Hotel Monterey

It's a documentary of a cheap New York hotel where marginalized residents live. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman walks around the hotel during one night with her camera encountering various people. This is completely silent. As an experimental film, it's better than security camera footage. I'm not sure how people felt sitting through this for an hour in a theater. I saw it at home on TCM with other media going on around me. I doubt that I'm getting the same experience. By the time the old man is sitting staring at the camera for an extended time, I had to fast forward the movie at double speed.

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.

Clearly influenced by Warhol Zeitgeist (remember it's 1972), Chantal Ackerman's Hotel Monterey is a study in empty headed documentary, eschewing key elements in favor of some provocatively mundane images and scenes that are laboriously drawn on but say next to nothing beyond the obvious. How Akerman, who had made nothing but shorts up to this point, deemed this worth cutting upward to an hour is mystifying since it's clear it is going nowhere after fifteen. But plod on she does.

Located in lower Manhattan the dark semi polished Monterey is populated by dignified if somewhat down at the heels men and women. Tidy little old ladies throw butts on the floor while glum slow moving gentlemen eye the camera suspiciously as they meet in the halls and the elevator. Some folks pose and smile others peer through a crack of the door betrayed by a shaft of light. Welcome to the Hotel Monterey.

Ackerman strives for minimalism over realism with fractured imagery and long tedious shots and slow zooms of the bleak setting omitting sound and titles. No narration, no interviews, no music score and most importantly no ambient sound which amputates both mood and impact. She simply moves about the hotel filming surface and offering no depth or insight. This may have well been her intention but I see it as a missed opportunity at a more substantive documentary that would have been more informative and interesting by involving other senses instead of self indulgent MOS camera work of tawdry hallways that are not allowed to be heard. By the time you check out of Hotel Monterey you'll probably need a good night's sleep.

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.