that what was truly filmic about a film revealed itself only once the movie
was deprived of movement. Only when it is stilled do we have the neces-
sary distance to contemplate the filmic-ness of film.
This idea has been enormously appealing to artists and photo-
graphers. Still photography had struggled with narrative as storytelling.
For Barthes, an image could be filmic without being a film. And by
extension the term ‘narrative’ could be grasped more as an adjective than
a noun. An image could simplybenarrative without belonging toa
narrative. The pictorial conventions to be found in film frames were rich
in association and full of dramatic possibility. No other kind of photo-
graph seemed to imply such a complex world within and beyond the
frame. By the late 1970 s artists’ awareness of the film still was opening
up new possibilities for photography. Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall,
who began to make staged narrative photographs around the same time,
were attracted by this compact power that seemed to set in motion
meanings that could never be resolved fully.^18
No longer confined to posing for the camera, figures in art photo-
graphs began toact, or at least to pose as if they were acting in isolated
scenes. Sherman’sUntitled Film Stillsremain influential almost thirty
years on. Mimicking the iconography of cinema, Sherman staged herself
as various types of femininity from popular and art-house movies. In the
gallery context her 10 x 8 -inch prints were deceptive. On one level they 135
121, 122 Cindy ShermanUntitled (film still)
nos 17 and 10 (1978).