on the verge of a complete breakdown. As cliche as it is, the unifying factor in their lives is that they all live in New York. The constant battle, then, is to retain this diversity of urban living—the bright lights and throngs of people that Akerman celebrates in her film—in the face of the grinding wheels of a capitalistic society that wishes to extinguish that diversity. Just weeks ago, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in seven years on a C train. Our paths must have kept crossing and recrossing. Yet simultaneously fares rise, services lessen, and multiplicity becomes five identically dressed cops in search of a purpose. Accessing the train platform, the epicenter (literally, as it comes halfway through the film) of Akerman’s ode to city living, has become harder and harder for anyone in New York City. There must have been something better here, once.
Near the end of the film, we see perhaps the most famous shot in the film: a tracking shot that moves along 10th Avenue and all the way up into Hell’s Kitchen. Some businesses and buildings we see along the way: Fiebiger Artisans in Metal, The New Yorker Building, Nick’s Grocery, Blue Star Bus Terminal, M Brown Fittings, Algar Records, Texaco, a social club (name unclear). Most of these businesses do not exist anymore. In their place stand the office buildings, multinationals, and condos that Akerman studiously avoids showing in News from Home, either because there weren’t as many of them, or because she saw the writing on the wall and knew that time would only push these images further away from the reality we live with today. You tremble on the precipice of despair with Akerman, knowing that you’re falling for the same trap she is. This isn’t reality, but don’t you wish it were?
Close to the start of that beautiful tracking shot, we stop in traffic outside a sign that says Grumbacher. They sell art materials. The sign notes their address – 374 10th Ave. If you look that address up now, you’ll find Hudson Yards.
“And eventually, all that will go. Those people will go. We are the pioneers here.”
—A rental agent for Park West Village, The Death and Life of Great American Cities