News from Home

Chantal Akerman's News from Home opened in 1976, between Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978). In 2022 it entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll, and on any reasonable account it belongs with the most distinctive work in Europe's tradition of the experimental essay documentary.

Long static shots of New York City (streets, subway platforms, intersections, fire escapes), filmed while Akerman was living in the city in the early-to-mid 1970s, are set against her own voice reading the letters her mother sent her in those years from the family home in Brussels. The letters deal in the small substance of family life: are you eating enough, why don't you write more often, your father is concerned, your sister has had her tooth fixed. The whole film is built on that gap, the distance between an American present you can see and a Belgian home you can only hear.

Babette Mangolte, Akerman's frequent collaborator in this period, shot the exteriors in long fixed frames, with small movements inside a static composition and an absolute refusal of conventional narrative. The result is a founding work of European observational cinema. The mother's letters are the only voice on the soundtrack, and their plain, patient weight is what has kept the film so moving for audiences in the decades since it was made.