EN
“In an entry from his 1983 journals, Derek Jarman lamented that, while avant-garde directors were relatively well known and revered in Europe, their British counterparts remained largely unrecognised. Among the few names he listed as comparisons – including his own – was Robina Rose. He spoke of a deeply personal kind of cinema, shaped by direct experience and often overlooked by the mainstream. Rose’s films embody this, evincing a profoundly intimate sensibility, but also the importance of collaboration.”
Charlotte Procter
“As night rolls on, reality and its others shade together, and perception unpeels itself from its object, the layers unfurling between what is seen from its constituent parts. In one extraordinary scene, in the deepest of night, the camera is positioned at the wall facing the parlor, set close to the floor, and we gradually discern a darkened figure, the receptionist, moving a gleaming vacuum cleaner to and fro as she nears the camera’s station. The machine’s proximate buzzing slowly blends with the muffled melody of a woman humming (credited as another composition by Jeffes, “Hoover Music”). The mechanized sounds of enervation register as mundane yet transformative. Internalized sensation—deadening tiredness and the circuitry of empty time—is externalized as routine. The night-worker labors into the aurora of morning, senses dimmed and bent by the fog of fatigue. New hotel guests appear suddenly as wraiths and visitors from other domains; the wife of the man in Room 16 presents a diorama of their past through totemic objects toted in a tied-up scarf, a show-and-tell from the beyond. Is she a ghost, or a teller of ghost stories? In the film's most pointed cinephile homage, the slow-motion pillow fight of Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) is restaged as raucous femme fantasia. An upside-down tableau of a male sleeper (Shaun Lawton) writhing in bed, shot through what seems to be a pane of weathered glass, portrays the event of sleep as a tormented agony, his involuntary gestures and rococo contortions a corporeal melodrama of dreamt disturbance. The music-box tune permeates these scenes, providing the phantasmic lilt of mechanical repetition—one of the film’s first images is of a coin-operated, nineteenth-century French music box, a clock of another order.”
Elena Gorfinkel
