Warhol built much of his cinema on the notion of absence, the stance that. The Female Body and the Film Frame. Chapter 3. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman

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1 Chapter 3 The Female Body and the Film Frame Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman We are always looking for art, or for good stories, drama, ideas content in movies as we are accustomed to in books. Why don t we forget literature and drama and Aristotle! Let s watch the face of man on the screen, the face of Marilyn Monroe, as it changes, reacts. No drama, no ideas, but the human face in all its nakedness something that no other art can do. Let s watch this face, the face of Marilyn Monroe, that is the content and the story and the idea of the film, that is the whole world in fact. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal Art wasn t fun anymore: it was people who were fascinating and I wanted to spend all of my time being around them, listening to them and making movies of them. Andy Warhol, POPism (1965) Warhol built much of his cinema on the notion of absence, the stance that the camera simply records what is placed before it, and that others could be hired to do the actual work of the cameraperson or the director. Yet, one cannot discount the mediation that occurs between the camera as an extension of the author, and the subject, while filming. 1 In this chapter, I will continue the exploration of Andy Warhol s films and their relationship to the work of late 1970s artists and filmmakers, now looking specifically to the early work of Cindy Sherman. In the Screen Tests, Warhol returned the body to the avant-garde film, now specifically the human face. I will carefully reconsider Warhol s Screen Tests, as well as his later film Poor Little Rich Girl, in V. Dika, The (Moving) Pictures Generation Vera Dika 2012

2 34 (Moving) Pictures relation to Sherman s Untitled Film Stills. Going deep into both Warhol and Sherman s work, I will address issues of portraiture, the cinematic body in movement and stasis, and the frame line as closure and as a boundary implying imminence. Warhol places these formal conditions in tension between painting and film. Sherman, on the other hand, interjects her own image as female, and as author, further complicating the tensions, now between photography and film, and implicitly commenting on Warhol s work. Although Warhol works with film and Sherman with photography in their contemplation of the cinematic, Warhol ironically privileges stasis, while Sherman tends to movement. Moreover, Warhol positions his films into critical tension with art history, while Sherman infuses art photography with the idiom of the mainstream film. Juxtaposing the practices of these two artists will allow each to shed light on the other. Andy Warhol Andy Warhol s silent Screen Tests (1965) recorded the film portraits of Factory regulars and contemporary celebrities. His Screen Test (1965) featuring Edie Sedgwick will be of special interest here, as will another of Warhol s films with the young Superstar, a nonnarrative sound film entitled Poor Little Rich Girl. In these portraits of a woman, Warhol involved himself in the isolation of cinematic properties through a unique strategy. Here, Warhol often superimposed the conditions of painting, photography, and even performance art onto his films for the purpose of unleashing their underlying potential. Warhol understood film as a set of operational strategies that could cross boundaries into other mediums, and that could, in turn, be crossed by them. In Screen Tests, he introduced certain conditions of painting and photography, especially through the genre of portraiture, and did so by attempting to impose stillness onto the time-based medium of film. The timed recording capabilities of the film medium, when set into opposition with the suppression of movement in the subjects, create an internal disruption that ultimately gives us insights into a number of cinematic and philosophical conditions. Warhol s subjects were asked to sit before the camera for their screen test, often told to not move, for the three-minute duration of a 16mm film reel. 2 The camera subsequently recorded the human face in a tension of suppression, in a way that reveals the life and character of a person as never before, not even in the close-ups of Hollywood cinema or in the face as normally experienced in real life. The close-ups of the Screen Tests tell us about the face both as an object and as an event. What we see on film, perhaps because of the time we are asked to watch it, is palpably not a representation of a face, or a replica of a face, but the equivalent of the face. 3 We see the light in the eyes, and the person residing there (what some might call the existence of the soul ) across lived time (Figure 6). What we watch is the revelation of the specific life that was in the filmed body, the presence of a particular personality that is still registered on the surface of the image. So while the Screen Tests seem to have portraits move in time, they reveal what portraiture in

3 The Female Body and the Film Frame 35 Figure 6 Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol s Screen Tests, 1965 painting or photography could never do. They reveal character in the process of becoming. And while Deleuze claims that this is a feature of all cinema, because it allows us to watch the filmed body as the flicker of light that gathers to compose it, this tension in Warhol s films is extended to the person him/herself. The faces of the Screen Tests differ from the fictional characters of a Hollywood film because we watch them struggle through this process of becoming across the time of an extended close-up. We watch them primp and pose, struggling within the confines of the frame to assume a social personality for the camera. 4 This is who I am! they seem to say. This is who I want to be in front of the camera s recording capability. But, in the end, three minutes is quite a long time, especially when the film is later projected at silent speed, creating a slow-motion image of four minutes in duration for our contemplation. Through the length of recorded time, and the effect of slowed projection time, we see the person struggle behind the face. The outer surfaces of the proposed self seem to disintegrate before our eyes, as various layers of the personality come to the fore. The pose initially offered by each subject alters into stages as varied as annoyance, amusement, and resoluteness, with the by-product being various revelations of the self. 5 In this way, the image is constantly vacillating among various layers of the self as performance, 6 and its ruptures. The tension between film and performance, however, had already entered into Warhol s silkscreen canvases. In Gold Marilyn, the staged self had been registered with a portrait of the star, an image taken from a Hollywood publicity photograph and distanced by the layers of paint. The veneer takes us away from the person from Marilyn Monroe, and further, from Norma Jean Baker, who is nonetheless entombed there. The image seems to recede, not only beyond the painted surface added by Warhol, but across the layers of

4 36 (Moving) Pictures makeup usually applied to Monroe s face, as well as the layers of fictions about the self, of the Hollywood persona, and of the fictional characters she played. All of these barriers were imposed on the fragility of Monroe s barely sustainable self, which was ultimately extinguished by the overwhelming glare of Hollywood. The highly condensed gestures enacted on the surface of Warhol s canvases had seemed to obscure the image, but in the end, they reveal the sorrow of performance itself. The Screen Tests were often shot by one of Warhol s assistants on location at the Factory. The name of the Factory ironically referred to his art studio as the location of an assembly line activity, one that utilized the talents of many assistants, thus opposing and combining high art and industrial production. In terms of film, it also referred to the Hollywood film studios. 7 This ironic tension was then recapitulated in the manner of the filming of the Screen Tests themselves, one that employed nonprofessionals to work the camera and to direct the subjects. Of course, Warhol had previously made the artistic determinations, for the subject s distance from the lens, for example, and for such considerations as the framing of the shot, the backdrop, the lighting, and the instructions to the actors. The reference to Hollywood, and to film history, then, is also registered in the naming of these films Screen Tests, recalling the Hollywood practice of testing the quality of an actor s presence on film. And while Warhol playfully referred to the silent Screen Tests as his stillies (rhyming with sillies, as they were often called by the Factory regulars), the films importance belie their seeming simplicity. The corporeality of the body has a special emphasis in Warhol s film work, and is evident in the Screen Tests. Here, we watch a document of an intriguing face in movement, or in a struggle to stay still, and because of the time with which we are confronted, both time as duration and time as history, we ponder the filmed subject s existence, and our own. Warhol s work is ultimately about the nature of existence now articulated through the properties of cinematic time and space, foregrounded for our contemplation. The Screen Tests also ask what we are willing to encounter in another. When we watch Edie Sedgwick, for example, she literally tests the screen, threatening us by what she shows. From our contemporary perspective in history, we are reminded that Edie Sedgwick is dead. And while her young face still shimmers and her eyes steadily hold our own stare, the film alludes to the ultimate passing away of the body, and the ephemeral quality of existence, while also referring to the ability of all film to bring us those past states. A tension between fascination and dread has been brought forward precisely in the absence of story or plot, and done so in silence, and across time as duration and time as history. Warhol has transposed the image across mediums, creating a tension between stillness and movement in time. The result is an extremely condensed image, one that gives rise to a complexity of meanings and thoughts, many of which are not arranged in a linear fashion. The process of watching is then extended in Warhol s subsequent films.

5 The Female Body and the Film Frame 37 Poor Little Rich Girl Poor Little Rich Girl is one of Warhol s talkies, a longer film portrait of Edie Sedgwick that engages woman as object of the look in significant ways. Time is extended in Poor Little Rich Girl, creating a 70-minute film that seems to promise a narrative that is never delivered. Instead, Poor Little Rich Girl presents concerns similar to that of the Screen Tests.The Screen Tests were meditations on the face. Poor Little Rich Girl is meditation on the face and the body of a woman caught within the confines of the frame (linking it to our later discussion of Sherman). It is also a cinematic portrait of how Edie Sedgwick moves and changes over the time of her exposure to the camera. For this film, Warhol used his Auricon camera with sync sound capabilities, now utilized to specific effect. Stephen Koch reports that Warhol had read Sergei Eisenstein s theory on the dialectical use of sound and was inspired by it. 8 In Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol uses the sync sound of Edie within the frame in opposition to that of the individuals outside the frame. Edie speaks on camera, while dialogue from Gerard Malanga, Chuck Wein, and Warhol himself is included from their position off frame. The dialogue, however, is not understood in the usual way. Instead, it, along with the background music that features songs from the Everly Brothers and the Shirelles, is used in counterpoint to the image, in a way that further defines the frame, and the objects within it. Poor Little Rich Girl is surprising in a number of ways. First, the camera eye is specifically that of Andy Warhol. He is the cameraman here, with the voice-over credits declaring...and on camera: Mr. Andy... And contrary to the general conception of Andy Warhol s films, Poor Little Rich Girl is not static. Instead, the camera movement is quite expressive, even if not quite emotional in the usual sense. Warhol s stare could be said to be autistic by the way it matches the mechanical eye of the camera, observing events for longer than usual periods of time, and aided by the absence of a conventional story. Yet, the incessant zooming back and forth on the object gives way to states of interest, of fascination, and even of eroticism. The body of Edie, the presence of Edie, the beauty of her face, these are all-important elements. Faceicity, the emotional quality given to the object in close-up, 9 and the perception image, the image authored by the filmmaker, are at issue here. Of course, it is Edie s affect that is on display, embodied in her face and her demeanor. But this cannot be fully separated from the interaction between Edie s emotional state and that of the camera employed by Warhol. The off-camera voice only adds to the emotional display, one now bordering on sadism, as it continuously addresses Edie, and she responds to it. 10 First we must mention that the entire first reel of Poor Little Rich Girl is out of focus, and extensively so, but this does not diminish the aforementioned fascination. The obscured image was reportedly the result of a faulty camera lens, but this mistake allows Warhol to set the film image into tension with painting. The out-of-focus reel gives a gauzy, feathery texture to the

6 38 (Moving) Pictures face and body of Edie, who is the film s singular onscreen presence. At first, Edie s features are all in blur, creating an abstract visual pattern for us to contemplate. Soon she rolls over, sits up, and picks up the phone. Edie talks into the receiver, her voice whispery and soft as she speaks some barely comprehensible chatter. We can choose to attend to her words, or continue to watch the quasi-abstract patterns on screen as the camera again comes in close to her face. We see the grain of the film, alive with movement, and the extreme beauty of the image. Then the camera zooms back. Edie rises and walks around the room. She is wearing a narrow-waisted, full-skirted white dress, one that makes her seem like an apparition, or a ballerina in an Edgar Degas painting. And here the film begins to recall not only painting, but also works from film history. The image of Edie as a softly dematerialized form strangely resembles the first pictures of movement ever recorded by W. K. L. Dickson of the Edison Company. In this film, Monkeyshines #1 (1889), a single figure is seen bending its body from side to side to demonstrate movement as the salient feature of the new invention. 11 The contours of its face and body are a ghostly blur, much as Edie now appears in this black-and-white film. Edie then takes off her dress and lies down across a couch. The body, her long, lean limbs, now exists as a type of female form we have also seen before. Edie s body becomes pure white, and the bra and skimpy panties that she wears are almost obliterated by the out-of-focus image. She seems fuller, more voluptuous than her usual self, and as she lies across the couch, her body positioned toward the camera, she recalls the history of the female nude in Western painting. The position of the body across the couch and its line and textures, as well as its pose and its framing by Warhol, recall painterly sources. The Nude Maja (ca ) by Francisco Goya comes to mind, while the extreme graininess of the image evokes the painterly tradition of Pointillism. And when the camera zooms to an extreme close-up of Edie s face, it calls to mind Warhol s own paintings, with their silkscreen process being a type of blurring, a barrier against our getting to know her or really seeing her face. The camera view and the camera movements in Poor Little Rich Girl have another effect as well. Since Warhol was gay, it could be said that his fascination with Edie and her body does not bespeak an erotic fascination. It is nonetheless difficult to remove erotic focus from the view of the camera itself. The eroticism of the image in Poor Little Rich Girl is apparent, and cannot be wholly separated from a basic function of the camera gaze. As has often been theorized, the camera function is voyeuristic, 12 creating a sense of peering into the private moments of another. Here, this function is made explicit as Edie is filmed in sleep, in stages of undress, and in casual actions and movements around her apartment. She has no sight of her own; she is an object, presented to be looked at. It cannot be ignored, however, that the fascination of Warhol s particular camera is in many ways more aesthetic than it is erotic. One can feel that the eye and the hand behind the camera are fully engaged with such aesthetic

7 The Female Body and the Film Frame 39 concerns as the shape, contour, and density of the body as created and augmented by the camera lens and its framings. Warhol frames the body at a distance, or in close-up, creating abstractions of form; the body is seen in segments, and out of focus, its visual features being analyzed. The camera is here involved in a kind of exploration of the cinematic image delving deeply into it and taking the spectator along on the journey. There is a sense of play in his explorations, of Warhol musing, What can I find here? or How will it look if I try that? as well as a sense of the wonder and surprise of what is revealed by the ever-changing movements and reframing of the camera, and of the subject. Some of his camera views are held and contemplated, some explored further, while others are quickly abandoned. In all these permutations we are presented with a moving picture that is continually changing, thus accounting for the drama and excitement of the discovery of the female body moving in space and time. This is a moving picture, a painting moving in time. In the second part of Poor Little Rich Girl, however, the image suddenly appears in clear focus. At first, this is somewhat of a shock. The world of the image as we had come to know it is gone. The image we now see is darker. There are more blacks and dark grays in the image, along with the white contours. The image is of Edie, dressed only in her bra and pantyhose, as she sits before her vanity mirror (woman is presented as Vanity in many classical paintings). We watch Edie as her presence unfolds before the camera through a new sequence of perceptions and understandings. We watch her actions and her face, caught in the stare of the camera, and we hear her words, while acknowledging the power of the male participants now on the film set. They are in control of Edie and her image; she is the victim of their stare. Observations about the representation of women have become familiar through feminist film theory, especially Laura Mulvey s comments on the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema. In Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema (written in 1975, ten years after Poor Little Rich Girl was made), Mulvey observes that mainstream cinema has objectified fascination with woman as object of the look from a male perspective. This dynamic is in play in Warhol s film as well, as we see Edie caught in the stare of the camera. Edie has allowed herself to be placed there by her intense need for stardom, and for love, 13 as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and countless other Hollywood movie stars. Once this glow of stardom was removed, when Warhol no longer needed her, she receded from view, and later tragically died from a barbiturate overdose. 14 Edie is a pathetic figure seen from this perspective in history. In watching Poor Little Rich Girl from our own era we sit in painful awareness of her ultimate fate. In Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol also knowingly or unknowingly recapitulates the seduction of the female Hollywood image, and the tragedy inherent in it. When watching Edie Sedgwick, however, her spirit and her life scintillate on film. This cannot be taken away from her by any of the above definitions. She lives beyond them, effervescent and fleeting. And as we watch, it is impossible to get enough of her. She fascinates through her movement,

8 40 (Moving) Pictures her life, and her ever-mobile affect. As Deleuze notes, in an inversion of what we have come to accept as a phenomenological given, the object (and here Edie) is luminous in itself. Edie does not need the gaze of the spectator to make her live. She is not brought to life by the gaze of our consciousness. Edie s luminosity is her own, and Warhol cannot bestow it on her. The allure of her presence, her photogenie, that quality of the camera noted by Jean Epstein that exposes the humanity of the subject, is in evidence. 15 It exposes the grace of her movements, contained within the life in her eyes, the emotions on her face, and her smile. The sorrow while watching her, of course, is that Edie did not know this about herself, and so we sense that Warhol is exploiting an innocent. We note the youth of her hands, again seen in close-up. They express, emote, in that Deleuzian sense of faceicity, of the close-up. They are not simply the hands of a young woman, or even a young girl. They are soft, smooth, but diminutive, not fully formed the hands of a child. Edie s hands are held in close-up as she dresses herself in the latest fashions, as she ties the bow at her hip in an expression of true sophistication and class. Warhol is fully aware of these aspects of his subject, and he shows them to us. There is youth and glamour in Edie s face, in the audacity of her makeup, and in the presumptions of upper-class America. Yet, we also see a lost child on film, being violated by the stare of the camera, and by the condescending remarks of the off-camera male, in a purposeful act of visual rape. And we participate in it, knowingly. In Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol has given us Edie s voice and the voices of the men who inhabit the space off camera, and the constant chatter that makes the time pass makes us think that we are participating in an event. We are participating in the film that is being constructed by both Edie and Warhol as coauthors. There are other such examples of collaborations in film history, and Warhol was referencing this type of interchange between the director and his star. Working relationships between Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, for example, come to mind, as do those between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. The irony, of course, and one that is fully intended, is that these female stars were knowing of their own power before the camera and of their own authorship. They may have been the object of the male gaze, but they were nonetheless paid for their work, and they were employed within a system that had to acknowledge their power as stars. Edie, on the other hand, was not such a star. Although the moniker Superstar was bestowed on her in a gesture that acknowledged the truth of her photogenic presence, it undercut her status at the same time. Before the camera Edie is eager, willing, giving it all away with such glee and hopefulness that it makes us almost embarrassed to be watching. Yet, before the camera, she constructs her own time there. Through her quicksilver movements, we watch a series of present tenses move before us, and then split off receding into the past, as a future that we have no way of anticipating emanates. And, yet, we don t want the time and the image to move forward. We find that we want to stop Edie s face for an instant, to hold it in time, to keep it with us. Paradoxically, we sit in wait, watching closely, anticipating what Koch calls

9 The Female Body and the Film Frame 41 the small miracle of Edie s smile, for her next giggle to light up the screen. In this way, Edie is one of the great faces on film, recalling Louise Brooks in her effervescent presence, or Marilyn Monroe, especially in The Misfits. And, like Marilyn, Edie fully earns the line written by Arthur Miller for Monroe herself. When you smile it s like the sun coming up. Like Marilyn s, Edie s smile is in the category of things photogenic. And this is how the camera registers such pain and vulnerability in a tragic figure of effervescent beauty. 16 Fleeting is the key word here, crystalline. The moment splits before us in radiance. We want to hold on. Poor Little Rich Girl in this way is not about literal time; it is about absorption. Woman in the Frame Film History Warhol s innovations in filmmaking were not fully understood in the avantgarde of the 1960s. His films, even at their most static, as in Empire, are not merely about sameness. Instead, they seek to establish a tension of sameness within the perspective of unavoidable change. They are about the durée that is, about change in time, about the affection-image, about the face, and about the pose of the body (even when it is inanimate, as in Empire) within the frame. And although Warhol s films, which number in the hundreds, have these and other elements in common, they are significantly diverse in other respects and require individual study. In Poor Little Rich Girl, we have noted the attention given to the person and the body of a woman, especially in tension with the frame, and the space beyond it. We have also noted the sadism and the desire that are in conflict there, a conflict enacted by the men in attendance, most particularly by Warhol behind the camera, and of our own participation in viewing as well. In this regard, Warhol has distilled Laura Mulvey s argument regarding the fascination with the female star on film and presented it outside the dominant narrative cinema paradigm. Edie is the object of the camera s look, of Chuck Wein s look, and of our look. To say that Warhol s is a critique of this dynamic, however, is not quite correct. It seems that both the filmmaker and the viewer are engaged in a knowing act of complicity, and fascination, with the on-camera events. In contrast, the work of Cindy Sherman can be seen to counter both the practice of the previous avant-garde and the mainstream film, now through a strategy that returns to the cinematic female body in tension with photography. Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman first began her film-inspired photographs Untitled Film Stills in Sherman, as has been well documented, was born in New Jersey and came to New York City after graduating from the State University College of New York at Buffalo. 17 In those early college days, Sherman found that she often dressed up in character. She recounts:

10 42 (Moving) Pictures I hadn t thought of my dressing up as art. I d be in my room and turn into a character, just out of curiosity a receptionist, a pregnant prom queen. And then, when I felt completely transformed, I d go out. 18 Sherman continued her dressing up after coming to New York. She would go to her job (as a gallery assistant at Artists Space), to openings, or to parties dressed in character. It was Robert Longo who first said to her, By the way, you should be documenting this. 19 Cindy Sherman s Untitled Film Stills developed from the characters she created. In order to understand the full impact of this type of transformation, it is useful to compare Warhol s formal elements described earlier and those of Sherman. In Untitled Film Stills, Sherman once again returns the image of the body into an art context. She now returns as a female character from some imagined movie, positioned in tension with the film frame, and does so through the medium of photography. In this new format, Sherman explores the exchange of looks ours, that of the camera, and that of the viewer in the fiction she presents. Sherman accomplishes this, as did Warhol, by destabilizing the flow of movement and time in these works, yet doing so through methods all her own. Sherman cinematizes the medium of photography. Warhol had sought to impose stillness on a moving picture medium. Sherman now animates a photograph because of the cinematic strategies she employs. That is, she infuses the conditions of film into the photograph, not so much to blur the boundaries between the two mediums, as to dynamize each through the tension that results from their encounter. Here is Untitled Film Still #5 (Figure 7). It shows a solitary woman reading a letter. There is dynamism between the stillness of the photograph Figure 7 Pictures) Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #5, 1977 (Courtesy of the Artist and Metro

11 The Female Body and the Film Frame 43 and the implied movement within the image, one created not only by its fictionalized content, but also by its formal qualities. In this image, the woman is presented looking off frame and about to speak, a pose that suggests the continuation of her physical action. The continuation, however, is also suggested by the framing and composition of the photograph, and in the manipulation of the style of the image, to look like a midcentury narrative film. So while the woman s looks and gestures imply a physical continuation, the framing and the look also give presence to the cinematic offscreen, or what Deleuze has called the out-of-field. Unlike Warhol, however, who had instructed the subjects of his Screen Tests to restrict their movements during the filming, in Sherman s Untitled Film Stills, time and movement have an inverse trajectory. The photographed woman and the setting she inhabits are by definition without movement, yet since the image is constructed cinematically, it is given the implication of movement distinctive of that medium. Movement, and therefore time, is implied in the image, imminent, present, within the frame. 20 There is also a disjunction between what we assume will happen and what will never happen, because of the medium overlap with which we are presented. A tension is created, one as destabilizing and potentially deconstructive as the instruction given by Warhol to his subjects. And as we stare at the stillness of the photograph, within the implied movement and time potential of its cinematic referent, we come to know and inquire about the film medium its cultural usage and its constituent properties. The Out-of-Field What are the implications of dynamizing the out-of-field, and how does this strategy fit into the history of similar practices in film and art? By addressing Sherman s Untitled Film Stills with a continued understanding of Warhol s work, and with a discussion of Diego Velázquez s Las Meninas (1656), a painting on which Warhol draws, we can further contextualize Sherman s manipulation of this dynamic. 21 First to consider is that Warhol engages a tension between on- and offscreen spaces in a way that refers to, and further disrupts, the dynamic in Velázquez s famed work. In Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol is interested in articulating the literal space beyond the frame as a space containing his presence on camera and the source of the voices and the music heard over the image. The space outside the frame is declared to be that from either side of the frame, or even on the reverse of the visual field, impinging on the image seen. We, as viewers, also acknowledge our own position there, matching the camera s gaze, distanced as we are by the lack of a conventional narrative. In Las Meninas, on the other hand, the out-of-field is made visible in the image, simultaneously showing us a fictional world and a real world. In this painting, the artist himself is presented at his canvas, and he looks at us, as do the other people in assemblage within the space a space that now includes the reflection of the King and the Queen in the mirror at the other

12 44 (Moving) Pictures end of the room. The reflection, however, simultaneously refers to our own viewing position and that of the King and the Queen, ultimately rupturing the illusion of a fiction. 22 In Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman sets up a similar play of off-camera spaces, but does so by different means, and to different ends. By first reviewing the more accepted interpretations of Sherman s work, we can later offer a renewed perspective, one that sees it as not only deconstructive of female stereotypes, but as contemplative of the cinematic as well. Sherman s early Untitled Film Stills have been extensively read in gender terms, ones described as accomplishing a critique of representation aimed at the stereotypical images of women presented in the media. 23 It is argued that these gender issues have been brought to the fore by an apparently simple, but profound, inversion. The artist is a woman, and Sherman now presents her own body, in disguise, to embody the characters she represents to the camera. The camera gazes at her in what Laura Mulvey describes as a parody of voyeurism. Mulvey continues: The viewer is immediately caught by the voyeurism on offer. But the obvious fact that each character is Sherman herself disguised introduces a sense of wonder at the illusion and its credibility. And, as is well known in the cinema, any moment of marveling at an illusion, immediately destroys its credibility. The lure of voyeurism turns around like a trap, and the viewer ends up aware that Sherman, the artist, has set up a machine for making the gaze materialize uncomfortably in alliance with Sherman, the model. 24 Sherman is therefore both the object and the author of her look, a tension that puts our own gaze into crisis. As we look at her image, we first indulge in, and then become aware of, the more conventional objectification of the female form by male artists, as well as by male viewers. We occupy, as the argument goes, the position of the male gaze inscribed in the history of Western representation, both in painting and in the popular media. We must note, however, that in so doing Sherman also brings to the fore the trajectory of gazes explored by Warhol in film and Velázquez in painting. In Sherman s Film Stills we are made aware of a similar exchange of looks, that of the artist (as camera), those of the character within the fiction, and our own gaze as viewers (one that we share with the artist/camera herself). In Sherman s work, this exchange of gazes has been read as deconstructive of stereotypes of women because of the presence of the female artist before and behind the camera. Sherman thus undermines what had seemed acceptable in popular culture, and in art, even in Andy Warhol s work. The sadism of Warhol s insistent framing of Edie s face and body, as well as the manipulation of space in Poor Little Rich Girl, is implicitly addressed by Sherman s inversions. And while it could be argued that Warhol too had acknowledged this objectification of the female, especially as it is utilized and exploited within the Hollywood system, his work nonetheless promotes that sadism. Sherman s work instead reformulates the dynamic from the point of view

13 The Female Body and the Film Frame 45 of a female artist, destabilizing its usage in the avant-garde film, and in the mainstream. For critics like Arthur Danto, however, this reading of Sherman s work may not be all that there is to be said about Untitled Film Stills. He states, even so, the stills are not in my view merely feminist parables. 25 Taking up the challenge, let us explore Sherman s photographs in terms of their time and movement potential, and further inquire how the cinematic has been utilized. This closer look will allow us to better understand Sherman s work and to later broaden our perspective on the film and film-related practices of her contemporaries. The Use of the Cinematic in Sherman s Untitled Film Stills In Cindy Sherman s work, the stillness of the photograph, in tension with film conventions, dynamizes the viewer s perception through the anticipation of a story. In reference to Sherman s Untitled Film Still #21, Crimp discusses the sense of something about to happen portrayed in the photograph, and speculates on how it might be constructed there. Crimp writes: But what is it, in fact, that makes this a picture of presentiment, of that which is impending? Is it the suspicious glance? Or can we locate the solicitation to read the picture as if it were fiction in a certain spatial dislocation the jarring juxtaposition of close-up face with distinct buildings suggesting the cinematic artifice of rear screen projection? Or is it the details of costume and make up that might signal disguise? 26 Crimp attempts to locate the sense of presentiment in a number of the still image s components, and cites film in only one fleeting example, in the cinematic artifice of rear projection. In the following quote, Crimp further grapples with the relationship of photography to film as posited by Sherman s art: Like ordinary snapshots, they appear to be fragments; unlike those snapshots, their fragmentation is not that of the natural continuum, but of a syntagmatic sequence, that is, a conventional segmented temporality. They are like quotations from the sequence of frames that constitute the narrative flow of the film. 27 Crimp reads Sherman s Untitled Film Stills as individual film frames quoted, that is, figuratively extracted from a strip of celluloid, the sequence of which he claims would constitute a narrative. On looking closer, however, we find that this interpretation is too linear to describe the work s temporal dynamic and that it also does not account for the formal strategy that would encourage a sense of an impending occurrence. 28 First to acknowledge is that the succession of frames on a strip of film does not result in the telling of the film s narrative and so is not accepted as being the smallest unit of narrative production in film.

14 46 (Moving) Pictures Sherman s Film Stills are more analogous to film shots. But what is at issue by our designating these images either film frames or film shots? The difference lies in their narrative potential, and the time and movement they connote. Sherman has not chosen the images of her Untitled Film Stills as descriptive of the often random, mechanized segmentation of movement on a strip of film. Instead, they have been staged and photographed to evoke a drama, a narrative. And in film, it is not the individual film frame but, rather, the film shot that functions as the smallest unit of narrative utterance. 29 So, while Crimp does go on to note that Sherman s Untitled Film Stills create a narrative ambience stated but not filled, 30 it is not just the content of the image as a photographic still that creates this feeling, but also the conventionalized function of the film shot itself, especially in its construction of offscreen space. True, the character within Sherman s photographs is often looking over her shoulder or to the side or even in the direction of the camera with an air of anticipation or dread. And yes, other elements within the image, such as the costumes, the locations, and the props, cue us to certain types of film narratives. But the Untitled Film Stills also embody a particular style of filmmaking, a midcentury classical narrative style, and so evoke the formal dynamics of framing, image quality, and composition typical of that era. The Frame Line The frame line is the basic compositional unit of the shot, and one that constructs the off frame, or what Deleuze calls the out-of-field. This out-of-field in film differs from that same property of the photograph, or of a painting. The out-of-field in narrative film is not the real space outside the frame line, the space of the gallery, say, or even the actual space offscreen at the time of the shooting, one that includes the camera and the crew, as Warhol had articulated. In mainstream narrative film, the out-of-field is the interconnection of fictive spaces and times that are realizable by the preceding and the upcoming shot, as well as by the composite of shots across the film as a whole. As Deleuze describes it: In one case...the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or another; in another case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot be said to exist, but rather to insist or subsist, a more radical elsewhere, outside homogeneous time and space both intermingle constantly. 31 Deleuze continues, claiming that all of these states are then simultaneously present within the shot itself: The out-of-field is that which is neither seen nor understood, but nevertheless, perfectly present. 32 In Sherman s work, such as Untitled Film Still #5, the gesture of the actress, her look off camera, and the frame itself imply an out-of-field, realizable in the next shot and the preceding shot, as well as the narrative

15 The Female Body and the Film Frame 47 construction of film as a whole. All of these vibrate within the presented shot, causing the sense of imminence, and of dramatic continuation, that is typical of the narrative cinema. Sherman s allusion to cinematic form thus creates a tension between photography and film, between the stillness of the photograph and the dynamism of the cinematic that has been suggested within it. And this tension is not merely a tension between the past-tense structure of the photograph and the present tense of film. 33 Deleuze points out that film is not a present-tense medium. According to him, film has a dynamic temporal structure of the film shot:...there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come...it is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image. 34 The past, present, and future of the cinematic are present within Untitled Film Still #5 because of its manipulation of the photograph, a past-tense medium, to mimic the conditions of a film shot, one that implies time and movement among and through the interaction with the whole of the narrative. In Untitled Film Still #5,then, the looking offscreen;the mouth pursed, about to speak; the framing of the shot from a lower angle, with the figure off center, is dynamized by this implied filmic temporal structure and the sense of something about to happen. Through the stillness of the photograph, we have witnessed a quality of imminence, a feature of the cinematic itself. The Pose To further appreciate the dynamic of Sherman s art, however, we must continue to distinguish between a film frame and a film shot, not only in its attention to framing, but also in its inscription of poses of the body in her work. Deleuze describes the individual photographic frames on a filmstrip as immobile sections, the result of the segmentation of natural movement into a series of still units. Deleuze also notes that this mechanical process of breakdown results in the inscription of equidistant instants, or poses, something new in the history of image formation, which he has termed any-instant-whatevers because of their ordinariness (not that they are unremarkable, but that they are intermittently rendered). And while Deleuze notes that this cinematic quality had influenced painting, dance, and theater, tending to replace the privileged poses of classical art with more casual attitudes and postures (as in the paintings of Edgar Degas), a reverse tendency can be seen in Sherman s work. It is important to acknowledge that the body poses in Sherman s work are not best described as typical of the any-instant-whatevers visible on the cinematic breakdown of movement on a filmstrip. That is, they are not suggestive of half-composed 35 gestures in the

16 48 (Moving) Pictures process of becoming more characteristic of one of the 24 frames-per-second units on a filmstrip. Instead, Sherman s poses are studied, halted at their most evocative moment. And if they are not quite the privileged poses of classical art, that of eternal poses, certainly they present us with a narratively rich gesture, one that asks a question, and implies not only a continuation, but also the suggestion of a cause. 36 And it is not only the poses, but also other elements in the shot in combination with those poses, that evoke this dramatic property. The image as a whole is in disguise, fashioned to mimic an old style of movie making. The setting and props, as well as the composition and lighting, and the black-and-white grainy image, lead us to the suggestion of a particular type of story, and cinematic style, from the 1950s or 1960s. In Untitled Film Still #44, for example, the figure of Sherman is seen in extreme long shot. Barely visible, the featured woman, dressed in heels and a light-colored dress, leans one hand against a wall, and puts the other hand to her face. The sign for the Flagstaff train station announces her location. In these simple visual strokes, all elements congeal to suggest a narrative: a lonely woman running away from an abusive husband, perhaps, or an ambitious secretary waiting for her lover. Crimp is thus both incorrect and correct when he notes:...these are photographs whose condition is that of the film still, of the fragment whose existence never exceeds the fragment. Sherman s Untitled Film Stills incorporate both of these tendencies within them. They never exceed the fragment, yet embody aspects of the whole within them. The Past as Strategy An important element that distinguishes Sherman s cinematized bodies in Untitled Film Stills, especially from the work of Warhol that we have been discussing, is that she empathically constructs her images as existing in the past. Moreover, in her work, we are not simply given a picture of a picture. Instead, we are presented with a carefully constructed rendition of a movie memory, a personal memory perhaps, but one that registers within a broader cultural perspective. By referencing the visual surface of old movies, Sherman s strategy is not entirely dissimilar from that of certain narrative films of the 1960s and 1970s, ones ranging from Godard s Breathless in 1960 to Terrence Malick s Badlands in 1973, and as we will later discuss, to Amos Poe s Unmade Beds in In all these films, the image takes on the look and feel of past movies. Sherman s work, however, has been rendered differently. As noted, we are not presented with the actual film, and we are not engaged in the elaboration of narrative. We therefore have more time to contemplate the image. As we gaze at the picture, we get the sense of something already seen. We experience akindofdéjà vu, of an image remembered but not locatable. Of her own creative process Sherman notes:

17 The Female Body and the Film Frame 49 If the Film Stills look like film noir, or neorealism, or B movies, it comes from my having viewed a lot of those kinds of films. I just soaked them in. The images then come from my unconscious. 37 This effect of memory is made especially palpable when the Untitled Film Stills are viewed within a gallery setting. The Film Stills are smaller than they appear in reproductions, and are of course smaller than actual projected films. They are often presented in 8 10 size, in modest picture frames, and displayed at eye level on the gallery wall, further underlining the quality of memory. In these images, we soon recognize the artist in disguise. And it is precisely in this combination of the past connotations of the photographs and the more contemporary status of the artist, as repeated in images throughout the room, that we experience the temporal rift. A disjunction is created between historical eras the 1950s of the movies and the 1970s of the artist one that causes an internal tension, a disruption. The temporal split, along with the repetition of the artist s body, ejects us from the fiction portrayed in the Film Stills, and finally allows us to see the frame for what it is, further explaining Laura Mulvey s observation (stated earlier): The lure of voyeurism turns around like a trap, and the viewer ends up aware that Sherman, the artist, has set up a machine for making the gaze materialize uncomfortably in alliance with Sherman, the model. The materialized gaze is actually that of the camera itself, set up by Sherman to record this world, and through whose mechanistic eye we now view her. This awareness makes the image almost palpably recede. The frame border comes into view, as does our position as viewers, standing in the position of the camera, now in the real world. In one sense, we have been identified, indicted, caught in the act of looking. But in Untitled Film Stills we cannot shake the sense of mediated sight, for it is the camera perception that is made palpable. And this is perhaps why we experience this sight as so menacing. 38 Interpreted from a fictional or cultural perspective we could be seeing the woman in one of the Untitled Film Stills from the leering point of view of the dominant male in the drama, or of patriarchy itself. From our real world perspective, it is the automaton stare of the camera that has created this image, and we can feel it. Self-Perception In preparing her Film Stills, Sherman engages in such actions as the selection of costumes, the determination of film stock, and the framing and composition of the image. It is only after all the elements have been determined that she finally enters the frame for its completion. Sherman then takes the picture, by either timed shutter or button control. 39 By this method, Sherman never sees herself through the camera eye. Since she is never the object of her

18 50 (Moving) Pictures own gaze, she underlines the position of all cinematic perception as being that of the camera itself. Moreover, she makes palpable our act of film watching as a perception of a perception, that is, our perception of what the camera has already seen. The act of self-perception, however, is nonetheless presented as the fictionalized subject of some of Sherman s work. In Untitled Film Still #56, for example, Sherman looks at her reflection in the mirror. This close-up image is framed in an off-center composition, with the back of Sherman s head in the left foreground, and the reflection of her face appearing at its center. Sherman looks at herself in the mirror in an act of contemplation, and she disturbingly gazes into her own eyes. It could be said that Sherman authors the sight of herself in this way, mimicking the process of self-creation that she engages in through the production of her Film Stills. On closer inspection, however, this too is revealed as only one of the fictions that we could impose on the image. We could, for example, say that Sherman sees herself in the reverse world of the mirror, as did Jean Cocteau s protagonist in Blood of a Poet (1930). Sherman s work too has been figuratively in the mirror, in the mirror of unconscious cultural memories. The art of Untitled Film Stills has centered on the image of woman in the frame, as well as the postures of the body, and the gestures of being. Now, in the mirror of Untitled Film Still #56, Sherman simultaneously re-creates that gesture, and shatters it. She is the star in her own movie, looking by turns like an image of Marilyn Monroe, or even Pablo Picasso s painting of Marie-Therese, Girl Before a Mirror (1932), her face partially obscured by a half-moon white light. By setting the camera in this way, Sherman also observes herself, much as Warhol had done Edie, as the object of the camera of patriarchal society. In this Film Still, Sherman is also Vanity (as Edie in Poor Little Rich Girl), recalling the history of Western painting that often pictured a woman looking in the mirror, and so blaming her for the act of viewing herself. 40 But unlike artists models from Marie-Therese to Marilyn to Edie, Sherman is her own artist s model. In Untitled Film Still #56, the forward flow of time is arrested, while implied, as she contemplates herself in that three-way perception. And this implication of time is potentially threatening. We are looking at her viewing herself, in a mirror angle that would rightfully reflect the viewer to her. Our focal point is her eye one that mimics the eye of the camera but one that can now, at any moment, shift its intense focus and see us. This is the look that can be so frightening, the gaze looking back at you from an objective mirror, a confrontational gaze, one perhaps in keeping with Johanna Burton s interpretation of Sherman s work as a feminine aggressivity. 41 We are now caught, revealed as occupying the position of the camera that device which distinctively separates the cinematic from the theatrical. But this dynamic does not simply acknowledge our position as viewer, as in Warhol s films. This is an assault, by the ostensible victim of patriarchy, an aggressive assault on our viewing position.