Dream­ing Walls – first-look review

“I’ve always liked to be where the big guys were,” says a young, Hors­es-era Pat­ti Smith from the roof of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. For over a hun­dred years, the tow­er­ing Man­hat­tan res­i­dence was a mag­net for artists, actors, and musi­cians. Oscar Wilde, Janis Joplin, Sal­vador Dali, Arthur C Clarke, to name a few, all stayed there. Leonard Cohen immor­talised it in his song, Chelsea Hotel #2. Andy Warhol shot Chelsea Girls with­in its walls. It is an impres­sive lega­cy by anyone’s reckoning.

Cut to the present day, and the build­ing is in a state of flux. The fas­cia is smoth­ered by scaf­fold­ing and the site is a sea of hard hats and tar­pau­lin. Real estate mag­nates pur­chased the prop­er­ty for $80m in 2011 and rede­vel­op­ment has been under­way ever since – nine long years and count­ing. Inex­plic­a­bly, amid the indus­tri­al hub­bub, some ten­ants stub­born­ly remain.

Maya Duverdier and Amelie Van Elmbt talk to the last souls stand­ing. Any­one expect­ing some sort of cama­raderie among the band of loy­al­ists will be dis­ap­point­ed; these ten­ants broad­ly keep them­selves to them­selves. Even so, their indi­vid­ual insights are fas­ci­nat­ing. Lucid and illu­mi­nat­ing rumi­na­tions on the role of art and the his­to­ry of the build­ing emerge from dance chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Mer­lie Lis­ter Levine and artists Rose Cory and Skye Fer­rante, amongst others.

Many con­tin­ue to be smit­ten with their sur­round­ings – roman­tic for its bricks and mor­tar, and the ghosts that walk the cor­ri­dors. The Chelsea Hotel is their idyl­lic secu­ri­ty blan­ket – their Shangri-La – and they are dev­as­tat­ed that it is being ripped from them. We wit­ness the denial: human beings unable to let go, fin­ger­nails cling­ing at the ledge of change, with an ocean of uncer­tain­ty lying beneath them.

Despite its best attempts, Dream­ing Walls fails to make the vis­cer­al impact of Zed Nelson’s sear­ing sur­vey of regen­er­a­tion, The Street, which looked at Hox­ton Street’s chang­ing land­scape over four years. It also doesn’t quite cap­ture artists-in-squalor with the same sense of focus that Nira Burstein brought to her riv­et­ing slice of ciné­ma ver­ité, Charm Cir­cle, either.

The virtues of Dream­ing Walls lie in being able to com­pare the present with the past so acute­ly. Images of for­mer guests, Mon­roe, Dali, and Hen­drix are pro­ject­ed provoca­tive­ly onto the bare walls. Con­cep­tu­al artist Bet­ti­na Gross­man, the eldest res­i­dent at the time of film­ing, talks of the dis­re­gard afford­ed to her by the devel­op­ers and posits the idea that they hope she’ll die before the works are fin­ished; sad­ly she did. Else­where, archive footage inter­sects effec­tive­ly with con­tem­po­rary inter­views. It is both gen­tly sen­ti­men­tal and sub­tly critical.

The result is an enig­mat­ic doc­u­men­tary that art­ful­ly hon­ours the Chelsea Hotel’s lega­cy. A palimpsest of sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al pro­por­tions that offers a sober­ing glimpse of what big busi­ness does to cul­ture and what we lose when mon­ey – which doesn’t ​‘talk but swear’ as one-time occu­pi­er Bob Dylan once put it – lives out its cap­i­tal­is­tic dreams. More specif­i­cal­ly, Dream­ing Walls is an ode to the dying embers of an old New York.