on 10/10/2024, 2:02 pm
Paging NC e-zine: time to "pull an Ariadne" on the trail between Cindy Sherman and "noir"...
Posted by Don Malcolm on 2/17/2021, 1:43 pm
Paging Imogen Smith...don't tell them where you got this idea from (nobody else does, anyway!)...but Sherman's work--particularly her long-ago but still highly relevant Untitled Film Stills series, per the review excerpt shown below--contributes significantly to an understanding of the shifting role of "noir" as it became baked into other "post-noir" artistic representations. Circularity and repetition are the keys to laying down a thread (like Ariadne) to track the entrapments of an idea...
Though her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80)--a now-iconic series showing Sherman herself in various cinema-inspired guises and settings--seemed familiar, they eluded simple explanation. They were not based on specific films or well-known actresses; cracks in the facades of these self-dramatizations revealed their artificiality, and yet these photos still looked like copies. They amounted to an almost encyclopedic list of female roles in Hollywood films, B-movies, film noir and European auteur cinema of the 1950s and 60s. They represented a challenging commentary on the stereotypical, cinema-derived notions of femininity in viewers’ minds.
https://fadmagazine.com/2021/02/16/cindy-sherman-tapestries/
What's intriguing/unusual/"groundbreaking" for this work is that it is the first non-photographic work that Sherman has produced (or, at least, made available to the public). Sherman's process for this series is described in the linked essay (by Mark Westall).
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5846068
(Note, BTW, the final "hammer price" for the Untitled Film Stills series...)
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