To honor the memory of the thoughtful and trenchant writer Gary Indiana, who passed away in late October, we’ve decided to spotlight Jackie Raynal’s Hotel New York, a biting send-up of the NYC-arts scene in the ‘80s that Indiana wrote the dialogue for. Indiana, who wrote numerous plays and screenplays, also had a career as an actor, starring in films by the likes of Ulrike Ottinger, Christoph Schlingensief, Michel Auder, and more. In Hotel New York, he plays double-duty: as a contributor to the film’s waggish script and an actor playing a more-or-less fictionalized version of himself. 

After a brief period spent in France editing short films and spaghetti westerns, Raynal moved back to New York in 1973, following previous stints in the United States living among artists and hippies on the West Coast. It was clear to her that American and French people did not share the same “tempo,” and according to an interview she conducted with Libération, the idea to make Hotel New York was prompted by a bad experience at the laundromat that made her realize how “things change all the time and are immediately replaced [in the United States], much quicker than in Europe.” 

“The late 1970s in New York was similar to the France I knew in the ’60s. There was a lot of music, a lot of artists and filmmakers mixing. We used to go to the Mudd Club or CBGB. That’s where I met Gary Indiana, who helped write the screenplays for my New York movies. The city was bankrupt and that was its hope.” JACKIE RAYNAL

 

Unlike her national contemporaries, Raynal was much more influenced by the work of NYC experimental filmmakers like Andy Warhol than the French New Wave. “We considered ourselves as the New New Wave,” she said when describing the Zanzibar Group (an experimental film collective she was active in alongside Serge Bard, Philippe Garrel, and Zouzou, among others.) Indeed, her spirit was much closer to NYC’s caustic and experimental tendencies, as seen in Hotel New York’s respective satirical savviness and incorporation of dreams and different film stocks.

Jackie Raynal was born in Poilhes, France, in 1940. She began attending the Cinémathèque Française when she was seven years old and despite never attending film school, became a film editor by the time she was twenty. She edited the first three installments in Éric Rohmer’s Moral Tales, in addition to Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963) and the six-part anthology Paris vu par… (1965). Between 1965 and 1970, she became involved in the Zanzibar Group, a radical filmmaking collective inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the events of ‘68.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to RE:VOIR.