Made in 1972 in the wake of Vietnam, Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey prowls the warm sickly halls of an old New York flophouse á la search-and-destroy. The place must have looked like cold storage at the time, but today it appears almost luxurious - a relic from an era when the poor could still afford a room from the small-time slum operator. By the 1980s, hotels such as the Monterey fell to the liberalization clearances fueling the NYC bankruptcy fire sale, like the old diners that gave your Ma a job for life and the palaces of the Deuce. Who'd have thought that that hoary nemesis of American industry, the mustachioed Evil Landlord, would have won out in the end? In 1971 the gold standard was abandoned, courtesy of Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle.
Look at where Miss Akerman's old hotel once stood, then you will see why people believe - poor people, black people, sickened believers - that some pathogen has been loosed by scientists or that the old inhabitants were turned into monster food. Such conspiracies metaphorize the Neo-Medieval policies of the Rentier class, using the lamppost flyer and pulp plotting particular to a desperate but wise underworld of inner-city DPs. Speculative power, phantom liquidity, the gnostic mythos of finance and brute brokerage force - an overpowering propaganda that convinces you to submit your own failure, to give them the last thing you are permitted to own. "We have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime." (Robert Fitch)
Hotel Monterey is silent on soundtrack but it is not really a silent film. Rents accumulate without noise; elevator doors bellow like waxless accordion keys - these things are rendered mute because Akerman is interested in surfaces and not in guessing about a psychology of loneliness. The first shot shows a strangely-placed small mirror in the foyer which reflects the front desk; soon, a hatted figure crosses the frame, right out of a Magritte. It seems to be in late evening in the Monterey, but this may be as deceptive as the hours of a casino. Ackerman is a scientist of the modification of time and the hydra-headed social contract. City housing is a political many, a multiplicity of actions public and private, acted out per square foot in magazine spreads, municipal code and law, and vacant skyscraper floors. The halls and doors of this little hotel conceal a grand machine: the basement is the menial heart, near the end of the film, under decades of express feet. Off Bowery, the year of the pig draws to a close.
The alienation of big cities is best captured by foreigners, who easily perceive the energetic lines of power in billboards and off-ramps, marble faces flashing for a siren moment in a crowd - especially port cities like New York. The late Miss Akerman made the slowest, most thrilling films. She ends this one with a narcotic pan over the rooftops, while the sequel, News from Home (1977), follows the different immigrant zones of Hell's Kitchen at a crawl by car. For all her haunts, Akerman was a materialist with a big nosey heart. Hotel Monterey was made a year prior to the coup in Chile, with Babette Mangolte on camera, who also shot Jeanne Dielman... The Monterey itself is now a Days' Inn franchise. Rooms are comparatively affordable, from $69 a night.
United Fruit, sponsor of coups and mass killings all over the Americas, merged with United Brands in 1970. In the hands of avant corporate raider Eli Black, it spun out into insolvency and fraud. Black jumped from his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in 1975. It would have taken him about an hour to walk to the Monterey or twenty minutes by subway.
Look at where Miss Akerman's old hotel once stood, then you will see why people believe - poor people, black people, sickened believers - that some pathogen has been loosed by scientists or that the old inhabitants were turned into monster food. Such conspiracies metaphorize the Neo-Medieval policies of the Rentier class, using the lamppost flyer and pulp plotting particular to a desperate but wise underworld of inner-city DPs. Speculative power, phantom liquidity, the gnostic mythos of finance and brute brokerage force - an overpowering propaganda that convinces you to submit your own failure, to give them the last thing you are permitted to own. "We have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime." (Robert Fitch)
Hotel Monterey is silent on soundtrack but it is not really a silent film. Rents accumulate without noise; elevator doors bellow like waxless accordion keys - these things are rendered mute because Akerman is interested in surfaces and not in guessing about a psychology of loneliness. The first shot shows a strangely-placed small mirror in the foyer which reflects the front desk; soon, a hatted figure crosses the frame, right out of a Magritte. It seems to be in late evening in the Monterey, but this may be as deceptive as the hours of a casino. Ackerman is a scientist of the modification of time and the hydra-headed social contract. City housing is a political many, a multiplicity of actions public and private, acted out per square foot in magazine spreads, municipal code and law, and vacant skyscraper floors. The halls and doors of this little hotel conceal a grand machine: the basement is the menial heart, near the end of the film, under decades of express feet. Off Bowery, the year of the pig draws to a close.
The alienation of big cities is best captured by foreigners, who easily perceive the energetic lines of power in billboards and off-ramps, marble faces flashing for a siren moment in a crowd - especially port cities like New York. The late Miss Akerman made the slowest, most thrilling films. She ends this one with a narcotic pan over the rooftops, while the sequel, News from Home (1977), follows the different immigrant zones of Hell's Kitchen at a crawl by car. For all her haunts, Akerman was a materialist with a big nosey heart. Hotel Monterey was made a year prior to the coup in Chile, with Babette Mangolte on camera, who also shot Jeanne Dielman... The Monterey itself is now a Days' Inn franchise. Rooms are comparatively affordable, from $69 a night.
United Fruit, sponsor of coups and mass killings all over the Americas, merged with United Brands in 1970. In the hands of avant corporate raider Eli Black, it spun out into insolvency and fraud. Black jumped from his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in 1975. It would have taken him about an hour to walk to the Monterey or twenty minutes by subway.