028: HOTEL MOVIES

Once again it is confirmed that a large hotel is a world unto itself and that this world is like the rest of the large world. The guests here roam about in their light-hearted, careless summer existence without suspecting anything of the strange mysteries circulating among them."

— Siegfried Kracauer, The Hotel Lobby

On this special episode of Out There in the Dark, Azed and Tom check in to Hotel Confidential.

This week, we’re shifting our focus to a unique collaboration. Hotel Confidential is a new three-day contemporary art exhibition that brings together 16 local and international artists to reimagine The Royal Hotel’s Annex in Picton, Prince Edward County. Curated by Christina Zeidler and Stacey Sproule, the exhibition transforms the hotel into a site for radical artistic experimentation and unexpected encounters.

The curators reached out to us to explore the cinematic DNA of the hotel, and we’re checking in for a deep dive. From the sterile isolation of high-end suites to the decaying hallways of the mind, we discuss six films that define the "hotel movie":

Grand Hotel (1932, Edmund Goulding)

Hotel Monterey (1972, Chantal Akerman)

Mystery Train (1989, Jim Jarmusch)

Barton Fink (1991, Joel & Ethan Coen)

Lost in Translation (2003, Sofia Coppola)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson)

Films set primarily in hotels possess a peculiar, uncanny quality. Regardless of genre, the hotel is never just a backdrop; it is a structural machine. By offering both extreme privacy (the "Do Not Disturb" sign) and exposed public arenas (the lobby, the bar), hotels reflect both a rigid socio-political hierarchy and a Freudian dreamscape.