Hotel Film and the Erotics of Adjacency

This essay is drawn from a larger project that takes as its focus the relationship between cinema and the hotel, and considers their ontological affinities, their common status as aesthetic and experiential products, and their mutually constituted histories. In Hotels I explore the privileged place of the hotel within the cinematic imaginary, and, in reverse gesture, I consider how film has played a crucial (if largely overlooked) role in the hospitality industry’s promotional apparatus. And to situate this essay within the more immediately context of the contributions that it is housed next to here, I hope to show that the sensual allure and erotic charge of the hotel remains beyond our grasp without some concept of nextness and its broader web of spatial and temporal cognates (notions of proximity, adjacency, the sequential; thoughts about tomorrow’s occupants, or the bodies next door). Embodying the temporal exigencies of this theme (…next!), this essay unfolds at a rapid pace; it draws a dizzying range of cinematic objects into its ambit and makes incursions into a range of fields—from architecture and film theory to media history—to bring to light the role that cinema has played in the propagation and circulation of fantasies about “hotel room behavior”. As if to mirror that peculiar experience of meandering through a hotel’s corridor at night, with a heightened attunement to the multiplicity of intimate scenes that may well be transpiring—and perspiring—in neighbouring rooms, the fragmentary reflections I string together below hopefully build upon one another, while nonetheless resisting the imposition of an overarching hierarchy.

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A hotel room is not necessarily only a bedroom. But its spatial relations are often oriented around a bed. For those hotels that court the trade of guests hoping to partake in bed-based activities beyond mere sleep, temporal relations come to be organized differently, too. Consider, for example, the “Hotels of Assignation” that cropped up in the post–Civil War United States or the love hotels that have gained widespread popularity in Japan since the 1960s, where the question of how we parse the time of hotel occupation gains a surplus meaning. As Elizabeth Johnson notes of the love hotel, “rooms can be rented overnight (dubbed ‘sleep/stay’) or just for a few hours (‘rest’).”⁴ In these establishments, which formalize the already deeply entwined relationship between hotel rooms and sex, “rest stops” and “rent-by-the-hour” models of room occupancy point to a sexual purpose that, somewhat paradoxically, feels both cloaked in euphemism and all too literal.

The affinities and tensions between cinema and the hotel become amplified when sex enters the equation. No doubt a reason for this is that cinema’s logic of indexical capture feels inimical to the working of a hotel, which, unlike the cinema, holds principles of discretion and impermanence in high regard. (Such a tension is one that photographer Sophie Calle would exploit to great effect in her 1981 series, “The Hotel”). As we consider how the intimate lives and dirty laundry of strangers offer artists irresistible narrative material, I am reminded of Rem Koolhaas’ reflections on the narrative potentiality of the hotel. In Delirious New York, he writes “in the thirties—when the second Waldorf is being built—the “Hotel” becomes Hollywood’s favorite subject. In a sense, it relieves the scriptwriter of the obligation of inventing a plot.”⁵ A quick survey of the wealth of slapstick comedies set in hotels will tell you that the primary narrative trope to show up this “cheating” on the part of the scriptwriter is cheating itself. Extramarital indiscretions are a dime a dozen in cinema’s hotel narratives.

Just think of Peter Glenville’s 1966 comedy Hotel Paradiso, a film that uncannily foreshadows Koolhaas’s claim. Here we encounter a playwright, Monsieur Feydeau (played by Glenville himself), who is searching for ideas for his next show and wrestling with writer’s block. Feydeau checks into one of Paris’s more disreputable “hotels of assignation.” There he observes the serial philanderer, Boniface, who regularly meets up with his lover, Marcelle. It just so happens that her husband, Henri, who is blithely unaware of his wife’s activities, is called to investigate rumors of ghosts in the hotel, only to find his wife in the arms of Boniface. After an ill-timed police raid, the hotel is revealed to be bursting at the seams with scenes of trysts, flings, and extramarital relations. While Hotel Paradiso is perhaps too farcical to make good on its trailer’s promise of titillation (it is more of a comedy of errors than an erotic comedy), Glenville nonetheless lay bare the promiscuous traffic of semidressed bodies that move in and out of the hotel’s rooms. What Koolhaas would later term the “collisions between human beings” is crudely, and carnally, literalized here.

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One way to start thinking about the erotic life of the hotel is to approach the topic by way of a specific example. Between 1998 and 2000, star architect Jean Nouvel oversaw the design of Lucerne’s “The Hotel.” Though more modest in scale that some of his more notable works, it exhibits all the hallmarks of Nouvel’s architectural signature. The Hotel’s exterior is sympathetic to the surroundings of the lakeside town, retaining the plain but elegant nineteenth-century shell. But inside we find a striking interplay between building materials (dark cherry wood and stainless steel), as well as the dramatic contrast between light and dark for which the architect is known.

A mere flip through glossy brochures, however, fails to give a full impression of Nouvel’s project. Seen from a slightly different perspective—that of the hotel guest gazing up from their bed—another feature comes strikingly into view. As guests switch on the light directly above their bed, they are greeted by huge cinematic frescos, the twenty-five rooms replicating scenes from a dozen films. In a text that describes his vision for The Hotel, Nouvel explains that he wanted to recreate the “impression of escape in classical and Renaissance palaces,” but to update this to the present day. “What are today’s mythologies?” he asks, before answering that the “stories that everyone knows” now “come to us from the cinema, because cinema is our culture.”⁶

Cinephilia is the governing principle of The Hotel. Guests staying in room 5700 are greeted by a shot from Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) plastered on its ceiling. The design of the room produces an optical vacuum: the peach tone of Michelle Pfeiffer’s skin is subtly referenced in the color of the walls, thereby drawing our eye upward. Similarly, in room 5100, the blue glow that clings to the torso of a strapping Brad Davis in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle is echoed in the color of the vintage accent chair. And the black, white, red, and jade that constitute the palette of room 5203 are lifted directly from Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses/Ai No Corrida, which also commands our gaze as it occupies the totality of the ceiling space. Nouvel’s favorite films dictate the bespoke design of every room. Each room’s chosen film still unspools a new style, palate, and design.

Those familiar with Nouvel’s architectural practice can attest that cinema is a recurrent motif in his oeuvre.⁷ As his longtime collaborator Brigitte Metra explains: “Jean often uses film metaphors. That’s because he creates sequences for his buildings. He wants the visitor to go through his buildings as though they were in a film, with different shooting sequences and emotions, accompanying every change of setting.”⁸ The itinerary that The Hotel offers through the history of art cinema and the Freudian recesses of its creator’s head is decidedly sexual, given that each of these frescos refers its guest-spectators back to what Dyer calls “hotel room behavior.” Even the hotel’s restaurant, bar, and its external facade exude eroticism. As architectural theorist Donald Albrecht writes: “Nouvel mixes mirrors, movie stills, and windows to alternately hide and reveal public spaces, like a sexy striptease.”⁹

There is a curious disconnect between the overt eroticism of Nouvel’s references and the hotel management’s sanitized presentation of this space via promotional materials and online platforms. For instance, the website boasts of creating the hotel equivalent of “taking a dream journey through the big-screen epics of cinematic history.” Such language leads us toward a misleadingly mainstream and chaste impression of the cinematic history on display. (In the Realm of the Senses was famously banned from the big screen in Ōshima’s native Japan, as well as many other countries, at the time of its release.) The official discourse surrounding The Hotel offers a negative index of the friction between Nouvel’s daring cinematic imaginary and the business imperatives of the chain that now manages it. Cosmopolitan hotel chains are, after all, in the business of aggregating tastes, neutralizing tensions, and appealing to diverse markets. Put simply, it makes good business sense to usher sexually explicit content into the realm of connotation.

Seen through the eyes of the cinephile for whom Nouvel’s references were presumably originally intended, then, one cannot help but wonder whether The Hotel serves the role of a Trojan horse. For while, on first glance, it is the formal signatures and credentials of the architect that ostensibly distinguish Nouvel’s building from the prestige hotels that act as its direct competition, on closer inspection the hotel’s distinction lies in the perverse (albeit often cryptic) cinematic references that are smuggled into its rooms. Some rooms (and films) come with a lot of baggage. Consider Bernardo Bertolucci’s risqué erotic drama Last Tango in Paris (1972), which tells of the sexual exploits of a hotel owner, played by Marlon Brando, who pursues anonymous sexual relations with a young Parisian woman, played by Maria Schneider. The film—which forms the basis for Room 5402’s decor—famously skirted the edge between art cinema and erotica in the early 1970s, only to be outdone a few years later by another film—whose images Nouvel plasters on the ceiling of three other rooms.

So let us now dwell for a moment with In the Realm of the Senses, whose “sensuous ceiling picture encourages far-reaching thoughts,” according to The Hotel’s website. Ōshima’s controversial erotic art film tells the tale of Sade Abe, a former sex worker, now a chambermaid, who works in a traditional Ryokan hotel in 1930s Tokyo. There she encounters the owner Kichizō Ishida, who overlooks the geishas working in the establishment, and initiates a string of sexual activities with her that will soon take on a momentum of their own as they flee to the countryside and take up lodgings in similar establishments. Since the film’s release, In the Realm of the Senses has generated much anxious discussion about where it sits on the spectrum from art cinema to pornography. (Much of this discourse has been limited, unimaginatively, to Ōshima’s use of unsimulated sex scenes.) But what strikes me as more interesting is how the film’s provocative blurring of generic boundaries come to be played out spatially. In an early sex scene, which takes place on the wraparound porch, we watch Sada sit atop Kichizō. Following a close-up on her poppy red kimono, which is ruffled by her lover’s fumbling hands, the camera cuts to a long shot that also contains an elderly woman dusting a statue on the other side of the courtyard. At another memorable midcoital moment, we watch Kichizō breaking a glass window to create a hole through which he will communicate with a geisha who waits patiently outside. What arrests our attention here is not necessarily the sex act, but rather the temporary shattering of the film’s pornotopic logic to show other, more banal, activities also taking place.¹⁰ By approaching this film through the prism of space we come to a greater appreciation of how the architectural features of the Ryokan (such as its thin walls, sliding doors, and semipublic courtyard areas) are key to constructing and navigating the film’s thresholds of sensual intensity.

If the film advances an understanding of temporary dwelling spaces as spheres that exist outside of the purview of conjugal relations (spaces marked by “moral weightlessness” as Dyer puts it), then this is not to suggest that the activities that occur within them are without consequence. Pleading to his lover, Kichizo says, “I’ll promise to set you up in an inn,” to which Sada responds, “I don’t want to be your mistress, I want you all the time.” The full extent of her wish for possession will not become clear until the film’s ending. The vicissitudes of their sexual exploits reach new levels of intensity, and their graphic exploration of each other’s bodies culminates with a string of crimes of passion: dismemberment, strangulation, and ultimately murder. Although we are spared the gruesome details of these actions in the frescos that adorn the ceilings of Nouvel’s Hotel, this might strike us as an odd sign under which to place the occupants of the King Deluxe Studio.

The cinephile who continues to wander through the floorplan of The Hotel will quickly learn that the corpus on which Nouvel draws is very much an anti-honeymoon suite of films. From Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling and Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky through to Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons, a common denominator among The Hotel’s references is a failing marriage. By projecting these eroticized images onto the ceilings of The Hotel’s rooms, Nouvel is making an implicit claim (a projection?) about guests’ own erotic object choices. Given that the rooms are typically quite dark, guests are invited to engage with their rooms in a way that mimics the working of the cinematic apparatus itself. With the flick of a bedside switch, the ceiling frescos are illuminated. The images make a claim on our attention, and perhaps invite us to attend to carnal pleasures of our own. Yet for the restless guest-spectator who lingers with these images once the initial frisson of excitement has subsided, or for the cinephile who traces these glossy images back to their diegetic source, the results may be unsettling. The implicit risk in Nouvel’s suggestive coupling of cinema and the hotel is that this might, over time, transpire to have been a dangerous liaison.

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Pornography is often filmed in hotels. Since the late 1980s, Los Angeles photographer Jeff Burton has worked in the San Fernando Valley to document pornography’s mode of production. His Dreamland series attends to the settings of porn shoots, from the rented houses of the Los Angeles nouveaux riches through to louche hotel suites, bringing into focus the lifeworld that typically recedes from view in pornography’s production. Neville Wakefield—here writing in a decidedly elegiac tone—notes how Burton’s series “documents this edge where pornography locates the real fictions of Pop amongst the debris of a mainstream long since curdled into special effect.”¹¹

In their accounts of how adult media offers us a rich historical archive of material culture, feminist scholars Jennifer Wicke and Elena Gorfinkel, respectively, have both paid close attention to the roles that interior design, decoration, furnishings, and accessories play in erotic cinema. “Bedroom props,” Wicke writes, “only have to be a shade off to sunder any sexual response to the pictures, and instead open up a reverie on the punctum of any particular image.”¹²  For Gorfinkel, too, a room’s decor is not ancillary to the sensory pleasures of vintage pornography; rather, these details are consubstantial with adult media’s very allure insofar as they exhibit the traces of a past world, a superannuated fantasy of “dated sexuality.”¹³

Burton’s photographs turn away from the “action” of pornography to attend to those small details—objects, furnishings—that crystallize the historicity of pornography’s image repertoire, attuning us to a fast-receding past. A sex scene involving two upright men and a woman laid on a table, redolent of the scenes of appetitive excess and bacchanalian debauchery we find in Marco Ferreri’s The Big Feast (La grande bouffe, 1973), will find itself trumped by the silver meat dome to the left of the copulating bodies. Another image, more tightly focused on a hotel room, further splinters our spectatorial attention: in the top right hangs a kitsch painting of a man on a horse, descending from the heavens; to the left is an ornamental lamp; and in the bottom left a mirrored surface on the bed’s headboard captures the ass of a man who penetrates a second body that remains just out of view. As we look at this photograph, the primary object of our gaze is unstable: as we toggle between the photograph’s competing focal points, we move between a series of perceptual states, ranging from ribald laughter (at the visual resonances between bareback sex and horseback riding) through to more measured, formally attentive form of reception typically reserved for a very different category of ready-made objects. Not only do the ephemeral details of private rooms and hotel suites often serve as a fleeting source of visual fascination, but Burton’s oblique framing of these erotic spaces works to destabilize the ontological order of things that the well-oiled machine of pornographic production so laboriously seeks to affirm. Somewhat in tension with Dyer’s earlier argument that it is the hotel room’s qualities of emptiness and anonymity that accentuate its sexiness, Burton reveals how interior backdrops might body forth from the recesses of insignificance to play a crucial role in the hotel’s erotic promise.

The logic of displacement that Burton’s photographs enact find a counterpart in a film by Mexican American filmmaker Naomi Uman, though this time the pornographic source is of a different vintage. In her short film removed (1999), Uman turned her attention to the archives of 1970s pornography to work through similar questions about how and where we look when we consume adult media. Uman’s removed reworks celluloid fragments from Swingin’ Models (1972), a West German softcore film. In one of the scenes in the original film, a weary young couple attend a swinging party in a luxurious “bordello” hosted by the wealthy pornographer and his wife. Later into the evening, the couple abandon their plan to travel home on the icy roads and accept the offer of a room for the night. Unbeknownst to them, the suite contains a two-way mirror which will allow the hosts to spy on the couple (thereby enacting the same sordid scheme that would gain widespread notoriety in the motel-based documentary Voyeur, based on the writing of Gay Talese). In the scene that Uman selects for her film, we listen to the host describe the scene of nudity that is unfolding in front of his eyes to his wife, who writhes on her own bed and moans in pleasure.

In her tactile reworking of the found footage, Uman used a combination of nail polish and bleach to remove the female bodies from each side of the mirror. removed brings into view a rough, scratchy, unstable burst of light where female forms one existed, accompanied by the ekphrastic descriptions of the eroticized bodies that we find in the source text. While it is perhaps tempting to read Uman’s film through the prism of, or as an artistic response to, Laura Mulvey’s account of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women’s bodies in her essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” I join others in thinking that it isn’t necessarily cut to the measure of Mulvey’s theoretical model.¹⁴ For me, the curious oscillation between figure and ground that is occasioned by this perceptual object also brings into relief how the 1970s mise-en-scène—gaudy lampshades, vintage wall décor—is consubstantial with (rather than a stubborn impediment to) the aesthetic pleasures of these images. The instability of Uman’s images, in other words, invites us to think about the relationship between copulating bodies and the trappings of style and décor in less strictly oppositional terms.

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Hotels are not only spaces of pornographic production; they are also important sites of its consumption.¹⁵ The story of pornographic film’s entry into, and circulation within, hotel rooms worldwide is a curious one, whose origins reveal much about the cosmopolitanism of the hotel form and the contingency of adult media’s dissemination. In 1970s Japan, rent-by-the-hour love hotels were booming in popularity in response to the particularities of domestic life in urban centers. The paper-thin walls of apartments and the multigenerational makeup of many households made it difficult for occupants to discretely have sex. Love hotels effectively rezoned the bedroom into the space of a hotel. As part of their offering, these establishments often screened adult films in their rooms by way of closed-circuit video systems. However, one day in 1971, this technology went awry. An Osaka hotel’s video system accidentally converted a steel railing on the rooftop into an antenna that transmitted the “pink movie” to televisions in neighboring houses, which prompted a stern police warning.¹⁶ The unfortunate incident received a writeup in a March 1971 edition of Time magazine with the admittedly belabored title “Sinerama in Osaka.”¹⁷ As the story made its way across the Pacific, it would have an important ripple effect. As adult film historian Peter Alilunas explains, one of the readers of the article was Don Leon, a Californian lawyer representing motel owners who saw a gap in the U.S. hospitality market. While pay-per-view models of film viewing in hotels were growing increasingly popular in the early 1970s, pornography was not yet an offering, not least because of a fear among innkeepers that its presence would be perceived as lending tacit approval to sex work. Alilunas goes on to describe how Leon convinced the group of motel owners that he represented to “convert an AutoLodge at 930 West Olympic Boulevard, downtown near the convention center, into an ‘adult motel,’ complete with water beds, fur bedspreads, mirrored ceilings, and closed-circuit adult films played on Sony U-Matic machines,” thereby paving the way for the on-demand model of adult media consumption we know to this day.¹⁸

As I trace the role of that the love hotel plays in adult media’s circulation and proliferation, I am reminded of a sequence from Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film, Enter the Void, in which we, the film’s disembodied spectators, temporarily alight on a Tokyo love hotel. The first part of the film fuses our own vision to the perceptual apparatus of Oscar, a low level drug dealer and twenty-something American living in Tokyo. Following his sudden death in a drug bust, the first-person gaze undergoes a transmutation—we leave his fleshy mortal body behind and follow his immaterial spirit on a vertiginous trip as his consciousness roams freely through the streets of Tokyo in search of his sister, Linda.

As its title suggests (and the Freudian fever dream that constitutes Noé’s back catalogue further attests), Enter the Void frequently gravitates toward holes. As part of the film’s disorienting plunge into the Tokyo underworld, we reach a love hotel. The building’s facade pulses with holographic tiles, piquing the magpie sensibility we have come to cultivate over the course of the film. A neon sign beckons us in. We enter through a fourth story window and watch from above a couple caught midcoitus before the camera wanders into another room where sex is also taking place. The corridor that connects the rooms is lined with a red light, fittingly reminiscent of an airport landing strip. Our gaze follows Oscar’s lines of flight, his trajectory of desire, as it passes through walls to reveal people engaged in sexual acts. Like a moth, he is drawn to the glow of libidinal energy that radiates from bodies. Hotels—and love hotels in particular—are supposed to adhere to a logic of discretion, carefully partitioning public and private zones. Noé upsets this spatial logic.

In this scene, which surveys a vast topography of copulating bodies, Noé combined on-location shooting with scenes that were produced in a studio with the use of cranes before later augmenting this footage in an intensive postproduction process that lasted over a year. Yet in spite of the scene’s technical ingenuity and visual pyrotechnics, my own patience toward this spectacle soon wears thin. While Noé, one of European art cinema’s enfants terribles, is obviously courting notoriety with such a cinema of carnal attractions, to emphasize the film’s transgressiveness risks forgetting what the long history of cinema’s engagement with the hotel can tell us: that there is nothing particularly novel about a director’s wish to play “Peeping Tom” and transgress the supposedly private space of the hotel. Although the sex scenes in the love hotel exhibit significant technical prowess—floating gracefully between rooms in a dazzling display of cinematic movement and visual effects—such novelty belies the fact that Noé is rehashing a trope from the days of early cinema: the voyeuristic motif of the “through-the-keyhole” drama.¹⁹

The through-the-keyhole drama was an important and historically significant type of film that can be traced back to the early 1900s, when filmmakers sought to show what was typically hidden behind the doors of hotel rooms.  The pleasures and anxieties of spectatorship in these early films was predicated on the access that its viewers were granted to spaces and scenarios that had hitherto been private. In Ferdinand Zecca’s Par la trou de serrure/Through the Keyhole (1902), for example, we follow a hotel porter and voyeur who looks through the keyholes of four different rooms, only to be noticed by the occupant of the final room, who subsequently kicks him down the stairs. These crudely diagrammed sexual dynamics are later reversed in Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Cameraman’s Revenge (Mest’ kinematograficheskogo operatora, 1912), a stop-motion film in which the characters are played by dried insect speciments. Here a restless Mr. Beetle leaves his doting wife at home to spend some time in the city, where he pursued a dragonfly working as a cabaret dancer. In the bar he has an altercation with a grasshopper—the eponymous cameraman—who later follows the beetle and the dragonfly to the “Hotel d’Amour,” capturing the beetle’s indiscretions through their hotel keyhole. Here our peeping Tom exacts his revenge; the compromising footage is later screened in a cinema that Mr. and Mrs. Beetle later frequent, thereby leading to public scandal and marital acrimony.

These keyhole dramas intuitively grasp the dialectical nature of spatial, sexual, and spectatorial relations—the logic of the burlesque. The relation between seer and seen is cunningly calibrated to full dramatic effect, eliciting the attention and stoking the curiosity of the prurient viewer, only to some- how frustrate the passage à l’acte. In Zecca’s case, the peeping Tom is caught and expelled. By contrast, Noé’s omniscient gaze, which glides frictionlessly across the hotel’s thresholds, achieves a very different effect. Once the “penetration of rooms” starts to lose its dramatic effect, Enter the Void resorts to penetration tout court.²⁰ We are gradually drawn into the orbit of a copulating couple, Linda (Oscar’s sister) and Alex (his best friend). In a further shift of scale, our gaze assumes an endoscopic function, as we follow the fluids that pass from Alex and into Linda, returning us to “The Origin of the World” (a nod to Courbet, a metonym for the French avant-garde tradition out of which Noé, too, would later be born).²¹

The lesson that Enter the Void imparts to us about hotel sex is one that we grasp by way of negative instruction: that the mere potentiality of sex taking place in the space of the hotel is often more interesting than the act itself. Enter the Void is beholden to a positivist epistemology; it is obsessed with the money shot. By contrast, “through-the-keyhole” dramas, which play peekaboo with erotic bodies, make more active use of the hotel’s own architectural forms—the tension between enclosure and disclosure, the play between visibility and invisibility—in ways that bring the hotel itself to the fore of desiring relations.

While the most remarked upon aspect of Enter the Void’s hotel scene—its endoscopic exploration of bodily interiors—might call to mind the more infamous and visceral work of American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage,²² there is another more subterranean connection between the two filmmakers that brings the question of hotel eroticism more squarely into view. In the early 1970s Brakhage embarked on a series of films that he named the “Sexual Meditation” cycle. These films, most of which were shot in 16mm, range between three and six minutes in length and explore the erotic charge of everyday spaces. In Brakhage’s own words, Sexual Meditation: Hotel (1972) “takes its cues from that ultimate situation of SEX MED./masturbation—the loft-and-lonely hotel room.” Tellingly, the space of the hotel benefits from a longer and more complex treatment than the settings of the other films in the cycle: an office suite, a motel, a field, a room at Yale University. Sexual Meditation: Hotel succeeds in piquing my curiosity where Enter the Void largely fails. For, while Noé’s “show all” approach to hotel interiors leaves little to the imagination, the visual grammar of Brakhage’s Hotel is subtle and tantalizing. The experimental short is ostensibly set in a hotel room that overlooks a similar establishment, though the ill-defined images and liberal use of close-ups thwart any possibility of visual or spatial mastery.

Hotel presents a patchwork of images, ranging from shots of TV static and test patterns, close-ups of body parts, architectural details, and shots looking outside of a window and into the hotel opposite. Brakhage’s homage to the “loft-and-lonely hotel room” throbs and pulses with an erotic energy. Haptic close-ups transform the surfaces of walls into something resembling flesh; framed from a particular angle, the textiles in the room across the way resemble close-ups of a body; the curved edge of the top of an antique fabric lampshade resembles the contour of a bustier. Brakhage’s camera not only animates previously inanimate things but also eroticizes them in a coy but suggestive game of peekaboo. The forms that we encounter are always on the verge of coalescing into legible images, only for the camera to cut to another form. By framing objects from oblique angles, the film transforms the hotel room’s manifold surfaces, details, and objects into a sort of erotic Rorschach test. Brakhage returns to the spectatorial relation and the hotel encounter a dialectical tension—a play of subject and object, public and private—that is dispensed with entirely in Enter the Void. Unlike the crisp images, and the smooth movements across hotel space that we find in Noé’s film, Brakhage’s grainy images, erratic editing, and frustrated movement through space engenders a sensation of friction, and a frisson of the illicit. Yet while Brakhage suffuses the hotel with an erotic charge, and succumbs to what Dyer calls the “flagrant inducement to filthiness” in the hotel, the preponderance of fetishized close-ups of women’s bodies in his Sexual Meditation cycle reveal the familiar contours of the filmmaker’s male heterosexual visual economy.²³  What, we may wonder in closing, might a queer feminist erotics of the hotel look like?

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The hotel is a staple of Chantal Akerman’s cinema. It acts as a waystation for the many exilic subjects that wander in and out of her cinematic universe. Akerman’s first treatment of the hotel was undertaken around the same time as that of Brakhage. In 1972 she made Hotel Monterey, a slow meditation on the life of a run-down hotel in Manhattan. Filmed over the course of a single day, Babette Mangolte’s camera roams the space of the residential hotel from the ground floor lobby to empty corridors and upward to a rooftop, advancing at a glacial pace not out of step with those of the elderly residents we see shuffling in and out of the frame at various points. Though there was nothing particularly queer about Hotel Monterey (except, perhaps, its mode of conception, having been financed from money that Akerman had pocketed when working in a New York’s 55th Street Playhouse, a gay porn theater), her patient study of the transience of hotel life, the footfall of anonymous strangers, and themes of intimacy, contact, and desire would go on to pave the way for a more avowedly queer imagining of hotel space a few years later.

The Meetings of Anna (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, 1978) follows Anna, a Belgian filmmaker and a thinly veiled stand-in for Akerman herself, who travels from Essen in West Germany to Brussels and through to Paris to attend a program of screenings and press events over the course of a few days and nights. Anna stays in a succession of hotel rooms. Like her previous film, The Meetings of Anna is also a hymn to the lulling cadences of hotel life. The camera often lingers on the suite’s plain furnishings, or frames Anna looking vacantly out a window, as if momentarily transported into the realm of an Edward Hopper painting, before she welcomes in men to occupy her bed for the night. The sex that transpires in these rooms is often detached, affectless, and most often unfinished. Though sexual climax is rarely reached in the film, it has been widely praised for its representation of casual sex, perhaps by virtue of its lack of sentimentalism and its failure to conform to heavily gendered scripts of erotic and emotional attachment. Akerman doesn’t yield to the demands of her more impatient spectators; her film’s refusal to succumb to the insistence for psychological transparency and to traffic in the habitual signifiers of cinematic desire can be understood as part of a feminist ethics of opacity.²⁴

Midway through the film, Anna arrives in the Gare du Midi in her hometown of Brussels and meets her mother for a coffee. The two decide to spend an evening in the hotel, sharing a bed, before the filmmaker continues to Paris in the morning. In the dead of night, she tells her mother about a brief tryst she had with an Italian woman. It started with a stray hand, then a momentary touch, then a hesitant kiss, and then Anna and her lover found themselves swept up in an all-consuming passion. She confesses that she thought of her mother during her sexual awakening, to which her mother responds, plainly, that she will not tell Anna’s father. The naked Anna nestles up against her as the scene draws to a close. The first time I watched this scene I was struck by its sensuality, its gradual erosion of the distinction between maternal affection and maternal eroticism. It turns out that I was far from alone in this impression: Marion Schmid sees in this the scene a “tight intertwin[ing]” of lesbian love and maternal bonding that acts as a tender counterpoint to the (hetero)sexual disappointment depicted elsewhere in the film; B. Ruby Rich, who compares this encounter with the film’s more explicit scenes of hetero copulation, also proclaims this the film’s “hottest moment.”²⁵

The temporary melding of identities between the mother, played by Lea Massari, and this Italian lover is not just a figment of Anna’s erotic imagination. Rather, it is further illuminated when we situate Akerman’s film within a broader constellation of European art cinema. Massari first came to prominence in 1960 for her role as a young Italian woman, also named Anna, who goes missing in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Akerman ends The Meetings of Anna with her protagonist, played by Aurore Clément, listening to a voicemail asking, “Anna, Dove sei?” (Anna, where are you?), representing a quite literal callback to an earlier moment in cinema’s history. But the film’s intertextual knots do not end there. Lea Massari had previously gained notoriety for her role in Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur, 1971), where she played Clara, the troubled and adulterous mother of a sexually precocious and unruly fourteen-year-old boy named Laurent. Following the development of her son’s heart condition, which necessitates a trip to a sanatorium, Clara and Laurent are mistakenly booked into a single hotel room for the duration of their stay. Dwelling in close quarters and unable to maintain their habitual privacy, the hotel room becomes a crucible of psychosexual experimentation. By the film’s close, Clara and Laurent will end up having sex, thereby consummating the Oedipal transgression to which Akerman will gesture, only mutely, in her own later film. (She knocks at Malle’s door, but does not insist upon entry.) So as we return to the Brussels hotel room that forms the erotic locus of The Meetings of Anna—and the final destination for this essay—it is not so simple to frame this setting as one that exists outside of habitual domestic routines, a space ungoverned by the strictures of the patriarchal law or unrelieved of the cumbersome baggage of cinematic metareferentiality. Rather, by way of the intertextually resonant screen presence of Massari, the hotel room becomes queerly inflected. Akerman’s hotel room is a space of tenderness and maternal bonding. But it is also a realm of polymorphous desire

Jules O’Dwyer teaches Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of two forthcoming books, The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), and Hotels (Fordham University Press, 2025)—from which the material in this essay is largely drawn. He is also an editor of world picture.

Many thanks to Erika Balsom and Genevieve Yue for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay, as well as Tom Lay at Fordham University Press for the permission to draw on this material here.

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