Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) weaves together a voice-over reading of letters that her mother sent from Brussels, and scenes of New York, where she resided at the time: streets, subways and squares. Natalia Akerman’s letters are a link, a materialisation of geographical distance, and as they cross over the Atlantic and come to New York, they express the rhythm of her family’s daily life back in Brussels. The one who is absent, who remained in Europe, becomes an integral part of the American city. These thoughtful missives, written by the mother, read by the daughter as she wanders about the streets, create a poetic connection: they roam around together, follow in the footsteps of anonymous passers-by. The words of the mother, affectionate and forceful, transform unknown silhouettes into familiar bodies, lessen the anonymity that predominates in major cities. Obviously, New York does not transform itself into Brussels, but the letters, as they are read, are superimposed over the images of the American city and establish a correspondence between exterior and interior, as if the world outside was invariably drawn towards the inner life. In other words, in News from Home, the daily life of New York City is permanently attached to the ‘everyday privacy’ of the flat in Brussels. The geographical gap between the ordinariness of the streets and the sentimentality of home exposes, within the frame of the cinematographic picture, a form of sedentary nomadism, a wavering between the here and the far away, the exterior and the interior, between reclusion and wandering. News from Home creates a local change of scenery, in a way that is reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot, who wrote that ‘a change of scenery does not mean the loss of one’s homeland, but rather a more authentic way of dwelling, of inhabiting without habits; exile is but a new way to relate with the Outside’.

To travel, to relocate, to be in transit, all these expressions convey a sense of moving, of mobility. But these ways to exist, to ‘inhabit without habits’, also aim to look for and find an elusive locus. Akerman is at once taken away by perpetual motion, but also impeded by it: she needs to get away from her mother while remaining in close contact with her.