Films By Stuart Sherman
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"Sherman's movies resemble his one-man shows in their suggestive, rebuslike juxtaposition of gestures and props. There's the same deadpan whimsy, but a greater degree of imagistic freedom . All psychodrama ultimately derives from Maya Deren, but Sherman is Deren's heir in even more specific ways. His films make especially clever use of the montage 'creative geography' that she pioneered in AT LAND - although Sherman does so not in the service of creating a dreamlike space so much as a means of supplying visual jolts and formal analogies. Like Deren, Sherman is an ingenious editor . The best of his visual puns have a Magritte-like poetic kick . There's a touch of Keaton in Sherman's stolid, off-hand persona." – J. Hoberman, Artforum
"... the tangible deliberateness of the composition of Sherman's films and the economy of his juxtapositions are worked out in a gesture of concision. Through the simplicity, clarity, and brevity of the images an acute sense of elegance and rightness is created. Like riddles, jokes, koan, and paradoxes, Sherman's films operate on this edge of sense, in a world of wonder." – Sally Banes, Millennium Film Journal