Sometimes I think I’m not good at watching movies. Or that I don’t truly like watching them. I sometimes miss messages or metaphors that others find obvious, and check my watch in the theater so often that I have to hide it under my shirt sleeve. It’s not even that I’m bored—I’ve just absorbed what I think is the essence of the film playing, and I’m ready to move on, to checking box office statistics, or reading critical reviews and seeing how well they match up with my judgment. Perhaps, as much as I’ve strained to avoid it, I have contracted the millennial condition. In another era my attention span would allow for endless consumption of two-hour stories, but not now, not when there is Vox. And Snapchat.
This perception of my own cinematic stamina was muddled on Friday night when I saw News From Home at the Metrograph, on the Lower East Side. The film is a mid-career project from Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker who was as famous for her avant-garde sensibilities as she was for her feminism. Admittedly, my experimentalist taste has been refined in the last few weeks because of the Polish cinema class I’m taking, but for reasons which I’m still processing, News From Home stoked in me an uncommon sense of understanding. I jumped on the creative decisions, thinking that I knew why they were made, and what they represented. I was shocked at the fact that I could stare at torturously long, unbroken static shots of a subway station, and not get bored.
Ackerman set the film in Manhattan, insofar as she took a camera and tripod around Manhattan, captured the settings of 1977 life that I’m assuming appealed to her most, and strung them together, without music or characters or dialogue. The only guiding device is the narration that comes from Ackerman’s mother, who we hear reading letters that she sends to Ackerman from Paris. The family misses Ackerman very much, her mother says. Her father misses her especially. They wish she would write more often, but they realize she is busy. They hope she’ll be home soon. I could relate to this sentiment in obvious ways, as I too am living in New York, and while my mother sends texts instead of letters, they are frequently filled with melancholic doubt that I’ll ever respond. I could hear my mother in Ackerman’s mother’s pleas for detail, in her eagerness to explain local developments.
A striking contradiction came from this maternal expectation of engagement—the repeated reassurances that poor communication is due to preoccupation with work—and the simplicity of the shots. Ackerman can’t write back because she’s doing this? She does not interact with the people she films. She allows them to register the presence of the camera, and waits for reactions, which are often negligible. She lets the camera roll long after subjects leave the frame. Why? Who wants as unfiltered—and objectively boring—a look at the New York of yesteryear as this one? I did, I guess. Maybe it was because of the lack of technical interference—the edits, tracks, lifts that weren’t there—that I had the time to feel that Ackerman was showing me something important.
I felt the importance of a different New York, reading into the expressions on people’s faces, the way they dressed and walked. My friend Mila noted that a couple on the subway platform across from Ackerman waited to embrace each other until a train whizzed past and hid them from her view. This couple wanted privacy, and had a means to achieve it. In the 42nd street passageway (the one connecting the 1 to everything else, I think), a woman with a little boy at her side walked straight down the center of the screen, veering off course only inches from the lens, as if to challenge an enemy, only she smiled subtly, dark sunglasses disguising whatever might have been revealed in her eyes. In a subway car, one elderly man stared directly at the camera for about two minutes before moving into another car, apparently uncomfortable. No peace signs were thrown, no tongues stuck out, no middle fingers lifted. The spectator-subject relationship was less confrontational, more easy-going than it is today. The same could be said for the relationship New Yorkers had with New York. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but I didn’t see so many commuters in a hurry, and above ground, outside brick buildings and garages, men and women sat on chairs on the sidewalk, without an obvious purpose or next destination. New York’s population in 1977 was 7,895,563, or about eight percent smaller than it was in 2016, but it looked half as busy in News From Home as it did on the East Side on Friday night. Was this pre-mass-tourism? It was certainly post-recession (America’s biggest since World War II). What to explain the change in pace? I got the sense that Ackerman was deciding how to differentiate this urban landscape from the one she left behind, trying to distract herself from homesickness. Indeed, as the film progresses, Ackerman’s mother’s narrations grow less and less audible, muffled by blaring car horns and sirens. We hear segments, snippets, broken verse. We lose the entirety of Ackerman’s mother’s affection.
It’s impossible, but I was convinced watching News From Home that Ackerman knew what 2019 would be like. She recorded these scenes, these transpositions of all that is witnessed by the human eye, because she suspected that at some point people might need to be reminded of certain behavior, certain structures and institutions. I can’t even be sure Ackerman liked what she saw, that she didn’t prefer New York through a viewfinder. The life she depicts certainly reveals, at times, an undertone of violence. In the middle of a mesmerizing drive up what I think was the West Side, the car in which Ackerman sits comes to a stop. The driver of the adjacent car has his window down, and in the backseat, another man’s silhouette can be seen, a gun pointed forward in his hand. This recognition dawns on the viewer without the aid of musical manipulation, or dramatic build-up. Immediacy is absent from this portrait of New York. We aren’t handed viral videos. We have to wait to figure out what the city is like.
The final shot in the film finds Ackerman on the water, slowly (and I mean slowly) moving away from the Manhattan waterfront. I think she is leaving New York permanently. It is overcast, with low-hanging San Francisco fog, but before long those towers are visible. Those two towers. In a post-9/11 world any sighting of them must be commentary, even though, in Ackerman’s case, commentary would have meant clairvoyance. But the silence with which she settles on the World Trade Center is astounding. We stare at the towers for perhaps ten minutes, longer than I had ever looked at them in one sitting. They were only part of the skyline when they existed, but now they consume it. I know Ackerman couldn’t have known, but at the same time, with this scene, how could she not have known? She seemed nostalgic before nostalgia was necessary. She left her old world for a new one, temporarily, and crafted a vessel to be transported to an even newer world, my world. The world post-divide, post-crisis, post-terror but not really. Ackerman probably didn’t leave on whatever ferry she caught to shoot the city skyline, but she crossed an ocean and she was back in her old world. I was back, for an hour and a half, in a world I never occupied. And it didn’t last. But being there was wonderful.
Fergus Campbell is a freshman in Columbia College.