2 - ‘My dearest little girl, I just got your letter and I hope that you will continue to write to me often’: Epistolary Listening in News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976)

Summary

Abstract

Once seen as alternative, arthouse, or experimental, Chantal Akerman's film News from Home (1976) has been transformed into a kind of ur-text for thinking about how the epistolary crosses over with the essayistic. In this chapter I argue that these discussions of the epistolary essayistic have placed too much emphasis upon the letter's function as an ‘emblem of distance’; instead, my discussion will emphasize the epistolary as a ‘bridge’ in order to explore how, when transposed to the cinematic context, epistolarity can bring about listening. In the case of Chantal Akerman's practice, epistolary listening constitutes an ethical position through which she finds her authorial voice.

Keywords: Chantal Akerman; voice-over; essay film; film-letter; listening

News from Home as Film-Letter

Once seen as alternative, arthouse, or experimental, Chantal Akerman's film News from Home (US/Belgium, 1976) has been transformed into a kind of ur-text for thinking about how the epistolary crosses over with the essayistic. News from Home's starring role in what Hamid Naficy calls the ‘Film-Letter’ has seen the film unquestioningly typecast in the same way across the ever burgeoning field of essay cinema. In this chapter I argue that these discussions of the epistolary essayistic have placed too much emphasis upon the letter's function as an ‘emblem of distance’; instead, my discussion will emphasize the epistolary as a ‘bridge’ in order to explore how, when transposed to the cinematic context, epistolarity can bring about listening. In the case of Chantal Akerman's practice, epistolary listening constitutes an ethical position through which she finds her authorial voice.

As a core part of his elaboration of an accented cinema, Naficy's analysis of epistolarity's recurring place in narratives of exile, migration, and displacement is intricately explored. Accordingly, he writes:

Accented epistolary films are divided into three main types: film-letters, telephonic epistles, and letter-films. Film-letters inscribe letters and acts of reading and writing of letters by diegetic characters. Likewise, telephonic epistles inscribe telephones and answering machines and the use of these devices by diegetic characters. Letter films, on the other hand, are themselves in the form of epistles addressed to someone either inside or outside the diegesis, and they do not necessarily inscribe epistolary media.