At Home/Far Away

A woman sitting with her arms crossed in a wooden chair at a city intersection. There is a "Don't Walk" sign illuminated above her.

"At Home/Far Away" brings together three experimental works by women filmmakers that explore questions of dislocation and the domestic. The program is presented collaboration with the comparative media course “Experimental Screens” (COML 4522/SPAN 4520), taught by Professor Patty Keller.

Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) opens this trilogy with a silent surrealist exploration of the liminal space between reality and dreams; between the conscious body and unconscious desire. Can knowledge of an individual’s intimate interiority be accessed through dreams? Can it, Deren seems to be asking us, be unlocked through the art of film?

In Inner Outer Space (2021), Laida Lerxtundi extends this meditation on the porous boundary between the internal world of memory and language, and the external world of landscape. How do our bodies become attuned to thought, to the environment, and to others? Collage-like fragments of image/text pairings, telepathetic dialogue, and embodied engagements with nature all coalesce in a geography of sensations, inviting us to experience rhythms, movements, textures and sounds.

Finally, Chantal Akerman's avant-garde autofictional masterpiece, News From Home (1976), departs from the minimal sound design of the previous works, capturing instead quotidian urban scenes from 1970s New York City in long takes, poetically framed through the experience of reading family letters sent from home. At once structured and adrift, the film’s epistolary arrangement repeats and wanders in its presentation of city life as simultaneously beautiful and mundane, strange and familiar. A soft-spoken disembodied voiceover (Akerman herself) reads aloud from her mother’s letters which convey feelings of longing, attachment, anxiety and love that offset the calm, detached, formal compositions of the film’s numerous fixed, static shots of streets and strangers.

Across these three films, the meaning of home itself is called into question—anchoring and unanchoring it from place, language and emotion. Where do we most belong? Is it in the visual world that surrounds us or the spoken one internalized within us? Can one feel more at home through words or images?

The program includes:

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, dir. by Maya Deren)
14 min., DCP, bw, sound
Courtesy of The Film-makers' Co-op

Inner Outer Space (2021, dir. Laida Lertxtundi)
16 min., DCP, color, sound, 2021
Courtesy of LUX

News From Home (1976, dir. Chantal Ackerman)
89 min., DCP, color, sound, 1976
Courtesy of Janus Films

This screening is part of our newly revived "Experimental Lens" series and supported by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Special thanks to Patty Keller for her partnership in curating this program.