Maxime Fauconnier

Maxime Fauconnier
New York, New York bis, 2025
Film installation, 16:9, color, stereo sound, 16'00", looped, site-specific dimensions. Sound design by Romain Waterlot.

In “News from Home” (1976), Chantal Akerman creates a striking portrait of exile, longing, and urban solitude. Throughout the film, her voice reads letters from her mother — desperate, tender, mundane — floating above images of 1970s New York. This one-sided correspondence collides with the vast, indifferent sprawl of Manhattan.

It is in the final sequence, filmed one morning from the stern of the Staten Island Ferry, that everything crystallizes into silence. The camera remains fixed as the boat moves away from Battery Park. Slowly, Manhattan fades, and the film dissolves into fog and memory. This long, meditative shot serves as Akerman’s quiet farewell — not only to New York, where she would no longer live, but perhaps also to a version of herself.

With “New York, New York bis” (2025)¹, Maxime Fauconnier reverses Akerman’s cinematic gesture by filming, nearly fifty years later, from the bow of the same ferry. Though adopting a similar framing, the sequence — shot at dusk during a stormy December — traces the opposite trajectory. As we approach New York, it emerges as a roaring, unstoppable machine, charged with possibility.

For Fauconnier, New York is the place of post-adolescent emancipation: the space where he faced both the violence and beauty of urban life — a promised place where one can leave fear behind. Through a long handheld shot, “New York, New York bis” stages a free gesture, an active confrontation, a leap into the unknown.

¹ The title “New York, New York bis” is a nod to a 1984 short film of the same name by Akerman, now considered lost.