Critics reviews

It’s a stunning portrait of urban alienation and the way things change when leaving the nest of motherhood.

Akerman keeps it simple but open. It's a film that wasn't finished by herself or the editor. It is finished when it meets its viewer, and when the viewer decides what s/he sees, what s/he wants to read into the images before his/her eyes. Only then News from Home is complete. Only then do we see just how complex simplicity can be.

It's simultaneously an elegy to New York City and a unique portrait of the mother-daughter relationship via Akerman's poignant reading of the letters she received from her mother when she moved to NYC from Belgium. A haunting, beautiful, brilliantly layered depiction of filial affection and late-‘70s Manhattan.

Cool-toned and frank, Akerman's New York is also a sort of dream of suspended animation, where stillness and movement, presence and absence, expectation and reality hang together in a fruitful ambivalence. The ambivalence is ours for being so powerfully and enigmatically hers: Akerman is implied, as few filmmakers are, in every frame of her films. The more lonely and anonymous the image, in fact, the larger she looms.

Akerman's tack is minimalism, as she juxtaposes voiceover readings of her mother's letters from Belgium with footage of New York streets and subways. So simple, conceptually. Yet every word she speaks in her mother's voice and every avenue her camera traverses deepens the trans-Atlantic story she's telling. She's never explicit about anything, never tells the viewer how to feel, but even so News from Home broke my heart; is still breaking it a couple days later.

It tries to make us see what she sees, and more crucially to make us feel something of what she feels. Not through performances or reaction shots, which film has long offered by way of emotional and psychological representation, but through the action of seeing. Instead of dissociating from camera, Akerman becomes it. What she sees is what I see—technically and substantively. And as the Staten Island Ferry pulls away from Manhattan, her recording is indistinguishable from my own memory.

A serene and monumental time capsule of Manhattan streetscapes and subways... What might otherwise have been a mere aestheticized travelogue becomes a work of aching psychological sleight of hand: like Akerman, the viewer observes the workaday tumult of New York and thinks of Brussels, watches the strolling strangers and imagines her mother.

The effect is hypnotic; the distanced eye of the camera works in dialectic with the seemingly simple letter readings. The performance of identity is subtly explored and the objective camera becomes an expressive instrument of seeing. Akerman allows us to view the iconic city [New York] as if we were from another planet.

The letters don't go entirely unanswered: one gets the feeling that even though Akerman is clearly writing back to her mother, that really what she is doing is filming back, that what we're seeing is another communication in an entirely different language, one intended for this woman who has such an immaterial but emotive, human, and lovingly familial presence in the film and in Akerman's life.

The fading bricked walls in desolate streets are made into astute perspective diagonals, a bus-stop sign gives the composition a strong vertical -- these are the streets of Taxi Driver, Chantal Akerman structures them all into a singular emotional state.

Hair-raisingly, Akerman ends News From Home with a lengthy shot of the World Trade Center buildings, her camera steadily watching them through mist. This visual choice had quite a different meaning in 1976, of course, but in 2010, it's a heartbreaker; inevitably, a film like this is always going to wind up being an elegy for a lost location.

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.