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Lot Essay
"Some people have told me they remember the movie that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all" (Cindy Sherman quoted in L. Nilson, "Q & A: Cindy Sherman", in American photographer, September 1983, p. 77).
Realised between 1977 and 1980, just after Sherman had moved to New York, the Film Stills series are a body of work comprised of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in which she plays the part of Hollywood characters, masquerading in conventional cinema roles. Sherman literally stages herself in the roles of B-movie actresses, questioning feminine clichés. By leaving the images without title, numbering them, and reducing them to the status of stereotypes, she depersonalizes the parts to let the viewer create his own narrative encouraged by the suggestion, through the contrived nature of her poses, that she is the object of someone's gaze.
In Untitled Film Still # 34, 1979, the voyeuristic aspect is obvious. We enter an artificial bedroom where a bare-legged Sherman lies on black rumpled sheets with a sentimental paperback novel next to her, suggesting her reading was interrupted by what she is intensely looking at, off screen, her lips suggestively half-open. This seems to indicate an action triggered without us, thus inviting us to unfold our own plot, based on this intimate set of erotic kitsch elements. The high-angle, the nudity, the underwear visible on the one side, the Louise Brooks wig on the other, the masculine shirt and the heavy make-up all contribute to building a network of oppositions which deliberately reduces the subject to the two-faced female cliché: the desirable prey versus the femme fatale.
Realised between 1977 and 1980, just after Sherman had moved to New York, the Film Stills series are a body of work comprised of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in which she plays the part of Hollywood characters, masquerading in conventional cinema roles. Sherman literally stages herself in the roles of B-movie actresses, questioning feminine clichés. By leaving the images without title, numbering them, and reducing them to the status of stereotypes, she depersonalizes the parts to let the viewer create his own narrative encouraged by the suggestion, through the contrived nature of her poses, that she is the object of someone's gaze.
In Untitled Film Still # 34, 1979, the voyeuristic aspect is obvious. We enter an artificial bedroom where a bare-legged Sherman lies on black rumpled sheets with a sentimental paperback novel next to her, suggesting her reading was interrupted by what she is intensely looking at, off screen, her lips suggestively half-open. This seems to indicate an action triggered without us, thus inviting us to unfold our own plot, based on this intimate set of erotic kitsch elements. The high-angle, the nudity, the underwear visible on the one side, the Louise Brooks wig on the other, the masculine shirt and the heavy make-up all contribute to building a network of oppositions which deliberately reduces the subject to the two-faced female cliché: the desirable prey versus the femme fatale.