Marilyn

Marilyn (2012) is an unnervingly patient tour of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel suite in New York City in which the iconic actress of the exhibition’s title lived in the 1950s. 

The film conjures Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagorical séance in her suite at the hotel. Phantasmagoria was an early form of cinema, a kind of circus act in which conjurers would use lighting and artificial smoke to summon an ethereal apparition in an attempt to bring back the dead. Here, the image is taken from the point of view of the deceased Marilyn. It is filmed from the perspective of, and narrated by, a computer-simulated Monroe whose elegant handwriting – first appearing slowly, then manically filling sheet after sheet of hotel stationery – is also a replication, produced by a robotic graphic device whose spiderlike carriage is only revealed in the work’s final moments. The film is ultimately the moving portrait of a ghost. 

The work reproduces Monroe’s presence by means of three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice, and a robot recreates her handwriting. The spirit of Monroe is reincarnated in an image that is, in fact, an automaton, something resembling a human, something quasi-human.