Back in the summer, a chapter of mine - first ever to be published - finally saw the light of day after a many-year wait and valiant efforts by the editors to see the project to completion. The anthology is called Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, and was published in July of last year by Lexington Books.
My chapter, written concurrently with the formative stages of my dissertation work, is ponderously titled "Just an Anonymous Room: Cinematic Hotels and Motels as Mnemonic Purgatories." (Honestly... what was I thinking?) The approach is reflective of my (then less-developed) fascination with the intersection of space/spatialization and narrative in filmmaking, analyzing such spaces as "paradigmatic zones of transit and homelessness." I look at Leaving Las Vegas, Memento, The Business of Strangers, Tape, Century Hotel, Chelsea Walls, The Tesseract, Dirty Pretty Things and 2046 and deconstruct the functions of the hotel/motel space in support of the narratives' creation of purgatorial spaces.
Mercifully, I think the chapter held up over the years and the anthology overall contains some great, vigorous analytical writing.
The book is available on Amazon and other online sellers, and hopefully at many local and campus libraries.
