Her mother’s letters come like intercepted radio transmissions, or echoes of prayers. In this state of relentless observation, pure receptivity, how could she not hear them? Often, they’re repetitive: sometimes in precise wording, always in sentiment. Descriptive details of life at home; mentions of enclosed money, the amount fluctuating dependent on the need for parsimony but always at least $10; requests for her to write more often and visit family members in her new city; accompanying packages of clothes for each season. Her voice is clear, but sometimes drowned out by the city, by its passing cars and trains and people. The audience is offered only that which they can make out, and whatever they might dare to imagine beneath the noise. The details of the letters might offer intimacy, but the voice that speaks them knows that it speaks over unfathomable distance.
We are never privy to her replies. They are implied only, as is she. Implied by complaints of her dwindling correspondence, implied by the necessity of someone behind the camera, someone to do the observing. In News from Home, Chantal Akerman makes of herself (or indeed, has found herself become) a purely receptive presence. She observes the city with intent, observes it at length, until such a time as it might reveal itself to her, or she might find herself finally, totally, dissipated in watching. She is never seen, save perhaps once, murkily reflected in the windowed doors of the 1 train. A shoulder, the line where her hair meets her face, given in flashes, snapping out of existence each time the doors slide open at a new station. It could be anyone, but somehow it must be her.
Here, the inverse effect of this mode of existence: casting nothing out and taking all in, she becomes a center. We observe these streets and subways and their endless movements not alongside Akerman, but through her, and as such find ourselves watching her. She has sought to efface herself entirely, and has in a sense succeeded, become a wandering ghost. But absence can become its own particular form of presence. Grief, maybe especially sudden grief, can change what we understand “goneness” to be. Suddenly anything only present in memory, in imagination, becomes spectral rather than simply displaced. That which is not nearby seems irretrievably gone, but paradoxically closer than ever in the mind. Mourning permits communication without presence; necessitates it, and the way of thinking can begin to permeate. Listening to Akerman’s mother’s letters, I hear the words I whispered every evening for months to a friend who had passed away. A friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to in half a year. I hear the “I love you”s I’ve repeated over and over, in my head and out loud, on public transport and in my office and in the dark beneath a duvet, to people far from earshot, people who I may never see again. I hear the prayers I’ve made in inexplicable, sudden desperation for people I do not know and will not ever have the chance to know. Sometimes being haunted is something we choose for ourselves.
Despite the long takes, Akerman’s eye is restless. A preoccupation with modes of transport quickly reveals itself. Always the frame will settle on a car or a tram or the subway; any vessel made to move bodies from one place to another. There are no stable interiors, only moving ones. The implication feels clear: run away and sending fewer and fewer letters, home is a place from which she has sought to displace herself, not one she wants to create anew. The streets and bridges and underground tunnels of New York are a holding pattern, a purgatory. The voice that speaks the letters, arising out of the city soundscape, is a final, temperamental thread leading back home.
The film’s final shot leads us out of a tunnel and into water. We move backwards, away from a city that grows smaller, flatter, less real with distance, covered in a mist that threatens its total disappearance. The only sounds to be heard are the lapping of waves against the boat, and the screeches of two or three seagulls intent on following until the very end. The voice has been drowned out once and for all. The river Hudson becomes the Styx.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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