Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

• The series eventually grew to a total of seventy photographs made over three years

• Featuring a wide range of female characters types that evoke a repertoire of starlets, from Brigitte Bardot & Jeanne Moreau to Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, & Anna Magnani.

Brigitte Bardot

Sophia Loren

• They refer to an ideal of beauty & femininity that belonged to Sherman’s mother’s generation; she was searching for the “most artificial looking kinds of women. Women that had clinched-in waists & pointed bras, lots of make-up, stiff hair, high heels, & things like that.”

– Thom Thompson “A conversation with Cindy Sherman” in Cindy Sherman.

Sophia Loren

• In developing the first six “Film Stills”, Sherman purposely caused fault in the negatives

• a grainy effect that results when one chemical bath is very different in temperature from the preceding one.

• Sherman did this with the intent of making the pictures look technically poor

• Sherman has referred to the protagonist as a “trashy has-been”, a type that she has explored in a number of other series…

• …the locations in the “Stills” were key to the success of their narrative potential.

• These pictures show us how identity, and the representation of it, relies not just on pose, gesture, and facial expression, but also on the arrangement of props, the choice of clothing, and, of course, location.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

• The “Untitled Films Stills” cost fifty dollars each when they were first exhibited.

• Their cheapness was important, as it evoked the original referent – the film still.

• Rarely printed anymore, film stills were never treated as artworks, and the photographers were rarely credited.

• Sherman’s stills mimic the publicity-still format – eight by ten inches, glossy – and often look like throw-away prints rather than precious works of art.

• “I wanted them to seem cheap and trashy…something you’d find in a novelty story and buy for a quarter. I didn’t want them to look like art”. – Cindy Sherman.

• “Untitled Film Stills” are irreversibly tied to the history of performance art, and Sherman has cited the influence of the work of 1970’s artists such as Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wike, and Adrian Piper.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

• “Once I’m set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person…I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. And one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.”

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

• Sherman acknowledges that we are conditioned by cinema and other media, and she uses these associations to steer her viewers in many narrative directions.

• “In keeping with the rules of film, her characters don’t address the camera, often looking out of the frame with blank expressions or seemingly caught in a (daydream/trace).

• “The still are constructed rather than appropriated; they blur narrative, fiction, film, role-playing and disguise. Without resorting to parody, they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images and refer to the culture filter of other images (moving and still) through which we see the world.

• “They look like copies, further complicating the cycle of representation in which they are (trapped).”

- Eva Respini, Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up? (2012)

• Art historian Craig Owens saw the women in the “Stills” as a critique of the construction of feminine identity seen in the media, posting: “Sherman’s women are not women but images of women, spectacular models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation, identification; they are, in other words, tropes (trivialized), figures.”

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

Silver Gelatin Print

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSBFrPWPS80