Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

Abstract

Since the late 1970s Cindy Sherman has been one of the most prominent artists in the USA. She is a cult figure because of her chameleon-like masquerade in a female imagery reminiscent of American and European cinema and western art. Her dramatic metamorphosis began with Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she acted out a variety of female roles from Hollywood and European movies. In the early 1980s she gradually transformed her image into horrific monsters and decaying matter. In the late 1980s Sherman assumed different male and female personas based on old master paintings. Since then, the subject matter of her pictures has increasingly been taken up by hybrid dolls with surreal or grotesque connotations. This paper attempts to venture back into the terrain of Untitled Film Stills that inaugurated Sherman's artistic career. This series of photographs has become one of the most prominent landmarks of feminist/postmodern art. I will propose a new interpretation against the grain of the established feminist readings of these photographs.