HOTEL MONTEREY (Babette Mangolte)

Babette Mangolte on HOTEL MONTEREY preceded by LA CHAMBRE | TIFF 2019 (YouTube) 58'
(TIFF) 11 nov 2019

"Cinematographer Babette Mangolte, a longtime friend and collaborator of Chantal Akerman’s, joins us to present two of their earliest films together, consider the influence of the New York structural-film movement on Akerman’s work, and reflect on the filmmaker’s legacy

Guest: Babette Mangolte

Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker and photographer based in New York. Her most recent solo shows include I = Eye at Kunsthalle Wien and Spaces to SEE at Rochechouart Musée d'Art Contemporain. She is currently completing a feature film and her next project is a book about photography.

La Chambre (Chantal Akerman) BELGIUM, USA | 1972 | Silent 11 minutes

A horizontal pendant to Hôtel Monterey's stacked verticality, La Chambre describes a continuous, 360-degree pan around Akerman's Spring Street apartment, depicting the filmmaker reclining on a bed like an odalisque, gazing at the camera. A nod to Michael Snow's Standard Time, this short is a distillation of some of Akerman's recurring themes and motifs, including self-portraiture, domestic still lifes awash in natural light, and her propensity for Chaplinesque visual gags.

Hôtel Monterey (Chantal Akerman) BELGIUM, USA | 1972 | Silent 65 minutes

RESTORED DIGITAL PRESENTATION! Much indebted to Akerman's encounter with Michael Snow's dizzying, post-human avant-garde masterpiece La Région centrale, Hôtel Monterey adopts a vertical grid schema to progressively portray, in meticulously staged compositions and unnerving, zoom-like movements, a Broadway residential hotel from the ground floor up, as night falls and morning ascends upon Manhattan. Working with a 16mm camera borrowed from Yvonne Rainer (and with money Akerman saved up from working as a box-office attendant at a porn cinema), the filmmaker and her DP Babette Mangolte move progressively from reception to roof, elevators to rooms, traversing each floor and recording the transient life inside the hotel and the building's austere, shabby period decor. Hypnotic, mysterious, its Egglestonian colours and quasi-abstract compositions setting off its disquieting silence, Hôtel Monterey flirts with fiction as much as with seriality, and evinces a curiosity for how humans exist as much as for the patterns and spaces they inhabit."