The Ethics of Repair: Re-animating the Archive

Keywords: Oracion, Marisol Trujillo, archive, ethics, Marilyn Monroe Abstract: The found-footage short Oracion, directed by Cuban Marisol Trujillo accompanying a poem by the Nicaraguan priest and Sandinista Ernesto Cardenal, concerns the tragic life, exploitation and death of American actress Marilyn Monroe. Intercutting archive footage from the Vietnam war and US and Latin American protests with stills and movie clips from Monroe's life, the film proposes both the impossibility of anyone other than God knowing the truth of her existence. The film poses questions about the ethical obligations of the archive both to the lost soul of the actress and the materiality of the found footage in a feminist frame that opens possibilities for reconciling the debts of the past in the obligations of the present to the future