Marilyn Times Five. 1973. USA. Directed by Bruce Conner. 16mm. 14 min.
Don’t Bother to Knock. 1952. USA. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on a novel by Charlotte Armstrong. With Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe. DCP. 76 min.
In Don’t Bother to Knock, Marilyn Monroe plays a heartbroken young woman, recently released from a mental health facility, who searches for normalcy by working as a babysitter in a busy hotel. In a rare dramatic role early in her career, Monroe explores the psychology of a woman whose innocence, trauma, and desirability foreshadow her own myth and public persona—and whose actions, as mentioned in Monroe’s private diaries, would later inspire an escape from a psychiatric ward where she was erroneously hospitalized. In Marilyn Times Five, Bruce Conner replays a loop of footage from an infamous porn film starring a Marilyn Monroe lookalike to examine “the roles people play” and the links between the self and public persona.