“With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass.” Time is something we feel, observe, experience. It’s also something we cannot truly know, because time is not real. It’s a description, a measurement of something fundamental to our reality, a means of understanding in terms of our own invention, something that we aren’t capable of understanding in its essence. And time can be seen and felt to pass in infinitely different ways. A moment of joy doesn’t feel the same as a moment of pain. A day spent in the presence love doesn’t feel the same as a day spent in its absence. A year in one’s youth doesn’t feel the same as a year in one’s old age.
Time can be measured physically too. Film itself is a physical thing, a chemical reaction on a strip of acetate, nitrate, or polyester. The images produced may capture a sense of time, but they are also an expression of it in themselves. A moment long past can yet exist in the present in the viewing of these images.
In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, such moments of a present long past become a past now present, and the viewer enters that past, seeing and feeling the time pass as Akerman herself did. Images of the streets of New York City, of the daily lives of strangers, are set to a soundtrack of another stranger to us, but not to Akerman. Letters from her mother in Belgium, read by Akerman, themselves of a recent past by the time they’d arrived in New York. Less recent by the time they were set to film, and far less so today.
The shots are long and absent of incident. New York is a bustling city, yet these images are placid or monotonous. Time passes slowly, repetitively, perhaps meaninglessly. The letters bring the presence of love, yet the distance confers its absence, and they speak of absence too. Akerman’s mother misses her. They also speak of dreams, the mind’s substitute for absence.
For Akerman, these letters are the substitute, pulling the viewer away from the images and into a cerebral, emotional space, where time is experienced differently. We enter her mind, as though reading her mother’s words as she did for the first time, looking out on a city far from home. The lack of any of her (apparently few) replies places us deeper into her mind. Absorbing the process of reading (or hearing) the letters, effectively not merely accompanying her, but becoming her in the moment.
News from Home is thus no portrait of New York. Nor an examination of a mother’s love nor a child’s reception of that love. But a self-portrait (as Derek Jarman once wrote, “What I write of them now is a self-portrait), or rather a portrait of what it means to exist in one’s self. We hear the words of a loved one as we gaze upon city streets, shops and cafés, subway doors and tunnels, hearing and seeing as Akerman did. The intersection of conflicting image and sound is thus harmonious. Expressing the feeling of being both in a physical space and in a separate emotional space that’s yet imposed upon and informed by the physical space.
This applies too to her mother. She exists in her home in Belgium, yet her expressions exist on paper in New York. And on audio recording anywhere the movie is viewed, spoken by her daughter. Each of us is as we see, hear, think, and feel, and as we perceive ourselves and are perceived by others. We are both here and there. We are in a humdrum cityscape and in a bittersweet emotional reflection. We are in the love and in the pain of these letters, communicated simultaneously through casual guilt-tripping and subtle declarations of tender affections.
These declarations were likely only meant to be temporary. News from Home was made in the 1970s – letters were the most affordable method of transatlantic communication for some. And Akerman’s mother did not send just a single, meaningful message, but a continuous stream of correspondences. Yet their temporariness is transformed through their recording and public dissemination, rendering them effectively permanent. Just as the unassuming, quotidien scenes captured by the camera have been made timeless by theirs.
Or perhaps not timeless. They are their own measurement of time, of something fleeting and unremarkable made most remarkable by the vision of one of the 20th (and 21st) Century’s greatest artists. We see the time pass in these images, and feel it in the ever-increasing absence of a mother and a daughter seemingly drifting further apart, despite their physical proximity barely changing. This is a landmark achievement by a master filmmaker. And one of the great movies about love, about the experience of living and being alone (as, ultimately, we all are), and about time.
Discover more from Femme Filmmakers Festival
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
