untitled film stills – student as archetype
In the first, a tousled woman peers out of a darkened room into the bright sunlight, martini glass in hand, sunglasses shielding her eyes from the glare, stocking hitched, a bored socialite drenched in ennui. Her children will populate the early Bret Easton Ellis novels of the 1980′s, deadened by money, neglect and sex.
In the next picture, we see a beautiful woman on a city street. She looks concerned. Maybe she has $30,000 in her briefcase, ‘borrowed’ from the office safe. She might be worried about her lover (James Stewart, perhaps?) who has been acting strangely recently. It’s possible that she is being followed by a portly gentleman with a distinctive profile. Whatever, she’s a smart woman in trouble.
These are 8 x 10 stills from B-movies you have seen before. At least, you’ve seen films like them. You won’t have seen these particular films because they were never made. They are a part of a sixty-nine frame series created by the artist Cindy Sherman in the late 1970′s, each of which she starred in herself as heroine, starlet, woman in danger, sex kitten, sophisticate, ingenue…
Sherman has continued to use herself as a subject, transforming herself into ridiculously-breasted virgin mothers, sinister clowns and fairy tale goblins. This not-quite-first series, however, is her simplest and most direct – both visually and thematically. The artist is an actress, and she plays ‘types’…. vaguely familiar, known but unknown.
Korean artist Nikki S. Lee has gone a step further in her immersion, as a guerrilla method actor, like Sherman not a photographer but an artist who uses photography to capture her conceptual or performance art. She places herself entirely into her context and collects snapshots as an archetype archaeologist.
That’s archetype rather than stereotype. Whilst the stereotype is cliched, oversimplified, tired, the archetype is the quintessential embodiment of an ideal. The archetype represents a universal, instantly recognisable to anyone. One might say it’s just a question of positioning. Nevertheless, archetypes are common features in literature, in psychology, in cinema, as shorthand to help us understand and connect to narratives. The Child, The Shadow, The Devil, The Sage, The Mentor.
Lately, I’ve noticed archetypes emerge in my classroom. I have been teaching some of the same classes for three years now, and although the students change every year…. in many ways they don’t. Classes from the same department have a familiar charater and chemistry year on year. I am wary of allowing this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as far as curriculum development goes (the narrative of teaching) I can work my story around certain archetypal characters before they actually arrive in my care.
Is this dangerous? Are there archetypes in your classroom? What are they, and do you use them to your advantage?
