Hotels
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From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film’s action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling—hotels, inns, and motels—to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life.
Along the way, O’Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.
Hotels ingeniously charts the trajectories of sight and site in the cinematic hotel, that place where the illicit transpires and fantasies are projected. From early silent shorts to the Chelsea Hotel, from Claire Denis to Atom Egoyan to Chantal Akerman, O’Dwyer shows how films and hotels have mutually constituted one another across a shared history. This slim volume offers a new way to imagine both cinema and its spaces.---B. Ruby Rich, author of New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut
1. I Can’t Sleep | 1
2. Labor, Leisure, and Visual Pleasure | 21
3. Lost in Space | 47
4. Love Hotel | 66
5. Chelsea Ghosts | 89
Acknowledgments | 101
Notes | 103
List of Figures | 113
Index | 115
