ABSTRACT
Before coming to encompass the many filmmakers and theorists discussed in the preceding chapters, this book was born in relation to Jonas Mekas's Walden and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, and the twofold enquiry to which they gave rise. It was clear, in both cases, that the films were very much and very openly about displacement, but that the reflections they offered went beyond nostalgia, or geography, or politics, or even the experience of time. They were not, in other words, primarily focused on a perceived lack of belonging in any physical, sociological or political sense, but appeared instead to articulate a peculiar kind of perceptual shift. This shift seemed profoundly related to vision: it was as if the displacement had triggered a new way of seeing that bordered on invisibility; the image was both forcefully there and utterly indecipherable, commanding the viewer's unwavering gaze yet refusing to yield any concrete, speakable, information. At the same time, both films seemed to posit this shift in relation to language: Mekas's reluctance to speak or write his own words, his emphasis on silence, tacitly commented on the elusiveness of his images and stood as a kind of sentimental parallel to Akerman's structural erasure of both the words of Brussels and the sights of New York.
