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News From Home
(Chantal Akerman, Belgium/USA, 16mm, 85 min., 1978)
Campus Co-Sponsors: Center for International Education, Experimental Tuesdays at the Union Theatre & UWM Festival of Films in French
An experimental home movie, or an experimental movie about home, News from Home is a diary, of sorts, of this European filmmaker's sojourn in New York City, the then dirtier metropolis captured (by Babette Mangolte's stationary camera and exquisite cinematography) in a series of striking tableaux. Available light and color haunt the imagery, imbuing the film with the melancholy and warm sadness of an Edward Hopper painting. Accompanying this captivating series of emotional postcards—it is a world largely bereft, presented for the viewer to inhabit—is Akerman's own voice, reading the letters sent by her Belgian mother that report on the anxieties and quotidian activity of some domestic elsewhere. Print courtesy of Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.
