There’s a City in My Mind: On Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976)
​​ The conceit of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976) is simple enough: over footage of Manhattan’s begrimed streets, the Belgian filmmaker reads letters she received from her mother while living in the borough from 1971 to 1973. Yet such a description belies the wide range of registers that this deceptively vast film works in. This documentary’s ostensible subject is its maker’s own life, making it something of an autobiographical work. Yet Akerman—only 26 at the time of her film’s release, and thus in her early twenties when she received her mother’s letters—never appears onscreen. Her readings of these letters are so composed as to be affectless, perhaps in an attempt to reflect the quotidian details included in the letters of her family’s life back in Brussels. Yet its undeniable that News From Home is also a work of narrative, and one that accrues a mounting tension: the letters acknowledge that Chantal rarely corresponds with her mother and thus grow increasingly desperate for a response. Akerman had already proved her capacity to mine tension from the rhythms of everyday life in her previous film, the titanic feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). If Akerman’s singular achievement in that film was to render every rupture of a housewife’s daily domestic duties as a transcendent, world-altering event, News From Home finds her extending this dramaturgical approach to her own life. The result is a penetrating work of autofiction, haunting and entrancing, that clarifies this formidable artist’s project around the eternal conflict between social belonging and individual liberation.
That Akerman is able to dramatize such mighty struggles is due in no small part to the simplicity of her film’s form. Her camera captures public spaces around the city—including side streets, major thoroughfares, and subway stations—gazing upon the millions of cohabitants roaming though the most liminal glades of this concrete jungle. In some ways, the film functions as a sort of ethnographic travelogue, providing granular, photographic detail of a particular time and place. Key to such a legacy is the contrast between the typically rooted positioning of Akerman’s camera and the unremitting bustle of city life. While the camera is occasionally perched on a moving vehicle—most memorably in a car ambling through Hell’s Kitchen and the closing sequence on the Staten Island Ferry—there are very few instances of pans, tilts or zooms. This static formal approach not only accentuates the movement of traffic and pedestrians—and along with it, the particular aesthetic stylings of late ‘70s New York, a city at the time undergoing tremendous cultural shifts—but also provides as convincing support for the great critic and theorist André Bazin’s enduringly provocative claim that photography is “objectivity in time” as your likely to find (even Todd Phillips, of all filmmakers, cited the film as a reference point when designing the Manhattan of his ‘70s-set 2019 film Joker). With people seemingly moving in and out of the scope of her frames by their own free will, Akerman seems to want to operate from a remove, crafting a visual style that functions almost like surveillance. While the idea of any image reading as authorless is dubious at best, Akerman’s images do undeniably convey a certain facticity, however contrived her methods may actually be.
Of course, if Akerman is interested in imparting artistic distance visually, the voiceover reading of her mother’s letters does the opposite emotionally. There’s an instantly familiar resonance in the tone of these letters, which are charmingly typical and almost banal in their content. We hear of updates about work (“Father’s vacation has started”), weather (“Summer's been oddly cool”), and most troublingly, her mother’s health, which is in a steady state of decline (she initially attributed this to menopause but, as she tells her daughter, a doctor has deemed it’s actually “exhaustion”). Every letter also contains that oft-heard refrain uttered from parents to their children who have left home—We miss you—though it’s clear that this family seems uniquely riven by the separation. Two different letters detail that both Mother and Father have both dreamt of their daughter, longing for her return, and the former’s tone grows increasingly despondent as Chantal only sparingly writes back. “If you wrote more frequently I would worry less,” one reads, and the absence of Akerman onscreen, despite her pleading, honors her mother’s concern. This structuring absence thus also renders Akerman’s film as a deeply moving account of the painful realities of immigrant experience. The intimacy of their relationship is stunning, and the mother’s evident heartbreak at the sudden departure of her daughter imbues within this otherwise muted film an intriguing disquiet: why would Chantal leave her mother when they are so desperately close to each other?
Perhaps the film’s visual style provides an answer. Akerman’s greatest feat in News From Home is the juxtaposition between the seeming boundlessness of New York City—the most readily indexed site of ethnic variegation in this nation of immigrants—and the insularity of her own familial attachments. Her mother’s most-repeated question—why don’t you write to me more?—is answered by the breadth of life teeming in her images themselves. Without directly inserting herself into the film, Akerman conveys the tension in the desire to both hold on to the love one possesses for their family while also building a future that is necessarily beyond them and, in some painful ways, a corrective to the somewhat provincial nature of the family unit itself. The street-level depiction of the city’s diversity—the array of identities subsumed under the new identity of “New Yorker”—gestures towards the millions of others around her that have negotiated a similarly uneasy bargain with their own families in pursuit of their own opportunities.
As the final sequence on the ferry reveals, though, with the city’s formidable skyline shrinking into a pall of fog as it leaves the city, even the modern metropolis can eventually seem small and descend into familiarity, and the desire to find the novel and branch out on one’s own may drive them farther still. Or maybe even back home, where Akerman—who identified first and foremost as a daughter and not a filmmaker—may (and did, in fact) return, fears of roads not taken allayed however temporarily by the encounter with the city. It’s a staggering portrait of a coming-of-age, one that simultaneously casts Akerman as unconditional in her love for her family while also restless in her pursuit of her own individuation from them. News From Home is enlivened by these competing impulses; it’s a searching, dynamic work that invites as impressive a range of interpretations as the diversity of the city itself.
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Reviewed 4/20/2025