There’s a raw, jagged loneliness that clings to new places. The isolation cuts at the sinewy strings holding thought, emotion and limb together. Chantal Ackerman allows the camera access to this feeling in her film, News From Home. The frames stare longingly out at the empty, dusky streets of New York City in the 1970s, only to remain an observer rather than a participant. Even the title makes it clear that this is not her home; she does not feel she belongs here. The film operates on three levels: the empty city at night, the people during dusk and the subway. Most of these images feature a voiceover of her mother reading the letters she writes to Ackerman over the loud sounds of the city, sometimes drowning her voice out altogether. The thoughtful, sensitive letters are juxtaposed with the passive, uncaring city and its people. The harshness of a city unaware of this young girl’s woes is contrasted with the tender words of a loving mother, creating a clear divide between the emotional comforts of childhood with the concrete reality of adulthood. This contrast creates the film’s dichotomy framed around the idea of movement versus inertia, change versus sameness.
Ackerman focuses on lower Manhattan, or what is now Tribeca, and it’s dirty. Instead of multi-million dollar penthouses and manicured parks, the streets are littered with old newspapers, broken glass and dilapidated street lamps. But the text of the film progresses in small ways as Ackerman begins to make New York City her home. The camera begins to stare at people, rather than empty streets: people sitting on sidewalks as the sun slinks down and the heat subsides, people working in diners framed by the shiny metal windows, both aware of and oblivious to the camera turned towards them. Sometimes it focuses on people who stare back at it, and walk forward curiously then hurry by, gone forever. Sometimes it looks at the underground scenes of the train station platforms, people milling about, not really doing anything, on their way to somewhere else, looking forward to something else while letting this moment elapse unnoticed. Sometimes it watches the city pass by unannounced from the windows of an aboveground train. Sometimes it passively stares out the window of a car for long wordless stretches, creating layered still photocompositions of hand-painted store front signs and double parked orange and blue vans at red traffic lights.
The F-train still makes the same squeaky braking noise even in its newly glinting, electronic body. The people still stare at you, at someone else, at the glazed over thoughts running through their minds. The platforms remain that dingy brown from thick layers of dust and dirt and too many coats of cheap paint. The cars weave and honk and crash just the same.
But it’s us who have changed. The people and the environment of New York City have moved on from the graffiti-ed trains and metallic counter top diners. Trains no longer come when they come — we have watch clocks. People no longer mill about or notice their surroundings — we have computer phones. Fashion no longer consists of mules and lime green-checkered bell-bottoms, but the sleek satin of corporate attire and the mass-produced distressed look of Urban Outfitters. Sidewalks are no longer abandoned and littered with violent debris, but filled with families, clean (ish) streets and advertisements. The subway platforms with the shoe shine stations, pay phones and film processing labs have vanished. No better or no worse, the city has shed it’s 1970s skin.
My mother, who was born and raised in Manhattan, says it’s better. The city is cleaner, it’s safer, it’s got more people, but at what cost? Before, New York City was a mystical land, a mecca of ideas and the new, but now the city functions more as a commodity, being sold as that idea rather than embodying it. The aimless wandering of time and spontaneity has been calculated and replicated for mass production. I can calculate exactly what time the train will come so I never have to wait, and I can never get lost because maps now plan out my route exactly for the most efficient path to my destination. That’s what New York City has become: the destination. As inhabitants of this city, we no longer have the option of enjoying the journey — the wait for the train, the walk to the store, or the taxi ride across the borough. The value of experience and journey is lost on us because time always has a specific purpose. This mindset exists as a distraction, so we can pretend we don’t have time to see the homeless man coughing next to the smiling family in the advertisements. It’s not just this city, but the culture that immediate gratification has created. We are obsessed with going places, but the going is never as important as the place we want to end up. And when we get there, it’s just another new place, empty with the unchanging loneliness.
