Chantal Akerman's American Stories opens with a long slow gaze at the New York City skyline as seen from a gently rocking boat, the soundtrack peppered with whispers from unseen immigrants. The rest of the movie is made up of their stories of life in that dark and glittering new world, told in their own voices, inspired by and partially adapted from the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Men and women, young and old, speak monologues into the camera while standing on street corners or in vacant lots. The most moving of those tales are filled with fear and loss — questions about the ethics of survival or the withering and subsequent reflowering of faith and how different that faith looks having made the transition — but sprinkled among them are exchanges of wonderfully surreal Yiddish-derived humor. First man: "You know, life is like a fountain." Second man: "How so?" First man, raising his eyebrows and shoulders: "So it's not like a fountain."
The result is casually striking, not only in how wide a net it casts over the immigration of Polish Jews to America, but also in the way it depicts a life that's inseparable from performance, a joyous, ever-beating theatricality that seems like a natural and life-affirming reaction to oppression, like blades of grass through concrete. The range of emotion is reflected in the eclectic settings, all of them outside and exposed to the elements, with bridges in the background and trucks rumbling past. An extended restaurant sequence takes place amid a cluster of tables in a field, each one with a seated patron, a tablecloth, and, hanging above it out of the night sky, a bare bulb. (In lyrical fashion, the bulb above a young woman in love is always swinging.) As Judy Bloch wrote in the program notes for the Pacific Film Archive, for these characters, "New York is a way station, a point of transit before another incarnation, so Akerman's camera magically makes the real location appear to be an artificial set." Indeed, the characters seem like an extended family who've gathered to act out skits among brick buildings that are lit with blue and red lights like the backdrop of a stage play, a mix of professional actors and amateurs joined by memories of what it was like to take root in a new land. The movie provides no subtitles for the Polish whispers that open the movie, so soft that they blend with the lap of water against the boat, but all of the monologues that follow are in English.
The existential role of comedy in the lives of struggling people is maybe never so clear as when those people tell jokes under umbrellas while lightning flashes overhead.