Chantal Akerman’s HOTEL MONTEREY was filmed in an Upper West Side transient hotel
HOTEL MONTEREY (Chantal Akerman, 1972) and LA CHAMBRE (Chantal Akerman, 1972)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, April 8, 2:30 & 7:30
Series continues through May 1
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
BAMcinématek continues its month-long tribute to the late Chantal Akerman, which began April 1 with a two-week run of the Belgian auteur’s latest, and last, film, No Home Movie, with a double feature of two extraordinary experimental works she made while living in New York City in the early 1970s. In 1972, following 1968’s Saute ma ville and 1971’s L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée, Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte took a camera to the Hotel Monterey, an Upper West Side welfare hotel, and set it up in the lobby, elevator, and various floors as it made its way upstairs and ultimately to an open window, where it ventures outside into the gray dimness of the city. The camera very rarely moves before then, instead capturing curious residents as they hang out in the lobby, look into the lens, or choose not to get into the dark elevator with the unexpected object; each shot lasts approximately one minute, and the entire film is silent. In hallways, the static shots sometimes look like photographs or paintings, the dreary, fading colors of the walls and floors adding a haunting, mysterious quality that is at times eerily reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which came out eight years later, while also evoking Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Occasionally, the camera enters a room: in one, a pregnant woman looks off in a Vermeer-like pose; in another, a well-dressed gentleman sits in a chair, looking directly into the lens; and in a third, a woman sits in a chair by a window, as if wondering what awaits her. A shot of an empty room with a striking red bed in the center can’t help but lead viewers into creating their own stories about what might have gone on there. Artfully edited by Geneviève Luciani, Hotel Monterey is a mesmerizing, and challenging, sixty-five-minute architectural journey into the physical and psychological properties of what film can show and how it is perceived.
LA CHAMBRE repeatedly scans a downtown tenement apartment, where the director alluringly waits in bed
The day after shooting Hotel Monterey, Akerman and Mangolte went downtown to SoHo, where they made La Chambre, an eleven-minute silent film influenced by Snow’s <----> (“Back and Forth”). In a cramped room in a tenement house where Akerman occasionally stayed, a camera slowly pans around the space, sometimes stuttering to remind the viewer that there is someone holding it. The camera treats every object the same, revolving past a table, a sink, a stovetop with a kettle on it, and Akerman in a white nightgown in bed. As it returns to familiar spots, you look deeper, perhaps to see if you missed anything the previous time, or to check if something changed, a natural inclination while watching a movie. However, the only element that changes is Akerman herself; each time the camera pans by her, she is in a slightly different position, fully aware she is being watched — but taking the power back as she stares directly into the camera, playing off her sexuality. She even picks up an apple and lasciviously takes a bite out of it, referencing Eve in the Garden of Eden. And then the camera suddenly goes from rotating counterclockwise to clockwise, completely shifting the visual narrative while obliterating all expectations, Akerman boldly telling everyone who is in control. It’s a thrilling eleven minutes that makes you rethink the way you experience cinema, especially in this age of social media and constant surveillance; in the early 1970s, people did not have the same opportunities to post aspects of their everyday life for all to see, and they were not used to being on camera everywhere they went, including lobbies and elevators.
Both La Chambre and Hotel Monterey, along with Saute ma ville, which is also set in small rooms, reveal Akerman’s fondness for shooting in tight, often confining spaces. For the Brussels-born director, these tableaux evoked her mother’s imprisonment in Auschwitz as well as the trapped role of women in society. “We can read the Akerman-room as a sort of artist’s installation, a reduced stage on which the filmmaker reenacts her agency as artist,” Ivone Margulies explains in “La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator,” a paper delivered at the December 2005 symposium “Images between Images” at Princeton. “Despite the affinity of this room with other video and performance images, ‘la chambre Akerman’ can be found only in her films. For this room gains its performative raison d’être from its relations to other spaces. The primary impetus for the room is its erection of a separate, rigorously demarcated space for the self. . . . The Akerman-chamber works as a display case for the conflict between artistic autonomy and the temptations of another less productive, obsessive kind of autonomy.” Throughout her career, Akerman, who was also a writer and installation artist, was nothing if not autonomous and obsessive; she actually made Hotel Monterey and La Chambre with money she had skimmed from her job at a gay porn theater in New York. All of the elements would later come together in her boundary-shattering feminist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Akerman died last October, reportedly by suicide, shortly after the death of her mother. “Chantal Akerman: Images between the Images” continues through May 1 with such other films by Akerman as Tomorrow We Move, The Meetings of Anna, From the Other Side, News from Home, and La Captive. In addition, Jeanne Dielman is at Film Forum through April 7 and Anthology Film Archives will host “Chantal Akerman x 2,” showing No Home Movie and Là-Bas April 15-21.
Japan Society’s 2016 Globus Film Series, “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film,” opens April 8 with Eizo Sugawa’s riotous, robust 1964 delight, You Can Succeed, Too. With the Tokyo Summer Olympics approaching, Towa Tourism is locked in a heated battle with Kyokuto Tourism for big travel clients. While Yamakawa (Frankie Sakai) has developed a can’t-miss plan to succeed at Towa — either marry the president’s daughter, become a union leader, or find the president’s weakness and exploit it — his friend Nakai (Tadao Takashima) does not enjoy the urban rat race and would rather settle down in the countryside. When the president, Nobuo Kataoka (Yoshitomi Masuda), returns from a trip to the United States with his daughter, Yoko (Izumi Yukimura), he puts her in charge of the foreign office as she extolls the virtues of efficient American business practices over the old-fashioned Japanese ways. Yamakawa sets his sights on Yoko despite restaurant owner Ryoko’s (Mie Nakao) obvious desire to marry him and move to the country for a more simple life, but Yoko is more attracted to the oblivious Nakai, who soon finds himself in the middle of the president’s untoward relationship with the much younger, hot-to-trot cocktail hostess Beniko (Mie Hama). It all comes to a head as a pair of American tourists (Ernest and Marjorie Richter) and a prominent U.S. executive seek the right Japanese tourism company to do business with.
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. No Home Movie primarily consists of static shots inside Nelly’s Brussels apartment as she goes about her usual business, reading, eating, preparing to go for a walk, and taking naps. Akerman sets down either a handheld camera or a smartphone and lets her mother walk in and out of the frame; Akerman very rarely moves the camera or follows her mother around, instead keeping it near doorways and windows. She’s simply capturing the natural rhythms and pace of an old woman’s life. Occasionally the two sit down together in the kitchen and eat while discussing family history and gossip, Judaism, WWII, and the Nazis. (The elder Akerman was a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz.) They also Skype each other as Chantal travels to film festivals and other places. “I want to show there is no distance in the world,” she tells her mother, who Skypes back, “You always have such ideas! Don’t you, sweetheart.” In another exchange, the daughter says, “You think I’m good for nothing!” to which the mother replies, “Not at all! You know all sorts of things others don’t know.”
In Tony Girardin’s debut feature-length documentary, Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame, friends and colleagues of Giuseppi Marinoni’s describe the Italian Canadian cycling legend as “explosive,” “authentic,” “iconoclastic,” “hard-headed,” and “cantankerous,” and the film shows him to be all that and more. Born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1937, Marinoni became a champion cyclist in his home country, then moved to Montreal in the mid-1960s after participating in races there. After he retired from racing, he turned his attention to building bicycle frames, training in Italy with Mario Rossin before opening his own business in Montreal in 1974, where he gained renown as a master craftsman. But he doesn’t necessarily like to talk about his life and career; it took the Montreal-based Girardin three years to convince Marinoni to agree to be filmed, and it’s clear that the septuagenarian is never fully comfortable being onscreen, whether building one of his coveted frames — he’s made more than thirty thousand, all by hand — or training to break the hour record for his age group, seventy-five to seventy-nine, a solo competition in which a cyclist attempts to go the farthest distance in sixty minutes. “Marinoni embodies what I love most about cycling: passion,” Girardin says at the start of the film. “It’s a culmination of life, love, and many things, but ultimately the challenge is to ride as far as is humanly possible.” Marinoni might never warm up to the camera — “You watching me is stressful!” he says to Girardin in French (he also speaks Italian but not English) — but other cyclists, promoters, and bike shop owners can’t wait to gush over how much they admire the man and his frames. Among those singing his praises are Andy Lamarre, Colette Pépin, Ken MacDonald, Julie Marceau, Federico Corneli, Marian Jago, Charle Lamarre, Marissa Plamondon-Lu, and Rossin.
