The Monroe Experience

Marilyn's text

The heart of the Monroe experience is Marilyn Monroe's unique autobiography. It's the text that she wrote about her life, the way she wants to tell her story, and it's not a projection of authors or artists onto Marilyn, no, these are her words. We propose to bring Marilyn back into today's world to question our time and see what Marilyn has to say about it.

So Marilyn is there, she observes, she returns to our contemporary world and she speaks to the spectators. For this, we offer a journey through an installation, a VR work, a play and a fiction series and a graphic novel.

The forms of the journey

The graphic novel is also integrated into the installation in a physical and digital way, certain boxes are displayed on the walls and others are staged on a digital table which represents Marilyn Monroe's office. We imagined for this creation at the Forum des images to start from books, comic strips, graphic novels.

We imagined that the viewer comes across a book, finds an invitation to go to the Forum des images in which they will find an interactive installation on which they can play with their smartphone. In the installation, there are first the major photographs of Milton Greene.

Image forum

We are working with Joshua Green who restored all of his father's photographs and makes them available to us to bring Marilyn back today. What we like is to offer new forms of storytelling with several entry points, a narrative tree in which the viewer can enter the world of Marilyn Monroe. We also have active modules, you can come and do your Marilyn on the Marilyn stage.

Each time it is a creation, that is to say that we are at the Forum des images, we completely readapted the project for the Forum des images, we created VR for the Forum des images.

In VR, what is interesting is that the spectators bring it into a world, into a universe where Marilyn's memories are there, where Marilyn comes back to talk to us, comes back to tell us her story and comes back to flush out all the fake news and she comes back to tell us a secret, which I don't tell so as not to pollute the story.

VR and memory

You know how to turn, it's a long-distance race at 100 meters, when you cross the line you say to yourself that's it, it's over, but in fact nothing is ever finished you always have to start another scene, another movie. Acting is like being in prison and looking at the door that says get out.

Playing is beautiful, it's like a game that allows you to escape from the world where you live, to access worlds so luminous that it takes your breath away, just that to think about it.

The creative work

So the project starts here at the Forum des Images, it will continue this summer in July and August at the Joseph gallery in Paris, in the heart of the Marais and then our dream which we would love very much is to bring Marilyn back to New York. Marilyn had a dream that she never realized, which was to return to New York.

So through this project which is the story of a French point of view on an American icon, even from a European point of view we can say, it is really to bring her back to New York and to finish this story where she wanted to return.