Excerpts from journal entries, novels, and other texts are read throughout the documentary. Van Elmbt and Duverdier are clearly well-versed in the works that were created on the grounds, or by former residents, and do their best to imbue their film with the same timeless cool that pulses through them. It’s in exploring the iconography of the hotel that the documentary shines the brightest.
While the hotel itself will be marked using its past residents to lure people to spend $300 a night, these small details of its rich past are apparently not worth preserving. Touring the section in the midst of renovation Willis shows the filmmakers a wall he painted blue and the toothbrush holder that once held Joplin’s toothbrush, all set to be demolished. Now living in a cramped studio, Willis lost a hallway, kitchen, and bathroom. What starts out as the story of how Willis snagged a residency in one of the rooms once occupied by Janis Joplin (after he produced a Mariah Carey music video in the hotel), ends with a tour of what he gave up in his settlement to remain a resident. The one interview in “Dreaming Walls” that manages to successfully straddle the line between overwhelming nostalgia and the cost of gentrification comes from multimedia artist Steve Willis. Within the history of the Chelsea is a larger story to be told about both the gentrification of the building and of the art world. They also discuss the irony of rich people who moved into the hotel in the 2000s choosing to live the “bohemian” lifestyle they were forced to live by circumstance, in turn helping the owners slowly price out longtime residents. They reminisce about how their mother took refuge in the hotel because former manager Stanley Bard didn’t ask for a deposit or make them sign a lease. In the foreword to the book Hotel Chelsea: Living in the Last Bohemian Haven by Colin Miller and Ray Mock, former child residents and sisters Gaby Hoffmann and Alex Auder have a clear-eyed conversation of growing up in the hotel in all its majesty and its squalor. The same goes for the implications of what it means for the city, that a historic monument of such prominence as the Hotel Chelsea has been turned into yet another boutique hotel. and to their dreams,” which is fitting because the filmmakers are more invested in the mythic qualities of its past than in interrogating the reality of gentrification.
The film is dedicated to “all those who once stayed at the Chelsea. The residents who have resisted the renovations are framed with wonder and awe, while those who have agreed to settlements are painted in a much more negative light. And there is a much greater focus on the myth that will be demolished by renovation, without much of an exploration into the reality of the squalor residents were living in. There is a clear bias here towards the past bohemia the hotel represents. But the reality of living within this decay is always just out of frame. Beautifully photographed by cinematographers Joachim Philippe and Virginie Surdej, the way the film stalks the hallways, lingering on the cracks and other imperfections that will soon be smoothed away, is reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s 1973 documentary “Hotel Monterey.” There is a certain undeniable beauty in this decay, an aesthetic made to be captured on film. Part a reverential history of the hotel, part a look at the complex situation for the remaining residents within the hotel during the drawn out renovation process, van Elmbt and Duverdier’s film is noticeably in love with the mythology and living history of the place. If only it weren’t as beguiled by the ghosts, past and present, that still haunt the hotel itself. Amélie van Elmbt & Maya Duverdier’s lyrical documentary “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel” is an elegy for the hotel’s past and a final look at the last of the residents who still reside within its walls.
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