News from home

Chantal Akerman was born in the mid fifties, in a jewish protestant family. Both her

grandparents and her mother were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Only the

later, Natalia Akerman, survived. Akerman’s mother is a central figure in her film career,

and Chantal seems to capture the depths of her, both as a value and as a problematic

figure, from a feminist point of view. And with saying this, and enjoying a certain

transparency that only cinema can achieve, I also believe that Akerman’s cinema comes

from a certain sense of time and its melancholy and comes from certain places and their

own sense of time. It’s like a whole universe can emerge from the banal sadness of any

given sunday. A universe made from the “saudade” of every trashcan, alley, hallway and

wall. And although I haven’t seen her entire oeuvre, the films of her that I like the most are

“Jeanne Dielman” “Tu, Il, Elle” “Hotel Monterrey” “La Bas” and “News from Home”. “News

from Home”, particularly, is a film that has moved me deeply, maybe because I have

certain things in common wih it. The letters from her mother, which are read as a

background for images that show a New York very different from the capital of the arts that

some snobs want to see in the city. This is a New York not of tourism, but of trash bags

floating in deserted alleys, and nocturnal figures coming in and out of the subway and in the streets.

Caetano and Transa

 Even though it’s difficult to define what’s my favorite band, songwriter or singer, I would

say that ,at least this summer, it would be the Transa album by Caetano Veloso. Some

aspects that I can say about Veloso are his longstanding career in music, with lots of

records, some of them recorded with his sister, Maria Betania.

I listen more to her music in other seasons of the year, like the fall, more specifically her amazing album Drama. You could say that Caetano’s music genre is bossa nova, but with elements of progressive rock, jazz etc.

I like his music specially in this time of the year, summer. It’s not that I like summer, I hate it but I can stand it with help of Caetano’s music. The great thing about Transa is that is listenable both in the beach, with a piña colada in your hand, and under any roof of santiago. “It’s a long way” is one of the most powerful songs in the album, because it builds a great castle of rythms, tempos, intensities, changes from english to portuguese and viceversa etc.