Marilyn Times Five

Created from 1968 to 1973, Marilyn Times Five is composed of clips from The Apple Knockers and the Coke – a 1948 girlie film featuring actress and Marilyn Monroe look-a-like, Arline Hunter. As Monroe's song, “I'm Through with Love” plays five times, footage of Hunter seductively posing for the camera is interrupted by fragments of black leader. As with Report, Conner edits the film to arouse and frustrate the viewer's desire to see. Extensive repetition, abrupt abbreviations, gradually protracted excerpts, and non-linear sequencing reveals film to be merely a subjective construct – one which commodifies celebrity and exploits women. In total, the object of desire in Marilyn is mediated by so many factors – from Marilyn Monroe's death and the age of the original film to the lethargic pace and absence of narrative closure in Conner's version – that is transmogrified into something truly strange, at once erotic and deadened.