American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989) User Reviews

it's sub-title: Family and Philosophy, almost tells all

[Quinoa1984 · 8/10 · 20 April 2006]

This is the first film I've seen by Chantal Ackerman, and I'm mixed as to see more of her films. I see so much here, even as I have personal criticisms of certain things in her style. I wondered when the film would end at times (not knowing the running time seeing it), and its shifting between rye, sly Jewish jokes and sad tales of Jews escaping the horrors (or not) of holocaust and the working-class immigrant's life, is very unexpected. But then again, the film has the feel of being a hybrid of documentary and fiction, with actors (there's character Kirk Baltz somewhere in there) and perhaps non-actors or really off-off Broadway people. As I was told, this is in the tradition of black-box theater, in particular Jewish ones, and its filmed with an invariable European feel and mood by Ackerman. Certain jokes were very amusing (there's even one that was featured in Coming to America!), and others that reminded me of the 'it's not funny but hmm' feeling of those in Jarmusch films.

The stories told are very long, and the shot-lengths go neck-and-neck in competition with other art-house filmmakers to be some of the longer ones in cinematic memory. Sometimes there is movement to the film, as in the brief, interesting conversations with the older characters. And there is some nice, understated dialog in the 'restaurant' scenes. It's really for a specific audience, and is unique for better or worse, the kind of underground movie that has a lot to ponder about the Jewish-American (and European, mostly Polish, Jewish) experience. Some of the stories, indeed, are rather horrific in scope, while others question what life is living in the less-classy side of the city of New York. And the film is given not only a beautiful opening image of the city from a small boat, but a brilliant end scene with an old man in the middle of a field, recanting a very sweet story. Hard to find (watched it in a class), and was glad to watch, once, as a good introduction to Ackerman.

Conviviality and shadow

[philosopherjack · 11 October 2018]

The title of Chantal Akerman's Histoires d'Amerique: Food, Family and Philosophy points at the film's duality - a promise of conviviality, served up by an outsider. The film isn't conventionally warm - the camera serves throughout as a fixed, direct spectator - but Akerman's humanism prevents it from morbidity or oppressiveness. For the most part, the film consists of direct-to-camera English-language testimonies from American Jews: they're not identified by name or period, but appear to belong at least primarily to the 40s and 50s, to lives recently brutalized by relatives lost in the camps or otherwise separated by exile, and before that by progroms and upheavals: even when the stories are primarily accounts of happiness and success, they always incorporate lurking shadow, the impossibility of ever traveling entirely into the light. Akerman intersperses these with humour of the "the food here is terrible and such small portions" variety - the often-mournful quality of the punchlines all the more plaintive for the surrounding figurative darkness. Not just that: Akerman frames her participants (actors doesn't seem like the right word somehow) against urban nightscapes, only yielding to hazy daylight in the final scenes, as the film starts to play with its own artifice, bringing its people together and reshuffling their assigned identities. For the most part though, it's suffused in profound loneliness even as it illustrates the power of community - it examines memory both in its glory and its burden. One of the closing testimonies, by a young man preparing to kill himself, is additionally chilling now for knowing Akerman's own life ended after a last film - No Home Movie - which while being closely aligned to this one, sheds its elaborations and mannerisms. It gives Histoires d'Amerique an eerie quality of premonition, as if to finally confirm its recurring sense of how events may become hopeless, even if not entirely serious.