Untitled Film Still #13

As one of the most iconic images from Cindy Sherman’s famed series, Untitled Film Still #13 epitomizes the sensuous ambiguity and referential artifice that make this one of Sherman’s most beguiling projects to date. In the present work, a young woman pulls a book from a high shelf while staring at something—or someone—out of frame. While her body is pressed closely to the bookshelf on the left side of the frame, the crop of the frame closes in on her right, cutting off the ends of her long blonde hair. Despite this apparent entrapment, the woman’s gaze is transfixed out of frame and away from the viewer, alluding to an entire world beyond the viewer’s purview. The knowledge that an entire story is unfolding just out of sight is only one of the many layers of ambiguity Sherman toys with throughout the series—a fascination that has cemented Film Stills as one of the most captivating and coy postmodernist works of art to date.

Although titled Film Stills, Sherman’s photographs are not recreations of actual movie scenes. Instead, Sherman presents us with meticulously crafted generic moments—fragments of easily recognizable cinematic reactions or relationships—featuring women who resemble archetypal actresses. The woman in the present work, for example, is based on Brigitte Bardot, but as Sherman reminds us, “she’s more of a Bardot type than a Bardot copy” (C. Sherman quoted in “The Making of Untitled,” in The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2004, p. 8). In performing this typification of the film still, Sherman distills the emotional, physical, and even geographic complexities of storytelling and image-making to their most basic visual codes, relying on the media literacy of her audience to fill in the gaps. How non-specific can Sherman’s images be while still maintaining the illusion of narrative? At the same time, she foregrounds the many layers of artifice—dramatic lighting, makeup, poses—from which these narratives are composed. As the art historian Douglas Crimp observes: “We do not know what is happening in [the Film Stills], but we know for sure that something is happening, and that something is a fictional narrative. We would never take these photographs for being anything but staged” (D. Crimp, “Pictures,” October, Spring 1979, p. 80). It is this tension between the structures and artifice of representation versus the universal, real emotional responses they precipitate that make Film Stills a quintessential postmodernist masterwork.

Sherman’s dissection of the structures of representation extends beyond film and visual media to encompass the postmodern subject, using her own body as a testing ground for her inquiry. She does not just create an image or artwork; she becomes the artwork. Using elaborate wigs, costumes, and makeup, Sherman demonstrates her chameleon-like ability to seamlessly transform herself into any character her work requires. In doing so, as Professor A. K. Thompson writes, “she effectively demonstrates that subjectivity was primarily a representational accomplishment,” rather than an innate quality of being (A.K. Thompson, “When Shock is No Longer Shocking: The Role of Seduction in Revitalizing Benjamin’s Dialectical Image Under Late-Capitalist Conditions,” Lateral, Vol. 8, No. 1, p. 10). It makes sense, then, that Sherman refused to classify Film Stills as self-portraiture. Rather, we can find the woman of Untitled Film Still #13 throughout the global visual canon: in Woman Reading by master Japanese woodblock printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi; in Carpaccio's The Virgin Reading; in Woman with a Book by Pablo Picasso. It is within this lineage of images that the present work belongs, an amalgamation of centuries of visual codes distilled into a singular iconic artwork.