The Female Gaze. Alicia Malone

a new country is to split your identity into two, wondering if it will ever be whole again while your physical whereabouts clash with the invisible inner voices of family members and friends from the past. Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, peerless in the craft of experimental filmmaking that blurs the divide between documentary and fiction, grabs on to that imperceptible (and by all means, un-filmable) emotional confusion and turns it into poetry with News From Home. Call it a cinematic essay, an homage to the New York City sleaze of the ’70s, or a languid portrayal of alienation. News from Home is all of that, as well as an introspectively accurate illustration of being the other. As an immigrant who once stood on the intimidating edges of this well-oiled metropolitan machine called NYC (hoping to blend in, and maybe even belong), I find the exquisite pain of loneliness Akerman sketches out to be brutally exact.

      In eighty-six meditative minutes, Akerman navigates the headspace of one such cultural outcast (herself) via unfussy methods. Along with cinematographers Jim Asbell and Akerman’s repeat collaborator Babette Mangolte, Akerman (never seen on camera here) films various streets, avenues, storefronts, and the graffiti-stamped subway cars of 1976 NYC through uncompromising long takes, representing the city’s estranging reality in the midst of a historically grim crisis of decay. She contrasts the eeriness of her purposely dim images with her own voiceover (sweet, fragile, and knowingly monotonous), reading a number of letters her loving mother wrote to her between the years of 1971–73, when Akerman lived across various neighborhoods of the city.