Hotels and motels play a leading role in a wide variety of films. This volume brings together a range of outstanding explorations of the cultural significance of stopping places, both on screen and off.

Mobility has long been a defining feature of modern societies, yet remarkably little attention has been paid to the various 'stopping places'_hotels, motels, and the like_that this mobility presupposes. If the paradoxical qualities of fixed places dedicated to facilitating movement have been overlooked by a variety of commentators, film-makers have shown remarkable prescience and consistency in engaging with these 'still points' around which the world is made to turn. Hotels and motels play a central role in a multitude of films, ranging across an immensely wide variety of genres, eras, and national cinemas. Whereas previous film theorists have focused on the movement implied by road movies and similar genres, the outstanding contributions to this volume extend the recent engagement with space and place in film studies, providing a series of fascinating explorations of the cultural significance of stopping places, both on screen and off. Ranging from the mythical elegance of the Grand Hotel, through the uncanny spaces of the Bates motel, to Korean 'love motels,' the wealth of insights, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, that this volume delivers is set to change our understanding of the role played by stopping places in an increasingly fluid world.

Chapter 1 Checking In
Chapter 2 Revisiting the Grand Hotel (and Its Place in the Cultural Economy of Fascist Italy)
Chapter 3 Floating Hotels: Cruise Holidays and Amateur Film-making in the Inter-War Period
Chapter 4 Vacancies: Hotels, Reception Desks, and Identity in American Cinema, 1929?1964
Chapter 5 The Swiss Hotel Film
Chapter 6 Cinematic Topographies in Time-Space: Wim Wenders' Hotels
Chapter 7 The Decay of Fiction and the Poetics of Pastness
Chapter 8 'Now, Where Was I?': Memories, Motels, and Male Hysteria
Chapter 9 'Just an Anonymous Room': Cinematic Hotels and Motels as Mnemonic Purgatories
Chapter 10 No Sympathy for the Devil or Lobby Music: Spaces of Disjunction in Barton Fink and the The Shining and Muzak
Chapter 11 Parallel Hotel Worlds
Chapter 12 No Quarter(s), No Camel(s), No Exit(s): Motel Cactus and the Low Heterotopias of Seoul
Chapter 13 Off the Highway: Some Notes on Stopping Places in Cinema
Chapter 14 The Real of the Screen: Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts
Chapter 15 Departure: The 21st Century Hotel: Your Media/Home Away from Home