Hotel Monterey

Hotel Monterey (1972)

*** (out of 4)

I'll admit that I had never heard of this Belgium film before it showed up on the wee hours of the morning on Turner Classic Movies. Even the plot description on my cable service was blank, which is just about right because there's very little "story" in this fascinating documentary. For 63-minutes director Akerman films various aspects of a New York hotel. We get footage of some of the people staying there. Other footage of the hallways as well as a few looks at the rooms there. You might wonder how on Earth any of this is entertaining and half way through the film I started to ask myself why I was so drawn into what I was watching considering there wasn't really anything to watch. There's no even anything to listen to as the film was shot silent so there's no dialogue, no score, nothing. I think what makes the film so entertaining is that you normally watch a movie and wait for the next thing to happen. This happens over and over until the movie is over yet that's not what happens here because you see a single image for fifteen to ninety-seconds and then it just goes to another random image. I think this works because while you're watching and studying one of these images your brain is pretty much preparing you for "what's going to happen next" but when that next thing happens your brain pretty much has to start over with studying the image and again going into the "what's going to happen" mode. I thought the film was extremely entertaining, although I'm sure most are going to grow bored within a matter of minutes. If someone did turn this off after a few minutes I can't say I'd blame them as this isn't a mass appeal movie. I think the ones I'd recommend this to the most are fans of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING because it's clear this movie was a major influence on that 1980 masterpiece. There are several tracking shots of the camera going down the halls and around corners, which of course was a major aspect of the Kubrick film. There's also a few shots of the elevators that will remind people of the Kubrick film and just check out how some of the people are shot and again you'll think of THE SHINING.

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.

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.

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.