
Songdelay. 1973. USA. Directed by Joan Jonas. 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 19 min.
“On downtown Manhattan rooftops and empty lots along the waterfront, a loose-knit group of friends (dancers, visual artists, filmmakers) gracefully interact, their movement and words taking the form of a roundelay” (Amy Taubin).
News from Home. 1976. USA. Directed by Chantal Akerman. DCP. English. 85 min.
“Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) had already guaranteed the 25-year-old director a place among the great European art film auteurs when she made a trip to New York to shoot News from Home. It was not her first visit: in 1972, she spent time in the city, immersing herself in American avant-garde movies and making two short films, La Chambre and Hotel Monterey, which were influenced by Minimalism, as Jeanne Dielman and News from Home would be. All four films were shot by Babette Mangolte. In images of extended duration, Akerman depicts a city that for the most part no longer exists. She begins in an empty Tribeca, then a place of illegal artist lofts and butter-and-egg warehouses. There are extraordinary sequences on the subway, outside bodegas, a 10-minute truck ride up Tenth Avenue when it was lined with auto repair shops and empty lots. Throughout, we hear Akerman’s voice reading letters that she received in 1972 from her mother in Belgium. The mother/daughter bond is at the heart of Akerman’s entire oeuvre. Here, her mother’s anxiety-ridden missives permeate the film’s coolly distanced visuals of New York during the hottest days of summer. In the final shot, looking toward Manhattan Island from the Staten Island Ferry, the skyline is gradually immersed in fog, obscuring the Twin Towers and their surroundings, transforming this image, like our memory of the images that preceded it, into a ghost of itself—a mirage” (Amy Taubin).