Hotel Monterey

MOVIE #1,529 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.11.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM This is shy of an hour long, but it is still widely considered Akerman’s first feature-length film. It is a silent movie consisting of various, mostly static shots in and around the Hotel Monterey on the Upper West Side (the building became a Day’s Inn in 2008 and is currently called the Night Hotel Broadway). Shots are meticulously staged to create visual patterns and optical illusions as the film slowly explores several different parts of the hotel, ranging from austere and claustrophobic basement corridors to hotel rooms—some occupied, some not—to skylines of neighboring building roofs and water towers shot from the rooftop.

At the 40-minute mark, the camera moves for the first time, slowly, up and down and hallway: at first it’s night and then it’s day, and we land on a window almost seven minutes later, revealing an impposibly gray exterior. Here it is sped up over 1,000%...

We eventually move fully outside and things get progressively less monochromatic. The proceedings conclude with a skyward shot and when we turn back to the city at large, there's a vibrance, a little bit at least.

There’s something meditative about this document. These shots are at once (obviously) boring and, through their composition and dissemination, compelling. Was the absence of sound a pragmatic choice or an artistic one, and does it matter? This is classified most often as a documentary, but I’m not sure how it functions as such. I feel like it’s much more accurately described as an experimental work. Perhaps, this is semantics but I feel like the designation goes a long way in terms of properly appreciating it.

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Hotel Monterey is a 1973 American silent documentary film directed by Chantal Akerman. It is Akerman's first feature film. It was released on September 11, 1973.