Chantal Akerman

News from Home

News from Home

Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.

Film Info

  • France, United States
  • 1976
  • 85 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

News from Home
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Cinematography
Babette Mangolte
Sound
Dominique Dalmasso
Sound
Larry Haas
Editing
Francine Sandberg
Voice
Chantal Akerman

Current

Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in New York as by her own past…

By Michael Koresky

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Babette Mangolte’s Time with Chantal Akerman
Babette Mangolte’s Time with Chantal Akerman
“We were different in age, but we had something in common. We were women, we had been affected by the fact that the film world was a man’s world.” In a new conversation published in Interview magazine, cinematographer Babette Mangolte sums up t…

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Chantal Akerman

Director

Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films. Such later Akerman films as the Proust adaptation La captive (2000) and the documentary on Mexican-to-U.S. immigration From the Other Side (2002) retain her daring, vital voice.