Forever Marilyn, a month-long retrospective, begins at Film Archive Austria in Vienna on Thursday, May 7. Alongside fourteen of her major roles – from an early breakthrough in Clash By Night to her cinematic swansong, The Misfits, a decade later – the programme also includes the 2011 biopic, My Week With Marilyn.
“Rarely does an actress exert such an unbroken fascination more than 60 years after her death as Marilyn Monroe. Her face remains iconic, her story shrouded in (unresolved) myths. She is the epitome of an era defined by consumerism and pleasure, which began its triumphant march from America, and of a new understanding of what it means to be a star – including all the darker aspects of the limelight. We celebrate her 100th birthday on June 1st with a major retrospective of her most important films – an opportunity to get to know her not only as a legend, but above all as an extraordinary artist.
Step by step, Hollywood moulded her into a screen icon: the seemingly naive blonde whose blend of vulnerability, eroticism, and humour immediately captured attention … Her screen presence, however, seemed paradoxical: simultaneously comic and melancholic, seductive and vulnerable, staged and surprisingly spontaneous. ‘I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it’—this statement reveals much about her roles, which repeatedly played with the expectations placed upon her, subverted male fantasies, or reversed power dynamics with a smile.
At the same time, she continued her search for artistic recognition. She briefly turned away from Hollywood, enrolled at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, and founded her own production company. Behind the glamorous surface, her complex personality became visible: a woman who understood the mechanisms of the star system and simultaneously fought against them. The more ambitious her roles became, the more she encountered setbacks. She tried to combat her growing self-doubt with alcohol and pills—unsuccessfully, as her early death on August 4, 1962, demonstrates.
Marilyn Monroe is one of the most photographed faces of the 20th century, yet simultaneously an underrated actress. Perhaps this explains why she is still primarily remembered through images. The legends surrounding her, however, continue to revolve around the question of who the ‘real’ woman behind the sex symbol was, embodying the contradictions of a generation both puritanical and obsessed with eroticism. And her enduring fascination may lie precisely in the fact that these mysteries cannot be definitively solved.”
– Florian Widegger
The Marilyn Report 