On how Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977) creates meaning from absence.

News from Home consists of shots of New York City — streets, subways, storefronts — accompanied by Akerman's voice reading letters from her mother in Belgium. The letters are about daily life: health, money, family visits, the desire to hear more often.

The film produces meaning from the gap between the images and the voice: we see New York and hear Belgium, we see the places Chantal inhabits and hear the relationship she has with someone who cannot inhabit them.

The formal argument about migration and distance is made without being stated: the mother's letters become more urgent as the film progresses, the questions more plaintive, and the images of New York become, through accumulation, a visual equivalent of the distance that the letters are trying to cross.

The final shot — New York receding from a departing boat — is Akerman acknowledging that she is leaving the city, which means she is also leaving the conditions that produced the film. It's a shot about endings and it arrives at the end of a film that has been entirely about the experience of distance.