Saturday, April 28, 2012

Lonely Hearts Hotel

Hotel Monterey (1972) - Akerman hotel monterey 2 hotel monterey 4 hotel monterey 5 hotel monterey 6 hotel monterey 7 Interesting. It starts on the lobby level with the shots of (mostly elderly) patrons coming and going. Then it's from inside the elevator going up and down, its door occasionally opening up to reveal ill lit, narrow, empty hallways. The hotel patrons disappear after ten fifteen minutes and it's kind of a slog with endless static/tracking shots of corridors in grainy 16mm. This 1 hour silent tableaux, documented entirely inside the New York hotel, evokes (as with Akerman's other NY films) the same loneliness and longing as Ed Hopper paintings or Robert Frank's America photographs. It's a rare time capsule of the 70s New York from an outsider's perspective. I liked it a lot.

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