The Cinematheque

“Shot silently and brilliantly by Babette Mangolte … [Hotel Monterey] reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Chantal Akerman’s formative stint in New York (1971–73) culminated in the structuralist masterpiece Hotel Monterey, her first long-form experiment in duration and visual strategy. Shot over 15 hours with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who introduced Akerman to the work of Michael Snow, an acknowledged influence, the film travels from lobby to rooftop, from night into day, in a succession of silent, immaculately framed shots that linger in the common areas, crowded elevators, dim corridors, and mostly vacant rooms of a run-down SRO hotel in the Upper West Side. The work builds upon Akerman and Mangolte’s first collaboration La chambre, another study in spatial choreography (also made under the spell of Snow), in which a slow 360-degree pan captures the inventory of a Soho apartment and the desultory figure reposed within it (Akerman herself). Preceded by Saute ma ville, Akerman’s 1968 debut, an apocalyptic sendup of a woman’s ​“place in the kitchen,” made when the artist was 18.

Saute ma ville
Belgium 1968
Chantal Akerman
13 min. DCP No dialogue

La chambre
USA/​Belgium 1972
Chantal Akerman
11 min. DCP Silent

Hotel Monterey
USA/​Belgium 1972
Chantal Akerman
62 min. DCP Silent