The Visitor

US, 1992
10 min, 16mm, B&W

Press Quotes

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“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.”
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Bouchra Khalili, THE 51st OBERHAUSEN SHORT FILM FESTIVAL CATALOGUE

“The filmmaker has tried since her early work to make confined social problems graspable on a personal level, not from the perspective of those involved but through a seemingly detached observer who rather than analysing the situation integrates it into her own biography… Already in her first short film The Visitor, filmed at 22, a man is observed from a distance, examined and judged on the basis of the objects he leaves in is his hotel room, which a chambermaid goes through and photographs.”
Olivier Rahayel FILM-DIENST, Germany

“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, The Days and Years of My Travels

“The world is small, even in New York, where Delfina Marcello took her first steps as a filmmaker at the beginning of the 1990s, in 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 This Business of Living. 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 and recorded her voice onto my walkman. I wrote this story for her.” Even more unusual are the recollections of the encounter with Delfina: “We shot The Visitor in a weekend in a Manhattan hotel room, carrying the camera and equipment into the hotel, hidden in suitcases. The actress, Delfina Marcello, whom I had picked to play the chambermaid for her beautiful face and a mystery about her, turned out to have come from Venice. 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. I didn’t recall our encounter but it was, indeed, the restaurant, where as a teenager, I used to meet my father. That was my first introduction to the strange way in which filmmaking weaves in and out of life.” 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 [assist her in preparing] 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 {..}

“The cinema of Delfina Marcello has always been allergic to explanations, and even more so to ‘ethical’ fabrications. It certainly selects reality, presents its features without deception yet works rather through suggestions, traces, significant fragments. One is struck, when it comes to the themes and figures of the trilogy, 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. Cinema that weaves in and out of life, she said.

“We do not have too many critical interventions about the cinema of Delfina Marcello, who lived on the margins of officialdom, like a substantial portion of the experimental cinema world of yesterday and today {…}A trait that unites the female figures of the trilogy, and upon closer inspection also a good part of the characters brought to the screen before this, 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 that envelope the corner spot, stream the headlights of the incessant traffic weaving through the streets of Manhattan.”
Roberto Ellero, “Love Accessories, Delfina Marcello” Catalogue, Italy