Butler's Cinema Scene

“Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel” My rating: B ()

80 minutes | No MPAA rating

One can say with some confidence that virtually every important American of 20th century arts and letters has spent time in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, either as an overnight guest or as a long-term resident.

The roster of artists, writers and musicians who have slumbered (and sometimes partied) under its roof range from Brendan Behan, Salvador Dali and Virgil Thomson to the Sex Pistol’s Sid Vicious and the impossible-to-top young lovers Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Heck, Leonard Cohen wrote a song about the joint.

But do not go to “Dreaming Walls: Inside theChelsea Hotel” expecting a litany of the famous and depraved. Documentarists Maya Duverdier and Amelie van Elmbt have given us something more akin to a tone poem than your traditional nonfiction feature. The best approach is simply to let it wash over you.

Early on one of the Chelsea’s octogenarian inhabitants hobnobs in the hallway with a construction worker who has spent much of the last decade renovating the venerable structure for its new incarnation as a boutique hotel. The young laborer admits while on the job he has sensed the presence of ghosts.

In a sense, Duverdier and Elmbt’s camera becomes one of those ghosts, drifting silently through halls and apartments, some now stripped down to the studs. Periodically the faces of famous Chelsea residents of yore are projected onto the peeling walls…spectres from a colorful past.

Here’s where the Chelsea is right now…the renovations are half completed, but are being held up by long-time habitués who, embracing the New York City equivalent of squatter’s rights, are doing all they can to slow the march of progress. Some have been moved to newly redone (and much smaller) apartments. Others refuse to vacate their homes of longstanding.

The tenants’ association has undergone a bitter division between those who — despite the attendant noise, dust and chaos — welcome progress and those who stubbornly oppose it (one curmudgeon refers to the whole process as “a slow-motion rape”).

Clearly the management recognizes that only death will loosen the grip of some of these old-timers. Work crews have installed a new elevator that will take them and their walkers to an exit at the rear of the building, thus sparing the hotel’s new young, hip and moneyed clientele the trauma of seeing poorly dressed wraiths inching their ways through the lobby.

Lacking any narration or titles to tell us what’s going on, we must get the lay of the land by listening to the residents talk. Happily, they are an interesting bunch, ranging from dancer/choreographer Susan Kleinsinger to artist Skye Ferrante, who fashions exquisite three-dimensional portraits of his fellow Chelseans using only pliers and wire.

There’s a smattering of old films taken at the Chelsea, including an appearance by the late Stanley Bard, for decades the hotel’s manager and probably the person most responsible for nurturing the building’s bohemian atmosphere (he was that rarest of creatures, a businessman who put esthetics on an equal footing with income).

One resident refers to the Chelsea as being like “a grand old tree, chopped down but rooted deep…there’s still life in there.”

“Dreaming Walls” is not encyclopedic and doesn’t want to be. But it gives a tantalizing taste of a grand old institution and the inevitability of change.

| Robert W. Butler