User Reviews

What's it like to live in an aging New York hotel. Most movies would weave a story into the precincts and turn the film into entertainment. Or, if more literally minded, maybe a documentary would result where denizens tell their stories to the camera. An artier approach, on the other hand, might juxtapose selected images into some kind of symbolic narrative that stimulates the imagination. This one-of-a-kind movie, however, does none of these, resulting in an approach unlike I, for one, have ever seen.

For the first half of the hour-plus, a static camera lingers on a particular hotel interior for as much as 90-seconds per scene, creating a rather disturbing sensation as we wait for the frame to change at the expected movie tempo (they don't call them "movies" for nothing). But, contrary to expectation, there is no movement, except for an occasional shadowy figure moving quickly in and out of the static frame. The camera, however, doesn't follow the figure in expected movie fashion, but instead stays fixed on the vacated part of the hotel interior. It's the vacancy of the frame that's being emphasized here, not the transient human occupants who seemingly come and go in an indistinct, anonymous manner. And since the entire film is soundless, the disorienting effect is compounded.

In a later segment, the camera begins a super-slow dolly down succeeding hotel corridors, each closely walled in by a narrowness illuminated only by hotel lighting with dim pools of light and shadow. The effect is to create a sense of claustrophobic confinement and unease. These empty corridor shots are emphasized throughout, tunneling our vision onto some kind of obscurely defined distance. The overall effect of both these main movie parts is of textures or what might be called a fabric of vacancy, confinement and impersonality, at least that's what I'm getting from the filmmakers' exotic technique.

The last part presents views from the roof (I think) in super-slow camera pans, resulting in a somewhat panoramic picture of the New York skyline, and a dehumanized one it is, that is, until the camera bends to a street scene below showing cars in motion, but too far removed to reveal real pedestrians. (I'm not sure if this final reveal needs a "spoiler alert"!) The cars too are confined, in this case by narrow city streets, suggesting an application of the hotel corridors to the outside world, as well.

A couple of frames are worth noting. One lingers on an aging, well-dressed man sitting alone in a hotel room. He's perfectly still for the entire time as if he too is part of the furnishings. It's the only time a full figure is revealed and made a subject. I assume he's the room's occupant and emblematic of the hotel as it once was. The other is a dimly lit corridor frame, blackened at the far end, until, that is, a door opens briefly, but we can't tell why. This occurs a number of times at odd intervals for no apparent reason. In most contexts, such mysterious events would be spooky. Here, the openings and closings are more curious than spooky, as if the neighbors down the hall are beyond our reach.

All in all, I'm not sure what to say about the film or its odd technique. Neither are easy ones to like, but then I don't think the movie was made to please. My guess is that the object is to provoke in an odd way an experience of what living in the hotel is like for its apparently lonely residents. The sequence of frames does follow a kind of spatial narrative as we transition from lobby to roof, even if it is at glacial speed. The effect can also be rather hypnotic as I, for one, began to study those mundane little details of walls, hallways, rooms, ordinarily overlooked in everyday life. In that sense, the technique opens up a fresh look at a common background dimension.

No, it's not a film for everyone, and I have no idea where it would be shown except maybe at film schools. Nonetheless, I think TCM should be congratulated for making such film curiosities available to a broader audience who stand to be provoked by the experience. I know I was.

Funny to thing spoilers would actually spoil a modern silent movie that has no action, no plot. The only suspense is what is coming next.

In this film the viewer gets to watch dried old paint peel. The trick to enjoying a viewing of this film is to dispense with any expectations and observe each scene with some purpose. Such as counting the number of people that get off the elevator compared to the number that get on. Or how many times the elevator door opens. Find something in each scene that needs adjustment such as straightening the orange bed spread. Make your own sound effects and imagine what any dialogue might be but do it out loud. Try to make the nicely dressed man in the chair in his room to chuckle with his smile.

No, I am not going to pretend I am an elite snob who thinks this film is some fantastic cinematic achievement. But I do see value for film students and buffs. When the pregnant woman does not move I was creeped out.

The most interesting thing to me was studying the composition and camera placement for each exciting scene of nothing much at all. Final panoramic shot from the roof just might be worth watching the whole film but only maybe.

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.