The deliberate open-endedness of each Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still gestures toward a rough narrative outline, but never actually delivers a specific plot. Curator Amanda Cruz has observed:
“Those small black-and-white photographs of Sherman impersonating various female character types from old B movies and film noir spoke to a generation of baby boomer women who had grown up absorbing those glamorous images at home on their televisions, taking such portrayals as cues for their future.”
Sherman was primarily inspired by the costumes and looks of European actresses such as Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret, Sophia Loren, and Anna Magnani, rather than those of Hollywood starlets, as she thought this would result in more obscure images.
The making of the Film Stills was highly practical and always reliant on the places and backdrops available to Sherman. Until 1979, many of the interiors were shot in her own studio / apartment at John and South Streets in New York City. Sherman has noted, ‘Some of the photographs are meant to be a solitary woman and some are meant to allude to another person outside the frame’ (The Complete Untitled Film Stills, p. 8).
Sherman composed an intriguing interior scene in Untitled Film Still #84. The heroine, seemingly coming home at the end of a rough day, is caught after her groceries have toppled to the floor. Or perhaps a more sinister story is unfolding as we witness the moment just before she confronts an unseen threat. No scenario is right or wrong; regardless of the narrative, the viewer is intrigued and unsettled by what will happen and who could be standing just inches beyond the frame.
Sherman has admitted that she did not title these photographs since it would have ruined their ambiguity. Their ‘untitled’ status gives each viewer license to embrace any allusion they may find in the pictures, be it flashbacks to scenes from mid-century movies or promotional film stills of celebrities. When Metro Pictures opened in 1980, the gallery assigned numbers to the Film Stills. These were originally chronological, but soon became arbitrary, used simply as a tracking system. Sherman has explained that ‘the numbers went up more or less to #65, then jumped to #81. . . Periodically I’d go back, edit some out, and add others, four of which became #81 through #84’ (The Complete Untitled Film Stills, p. 7). Untitled Film Still #84 was taken moments before or after Untitled Film Still #10 but was not officially added to the series until later.
Nearly forty years have passed since Sherman completed this ground-breaking series (1977-1980). Each image from the edition of 10 is printed on 8-by-10 inch paper, a sheet size deliberately chosen by Sherman since it has the same dimensions as real-world film stills. Complete sets of the 8-by-10 inch Untitled Film Stills are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York.
