(book 1 of 2)
The complete Untitled film stills
Cindy Sherman
P. by museum of modern art, New York
2003?
0-87070-507-5
The Making of Untitled
Her starting inspiration, a film consisting of mostly images: Chris Marker's La Jetee p4
Cindy had experience in film making, stop motion animation
wasn't in to painting... "I was into conceptual, Minimal, performance, body art, film-alternatives." p5
Dressed up for parties, in character
"I knew I wanted to go on making little narratives, but without using other people. I wanted to work alone; I wanted a controlled situation in my studio." p6
"This kind of imagery would solve my problem of trying to imply a story without involving other people, just suggesting them outside the frame: something clicked" p6
"I didn't want to title the photographs because it would spoil the ambiguity" p7
arbitrary numbering of photographs
"I really didnt know what I was doing at the time, I was playing."
"Whenever I install any of the Film Stills in a group, or order them in this book for example, I try to destroy any sense of a continuum; I want all the characters to look different. When I see two blonds together I get nervous that they look too much alike."
"I was mostly going for the look of European as opposed to Hollywood types. Some of the characters consciously influenced, for example #13 by Brigitte Bardot." p8
"What I didn't want were pictures showing strong emotion. In a lot of movie photos the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught, frightened, tough, etc., but what I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless." because there's a lot of overacting.
"I looked for it consciously; I didn't want to ham it up, and I knew that if I acted too happy, or too sad, or scared-if the emotional equotient was too high-the photograph would seem campy."
"None of the Film Still characters was a particular stretch because I never knew what I was setting out to do- it wasn't like I had these visions in my head that I had to realize"
Left impression that there are are other people outside the frame p8-9
"I'm not sure if I was yet aware of the fact that in most early films, women who don't follow the accepted order of marriage and family, who are strong, rebellious characters, are either killed off in the script or see the light and become tamed, joining a nunnery or something. Usually they die. I think I must have been unconsciously drawn to those types of characters" p9
"I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women .... They were women struggling with something but I didn't know what ... but I defiitely felt that the characters were questioning something-perhaps being forced into a certain role. AT the same time, those roles are in a film: the women aren't being lifelike they're acting. There are so many levels of artifice. I liked that whole jumble of ambiguity."
-experiemented with men but didn't work out, cliches were so contrived and stereotypes few
"I tried to think of ways to make the loft look like it could be other places" p10
"I wanted those first six shots to look cheesy so I deliberately used warmer chemicals in the darkroom to make the film reticulate, which gives it a sort of crackling, grainy look."
-Went to an opening in character, Duchamps creation
"But I loved performance art, the idea of performing; I saw a lot of it and briefly toyed with it myself"
inexperienced with make up p12
Didn't think what she was dong was political
"I wanted the pictures to be mysterious, and to look like unidentifiable locations. So I used types f buildings that looked as if they could be anywhere-just like I used to make my studio look like hotel rooms." p13
Cindy Sherman tried to strip away all identity in a photograph, perhaps this is more impossible than portraying a completely accurate recording? Maybe I have this the wrong way round?
THINK OF THE GUY WHO COPIES SHERMAN'S IMAGES
"Generally I didn't take more than six shots of any one character or scene" p14
More subversion with more photographs.... But this may not matter so much as it's already heavily constructed.
"At some point I accidentally loaded a roll of color film, so there's one roll of color shots . I didn't like them at the time because they looked too real, too contemporary. I like them now, perhaps because they've faded and have their own truly vintage color, washed out and purplish." p15
Changed opinion.perception over time
In reference to #43, "I did a lot of severe cropping, which was why I felt OK about giving other people control of the camera: I figured I could always crop down to what I wanted" p15
small point about looking like the characters she portrayed
"Throughout my life I've tried to keep looking different, so my hair has been all different colors, all lengths and styles. As a result, a lot of these characters look like me in the periods of my life since I shot the Film Stills- perhaps unconsciusly I've been following them, or at least their hairstyles. Occasionally I've felt that as I've gotten older I've come to look more like some of them." p15
After this, run out of cliches and started experimenting with color.. p16
#4, 1977 cindy against the door
#3, 1977
#54 1980
#58 1980
#6 1977
#13 1978 library
#48, 1979
Interestingly, found her earliest photographs the most interesting, with the exception of 2.
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(book 2 of 2)
Untitled Film Stills
Cindy Sherman
with an essay by Arthur C. Danto
P. Jonathan Cape London, 1990
0-224-03017-5
Photography and Performance: Cindy Sherman's Stills
-Arthur C. Danto
Heroes, Greek Gods, lessons for the West, Pre-Raphaelites,
"There is a deep and unanswered question in social history of why, in the early 1960s, a great reversal took place, in which the objects that define the very form of life that had been routinely dismissed as aesthetically unacceptable, began all at once to swamp artistic consciousness, and to flood the precincts of high art with the energy of a profound revolution" p6
"Who ever could have imagined the soup can or the soda bottle becoming the motifs of fine art? Or comic strip, the numbered painting, or the advertising image?" p6
Transformation of the art world, Sherman's work in response to this perhaps. p8
"it is widely accepted that all the stills (and nearly all her work to date after the series of stills came to an end) are of cindy sherman herself. The "of"requires as much by the way of explanation as the "by" in describing them as "by" Cindy Sherman, when the latter does not entail that she took the picture. She, Cndy Sherman, is, for example, in no sense the subject of these works, even if it is an important fact about them that they are more or less all of her." p9-10
pose is like a painting p10
just some actress playing the part
"In this sense, none of Cindy Sherman's images is of Cindy as. They are of The Girl, for whom Cindy Sherman posed. So the images are of Cindy Sherman in a way that is incidental and even secondary in any given work, but curiously centra and essential to the work taken as a whoke, The whole for once is greater than the sum of its integral parts." p10
"In whatever sense it is that the individual stills are of her, none of the works so far as I can tell is in any sense a self-portrait of Cindy Sherman. They are portraits at best of an identity she shares with every woman who concieves the narrative of her life in the idiom of the cheap movie" p10
"Sherman's face is a neutral base on which she inscribes the countless faces of The Girl in her myriad embodiments."
USE THIS... seems to suggest and cohere with Butler here, the individual person is irrelevant, a naked body for example is just that, stripped from identity, identity is not the physical shell but the mental aspects and experiences/memories that make up a person is it not? What is being transcribed here in Sherman's work is her actions, and actions create this identity...
(directly follows on)
"Nor do they have as contemporary counterparts the photographic studies of his own aging body by John Coplans. From Coplan's photographs of his body it would, I think, be possible to recognise his body if one saw it naked, so remarkably unanonymous are they. But I cannot imagine anyone who could recognise Sherman from the stills." p10
-so little she resembles them, was surprised when he met her
-Herrnsteins pigeons
-Performance art p11
The stills are all frozen dramas
"The Girl is always alone, waiting, worried, watchful, but she is wary of, waiting for, worried about, and her very posture and expression phenomenologically imply the Other: the Stalker, the Saver, the Evil and the Good who struggle for her possession." p13
Better Stills in this book!
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Cindy Sherman - untitled film stills
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