Untitled (Film Still #43)

The power of media to influence identity, especially in younger women, is not a recent phenomenon. During World War II, media promoted the glamour of work to attract women needed in factories to substitute men, who were fighting abroad. However, as soon as the war was over, women with interests outside of motherhood and homemaking were portrayed as bad mothers or mentally unhealthy. Cindy Shermans sixty-nine heroines capture a constellation of a manufactured fictional femininity, which speak of the conflict of feminist desires that took hold in post-war America. To a generation of baby boomer women who had grown up with the mixed messages of media, Untitled Film Still #43 captured the inner conflict generated between the feminine and glamorous images manufactured on home televisions and movie screens and the wave of the Feminism of that took hold of the era.
It is then not surprising to know that Cindy Sherman was influenced by feminist performance work of the 1970s by artists such as Eleanor Antin and Adrian Piper, whose performances are known primarily by photographic documentation. "Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are not only photographic records of performances, but inversely, performative accounts of filmic images" (A. Cruz, "Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty Years of Cindy Sherman", Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, London 1997, p.4). Since Sherman's character in the Untitled Film Still #43 is not specified, it encourages a personal narrative and participation by suggestion, through the deliberate nature of the work's location, costume, and Sherman's own pose.