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Chelsea on the Rocks review
:. Director: Abel Ferrara
:. Genre: Documentary
:. Running Time: 1:22
:. Year: 2008
:. Country: USA
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Messy, uninhibited, relaxed, eclectic, crazy. These qualifiers apply as much to Abel Ferrara as they do to his subject. The Chelsea Hotel, located in the heart of New York, still enjoys its reputation: a place that draws its aura from all of the tenants who helped build its legend. William Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski… the list of artists of all stripes who chose to live there is infinite.
Managed today by a company that specializes in luxury hotels, this institution that represents the free spirit of the Big Apple deserved a documentary. Behind the camera, nothing could be more natural than to find a figure as extravagant and touching Abel Ferrara. Surrounded by a team reduced to a bare minimum, he went to meet the current occupants (painters, writers, directors, costume designers), former tenants and to take his camera through the corridors and stairways.
The interviews are relaxed, open discussions that leave the field open to anecdotes and stories of the past. A boom operator walks through the shot? Ferrara could care less. He even allows himself to intervene in offscreen conversations, whether he's bursting out laughing, commenting about he surrealism aspect of the stories told or appearing on the screen, furtively. Here, what counts is the power of the word, the evocation.
In the course of interviews, old stories elevated to the rank of legends come and help draw a portrait of the place, like the hotel sign that, at random, formed the words "Hot C" or "Tel Che." Within that, the director inserts archival images and segments of fiction, reconstructions of the collective memory of the place, such as the murder of Nancy, Sid Vicious's girlfriend.
Chelsea on the rocks tells us stories of suicide, ghosts, drugs, life, death, love and freedom. "Here, people don't walk, they float." While Milos Forman goes to confession, Julian Schnabel's daughter passes through to distribute flyers for the next show. The camera continues to roll, we are among friends. And Forman continues his story: a celebration on the floors, a fire caused by cooking meat released a huge cloud of smoke and triggered the intervention of firefighters. The room flooded by firehoses, the occupant drowned. They watch the body transported to the elevator, in a silence of death, and once the doors closed, the party continued. The Chelsea Hotel is packed with stories like this and Ferrara shares them with is, creating a documentary full of energy
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
 Documentary Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Documentary Reviews: 2012 - present
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