Research in Hotel Monterey’s Inspiration

Director – Chantal Akerman,

Cinematographer – Babette Mangolte

Anthology Film Archives

Structuralist Cinema/Film

Andy Warhol’s Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serene_Velocity

Michael Snow’s Wavelength and La Région Centrale

While she was in New York

The initial idea was to try to shoot what happens at night in the hotel.

Mangolte lived in a hotel $35 a week rent, mostly for transients and those on welfare. Hotel Monterey reminded her of her experience.

Chantal wanted to show the passivity of those living in the hotel, as much about the people using the space, an investigation of those living there, people without security and a safety net.

Was shot in one night, ends with the new day on the roof.

About the people using the space.

Akerman’s approach to structuralist cinema (through long takes and a focus on the pure geometry of a shots content) retained a sense of inferable narrative, the perspective of the building and its occupants

Narrative expressed through Structuralism/Formalism

In the second of her 1972 experiments, Akerman again wanted to draw viewers’ eyes to elements in the frame that they might not otherwise have considered. Similarly focused on architecture and interior spaces, Hotel Monterey is grander in scope than La chambre. Through a succession of elegantly composed, silent shots—some tracking, some static—Akerman transforms a run-down Upper West Side single-room-occupancy hotel (where she had sometimes spent nights with a friend) into a site of contemplation and unconventional beauty. There was barely any planning: Akerman knew only that she would start filming on the hotel’s main floor and end at the top, and that she wanted to emerge from dark into light, night into day. The shoot lasted one night, approximately fifteen straight hours, during which Akerman and Mangolte would put the camera down wherever it felt right and roll until Akerman’s gut told her to stop. Akerman later explained that “the shots are exactly as long as I had the feeling of them inside myself”; about the overall conception, she said, “I want people to lose themselves in the frame and at the same time to be truly confronting the space.” The result is minimalist yet rich: the viewer, wandering these mostly vacant hallways, elevators, and bedrooms, grows hyperaware of her or his own physical presence. A hotel is a place meant to be occupied, yet this one is largely drained of visible people, so it often seems like a way station on the road to some netherworld.

At a little more than an hour in length, Hotel Monterey was Akerman’s first sustained experiment in duration. Her interest in making the viewer engage with the passage of time, as well as the boundaries of space, would fuel the rest of her films in the 1970s, including her next New York work, 1976’s News from Home. (In 1973, Akerman had begun another New York film, Hanging Out Yonkers, intended as a portrait of that Hudson River city, to be accompanied by a soundtrack of local children’s voices, but it was never completed because of money and postproduction difficulties.) Though it wasn’t shot (with funding from French television) until after she had moved back to Brussels and made two feature films there—1975’s Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman—News from Home has its origins in her stay in New York: the impetus for this exploration of physical and emotional dislocation was the series of letters her mother sent her while she was abroad.

Michael Koresky
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1351-eclipse-series-19-chantal-akerman-in-the-seventies

In 1972, Chantal Akerman and her cinematographer Babette Mangolte spent a night filming a single-room-occupancy hotel in Manhattan, constructing an hour-long film named for its setting, Hotel Monterey. Long, mostly static shots gaze dispassionately at the lobby, the elevator doors opening and closing, the dingy ochre hallways, the small rooms, tiled bathrooms, fire escapes, windows. People appear, sometimes as reflections in mirrors, sometimes passing in front of the camera, sometimes sitting motionless, looking stranded in space and time the way people do in Edward Hopper’s paintings. To some viewers, Hopper’s pictures suggest stories—generally in a noir vein—but to me they evoke people realizing their stories are “all used up” (to quote Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil), that they will never move and nothing will change. The same feeling suffuses the formalist experiment Hotel Monterey. The film is silent, which adds to the hushed, spellbound mood of wee-hours melancholia. Some images are dark and murky, others are saturated with color, like the startling vision of a vermillion bed framed by autumn-hued drapes in a narrow empty room with walls painted robin’s-egg-blue. There are also glimpses into messy rooms with unmade beds. This is not a hotel where people are passing through, traveling or vacationing, but a place where people are hanging on, going nowhere, in the lowest rung of shelter.

Because there are no recurring characters in the frame, no narrative to follow, the viewer becomes acutely aware of the camera itself. Watching the movie, you feel yourself as a presence in these spaces, a ghost haunting the hallways and rooms. Many shots have no windows or clocks, but it feels like night because of the quiet and the harsh glare of artificial light. As Mangolte said in a 2016 Village Voice interview, about the films she and Akerman made in New York: “Night was very important—night is where the lonely people are.”

Imogen Sara Smith
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6679-hotel-noir

“ I saw it in New York, when I was 21, thanks to Babette Mangolte, who brought me into a world I hadn’t known about, a world at the time very small, very covert. The sensory experience I underwent was extraordinarily powerful and physical. It was a revelation for me, that you could make a film without telling a story. And yet the tracking shots of <——–> (Back and Forth, 1969) in the classroom, with movements that are purely spatial while nothing is happening, produce a state of suspense as tense as anything in Hitchcock. I learned from them that a camera movement, just a movement of the camera, could trigger an emotional response as strong as from any narrative.”

Chantal Akerman on La région centrale (1971)

… Where was the Hotel Monterey?

It was on 96th Street and Broadway, I think. It’s been destroyed.

What was your relationship to the hotel?

I met a Japanese guy who was living there. And sometimes when I didn’t know where to sleep, I slept on the sofa in one of his two rooms. I was fascinated because it was a welfare hotel, with many old people living there. 

Many of your films from the 1970s, with the exception of News From Home, are defined by rooms. What so fascinated you about these very small, intimate spaces?

Closed spaces. I think if you see the film I did in Tel Aviv, Là-bas (2006), you will understand that, in a way, the room is a protection, but it’s also a jail. And as a child of the second generation, which means that my mom was in the camps, I perpetuate the jail thing. I would always put myself in a jail, but I always have a little doorway that I break, and then I make movies! But in a way, I’m in a kind of strange [situation]: always liking my jail, loving my jail, and hating it, and fighting against it, but then, when it’s getting too close to freedom, I’m afraid, [and go back] to my jail. 

That’s a kind of psychoanalytic explanation, but also in terms of movies, what I like is the walls, those lines. The way I shoot, I always put the camera at my height, and then I do it straightforward. It has the strength of an abstract image and of a concrete image. That’s very much the case in Hotel Monterey. If you see those corridors, they are lines, but there is also a corridor, and suddenly you forget it’s a corridor, it’s only lines, and color, and material. That’s why I’m also fascinated by shooting inside—doors, lights, corridors. You have immediately a frame.

After we see so many corridors in Hotel Monterey, there are moments when we see just a tiny bit of window, from which we can see a microscopic car below.

Yes, very minimal. And it’s like a big event. It’s more important than a car crash.

Another big event is the grand finale: the view of the Hudson River.

It gives an effect. When you see all those films with many big effects, they need to make more and more and more to give you any kind of impression. But me, with almost nothing, I can give you that impression.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/her-brilliant-decade-20100119

Hauntology and the theme of dislocation