They sat deathly still, their eyes shielded from the dark, metal sun and tears moving down their cheeks, as if by chance, as if it had nothing to do with them.”. “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. A dialectic commentary of personal history is presented in Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976-77); a feature length cinematic experiment that seems born of cathartic necessity rather than simply creative ambition. READ MORE: Landmark Belgian Filmmaker Chantal Akerman Dies at 65. I thought if I read everything about it I would learn something. New from Home de Chantal Akerman un film à télécharger en VoD (et streaming légal) sur LaCinetek Filmed images of the City are accompanied by the texts of Chantal Akerman's loving mother back home in Brussels. No Home Movie review – infinitely careful, painfully poignant documentary 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. Best Sellers Today's Deals New Releases Books Electronics Customer Service Gift Ideas Home Computers Gift Cards Sell Movies & TV Shows New & Future Releases Best Sellers Movies TV Shows Box Sets Blu-ray Prime Video Akerman explores the disjunction between European myths about New York - with its monumental cityscapes and cinematic glamour - and the reality, a place of hopeless ghettos and monotonous suburbs. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Meanwhile, the visual content of the film is strictly scenes of New York. In my story, Show Them a Good Time the characters spend their days working in a garage, a job that is not a job, suspended in a purgatorial space. She is filming a masculine, crime-ridden city with a feminine eye and overlaying it with intimate and private correspondence. She moves easily through the streets, although many of the threatening night-time shots don’t feature a single woman. Akerman had been working her way up throughout the 1970s and News From Home was made after her critical appreciation had grown, largely thanks to the impossible-to … They were incredible, these ladies! The Toronto International Film Festival’s retrospective of the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, titled News From Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman — curated by TIFF programmer Andréa Picard and by Akerman’s collaborator and editor, Claire Atherton — opens Friday (November 1) with News From Home. I write about mothers often, concerned mothers who communicate with their daughters as they attempt to make lives for themselves in other cities. With Chantal Akerman. Akerman's unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection. 1976 News from Home. In counterpoint to cinema-photographer. Her 16mm footage of anonymous streets, parking lots, subway stations and shabby fast food restaurants expresses a sense of disconnection—from home, family, the past and her old identity.Alongside this fantastic time capsule of a desolate city, Akerman reads aloud letters from her mother. This is also not unusual for me. This is not the breathless reporting male genius receives. The films looked at are: Je tu il elle (1974), jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News From Home (1976), and … Obviously Akerman’s mother’s letters are revealing, not just for their contents but for what is hidden, what they unwittingly disclose about their relationship. To that end, last week I watched Chantal Akerman’s News From Home. It’s clearly directed by someone who has one foot out of this life already. 6 June 1950, Brussels, Belgium d. 5 October 2015, Paris, France “When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”.” – Chantal Akerman. Despite the multitude of filmmakers and characters that wander these urban environments, locating revelatory findings in its spatial-imaginary as they do, the flâneur remains a surprisingly underdeveloped concept in film theory. Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States Letters from Chantal Akerman's mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. IN a Chantal Akerman movie, there is no Hitchcockian suspense. She has no idea that, forty years from now, her daughter’s films will still sell out theatres, that people will travel across vastly changed subways and navigate the same streets she once filmed, to watch them. I wrote it against a ground bass of social change for women, during the abortion referendum and the Belfast rape trial, a case I followed with intense interest. Despite the multitude of filmmakers and characters that wander these urban environments, locating revelatory findings in its spatial-imaginary as they do, the flâneur remains a surprisingly underdeveloped concept in film theory. You have to convince friends and acquaintances, exuding a mix of confidence and humility, which is its own sort of prose, its own sort of lengthy joke. Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. On Chantal Akerman. Such is the beginning of Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1996), a first in the history of the venerable French public-television series Cinema, of Our Time, each installment of which had been—until then—one filmmaker’s profile of another. She still showed up, didn’t she? I'm slowly but surely diving more into Chantal Akerman's filmography. Her shots linger, exteriors of densely-packed apartment buildings, busy streets, rattling subways. There is an added layer of poignancy and it comes from this: Akerman’s mother doesn’t know who her daughter will become. News from Home, although simply-made and hardly provocative, is a calmly defiant picture. IN a Chantal Akerman movie, there is no Hitchcockian suspense. You understand from the opening moments of News from Home that Akerman had no interest in making a traditional film but she was deeply interested in time and how it moves. I knew it from the final shot of News from Home, which makes New York a ghost town, an indistinct grey mass. She is tired and ill but she has faith. It was 1977, Taxi Driver-era New York, and Akerman was a lone woman with a movie camera, making a mother-daughter picture. I will never leave you again.” This was interference, a shred of love appearing where it never should have been. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Instead, Akerman reads out her mother’s letters to her from home in a dispassionate, occasionally rushed, voiceover, as long shots of pre-Giuliani New York fill the screen. News from Home is a 1977 avant-garde documentary film directed by Chantal Akerman.The film consists of long takes of locations in New York City set to Akerman's voice-over as she reads letters that her mother sent her between 1971 and 1973 when Akerman lived in the city. Chantal Akerman is gone. I’m familiar with this routine – collecting my things and travelling a certain distance to sit in a dark room and watch, in the alleged service of higher education, films by Godard, Cassavetes, Hitchcock. Film Review: ‘No Home Movie’ They say 'You can't go home again,' but that doesn't stop Belgian innovator Chantal Akerman from trying to capture her mother's memory. Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important and interesting female director of her era, yet she is sadly under-known here in the U.S. It’s lonely, but that’s probably also what she was seeking. Akerman killed herself when she was 65, the age my mother is now; still young; still capable of good work. Belgium-France, 1976 / 16mm / Color / 90 min Chantal Akerman Even after having lived within the confines of that shot, and having lived within stumbling distance of those towers, I still feel it. I write about young women in self-imposed exile, searching for meaning that they might never find. The city is loud but you understand that loudness was what Akerman was chasing. Brenda Longfellow , 'Love letters to the Mother: the work of Chantal Akerman', Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory , 13 (1-2) (1989). Tagged with: A Nos Amours, Chantal Ackerman, News From Home, French, 16mm. A paragraph in Show Them A Good Time reads: “I liked to talk about the city women on the trains, the women who never removed their sunglasses. In the same essay by AS Hamrah, Akerman discusses her technique, how when she worked in video “she had to try to make the image look worse than it would otherwise because if the video looked too clear and boring, like everything it captured was understandable and normal, there wasn’t enough interference”. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection. All I learnt was how much news I could consume. And we see what she was seeing, too. Related posts. A Nos Amours: Chantal Akerman 4: News From Home, Thursday 23 January, 7pm. All rights reserved. Of course, there are also the letters. NEWS FROM HOME is a non-narrative tone piece in which Akerman reads letters from her mother in native Brussels, describing familial matters. To talk any more about that process would be a waste of time. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Besides, I don’t care. The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription. Akerman's unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection. I believe that her work contains a lot that I have been interested in throughout the past years, and it might be worth looking at it in more detail over the coming months and years. I like this idea of interference, which is essentially what writers do. Into the Fog: On the Last Shot of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home By Eric Hynes I didn’t know about Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) until I was deep into my twenties, yet I’d been preoccupied by what she captures in its final shot from as far back as I could remember. Someone else’s life is not yours to decide. You don’t need to convince me. Letters from Chantal Akerman's mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. It taught me nothing else. She is haunted in other ways now too – by a mother figure who is disappearing and being replaced by someone needier and more severe. The description of it as a “drama” is imperfect; in fact, nothing happens at all, there is no narrative, no journey or catharsis. Each shot is a meticulously crafted slice of New York life. Déjà vu! Akerman often worked in her pyjamas, her depression so bad she nearly couldn’t get out of bed. Try another? For his moody thriller set during the famous New York City blackouts in … It’s a grim, one-dimensional view and it sucks the love and joy from her work. No Home Movie review – infinitely careful, painfully poignant documentary 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. I share this also – in the collection stories are set in New York, Dublin and Paris. One letter simply ends with, “Stay well, sweetheart”. Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels to a mother who had survived Auschwitz (this great woman was the subject of many of her best work, including "No Home Movie"). I write about this too – in a story called Track a woman, after a period of mental instability, finds herself in a relationship with a well-known comedian. A uniquely cinematic Her 16mm footage of anonymous streets, parking lots, subway stations and shabby fast food restaurants expresses a sense of disconnection—from home, family, the past and her old identity.Alongside this fantastic time capsule of a desolate city, Akerman reads aloud letters from her mother. News From Home (1977) ***1/2 An interesting experiment; Various images of New York City, mostly still at first, with ever more movement as the film goes along, accompanied by the sound of Akerman reading aloud letters from her mother in France. I wrote this collection, from the publication of my first story, on and off, over a period of four years. Chantal Akerman - 1977 - Chantal Akerman moved to New York in the 1970s. I just hope a feeling of private correspondence remains in these stories, something honest and open and uncynical, as simple as signing off a letter with, “Stay well, sweetheart”. 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