Film: Chelsea Hotel, NY Landmark, Last Bohemian Holdouts: Home of Dylan, Patti Smith, Arthur Miller
Last edited Tue Jan 3, 2023, 11:22 PM - Edit history (2)
- They are holding on to a dream’: the last bohemians at New York’s Chelsea Hotel,' The Guardian, 1.2.23. Ed. The Chelsea exists in the minds of those who invented it’…a still from "Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel." *Trailer below.
Cultural icons from Patti Smith and Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg and Arthur Miller once roamed its corridors – but what of the artists still living there? A new film checks in with the refuseniks holding out against gentrification.
A young Patti Smith playfully leans over a rooftop wall, her raven-black hair tangling with the wind as she points towards the stiletto nib of the Empire State Building in the distance. “Dylan Thomas used to hang out on this very roof!” says the singer. “I’m sure he threw up one too many rums.” She laughs, then turns to face the camera. “I’ve always wanted to be where the big guys were, you know?” This is the opening of Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, a film about the famous New York landmark.
In the course of its 138-year history, this 12-storey Victorian gothic building on West 23rd Street has meant many things to many people. For Smith, who lived there in the early 70s, its wrought iron floral balconies & spiralling grand staircase signified something ecclesiastical – “like a doll’s house in the twilight zone”, she would later write in her evocative memoir, Just Kids. The hotel has 250 rooms, each imbued with its own mythology. Edie Sedgwick, the actor, model & Warhol superstar, accidentally set fire to a mattress in hers. Bob Dylan wrote Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in his. Robert Mapplethorpe got his nipple pierced in room 1017.
Writers have written here, artists have composed – but for Belgian film-makers Amélie Van Elmbt & Maya Duverdier, the Chelsea’s story is as much about the lesser known long-term tenants who still live there, wandering its halls. "History remembers the big names, the success stories,” Van Elmbt says of the impressionistic documentary made over 2 & a half years. “Nobody remembers the ones who were in the shadows but created this fertile soil.” In 2018, she & Duverdier randomly drifted into the hotel, after she’d bumped into Merle Lister, an elderly choreographer, dancer & permanent Chelsea resident. “We wanted to see if we could find our own stories here,” Duverdier says.
And they did, with a Bolex camera and 16mm film: not the stories we already know but the ones we are yet to encounter, the beatniks who are “still dreaming of their idolised lives” as Van Elmbt puts it. “The concept of the film is that the Chelsea exists much more in the minds of those who invented it,” she explains. This means windswept characters such as conceptual artist & oldest resident Bettina Grossman, who at the time of filming was still exhibiting photography in her 90s. And Lister, whose frail mambo dancing with a young construction worker against a backdrop of wires & scaffolding comes to symbolise the joy and conflict at the heart of this film.
..To cut a long story short, the luxury developers have moved in and the bohemians who created the property’s value are being pushed out... - Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/03/they-are-holding-on-to-a-dream-the-last-bohemians-at-new-yorks-chelsea-hotel
- Official UK trailer, "Dreaming Walls," exec. producer Martin Scorsese. In UK cinemas & on demand from Jan. 20.
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