the visitor: Press quotes
“She films her first work The Visitor (1992) in a New York hotel room. It is the story of a chambermaid who photographs the traces of an occupant of a room she cleans each day. Bit by bit this place becomes a room for images, a space in which the objects find their echo through the contact of this chambermaid, who knows how to welcome them, to give them resonance.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing (English translation)
“The filmmaker has sought, since her early works, to make ostensibly confined social issues tangible as personal experiences—not from the perspective of someone directly affected, but as a seemingly detached observer who does not proceed analytically but rather brings these experiences into dialogue with her own biography … Already, in her first short film, The Visitor, which she made at the age of twenty-two, a man is observed, examined, and interpreted from a distance based merely on the objects scattered around his hotel room, that the chambermaid rummages through and photographs.”
Oliver Rahayel, Film Dienst, Bonn
“Waddington’s works carry their heart on their sleeve, as they want, need to be understood. Starting with her ‘maiden film’ The Visitor … the work ‘describes’ a movement out into the open. From the enclosed spaces of work and home in The Visitor, breeding desire, which is also the need to get away.”
Olaf Möller, 41a Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema Pesaro Catalogue, Italy
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (English original)
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (Italian translation)
“I wanted to go to film school but was too young so studied English literature at Cambridge University. After a few weeks, I stopped going to classes. There was a local art cinema and I started going almost everyday. I randomly discovered Murnau, Tarkovsky, Jack Smith, Vigo, Jean Genet. For the next three years I sat in the cinema and read books in the library. I decided I should try and make films as quickly as possible so when I was when twenty-one, I left to New York. I worked on. independent films. I shot my first film The Visitor with friends in a hotel room in a weekend.”
Interview with Laura Waddington by Olaf Möller, 41a Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema Pesaro Catalogue, Italy
Read: Interview with Laura Waddington (English original)
Read: Interview with Laura Waddington (Italian translation)
“A trait that unites the female figures of the trilogy is the condition of solitude that defines them, the absence of relationships and emotional ties, social motivations and perhaps even personal ambitions, solitary and suspended characters, who at best escape into dreams, into recollections of a happy memory now irrevocably distant in time. A condition that can certainly well apply to the sensibility of the author, whom we have remembered, since her first performance in Laura Waddington’s film The Visitor: that Hopperesque ending that presents her in complete solitude at a bar table, an astonished look, while through the glass windows … stream the headlights of the incessant traffic weaving through the streets of Manhattan.”
Roberto Ellero, Love Accessories: Delfina Marcello, exhibition catalogue, Venice
Read catalogue essay: Il cinema di Delfina, che andava di fretta (English translation)
“The world is small, even in New York, where Delfina Marcello took her first steps as a filmmaker at the beginning of the 1990s, within the milieu of independent cinema. In 1992, she landed on the set of Laura Waddington’s film The Visitor, the story of a chambermaid who photographs the traces left by a guest in the hotel room that she cleans each day: personal possessions, the first page of a diary, the cover of a French edition of Cesare Pavese’s Le Métier de vivre. Delfina was born in 1966; Laura, a London transplant, younger, in ’70. A friendship was born. And the genesis of the film, which the director traces back to a Venetian memory, is curious: “Once in a hotel in Venice, a chambermaid had gone through my things …” Even more unusual are the recollections of the encounter with Delfina … “At the end of the shoot, she told me that we had already met. Years before, while studying in London, she had worked as a coat check girl in a restaurant and had always remembered a shy school girl, who had handed her a coin and smiled … ” Delfina, whose first role is therefore that of a chambermaid, after working in a London restaurant while studying at The Courtauld Institute of Art, will go on to work as Waddington’s assistant on The Room (1994), in which she will, also once again, play the role of a chambermaid, and Zone (1995), to then avail herself of Waddington’s collaboration (camera assistant) on the occasion of Prayer for Violence (1994-2003). Life events, destined to produce strange echoes, and returns of time. … One is struck, when it comes to the themes and figures of the trilogy [later directed by Delfina Marcello], by the singular circularity of a return: female ‘service’ figures, exactly as in the first roles played by Delfina for Laura Waddington and recalled by her in the recollection of the first meeting. Filmmaking that weaves in and out of life, she said.”
Roberto Ellero, Love Accessories: Delfina Marcello, exhibition catalogue, Venice
Read catalogue essay: Il cinema di Delfina, che andava di fretta (English translation)
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