Film Stills- A Copy without an Original Piece

I found myself accustomed to accept photographic images with subtitles (specifically yellow) as faithful stills from films movies. I blended the traditional duality of copy and original which express the generic similitude and aesthetic of modern popular culture films. This sort of territory is wonderfully explored by the art of Cindy Sherman. From the late 70’s, Sherman began work on her so-called ‘Film Stills’ series, a range of photographs that presented the artist modelling in the guise of film stars and advertising models. By inventing her own genre, Cindy Sherman has influenced the way generations of artists including myself think about photography, portraiture, narrative, and identity. 

Character, image choice, formatting and symbol support were all key elements of film stills. I researched the most used fonts for subtitles and decided on settling with the universally- supported, Arial in the highly popular yellow shade. I watched 2019 popular modern films and noted the commonly used angles, formats, transitions to further express emotions, ideas and movements. High definition landscape images, with high contrast, saturated, colour graded and black borders were some popular qualities of films.

I drew from the unlimited supply of images provided by the Internet simply screenshotted/ downloaded and edited on. For my characters in the film stills, I did not impersonate specific people—Instead, my invented characters occupied a private world constructing their own narratives and creating their own conceptions of time and reality. The narratives in the film stills do not belong to any film and instead are inspired by my religious upbringing in the Buddhist Philosophy, in that time is relative and subjective to our consciousness through our perceptions of the world via our senses (Bunnag, 2016, p. 89). The thick black borders lead the eye to wander but it can be viewed in any order (horizontally / diagonally/ vertically) as there is no order to it. It is structured to resemble a storyboard and as a cohesive set belonging to a “film”.