Hotel Monterey

Akerman’s debut feature silently captures a mesmeric night of down-at-heel accommodation in 70s Manhattan.

Shot over the course of an evening in an Upper West Side welfare hotel where the director had occasionally stayed, Chantal Akerman’s first foray into true durational filmmaking is a striking start to a singular career. Without narration, the camera takes in the various rooms and levels of the establishment, beginning in the lobby and ending on the roof. Captured through mostly static shots and slow pans, scenes of quiet corridors are occasionally disrupted by residents as they either attempt to navigate the camera’s intrusion into their private space or ignore it wholly. As time slowly passes, the viewer is invited to pay attention to the small details: a wall colour; a patron’s bow tie; a reflection in the mirror.

After moving to New York in the early 1970s, Akerman sought out cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who would become a frequent collaborator on key films including 1975’s Jeanne Dielman. Significantly, she introduced Akerman to a coterie of avant-garde artists and experimental filmmakers of the time, including Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer (Mangolte also shot a number of the films in MIFF 2024’s Yvonne Rainer: Autobiographical Fictions retrospective). Hotel Monterey, their first collaboration, is a radical and hypnotic exercise in observation.

“The film is a remarkable feat, each Hopper-esque composition and perfectly timed edit deepening a sense of ominous alienation that feels like the antithesis of celebratory, silent-era city symphonies.” – Slant

2K Restoration. Restored in 2013 by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK), under supervision of Chantal Akerman, with the support of the Fonds Baillet Latour. 

​This film screens with Le 15/8.