Knowing looks.

In December 1995, New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired the only complete set of Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills." Realized between 1977 and 1980, this. generation-defining series will go before the public this June in a special exhibition on view through September 2. As the sixty-nine photographs take their place on the museum's walls, Herbert Muschamp looks again at these icons and their era. The series is reproduced here in its entirety.

If Troy Donahue can be a movie star, then I can be a movie star.

In the '70s, I had a hairdresser named "Atom!" who used to go see A Chorus Line about once a week. One performance was enough for me, but Michael Bennett's musical was unquestionably a major emblem of its time.

In the course of the play, you meet a group of Broadway hopefuls. They are presented as individuals, or at least as personalized stereotypes: the nelly faggot, the fallen star, the spunky Hispanic, the straight guy tapping his way through a sissy's world, the dizzy blond with silicone tits. At the show's climax, a cut is made: some make it, others don't. Then, the entire cast assembles on stage, kicking and singing, winners and losers identically garbed in glittering top hats and tails.

That number is called "One." This is when you realize the characters are facets of a single generic type, reflected and multiplied by the set's mirrors into an infinitely extended metaphor of success, bliss, acceptance, fame, or, better, the tenuous solidarity of young American dreamers. As the lights fade, the chorus kicks.

Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills," 1977-80, the series of sixty-nine black and white photographs that inaugurated her career, could also be collectively entitled "One," even though it kicks off from a different premise. Here, a single person presents herself in the guise of a cast of dozens, if not thousands - the girl next door recast as social and cinematic stereotype: siren, housewife, victim, vixen, hayseed, career girl, spoiled princess, runaway, beatnik, lady of leisure, slut. These pictures are a triumph of self-invention, and also an expression of its discontents: a witty howl of protest against a restrictive quota system that would insist, One self per person, please.

Some people remember the '70s as one big party, a protracted carnivalesque bash - that is, before AIDs crashed the gates. There was indeed huge fun to be had. But beneath the merrymaking, the decade was in many ways depressing. With the passing of the '60s came the end of the youth generation's youth. The notion that you could simply throw yourself at life, trusting that it would catch you, no longer seemed viable. Life, after all, had let a lot of leapers crash.

In the '70s, lots of the people who'd dropped out were trying desperately to drop back in. You can see why some people found it easier to go backward than forward. After all, they'd frightened themselves half to death destroying the institutions of authority, only to find that without those institutions - government, education, parents - they wouldn't know where their next meal was coming from.

There's a picture Sherman made in 1978 that I identify with - Untitled Film Still #21. It shows Sherman standing in a cityscape that I take to be lower Manhattan, looking apprehensive. She looks like she could be dressed for a job interview circa 1962. I know what it felt like to be That Girl. I came back to New York in the early '70s to pursue a career as an architecture critic. I'd written a book, it was about to be published, and I was eager to break into journalism. But it would be seven years before I finally got a paying journalism job - as a columnist for Artforum.

As it turned out, that was OK. Being a failure at that moment was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It kept my fantasy life going and I found you didn't actually need a job to create a world. Art will meet you where you stand only to take you someplace else. With two friends I started a tabloid publication called Express, for which I wrote a bunch of imaginary interviews with "Anonymous Sources." It was a way of figuring out how to put some of the voices in my head on the page, just to see how they'd sound.

I remember thinking, when I first saw Sherman's movie stills, that she was doing something similar with pictures. I thought, what a free thing to do. Sweetheart, you ought to be in photographs. So put yourself in pictures. I liked the crudeness of Sherman's photographs. I liked that they were black and white. That they contradicted the glamour of the Hollywood they evoked. Most of all, I liked their view of the self as a repertoire of roles.

People have commented on the Hitchcockian mood of Sherman's early pictures. Arthur Danto, in his introduction to a book of them published by Rizzoli in 1990, observes that in most of them she is the Girl in Trouble. The trouble, surely, comes from within. The monster in pursuit of the Girl is the fear that one of the other Girls might pop up unannounced and take her over, body and soul, just as Mrs. Bates took over Norman, or Kim Novak took over Kim Novak.

And that was the terrible thing about the '70s. With the passage from external authority to internal authority, from rights to responsibilities, we discovered that the self was not some master of the universe, it was a mess, a dumping ground for every fear, disappointment, partial personality, defense, monster, wrong number - the whole smelly heap crawling with anxiety and worms. In her later work, Sherman takes the viewer deeper into this psychic muck: bones and teeth swim in pools of blood and vomit. The images became Technicolor, larger, richer, more extravagant. Compared to these, the early pictures look like a simple case of multiple personality disorder. Or, rather, an object lesson in multiple personality order, in the determination to resist the constraints of one perfectly formed self.

Sherman's pictures are the perfect answer to a moment when the questioning of authority and the identities it supported was transformed from an individual issue into a broad social and cultural condition. Some signs: the self-help industry; semiotics (French division); the fetishistic aura of fame; me-ness, narcissism, solipsism. In architecture, the field I was trying to cover, this general dissociation was trumpeted as "postmodernism." This crisis affected the appearance and meaning of externals, too, including the image one fashioned to face the world. Those were the days of the pioneering drag cabarets, like the Angels of Light and the Hot Peaches. One of the Peaches did a soliloquy about her travails with gender confusion: at first she thought she wanted to be a man, then she thought she wanted to be a woman, until finally one day she woke up and realized she didn't want to be either a man or a woman, what she really wanted to be was a Drag Queen. She didn't want to be trapped inside any identity she couldn't take off at night.

And it was true that the drag queens seemed to embody an authenticity that eluded the movie stars they imitated. Elizabeth Taylor's life looked like a nightmare compared, for instance, to Divine's. Taylor was forever trapped in her persona. She didn't seem to have a choice. Liza Minnelli entered more darkly into her mother's shadow even as she stepped into her light. Divine's personality was agreeably fractured. His fame met him wherever, or whatever, he was: Baltimore, San Francisco, Hollywood, male, female, star, or loser.

My name is Alfred Hitchcock. My name is Kitty Carlisle Hart. My name is Bennett Cerf. No it isn't! No it isn't! Sit down! Sit down! What's My Line? To Tell the Truth! Heartline! Heartline! Queen for a Day. Beat the Clock. The Price is Right. Camelot. Camelot. My name is John Cameron Swayze. I took a licking but I'm still ticking. My name is Lowell Thomas and this - This! - is Cinerama. I wanted my parents to think I had good values so when I was ten I asked them to take me as a special birthday treat to a movie about Albert Schweitzer. Will the real Albert Schweitzer please stand up. Will the real Albert Schweitzer please sit down.

Amazing to realize that when they first screened Psycho, grown men ran out of the theater. Amazing that within the memory of people, like me, who have yet to turn fifty, Hollywood could not deal with something as widespread as dissociation.

Amazing that Cindy Sherman could have so fully anticipated the spirit of fracture that has become so ubiquitous: "Untitled Film Stills," now playing at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Herbert Muschamp is architecture critic for The New York Times.