Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976-77) is a visual diary reflecting on a very personal history. A feature length film of sorts, it seems born out of cathartic necessity rather than simply creative ambition.

Akerman had been working throughout the 1970s, and News from Home was made after her critical appreciation had more grown in stature, largely thanks to the impossible-to-ignore vigour of her four hour 1975 feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as well as her coldly erotic Je Tu Il Elle (1976). News from Home feels like a project from someone earnestly haunted by certain memories, perhaps even guilt at the sacrifices necessary to achieve her overall creative goal, choosing to look back for a moment and create something smaller in scale in comparison to films she could have probably made at that point.

News from Home is first and foremost a visual document of 1970s New York. The film has no strict narrative but instead spends time capturing a sense of place; one surprisingly sparse for a city that supposedly does not sleep. Akerman frames New York with a beautiful sense of light, brought over from the earlier Hotel Monterey (1972), to create an Edward Hopper-esque aesthetic of low-lights for low streets.

The Hopper comparison is one often discussed, but Akerman’s film seem to genuinely manifest his aesthetic ideals without the intention of mere mimicry; the two artists sharing a general interest in the interpretation of spaces and light. These are the shadowy dawns and dusks that drape a spectral sheath over the everyday rumblings of American city life.

‘Maybe I am not very human,’ Hopper once suggested, ‘what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ Akerman channels this idea and also answers the question that Hopper rhetorically poses: what does such urban light really look like?

Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s to become a filmmaker though not before working numerous low-paid jobs, infamously but appropriately selling tickets at a porno theatre to buy her celluloid stock (which likely allowed her to watch the city safely during all those mysterious hours usually unseen by the majority of the public).

Akerman’s film is a manifestation of the very human desire to want to document the sun on the side of the house, the Nighthawks-esque hotel, the empty streets, and the bustling train station but she also quietly suggests that it is only humanistic to do so if shot through with a personal reflection or inflection. She is not a disinterested observer above it all but an active participant.

New from Home is connected to Akerman’s personal life through the presence of a voiceover reading out genuine letters sent to the young director by her mother when she first moved away. This is another answer to Hopper’s rhetorical question. In other words, she was living in this city to make her work and, to do so, she was forced to have a more sparing relationship with her parents.

Capturing light is something to do when parents are far away. It is still humanistic but Akerman is clearly addressing some self-accusation, some guilt lingering from her earlier days of creative struggle. It is a natural phenomena but one that sits in contrast to the growing distance clearly present in the letters themselves.

The viewer never hears what Akerman sent back, tellingly, but it is obvious that her replies became less frequent, less personal. She chose to hide the life she was leading in order to stay true to her own creativity. The mother’s voice becomes cloying and increasingly desperate to know what her daughter is doing to sustain herself. Akerman does not even tell her when she is moving apartments until far after the event, in spite of receiving a steady flow of money, support, and even occasionally clothing from her mother.

Akerman has to walk the streets in order to create her work (both in the sense that she worked her jobs in the city and in the physical sense of actually making the film itself). By doing this, she needed to throw off the loving shackles of her home life. Yet it also seems like a pertinent sacrifice; if she had not succumb to this, painting her city with the same moody pallets and philosophy as the Hopper, then perhaps Akerman would not have become the creative success that allowed her to eventually return home (a theme she would explore in Les Rendez-Vous D’Anna (1978) which hints at a negative outcome).

News from Home is one of the most affecting critiques of the creative process and the personal sacrifices often required to fulfil them. Akerman’s film suggests that this results in a loss of humanity, but not in a negative or permanent way.

The city as consolation.

Her distance and selfish determination to create would flower into a startling artistic talent, but the journey was always circular rather than simply linear: the city, another, and then another.

No mother stood a chance.