In her first substantial experiment in duration, Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte set about gradually ascending the floors of a fleabag motel in Manhattan over the course of a single day, pausing throughout to scrutinize the building’s nether regions in intense, uninterrupted takes. The result, a silent visual poem running a fleet but dense 65 minutes, excavates a looming current of sadness and dread in musty lobbies, creaky elevators and poorly lit hallways, the frozen camera only incidentally happening upon patrons, many of whom appear to be literally stuck in place. As it rises toward an eventual release from the interior space, Akerman breaks the stasis for a ghostly slow-motion slide down a top-floor hallway toward a window and back—a dolly move that's then reprised multiple times in a row under various lighting conditions. Such a maneuver invokes Akerman's affinity with structuralist practitioners like Ernie Gehr and Michael Snow (artists whose work she was encountering for the first time while living in New York), and yet Hotel Monterey belies any sense of intellectualized calculation, maintaining instead an eerie, precarious balance between trance and sheer mundanity.