Our Marilyn

Directed by Brenda Longfellow

Canada, 1987 (documentary, 27 minutes, colour / black and white, English)

Film Description:
"Marilyn Bell became a Canadian heroine when she swam across Lake Ontario in 1954 at the age of 17, beating the American Florence Chadwick. In [Our Marilyn] the artist [Brenda Longfellow] explores her relationship with her childhood Canadian heroine, and compares her to Marilyn Monroe who was another major pop icon and national symbol at the time."
-- WorldCat (source)

Film Credits (partial):
Principal Cast:	Linda Griffiths, Brigitte Cauthery, David Fraser
Music:	Garyle-Marilyn Young

(sources)

Quotes about Our Marilyn

"The power of the story is strange because you know how it ends, you know Bell makes it—the film [Our Marilyn] even shows you the front-page celebrations first. But the drama still draws you in. There are those wonderful, abstracted images, a powerful soundtrack—the water, the narrator's rhythmic voice—and a text that follows the chronology of the swim."
-- Cameron Bailey (source)

"The idea of Marilyn Bell, and the historical event itself, are re-constructed through a variety of techniques [in Our Marilyn]. On the one hand, a mix of 'official' discourses of information, various media representations, such as newspaper headlines, popular songs of the times, 'authentic' radio broadcasts, and archival newsreel footage offer authorial sources. On the other hand, the manner in which a sense of a past self is evoked, in the re-presentation of a historical figure, wildly pulls away from the effects of these documentary conventions. For the third Marilyn, the 'I' of the piece, is the fabricated narrator of the film. An investigative agent, she both historically situates Marilyn Bell's swim through her memory and provides the film's through-line; all the elements pass through her."
-- Kass Banning (source)

"Brenda Longfellow's Our Marilyn (1987) is as much a meditation on the extraordinary swim by Marilyn Bell across Lake Ontario as it is an exploration of how to recover history when there are very few archival images to give a historical moment its feel and look."
-- Ron Burnett (source)

"[In Our Marilyn, Brenda] Longfellow repositions film discourse to locate, analyse and trouble the cinematic production of woman by reworking phallocentrically produced film images of Canadian marathon swimmer Marilyn Bell and Marilyn Monroe through voice-over, editing, optical printing and re-enactment to privilege the process of becoming and defer any fixing of gender identity."
-- Christopher E. Gittings (source)

"The film's [Our Marilyn's] two Marilyns are not mythic figures for us to incorporate into our own pantheon of heroes and heroines. They are examples of the process of fetishizing the historical. They pose alternative possibilities for the female body, while the film refuses to represent either as an unproblematic icon, waiting for adoption."
-- Bill Nichols (source)

Bibliography for Our Marilyn

Brief Sections of Books

Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation. London: Routledge, 2002. (pp. 273-274)
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. (pp. 260, 265)

Brief Sections of Journal Articles

Banning, Kass. "The Canadian Feminist Hybrid Documentary." CineAction, no. 26/27 (Winter 1992). (pp. 111-113)

Articles from Newspapers, Magazines, or News Websites

Bailey, Cameron. "Brenda Longfellow's Our Marilyn." Review of Our Marilyn. Cinema Canada, December 1987.