Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster - Softcover

Schweitzer, Dahlia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841507075 ISBN 13: 9781841507071

Publisher: Intellect Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

One of the twentieth century’s most significant artists, Cindy Sherman has quietly uprooted conventional understandings of portraiture and art, questioning everything from identity to feminism. Critics around the world have taken Sherman’s photographs and extensively examined what lies underneath. However, little critical ink has been spilled on Sherman’s only film, Office Killer, a piece that plays a significant role both in Sherman’s body of work and in American art in the late twentieth century. Dahlia Schweitzer breaks the silence with her trenchant analysis of Office Killer and explores the film on a variety of levels, combating head-on the art world’s reluctance to discuss the movie and arguing instead that it is only through a close reading of the film that we can begin to appreciate the messages underlying all of Sherman’s work.

The first book on this neglected piece of an esteemed artist’s oeuvre, Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer” rescues the film from critical oblivion and situates it next to the artist’s other iconic works.

About this title

About the Author

DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is a writer, teacher, and former cabaret star who has toured widely in Europe and the United States. Schweitzer's works include the books Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster, Queen of Hearts, Breathe With Me, Seduce Me, Lovergirl, and I've Been a Naughty Girl; essays in publications including Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, and The Journal of Popular Culture; and an album of electronic dance music, Plastique. Dahlia currently teaches classes on writing, art, and film in Los Angeles while working towards her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.

Review

'Smart, sassy, and scholarly all at once, this is a wonderful book.' - TOBY MILLER, author of Blow Up the Humanities and Greening the Media

'Schweitzer's deft, witty and empathetic prose takes the reader from the corporate space of Constant Consumer magazine, through the confining domestic structures of the film's protagonist, Dorine, and down to the basement where her victims find a new home. As our tour guide through this female-centred environment, Schweitzer encourages our sympathy in strange, surprising places, pointing out telling details, cluing us into the cultural context, and analysing the uneasy atmosphere. If Office Killer is the movie of Sherman's famous photographs, this is another kind of text that deserves to be considered alongside them: an authentic and compelling love letter from Schweitzer to Sherman.' - WILL BROOKER, editor of Cinema Journal

'Dahlia Schweitzer's book takes Office Killer's strangeness and relative obscurity and painstakingly unpacks them, in the process escorting her readers on a tour that takes in Sherman's oeuvre as one of the most celebrated photographers of our times, the matrix of cinema/Hollywood/genre, and the industrial, social and political landscape of late 1990s America to elucidate the larger 'puzzle' that it represents: what is at stake in the disquieting experience Office Killer provokes and the fact of its critical and commercial failure?' - DEBORAH JERMYN, author Female Celebrity and Ageing: Back in the Spotlight
'Dahlia Schweitzer is THE major Jeanne Tripplehorn scholar!'
- STEPHEN MAMBER, Chair of the Cinema and Media Studies Program at UCLA

Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1841507075
• ISBN 13: 9781841507071
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208