& Hotel Monterey (Akerman, 1972)
ICA Cinema, 7.30pm
Chicago Reader review of Hotel Monterey:
This early experimental feature, slightly longer than an hour, by Chantal Akerman (1972), shot silently and brilliantly by Babette Mangolte, explores the corridors, lobby, elevators, and rooms of a cheap New York hotel. Occasionally the rooms' solitary occupants are glimpsed, but this only increases the overall atmosphere of eerie isolation and quiet, and reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work. Saute ma ville!--Akerman's first film, made when she was still a teenager--is a hilarious and appropriately claustrophobic forerunner of [her movie] Jeanne Dielman, starring Akerman herself as a neurotic individual who creates apocalyptic havoc in her own kitchen. An illuminating and luminous program, not to be missed.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is the ICA introduction to tonight's screening: A Nos Amours film club commence a complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman's entire cinematic oeuvre at the ICA, beginning with Akerman's first three films, including the beguiling, beautiful, rigorous Hotel Monterey, and the film that prefigures Jeanne Dielman, Saute ma Ville.
Programme
Saute ma Ville (1968)
L'Enfant Aime (1971)
Hotel Monterey (1972)
Akerman's work has consistently offered a playful and beguiling critique of cinema. Over a vast and hugely varied body of work, Akerman has brilliantly energised the avant-garde project, personalising and humanising the dead spaces created by consumerism and the habitual lives that we inhabit
Akerman's cinema goes far beyond popular notions of image making, beyond modernist and feminist strategies, in pursuit of her obsession with borders, with the tension between documentary and fiction, between her mother and herself, between chaos and control, cinema and history.
Screenings will be in original formats wherever possible, and will include a number of recent restorations.
A Nos Amours intends to publish a catalogue raisonné to coincide with the climax of the run in 2015, and to convene a conference in conjunction with CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media), University of Westminster. The full programme will be announced shortly.
Here (and above) is an extract from Hotel Monterey.
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