Seven Hidden Cinema References In Cindy Sherman’s Work

By Lauren Carroll Harris

Film has been a part of the art world for a long time. But who else, apart from Cindy Sherman, has lived and worked across the worlds of film and art so winningly? Though she works mainly in still photography, Sherman’s images are soaked in the visual language of cinema: their composition, the use of black-and-white film stock, the mise-en-scène, the costuming, and the illusion of narrative, the low horizon and deep focus camera techniques. This is why, even when working purely within the domain of art, Sherman’s works seem so much like stills from films – but they never are. Sherman poses sometimes as a B-movie heroine, sometimes as a European art-house character, always transforming herself, hiding herself in plain sight and making herself the work of art. Here we look at five of the many cinema references buried inside her work.

UNTITLED FILM STILL #35 REFERS TO SOPHIA LOREN IN TWO WOMEN

Directed by neorealist filmmaker, Vittorio de Sica, Two Women (La Ciociara, 1960) is the film that won Sophia Loren an Oscar for her portrayal of a wartime widow. Untitled Film Still #35 (1977), of Sherman’s famous Film Stills series, sums up her artistic mandate in one still: braiding together costuming, staging, femininity, characterisation, and highly constructed and posed photography in a mostly male art world.

UNTITLED FILM STILL #7 REFERS TO ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN BUTTERFIELD 8

The costuming, the domestic spaces, the hair, the pose: all the visual markers here point to another mid-century actress, this time Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960). The significance is more than surface-level. Butterfield 8 shows a call girl caught in a tragic affair with a wealthy married man; it’s tagline: “The most desirable woman in town and the easiest to find.” Here, Sherman is showing us another woman fighting for her place in a hostile world.

UNTITLED FILM STILL #25 REFERS TO THE BLACK AND WHITE ART FILMS OF FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

Artist Robert Longo lived with Cindy Sherman for seven years, and helped her take photos, including Untitled Film Still #25 (1978), which is broadly inspired by the aesthetics of The French New Wave. “We’d drive to locations, and she would change in the back and come out of the van a different character,” Longo has said. “We used to see movies at Bleecker Street Cinema. We saw a bunch of art films from Truffaut. When she got out of the car with this outfit on, I jokingly said, ‘Are you a daughter of Visconti?’ I shot this photo from the roof of the van, looking down. It looks like the end of a movie. Like credits should roll, like her lover has driven off the pier and died, and she’s walking away.”

 

 

UNTITLED FILM STILL #16 REFERS TO MONICA VITTI IN LA NOTTE

There’s a clear visual reference here to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film, La Notte (The Night) – in the cropped haircut, the placement of the props, and the interior domestic space. As with all of Sherman’s works, you can’t discern exactly who the character is or what she’s doing. We’re made to feel that we’re interrupting a narrative, but the arc of that narrative is never revealed. La Notte has been called “a feminist critique of capitalist society, which centres around women [and] consumption” – all pretty congruous with Sherman’s themes. The artist has said that her photographs are about “provoking men into reassessing their assumptions when they look at pictures of women…in a way that would make a male viewer feel uncomfortable.” Sherman has said that many female artists of her generation “weren’t accepted in the guys’ world, so we found this whole other way to create.”

 

 

UNTITLED FILM STILL #4 REFERS TO SHELLY WINTERS IN EXECUTIVE SUITE

Though parallels are often drawn between Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus, here are the obvious allusions to the melodrama, Executive Suite (1954), in the pale business suit, the door panel, the dramatic shadow, and the agonised posture. Like Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8, Shelly Winters is a woman made vulnerable by the carelessness of men: she is destroyed by an affair with a man in her company senior to her. As usual, Sherman is working far beyond the realistic conventions of photojournalism or documentary photography. All the hallmarks of her lifetime of self-portraiture are here: the clearly constructed image, the painstaking positioning of props, the artificiality, the dress-up, the make believe, the disposal of naturalism, and the absence of a name for the woman or the photograph.

UNTITLED #92 REFERS TO HITCHCOCK’S HEROINES

As Sherman leaves the world of black-and-white imagery behind, colour enters her visual language in a really important way. In this 1981 photograph, Sherman borrows from the visual style of Alfred Hitchock. A high-angled shot of a woman in danger, complete with very tailored clothing, close-set hair, and strong diagonal lines dividing the frame – these are all part of Hitchcock’s classic psychological-thriller film grammar.

UNTITLED #512 ALLUDES TO PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

More women in danger! This time, it’s the virginal sacrifices in the seminal Australian film and great unsolved mystery that is Picnic At Hanging Rock (1959), which shares a muted colour palette, composition, and costuming sensibility with this piece from Sherman’s work with Chanel. As mysterious and sensual as Peter Weir’s film, Untitled #512 features the melancholic Icelandic landscape, digitally inserted behind the artist, who is wearing white couture.

DID UNTITLED #153 INSPIRE THE CLASSIC IMAGE OF LAURA PALMER?

Here’s a bonus round – a reverse cross-over from Sherman’s art to the film world. Did David Lynch find visual inspiration for his TV series, Twin Peaks (1990-1991), in Sherman’s 1985 photograph, Untitled #153? The similarities in the framing, shadows across the face, cold colours, positioning of the corpse, and stringy ribbons of hair are all there. Certainly there are big thematic likenesses in Lynch and Sherman’s work. You decide…

For information on The Gallery Of Modern Art’s Cindy Sherman exhibition (which runs from May 28-October 3), head to the website. For information on the In Character film program responding to the exhibition (which runs from May 28-August 28), head to the website.