The Female Body and the Film Frame

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 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.