News From Home the redux version: Amodal perception and ‘la jouissance du voir’

Abstract

In my 2004 article on Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976), I deployed a Deleuzian reading of the film to release the film from being interpreted as manifesting the impossibility of a woman’s desire (Stephen Heath) or a desire to return to the mother (Richard Kwietniowski), arguing instead that the indeterminacy of the final sequence opens out onto a transformative freedom from identity. In this article, I persist with this idea but reconsider it in relation to Griselda Pollock’s convincing insistence that Akerman’s work is a journey towards maternal trauma, a position that she develops in relation to Akerman’s installation Walking Next to One’s Shoelaces Inside an Empty Fridge. Before encountering this work, Pollock says that Akerman’s cinematic intervention was linked to ‘the choked feminine voice in culture meeting a new cinematic formalism’ rather than to the ‘deeper trauma’ of being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Pollock’s convincing reading of Akerman’s installation as visualizing the effects of unmourned trauma transmitted to the children of Holocaust survivors had a profound impact on me, one that I take into consideration in my reframing in this article of the final sequence of News From Home. In this, I deploy Raymond Bellour’s adaptation of psychoanalyst Daniel Stern’s notion of ‘amodal perception’ as a sensory, kinetic modality of spectatorship. This model allows me to retain the transformative freedom from identity in my earlier reading, while nonetheless mapping early intersubjective relations onto the pleasures of the film body Akerman called ‘la jouissance du voir’.