‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Film Review: Doc Celebrates NYC’s Legendary Residence
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In Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s mesmerizing and immersive documentary about the Chelsea Hotel, “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” the filmmakers pay tribute to the last bastion of New York bohemianism and breathe memory into the walls of this iconic building; walls that would speak volumes if they could talk.
The Chelsea Hotel has long loomed large in our collective cultural consciousness, demonstrated in a snippet of archival footage, with which the film opens, of a young Patti Smith describing how the hotel was the first place she landed in New York (thanks to one of the hotel’s most famous residents, Dylan Thomas), declaring “I always wanted to be where the big guys were.”
To underscore the point about the “big guys” that lived within those walls, Duverdier and van Elmbt utilize a hypnotic stylistic motif throughout the film, projecting images of the celebrities who spent time at the Chelsea onto the walls, almost anthropomorphizing the ghosts, or at least the spirits, imprinted on this space: Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, etc.
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“Dreaming Walls” espouses Leonard Cohen’s memorable refrain, “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,” the past and present bleeding together, the filmmakers seamlessly blending archival footage with contemporary cinematography. But this film is not about the celebrities who lived, died, and stayed within these walls, but rather the non-famous residents, the ones who still live there, living a true artist’s life, holding the memories. They have stayed during the years-long renovation to update and renovate the hotel, a process that has upended their lives in the process, either out of a stubborn impulse to fight for their space and history or a lack of anywhere else to go.
The camera beckons us inside these scaffolded walls, walls that breathe, dream, remember and disintegrate. Floating through the lobby, pushing down corridors, effortlessly, ghostlike, we follow our tour guide of sorts, Merle Lister-Levine, an elderly choreographer and dancer. She moves about the space with her walker, visiting friends like sculptor Skye Ferrante, who renders her face in wire, or Zoe Serac Pappas and Nicholas Pappas, who have her over for dinner and lively debate about the state of the renovations and the future of the Chelsea.
Merle trains her body on the famed stairs, marching up and down, or doing jumping jacks at the railing. She dances in front of a fan and later guides a dancer through a routine on the stairs, the footage intercut with the same dance piece from years before. She chats up a construction worker about the building’s ghosts before they share a quick mambo in front of a window.
The documentary captures the hotel in a liminal moment, a space of transition, looking back at its history while also capturing this specific time as the artists in residence grow older among their art. There’s a performance art quality to “Dreaming Walls;” in the experimental projection sequences, the meandering walks and looks around the space, and in the tone of surreality that suffuses the work.
But it’s also performance art in the way that it simply observes these artists at work in their home — Merle dancing, Skye sketching, the late photographer Bettina Grossman (at the time the hotel’s oldest resident) peering over her balcony and rifling through her archive. Their lives here are an art piece, an embodied performance of art captured on film and engendered by the creative energy and freedom found in this space, which several of the residents attribute to former manager Stanley Bard.
Duverdier and van Elmbt take an observational approach. We simply watch and listen to the residents, taking in who they are, but not even their full names (there are no titles or chyrons). We discover Merle’s full name when she pages through old programs, but there are only two formal interviews where residents identify themselves and offer commentary, with performance artist Rose Cory and video director–artist Steve Willis. Otherwise, we are simply taking in the past and present of Chelsea Hotel, and wondering about its future.
“Dreaming Walls” capably captures this place and its current residents, “people who are the remnants of another time in New York,” as Cory puts it, but if the filmmakers have an agenda beyond that goal, it’s unclear. It’s not a complete history of the hotel, though history is palpable, and if there is an indictment of the landlords renovating the hotel and putting the residents into this precarious situation, it only comes up when the subjects mention it.
Still, in remaining present, with the past and future swirling feverishly, the film is a deeply poignant and moving love letter to those that remain, who “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas once wrote. Someone’s got to make a stand for the last vestiges of the soul of New York City, and “Dreaming Walls” beautifully captures their fight and their dreams.
“Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel” opens in U.S. theaters July 8.
