Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:04][music] >> We are in a storage room looking at works in the collection of the Artbridges Foundation. Right now, we're standing in front of one in a large series of photographs by Cindy Sherman collectively titled "Untitled Film Stills". And this is number 21. They are self-portraits of sort imitating publicity film stills from Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s taken on set to use for advertising purposes. And in this series, Sherman dresses up in wigs and makeup and clothing costumes to assume the identity of the different roles played by women in these movies, often very stereotyped gendered roles. I think Sherman was interested partly in the marketing of the woman that's represented in these images. A film still is a little bit like the covers of pulp fiction paperbacks. The image is designed to make you want to go to see the movie.

[00:01:13]So, we're in this moment of tension.

[00:01:16]This lone figure always in the film stills, a lone female figure always at this moment in between. Something seems to have just happened to make the figure concerned, uncertain, wary, fearful. And we don't know what she's looking at, and we don't know what's about to happen.

[00:01:38]Sherman intended for the narratives to be open-ended. While the photographs are shown together in various groupings, they are not sequential. They do not build upon one another to form a narrative, but rather Sherman wanted viewers to bring in their own assumptions to create their own stories and also perhaps to recognize the biases that might accompany some of that media consumption.

[00:02:05]>> Well, if we think about this through a feminist lens, we come up against the ways that images in popular culture are used to construct identity. And from that we get the idea of identity as a kind of performance and something which is unstable.

[00:02:23]>> She is a photographer as much as she is a performer. And I like to think about the Untitled Film Stills as a performance series that uses the photographic medium as its format.

[00:02:36]>> The photograph makes me ask in what ways have I determined my own identity as a woman through mass culture? And is there space outside of mass culture and these very stereotyped images where I can have some kind of authentic identity?

[00:02:55]>> Sherman's talked about how she grew up watching TV and movies for hours on end.

[00:03:01]And also the post-war period and ideals of femininity, these were really powerful images for people to contend with.

[00:03:09]>> The core questions that Sherman raises about identity are questions that any woman, perhaps any person, can grapple with and understand on their own terms.

[00:03:19]By this I mean Sherman is everyone and no one at once. She is representing through these many roles the different ways that women, both in the 1970s as much today, assume roles almost unwittingly that they have absorbed as they've grown up through this media culture.

[00:03:40]>> She's recreating a pre-existing type of image. Sherman intentionally and purposefully is making photographs that are not fine art, that draw on mass media, the film still, but that intentionally look like the images that we encounter in our lives every day. So, in a way I think about it as the opposite of a photograph by, say, Ansel Adams, where every aspect of a photograph so carefully calculated to produce this perfect photographic image, here that's not the intention at all. In fact, imperfection is the point.

[00:04:20]>> Sherman saw these publicity stills as cheap throwaway images. Those are her words. And that isn't to demean the images of mass consumerism, but rather, I think, to actually celebrate them as a form of art regardless of their popularity. She even, in some images, developed the film with hot chemicals in order to create this effect of graininess as opposed to clarity. So, what doesn't often get spoken about with Sherman is that she really enjoyed dress up and the idea that she could play the housewife. And instead of maybe, like, first-wave feminism critiquing some of these stereotyped understandings of what a woman is, that you can play within those confines and take control of the narrative yourself.

[00:05:12]>> She talks about play as, in a way, the origin of these images. I'm thinking actually about Colorforms that I played with as a child, figures that you could dress up in different ways. That idea of play and choice is really important here.

[00:05:28]>> Sherman's demonstration of this slipperiness of identity actually implies a really radically feminist notion that we may shed the roles that we play either by choice, default, or force just as easily as we assume them.