Hôtel Monterey

Chantal Akerman's first feature-length documentary is a look at the Hotel Monterey at 215 West 94th Street in Manhattan. It looks to be a Single Room Occupancy, a type of boarding house that still seems pretty obviously named. We called 'em "SROs" in ironic confusion with a hit Broadway show's "Standing Room Only." I had several friends who lived in SROs back then. They were usually filled with welfare recipients like my friends, and I always thought it was an economically inefficient way to house them. The SROs were privately owned and charged hotel rates, far more than the cost of a series of studio apartments. The SROs my friends lived in offered no services, so how the place looked depended on the roomer. The individual rooms in this movie look clean, well maintained, with decent if cheap linen and drapery typical of a lower-priced hotel in those days, a bit 1970s-gaudily patterned, but easily washed material. Perhaps the Monterey offered services.

The long sequences set in the green-brown corridors where nothing happens is what I have come to associate with Ms. Akerman's documentaries. With no soundtrack, it seems an attempt to show how low-key miserable these people are, stuck in this place like it's the Overlook Hotel. In truth, Ms. Akerman seems to have mistaken specific locations with where people live. My friends may have slept in their SROs, but they lived in New York City, or the library, or inside their heads.

This being Ms. Akerman's movie and not mine, she was free to offer her own view of life in Manhattan. I agree that it's a useful contrast to the glamorous sort of life usually offered in the movies, but just as false and ridiculous. I don't find it interesting enough to stretch out to over an hour. Rather than live in Ms. Akerman's Hotel Monterey, I'd rather live in New York City, or the library, or my head.

Hôtel Monterey (1973) was written, produced, and directed by Chantal Akerman. It's a silent film, showing long takes of nothing much in the Hotel Monterey, 915 West 94th Street, NYC. (The hotel was a residence hotel, and but it wasn't a flophouse, as some have suggested. It still exists as a two-star hotel.)

Frederick Wiseman could have made a good documentary at the Monterey. The people there weren't rich, but they weren't down and out either. They all had their stories to tell.

However, Akerman isn't interested in their stories. She's interested in giving us long takes of the small window that lets us see the elevator going up and down. Finally, she goes up to the top floor (or the roof) to show us the streets below and the ugly buildings that surround the hotel.

This movie is part of the Eclipse Criterion Collection. (Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies.)

This film will be as good on the small screen as the large screen. Hotel Monterey has a dismal rating of 6.4. I rated it 2. I know that when you give an experimental film a rating of 2, you can look like a philistine. I'll just have to risk it.

Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important and interesting female director of her era, yet she is sadly under-known here in the U.S. The range of her work is astounding, from largely experimental 'difficult' works like this, to frothy musical-comedy, and just about everything in between. Even if you don't respond to this film, you may well like other things she has done.

Hotel Monterey is an experimental silent 60 minute 'documentary' set in a cheap NY hotel. No story, just images that cross the sadness of Edward Hopper's paintings with the weirdness of David Lynch (who seems to have been influenced by this). It's like a great photo book come to life. It has a fascinating look (very grainy 16mm, with super rich colors). No question that by nature this feels dull in spots and some images are less powerful or repetitive, but its full of wonderful, disquieting moments, and it has a fascinating, hypnotic almost imperceptible build to a 'climax'. If nothing else, the film is worth it for the simple power of the moment when the camera starts to move after 30 minutes of still images.

What a great accomplishment is this silent film, made in 1972, by Chantal Akerman. I wonder if the wonderful series of tracking shots of hotel corridors leading to windows and back again influenced Antonioni (an auteur whose earlier work Akerman surely studied) when he was composing my (hardly original as such) favorite shot in all of cinema: the penultimate shot of "The Passenger", from 1975.

Reminds me of running around, exploring the vacant spaces of ferries, hotels and various older buildings while traveling with my parents as a child.