When we finally moved out of a trailer park lot and into a small house that made us neighbours with our grandparents it felt like we were going to be a normal family. Wasn’t long after we moved in that the men in my family started laying down gravel so all of us could park or drive out to work easier. It always kicked up such awful dust clouds that obscured vehicles on the way out. It was almost cinematic to watch things fade off into the distance. They never figured out why it kicked up so much debris, but it became a character trait of where we lived. I always liked it. I felt like it gave our mundane tasks something more. I was obsessed with Westerns at the time we moved in so I always liked to think of it like the end of all those classic movies where cowboys would ride off into the sunset. The last my mom ever saw of me was probably that same dirt cloud when I drove my truck away from home in 2014. I was finally free of the burdens of Kentucky. Of masculinity. Of my abusive father. It was one of the best days of my life. It was one of the worst for my mom.
“I have you on my heart this morning. I miss you more than you know. I wish you could come home, if only for a little while”.
-my mom
In Chantal Akerman’s, News From Home (1977) she stitches together in voice over, letters from her mother, and images of New York City. Her images are often mundane, stretched out for an extreme amount of time, as people go about their daily jobs/habits/hobbies. Akerman is a rigorous filmmaker who believes that time must be felt when telling a story, and she usually manages this by forcing viewers to really sit with an image so they consider everything in her frames. During the 1970s she moved to New York City and made a few films that would help cement her as one of the most important filmmakers of her generation. News From Home is likely the most significant of these, and may very well be the best film she’s ever made. In these images of New York City she isolates everyone and everything by merely showing what others do in their day to day lives. Here’s this city, a total hub for art and life, at least that’s what they tell you, and everyone is cornered off in their own little world. This has the effect of tinging her version of New York City with a melancholy that is then amplified through the voice over of the director who is reading letters from her mother about what is going on back home. Akerman’s mother aches for her child and is in grief for the loss of having access to her daughter, the fracturing of her family unit and her normal. Chantal, on the other hand, is considering what she had to give up to follow her artistic impulses, and the images of New York are used as a fulcrum for her negotiation of how individuality and family can be in conflict with one another. But individuality is always a lonely road. Chantal Akerman had to move to New York, but breaking the heart of her mother was the cost.
Chantal Akerman has always been interested in the ways subjectivity can be made artistic. All of her movies intertwine elements of memoir, narrative and experimentation, and one of the biggest over-arching themes of her work is that her mother is her home. In her very last film, No Home Movie (2015) she skypes with her mother, and asks her questions about her life, her family, and her upbringing. It’s a final gift to her mother whose words in News From Home are now made physical into an image. Her mother was sick at the time, but she was still passionate about her daughter’s interests; always probing as mothers tend to do. In long sequences of conversation the distance between Chantal and her mother seems completely non-existent. They’re attached, like all mothers and daughters. They converse in a rhythm and language that only belongs to them. Chantal’s mother lives in her movies, and there is an immortality that came with that instinct that means it’s impossible to think of the work of Chantal Akerman without considering her mother Natalia. Akerman’s dedication to chronicling her relationship with her mother as it evolved through the years is a defining quality of her work. They are these brief glimpses of beauty across decades and they told us everything about her mother and herself.
Sometimes Akerman’s titles will tell us everything we need to know about the movie. In the closing moments of No Home Movie, after Natalia Akerman has passed away, Chantal ties her shoes, pulls a curtain closed, pushes her hair back, out of her eyes, and walks out of frame in silhouette. There is then a cut to an empty room, adorned meticulously in familial symmetry and the film ends. It’s a fitting final image to the career of a pioneer: a woman known for asking audiences to observe women in spaces now showing audiences an empty one—one without Chantal, one without Natalia Akerman. An image to tear a hole in the fabric of cinema like she did with her entire career. A hole that will never be filled by another director. In one last gift to the world, Chantal Akerman gave us a portrait of her mother—a woman she loved, a woman who was home for a director who often felt like she didn’t have one.
There’s context in these titles: News From Home. No Home Movie. They’re the Genesis and Revelations of Akerman’s work and form a complete picture of the relationship that she had with her mother. In News From Home she juxtaposes these aching stories of summer, in the deep romance of family with these images of a hollowed-out, lonely, New York City. It’s a filmmaking decision that still floors me to this day. There are two stories happening side-by-side in News From Home, and they are both illuminated through Akerman’s dedicated experimentation. As the film goes along we hear from less from Natalia, and she fades while these images of New York become more stark and take on a dominant effect. New York becomes over-powering and it only amplifies the restless displacement of Akerman’s form. Akerman’s mother begins to transform into memory, and distance becomes the defining factor in their relationship.
My mom sends me letters about once a week in the form of a prayer card with slogans like “a home is hope and joy” printed across the front. Over the years I’ve received hundreds of these cards, and before I open them I know what they’re going to say, because they always say the same thing. She misses me. She’s praying for me. She wants me to come home. My mom knows I have to live my own life, but she’s never gotten used to the idea that she’d have to live without me and my brother. It’s severe empty-nest syndrome and I should have probably seen this coming when I was a child. She was never happier than when she was telling me of her experiences during pregnancy, which I was always eager to absorb. She used to always say things like giving birth to me was the best day of her life. She put all of her stock into being a mother. It’s all she ever wanted to be, and now that she’s left to her own devices she is lost. The urge for motherhood is something she passed this down to me in some ways. And as I get older I begin to feel more like her. I can’t get pregnant, but being a mother is a desire that I have that I cannot act on directly so I have to let it drift away until the moment where it could feasibly become a reality through something like adoption. I don’t want to make some of the same mistakes I know she made by being overbearing and too protective of my brother and I, but I know I’m made of the same stuff. I can see her in myself, and it is a struggle to know that I can’t talk to her about these things mother to daughter, because my transness is never something she’s fully accepted. Despite this, I still love her, and I am sometimes burdened with the thought that in order for me to survive I had to leave, but doing so broke her heart, probably forever.
It’s difficult for me to rewatch News From Home with this new, real life, context. I’m far away from my mother, the same as Chantal and I wonder if she felt guilt too, leaving when she did. I can’t watch without thinking of my own letters from home. Some of Natalia’s words echo my mother’s. Sometimes word for word. It has this scary effect of feeling too close to the spirit of my own life as it unfolds in front of my eyes, and I struggle knowing that there was no easy way for my mother or I to get out of this situation without wounding one another.
The final image of News From Home is a static shot of New York City drifting away, getting smaller and smaller from the perspective of a boat leaving port. It plays like a reverse Ellis Island. There’s no voice over in this scene. Just the size of a city shrinking, and fading. I wonder what my mom thought when she saw my car drifting away behind that cloud of dust. In her heart, I think she knew she wasn’t going to see me for a long time. I think she knew that this was goodbye.
I wish I could see her, but more than that I wish she could see me.
this essay was originally published on my patreon in 2019. It was re-edited and re-published on May 5, 2020
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