News From Home & From the East

As we walk into our second film of the retrospective, Akerman’s blunt cinematic techniques are slowly becoming palpable. The dead loneliness of a woman’s existence, the sharp symmetry with the focal point carrying the character, the unnerving hyperrealism, the philosophical timelessness of the film are some of the building blocks of her films. In The Meetings With Anna, the hyperrealist-minimalism forces the audience to be attentive to minute gestural shifts that come with Anna’s changing, yet stagnant life. As we follow Anna through her emotional and unemotive segments, and as we glare mutely into her eyes as she looks at us as though staring at a void, the vérité of Akerman’s filmmaking has situated itself in our hearts.

Now, with News From Home, Akerman makes use of a structuralist filmmaking style that, from its school of thought from linguistics, utilises ‘codes’ to communicate with the audience. However, unlike in linguistics, in cinema, the temporality becomes the ‘code’. This is further complemented with her fixed camera shot morphing each shot into a four-dimensional still-life image, extending the character and depth of the frame. The tight juxtaposition of text and images as Akerman reads through letters from a distant mother with a proximate presence, in a cold, inert New York invites us back to Akerman’s general feminist existentialism.

We move ahead from News From Home to From The East, we travel from static emptiness to tumultuous nothingness, as we explore the lives of people in Europe after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. A strong, anachronistic memory that only cripples even a faint perception of a deterministic future. Following in the structuralist thought of filmmaking, Akerman's loops are arrhythmical, repeating asynchronously. We follow back and meet characters again and again as we understand a general sense of hopelessness towards their problems seep in.

In films like Meetings With Anna, News From Home, and the films that will follow, there is a general dissolution of reality and fiction, and we see no diversion in From The East.