Jon Paul Cabas                                                                                                                 12/19/21

     While watching Chantal Akerman’s News From Home , the presentation of  addresser and addressee really popped out at me. I had seen the film before but felt like I found a new appreciation for it while watching it again. I like that we never hear or see from Chantal Akerman except for when she reads her mother’s letters. We don’t know exactly what Akerman said in her responses, leaving us with only half of the interaction. This presentation of the mother’s letters makes the addresser and addressee identities become the same, creating a unique form of communication. Another thing that stood out was the occasional interruption of the voice-over by the loud ambient sound. When I watched the film the first time, I wasn’t entirely sure if these moments were left in on purpose or not but on a rewatch it became clear to me that it is entirely intentional. These moments disrupt the sense of closeness between Akerman and her mother with the reality that they are actually distant. You can try to read a moving letter from your mother who’s on the other side of the world, but the sounds of the New York subway will likely make that difficult. 

      Akerman is clearly interested in the scope and space of New York as well as movement within different spaces, which she captures well in this documentary. One scene inside the station captures many people entering the station through stairs as well as people moving towards and past the camera as it’s fixed in the middle of walkways. Most of the people who pass the camera stare at it intensely which made me feel like I was there in place of the camera. Every shot feels like it could be from Akerman’s point of view which we are also inhabiting. One striking moment in the station was when the camera panned endlessly, following a moving crowd of people. This shot definitely gave me a slightly uneasy feeling as the camera forced me to follow people who may or may have not wanted to be filmed. Somehow, just being a viewer of the film made me feel like I was directly responsible for possibly annoying some of the passersby. The scenes inside the subway car are just as interesting, especially because the space is a lot smaller, making the possible angles a lot more restricted than in the station. In these shots, the camera was either fixed on the subway doors or the passengers on the train. Even though the camera doesn’t move, these shots come alive through the people’s expressions within the frame as well as their entrances and exits of the frame. 

     The voice over and the ambient sound mostly work as two layers of sound being played at once. The few moments where the ambient sound temporarily drowns out the voice over are instantly noticeable and serve as a reminder to the audience of the space we’re in. The content of the letters are specific to Akerman and her family’s struggles, desires, etc, but they also felt like bits and pieces of a story being told to us. Obviously the letters are real but they have a narrative quality to them when they’re read in succession of one another throughout the documentary. The emotional tone changes a bit from each letter but almost all of them give off the tone of a worried mother who misses her daughter and who is struggling to keep everything running at home. The mother’s letters occasionally take on a frustrated tone as she constantly begs her daughter to “write more often.”