In the late 1960s, Marissa Marcel was an actor on the brink of Hollywood success. Beautiful, young and talented, she was selected from thousands in an open casting to star in a famous (and famously mean) director’s hypersexual arthouse-cinema adaptation of an 18th-century gothic horror novel. But the resultant movie was never released – and neither was her next picture. Marissa disappeared for years, resurfacing for a comeback role in the 1990s in another movie that never made it to theatres, before vanishing for good.
What happened to her, and what was going on behind the scenes of her unusual life? Presented with an archive of footage, you have the opportunity to comb through it all and try to find out. You’ll watch these three fictional movies out of order, piecing them gradually together, flitting between clips by highlighting a face or an object, which will then take you to another clip in which it appears. You can rewind and take screenshots to remind you of important moments, and I was writing down off-camera comments in a notebook.Immortality is an extraordinary thing, a documentation of a fictional film career replete with period detail. You will believe that you are rifling through real rushes from unreleased films, seeing real actors and directors and crews working the magic that creates cinema.
