SHERMAN CROSSES OVER TO CINEMA; ARTIST'S DEBUT COMES OFF STRANGELY TRUE TO FORM, YET AMATEURISH.

Byline: Roberta Smith The New York Times

It's Cindy Sherman's turn. Over the past three years, three other ambitious '80s art stars - Robert Longo, David Salle and Julian Schnabel - have succumbed to the siren lure of celluloid and decided to try directing movies. Just once. Each.

Now Sherman, who called her earliest works made in the late '70s ``Untitled Film Stills,'' has followed in their footsteps. She may end up being the leader of the pack.

``Office Killer,'' the murky horror flick with which Sherman is making her directorial debut, has been an object of rumors and eye-rolling in the movie world for nearly a year and has received mixed reviews at international film festivals. It opens today in Los Angeles.

Miramax bought the distribution rights from the film's executive producers, Good Machine and Kardana and Switsky, and its original producers, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler of Killer Films. Miramax then delayed the American release more than six months while Sherman finished the editing. Finally, the North American distribution rights were sold to Strand Releasing.

But one world's flop is another's cult classic or ironic sendup or, at least, its intriguing footnote. ``Office Killer,'' a victim-turned-avenger tale, hinges on a murderous copy editor named Dorine (played by Carol Kane). Spinning into madness at the film's center - like Bette Davis in ``What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?'' - Kane leads a cast of fairly seasoned professionals, Molly Ringwald and Jeanne Tripplehorn among them, who act like zombies even before they've been killed.

Stiff and clunky, made with a camera that sometimes seems in danger of being dropped and shadows so dark the film looks burned around the edges, this project lacks Sherman's usual finesse. It feels more like a primer about her artistic development and working process than an actual movie.

Still, Sherman's achievement as an artist makes anything she does required viewing, at least once, by anyone interested in contemporary art.

Style all her own

For nearly 20 years, Sherman's photographs have stirred the image-rich sediment of popular culture, sometimes brilliantly, using little more than inventive makeup and an array of props, costumes and fake body parts. With a genius for sleight of hand that fools no one, that shows its seams yet conjures a fragile illusion often based only on subtle facial expression, Sherman has devised a multitude of female characters.

Many of these personae, all played by her, are inspired by movies. She has also dissected the genres of fashion photography, Old Master painting, children's-book illustration, pornography and the stock horror film.

With a restlessness masked by her placid, slightly detached demeanor, Sherman has continually revised the subject, palette, scale and viewpoint (both spatial and psychological) of her art. Always working in series, she has delivered a new ``model'' with the frequency of Frank Stella and spent an unusually long time at or near art's cutting edge.

That she has been as influential and prominent in the '90s as in the '80s is indicated by the full-scale retrospective, her ninth, which opened this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.

The show has been organized by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, the museum's curator, and Amada Cruz, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. After closing in Los Angeles on Feb. 1, it travels to Chicago before starting a three-continent tour that is itself a measure of Sherman's stature.

The idea of a film by Cindy Sherman is dicey. On the one hand, it seems like a logical project for an artist so steeped in moviedom, who has spent two decades working as her own director, actress, camera person and wardrobe mistress. Theoretically, she should be better prepared than her predecessors in the crossover game.

Yet despite her success, Sherman is a solitary artist who rarely uses a studio assistant. A certain amount of isolation is necessary for her to be able to work her magic, and it hardly prepares her for the intensely collaborative, constantly compromised reality of feature filmmaking. Since the completion of ``Office Killer,'' Sherman has said she's quite happy to be back in her studio, working alone.

Most important, Sherman's reputation rests on single images that trigger elaborate narratives in your mind almost before you know it. She leads a generation of photographers and painters whose work made new use of the imagination's uncontrollable reflexes and illuminated the way memory, association, innuendo and pop culture can run riot in the brain.

Why would she take it all back and start spelling things out, on film, in real time? It's as if she's saying: ``Take it easy everyone. I'll be doing most of the work here, making narratives the old-fashioned way, one scene at a time.''

To people familiar with her career as an artist, ``Office Killer'' is a fascinating if lumpish bit of Shermaniana, especially when considered in conjunction with the Los Angeles retrospective.

Rooted in movies

Containing 156 works, the MOCA show delivers a surprisingly fresh account of Sherman's progress. It helps that many of her series are represented by a picture or two that have rarely been exhibited, and that she has done some chronological mixing to emphasize how she introduces ideas, drops them and then circles back to develop them later.

It's great to get back in touch with the sheer formal power and invention of her images, which tend to get muffled when they're seen in reproduction, and are magnified when they're seen in bulk.

The show traces Sherman's persistent interest in various forms of creepiness, which has generated a virtual catalog of monsters, pathologies, crimes against women, sexual hybrids, freaks, harridans and festering landscapes that suggest murder scenes but are usually made of mashed-together food.

It reiterates that Sherman's vision is not only essentially cinematic but has always been rather dark (its parodic tendencies notwithstanding). And growing darker all the time.

Thus the show points directly at the film. It also suggests that although Sherman began her career on the post-modern image-appropriation bandwagon called Pictures Art, she has evolved into the most genuinely Neo-Expressionist artist to come out of the '80s. Much of her work dwells upon the black comedy, emotional extremes and deformed outcasts favored by her German Expressionist predecessors, and it is, in fact, genuinely new.

The movie itself is almost a Sherman retrospective. Its film noirish (black and white) opening credits evoke the ``film-stills'' series that first made her famous. After that, there are echoes of Sherman women and Sherman sets everywhere: at the office of Constant Consumer magazine, where Dorine is ridiculed and exploited by her loathsome co-workers; at the dreary house she shares with her crippled mother and, finally, in the flashbacks to a younger, even nerdier Dorine, who, in one of the film's least believable scenes, causes the accident that crippled her mother and killed her salacious father (Eric Bogosian).

And of course the film ends knee-deep in viscera, like the horror images that started appearing in Sherman's work in the late 1980s. (It helps to keep in mind that her favorite film is the 1974 ``Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'')

After Dorine accidentally electrocutes Gary, a particularly odious colleague, while they're working late at the office one night, she gets back in touch with her demented inner child. She takes the body home, then starts knocking off the other miscreants, beginning with Virginia, the shrewish, chain-smoking, echinacea-drinking editor.

Soon Dorine is spending a lot of time in the basement, playing make-believe with dead people who disdained her in life. Sitting on the couch between Virginia and Gary, eating popcorn, she indulges in the activity that made the art of Sherman's generation so different from its predecessors, watching television.

Dorine cuts her victims up into Cindy Sherman body parts and arranges them into gruesome Cindy Sherman tableaux. When she tries to mend Gary's eviscerated chest with clear plastic tape, it's like being behind the scenes in Sherman's studio, watching a little trick that she has used hundreds of times before when setting things up to take a photograph.

As the law closes in, Dorine sets the house on fire, dons a blond wig and sunglasses and drives off in search of another job, looking suspiciously like an image from Sherman's first color photographs.

In the shadows

I may be giving too much away, but suspense is not the point here. It's fun to watch the film for echoes of Sherman's photographs, but it's more interesting to watch her play with the medium of film the way she must play with props and wigs in her studio. She experiments with extreme camera angles and all kinds of cropping and cultivates those pesky shadows. (She seems to think that none of her scenes would stand up a under strong light, and she's probably right.)

She uses so many cliches it's difficult to know if she's being ironic or just amateurish: One scene is shot by the light of a copying machine, another is reflected in a convex mirror. And there is the requisite horror-movie staple, the scene when the dead momentarily lurch back to life.

The catalog to the Los Angeles show, which reproduces pages from Sherman's notebooks and contact sheets, suggests how carefully considered her seemingly casual, thrown-together photographs really are, how narrow the span of their illusion. ``Office Killer'' proves that this process doesn't transfer to film, where there are many more elements to juggle and a lot more space to account for. It is genuinely casual.

Even the casting is rough around the edges. For example, Sherman doesn't seem bothered by the fact that Bogosian is far too hip looking to be Dorine's father, much less married to her mother, played in the flashbacks by a woman who could almost be his grandmother. Sherman might even like the feeling that all the characters seem to have come together from different lives and environments to be in her film, because that's the way she combines the parts of her photographs.

But if Sherman seems out of her depth, she has still made a film that remains truer to her vision and touch than any of her '80s peers. And perhaps a bit of failure, which she hasn't experienced much at all, can have salutary effects, giving an artist a new kind of incentive to keep up the pace.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Office Killer'' (not rated).

The stars: Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald and Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Behind the scenes: Written by Elise MacAdam and Tom Kalin. Directed by Cindy Sherman. Produced by Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. Released by Strand Releasing.

Running time: One hour, 49 minutes

Playing: Nuart, West Los Angeles 

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Carol Kane plays a nebbishy magazine employee who exacts revenge on her co-workers in ``Office Killer.''

(2) Molly Ringwald also appears in the film directed by Cindy Sherman.

(3) ``Office Killer'' director Cindy Sherman's photographs are currently on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.