The personal and the public. Private letters and open spaces. Home, exile. Chantal Akerman’s News From Home is often torn between personal introspection and visual ethnography. Here, its slow composure is put in to conversation with the chaos of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Whilst the former tackles the personal and transcends towards the universal, the latter uses the universal to invoke a self-observating experience. If Koyaanisqatsi signals a life out of balance, News From Home tries to rectify that balance - in pace, in space and in the everyday -Jessica McGoff
This is my new video essay in which I compare two ways of approaching the relationship between spaces and people in News From Home (Dir: Chantal Akerman) and Koyaanisqatsi (Dir:Godfrey Reggio).
Extracts from a new soundtrack to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 cult doc Koyaanisqatsi which I saw live at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music in 2019