News From Home

I couldn’t help but think about these movies as I drove home from class yesterday. Especially News From Home. The everyday street scenes with the voice over reading the mother’s letters about her everyday…and imploring her daughter to write to her. The film was hypnotic, and I found it infused with a pervasive sense of melancholy. Why didn’t she just write back to her mother? How is it that our “everyday” life can intrude upon our “personal” life? Is that a paradox…our life intruding on our own life? But it can. Can we alienate ourselves by getting too wrapped up in the mundane? The everyday is "both where we become alienated and where we can realize our creativity." (The Everyday, p. 15) Akerman combined these themes of alienation and creativity very well in her film.

There are a lot of things that I would like to do, but the everyday stuff keeps getting in the way. For example, I would have posted this blog earlier, but I had to do the dishes first!