John Lautner – Desert Hot Springs Motel

A continuous voice-off, the desert and, hiding in the desert, three small buildings turned in on themselves: the Desert Hot Springs Motel designed by John Lautner. “Ten days after I stopped writing pornographic stories, I met William Burroughs…” This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the narrator, Steven Lowe, and the author of Naked Feast. It is also the beginning of this short film, which is both a fine meditation on writing and a tribute to Steven Lowe, who died last year. Steven Lowe had bought the Desert Hot Springs Motel and converted it into a writing “city” for novelists and screenwriters in search of a place away from the noise of the world. John Lautner’s architecture, typified by an inner and outer privacy (“Shelter is the most basic human need” according to him) seems perfect for a writer’s need for isolation and concentration. Writing is an invisible–thus unfilmable–act that presupposes the evaporation of the world. When he was writing, Burroughs already shut himself away into a dark room, with no opening, the only furniture being a chair, table and typewriter. (Yann Lardeau)