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Lot Essay
Untitled Film Still #8 is one of sixty-nine images from Cindy Sherman’s iconic series, Untitled Film Stills, which stand as the most important series in the artist’s early practice. As seen in the present lot and representative of the series, Sherman employs cinematic compositional tools–lighting, cropping, framing, camera angle—as well as bodily conventions—clothing, gestures, and poses. The use of this vocabulary conjures a feeling of suspense as the viewer perpetually finds themselves at some single point along the continuum of a narrative that never has a clear beginning or end. As Sherman notes of works such as Untitled Film Still #8, ‘Some of the women in the outdoor shots could be alone, or being watched or followed – the shots I would choose were always the ones in-between the action. These women are on their way to wherever the action is (or to their doom)...or have just come from a confrontation (or tryst)’ (C. Sherman, ‘The Making of Untitled’, in The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York 2003, p. 9).
Created in the late 1970s, the Untitled Film Stills were influential in the field of photography and contemporary art for their engagement with ideas surrounding identity and constructed reality. Prompting notions of the uncanny in their strangely familiar, yet undoubtedly ambiguous compositions, Sherman’s series presents the artistic self through imagery suggestive of film, television and media in a way that critiques modernist assumptions and societal constructs. ‘The stills are dense with suspense and danger’, Arthur Danto stated, ‘and they all look as if they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The invariant subject is The Girl in Trouble, even if The Girl herself does not always know it...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 Good who struggle for her possession’ (A. Danto, quoted in Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, New York, 1990, p. 13).
Held in major private and museum collections internationally, Cindy Sherman’s photographs have intrigued, disturbed, affirmed and questioned; underscoring the artifices and performance of everyday life. Untitled Film Still #8 represents the artist at the beginning of her enormously influential and celebrated career undertaking an exploration of contemporary female identity in series after series of eloquent photographic masterpieces.
Created in the late 1970s, the Untitled Film Stills were influential in the field of photography and contemporary art for their engagement with ideas surrounding identity and constructed reality. Prompting notions of the uncanny in their strangely familiar, yet undoubtedly ambiguous compositions, Sherman’s series presents the artistic self through imagery suggestive of film, television and media in a way that critiques modernist assumptions and societal constructs. ‘The stills are dense with suspense and danger’, Arthur Danto stated, ‘and they all look as if they were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The invariant subject is The Girl in Trouble, even if The Girl herself does not always know it...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 Good who struggle for her possession’ (A. Danto, quoted in Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, New York, 1990, p. 13).
Held in major private and museum collections internationally, Cindy Sherman’s photographs have intrigued, disturbed, affirmed and questioned; underscoring the artifices and performance of everyday life. Untitled Film Still #8 represents the artist at the beginning of her enormously influential and celebrated career undertaking an exploration of contemporary female identity in series after series of eloquent photographic masterpieces.