GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL

Serge Garcia
The camera is placed in the foyer of the eponymous hotel, the lens turned towards the door. Pulling a suitcase on wheels, instead of a clear, distinct figure, a hazy shadow crosses the threshold. It could almost be the start of a film noir or a tribute to Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey. Or perhaps a bit of both: it’s the beginning of a very idiosyncratic interview with an iconoclast of the electro scene – Terre Thaemlitz, better known by the moniker DJ Sprinkles. Why idiosyncratic? Because, very specifically, it’s this idea of idiosyncrasy that the film strives to demolish. Firstly, although the camera follows the character into the privacy (by definition protected) of the asylum of a hotel room (taking a shower, masturbating, sleeping), none of their features are revealed. The character retains their mystery, like in a fantasy movie, a faceless person with a vague outline, mobile, an undefined being – a person for whom the notion of identity has drifted off course. And secondly, because it’s off camera, always and unavoidably off camera as if emanating from the depths of a secret revealed there, the protagonist’s voice theorises exactly that. With a rare shrewdness and driven by a disconcerting determination, the voice speaks of itself as a theoretical being, and what such a demanding existence requires on a practical level, refusing gender assignment, and laying claim to constant shifts, endless and precarious change. But this also means rejecting all the terms in vogue to challenge the vocabulary and to try and express this glorious instability without stabilising it again. Being a hotel, in short, welcoming all tendencies without ever locking them down, without ever taking them for granted – this is “who” Serge Garcia has chosen to accommodate for a night in his sober and explosive Grand Central Hotel. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)