A full, month-long movie retrospective for Marilyn begins at Cineteca di Bologna on Friday, May 1 – and from May 11, four of her films will be screened at venues across Italy (Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch and The Misfits), as part of the Cinema Rediscovered summer festival.
‘Beauty has no manifest function, nor any clear cultural necessity. Yet civilisation could not do without it’ – Sigmund Freud
“And so the twentieth century invented Marilyn, the Marilyn of the skirt lifted by the metropolitan wind, the Marilyn that all of America loved and that all of America wanted to be loved by (by the athlete, the intellectual, the President), the Marilyn who met all the right directors along the way, even if not all of them at their best (Hawks, Wilder, Huston, Preminger; Negulesco who did a magnificent job with her; Olivier and Cukor, a little less so), the Marilyn of Warhol and Pasolini, the defeated and drunk Marilyn of the terrible ‘Happy Birthday,’ the Marilyn that America ultimately despised and perhaps, who knows, at a certain point chose to free itself from. Was she a good actress, whatever that means? Yes, or at least she wanted to be with touching tenacity. She wasn’t the most beautiful of the Hollywood realm, but she was the beauty capable of dazzling a civilisation and exposing its discomfort: only she was Sugar Kane, only she was ‘cotton candy’, with all the maternal and perverse things that such sweetness can evoke. To celebrate the centenary of this irrevocable image in the history of cinema, I believe the best way (and it’s a very strong recommendation) is, between one film and another in our retrospective, to read Blonde, the masterpiece in which Joyce Carol Oates traces Marilyn’s life, without ever mentioning her name – ‘a life radically distilled into the form of a novel, and reconstructed with the aid of synecdoche.'” – Paola Cristalli
Full listings for the Bologna retrospective are available online and Marilyn also graces the cover of the Cineteca’s monthly programme, which you can download here.
The Marilyn Report 