If it was true that building can store the energy of previous occupants, then The Hotel Chelsea in New York would have possibly the coolest ghosts in the world. It was built in the late-19th century, but from the mid-20th it became a Bohemian mecca for the cream of the creative sphere. Arthur C. Clarke and Allen Ginsberg wrote some of their work there. Dylan Thomas was a resident at the time of his death. It was home for a while to the likes of Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin allegedly conducted an affair there in 1968. More ignominiously, it was where Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death.
Those days are long gone, and the Chelsea underwent an extensive period of renovation prior to its reopening as a swish boutique hotel in February 2022. Filmmakers Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier documented the period just before its reopening, where great sheets of plastic hang everywhere, builders operate in masks to protect from Covid as much as dust, and the aging long-term residents reflect on their time at the hotel and their future within it given how grudgingly the new owners have allowed them to stay on.
Lyrical and elegiac by design, Dreaming Walls is an ode to a time past as well as a lightly despairing forecast of encroaching gentrification. The various remaining residents seem to drift through the rooms, largely unheeded by the men in hard hats; as if two different planes of existence are inhabiting the same space, although the first resident we meet is the exception. Ex-choreographer Merle Lister remains an ebullient presence even hindered by a stroller. She engages a construction worker in delightful conversation and a cheeky mambo. He tells her about the ghosts he’s seen. She tells him there’s no such thing, and leaves to haunt the corridors some more.
Loss is a central theme. Susan Kleinsinger is depicted with her ailing partner Joe, and immediately after his death. Her grief is palpable. He’s a metaphor for the very death of the way of life depicted. Elsewhere one of the younger residents, Steve Willis, shows how he had let his living space, once occupied by Joplin, to be gradually whittled away in order to be allowed to remain. Bare wires sprout from the decimated areas that were his kitchen, bathroom, and the connecting hallway.
We’re used to faded grandeur in this country and can usually find something charming about a site in splendid disrepair and the documentary invites us in with such joys. It’s true Dreaming Walls does allow itself a bit of a wallow in nostalgia, but it’s clear-eyed enough to appreciate nothing glamorous in the dilapidation of the residents’ living space, and indeed, in most of the residents themselves.
Still a little in thrall to the icons that lived and loved, fucked and fought, and even died there, Dreaming Walls has a tragic air; its subject coming across as a purgatorial limbo with its residents clinging on with splintering fingernails to the last vestiges of the turn on, tune in, drop out lifestyle. And also, perhaps, to the last bit of affordable property they’ll ever get a chance to stay in in New York. The people who remain within these Dreaming Walls are often admirably stoic and spirited, witty and wise, and they’re captured with respect and affection by Duverdier and van Elmbt. Yet the main feeling one has when leaving the the Hotel Chelsea is overwhelming melancholy.
Available on-demand and in certain cinemas from Fri 20 Jan 2023