Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Films Stills that were taken between 1977 and 1980 are a series of black and white staged film stills portraying female roles in mainstream cinema and film noir. Featuring a blonde actress’s film career in these stills, Sherman devises a collection of femme fatales, cute girls next door, housewives and other clichés. Using methods such as masquerade and self-reflexivity Sherman tackles patriarchal representations of women via two different, but major conduits: the movies and model photography. The complexity lies behind her use of narrative as well since these film stills are worth over a thousand words in what she is saying about society’s view of the female gender in popular culture.
Corina Pilay
