Review: News from Home (1977)

 

The comparison of human eye to a camera is a well-worn trope in photography and cinema. In a photograph or film, the camera quite naturally stands for the artist’s gaze. As passive consumers, we do not normally question the validity of such equation: the camera’s mechanised functionality is presumed and taken for granted - it is only a tool. Another line of thought undertaken by, most prominently, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, hints at the complex roles the act of taking a photograph automatically assumes: “…the Photograph,” writes Barthes in Camera Lucida, “is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” Every subject is an object in a photograph, and the lived moment captured and, accordingly, preserved. Time is especially a knotty matter here: it is ever-present but frozen at a particular juncture, at the past; anticipating an unestablished future, a sure course to death.

 

To see myself as “other”, as a stranger in a photograph, implies in some part an unconscious denial of the knowledge of death. The camera is thus not the innocent machine it is generally considered - the danger of standing in front of it is, in a perhaps dramatic way, identical to being threatened at gun-point. 

 

In Chantal Akerman’s films, this lingering morbidity of the photographed is enhanced by the erratic, at times almost static, camerawork. Behind the lens, Akerman was signally more of an observer than a critic. Her camera ambulates gamely but never pries, rarely hovers, and always maintains a respectful distance from the unfolding scenes. It does tend to give way to a sudden voyeuristic interest, contemplating the subject a little too raptly for the viewers’ comfort. There are a few such scenes in News from Home(1977) where we are staring, for a protracted spell, at something that never happens. What really happens - more precisely, what we suppose will ultimately take place - is inexplicably cut off: a young couple waiting for their train on the platform, a train passing by, the couple drawing near to each other ready for an embrace, another speeding train, cut! 

 

Akerman’s brand of abstract visual language seems at once congenial and jarring to the personal core of News from Home. The film, composed of desolate images of New York’s cityscape and setting to Akerman’s voiceover narrating her mother’s letters from Belgium, is perhaps one of the most revealing illustrations of the sense of ambivalence common to all exiles. The “revelation” - a word that is not usually applicable to Akerman’s themes or style - is less in regard to the director’s self-expression than to the viewers’ epiphanous self-knowledge. Ten minutes into the film it dawned on me that Akerman’s disdain of overt emotionalism generates a power so visceral that each image, stark, unglamorous, bled of liveliness and evident meaning, is a blank canvas for us to project our long-unplumbed, deeply resonant thoughts.

 

Seeing how Akerman’s camera is inclined to focus on a single object amidst the rushing life and chaos around her, I was reminded of an abiding yearning I have from years of living abroad - a yearning of being anchored, emotionally if not physically, to a safe spot, where homesickness is temporarily salved and hopefully dwindled to a mild prick that only bothers on occasion. This habit of undivided concentration is to me, and I believe to many others exiled from their beloved home, a measure of comfort, like the old, pee-stained blanket babies cling to. A recurring focus of Akerman’s long takes is in the subway, the grubby interior of the train and the frosty-faced commuters gnomically wedded to the soundtrack of her mother’s letters, chiding her for not writing more. Akerman also shows us the canteens, the newsstands, more frosty-faced people, the suburb - all with a candidness that highlights the fundamental elements of photography proper - observation, documentation, impersonalisation.

 

Could the relative blandness and lack of variety of Akerman’s New York footages be a telling sign of her incuriosity for the city? This is up for debate. But knowing that Akerman was especially close to her mother, and had indeed paid tribute to her in a number of her works, I wonder if the film’s overall imperviousness may amount to a personal expression of familial love. I might very well be projecting, for I also share an intimate bond with my mother and, even in my 30s, every leave-taking from home feels as wrenching as leaving a small part of me dead. In her letters, Akerman’s mother does not stray from the quotidian: the business at the store, the weather, the birthday party, the younger children’s academic performance, someone’s marital woes. Occasionally, she admits to feeling a bit under weather. If deep love comes with a price, it would be mortality (Akerman’s mother lived until 2014). But not wholly conditioning to death’s inevitability, love can be memorialised and thus lived on. And of that the camera, for all its animus to basic humanness, does a fine job.