Cindy Sherman #untitled review – love, death, ageing and parrots

Cindy Sherman does not want to appear on camera. “Why not?” asks the director, Clare Beavan. “People,” says Sherman, “are just so curious to see what I really look like. So there is this intrigue.” Can you make a film about someone without seeing their face as they talk about their life and work? I’m one of those desperate to see Sherman, to reconcile the person with the roles she creates for her art, but perhaps I’m just prying. In the Arena documentary Cindy Sherman #untitled (BBC Four), we get her voice in a new interview, and Beavan has filleted previous filmed interviews, the last from 2009. Peel away the layers in her portraits and you can see the traces of Sherman’s eyebrows and the wrinkles in her skin. “You can see the cracks in the armour,” says her old photography teacher. She’s in there somewhere, despite her best efforts to vanish.

This film is a great look at one of the most important artists working today, told through the interviews with Sherman and through insightful offerings from those who have known and worked with her. I could have done without the inclusion of a group of Instagram influencers – used to make the point about how relevant Sherman’s work is in our selfie-obsessed, digitally artificial world – and had more from Sherman on the big issues: love, death, ageing and parrot-keeping. Her parrot, Mister Frieda, is the only being allowed in the studio with Sherman while she works – it’s a pity he only says “hello”.

I love Sherman’s filing cabinets of props – fake eyeballs in one drawer, teeth in another, noses in another. People say she is really trying to do self-portraits or reveal a hidden side to her, but that’s not right, says Sherman: “It’s more that I’m trying to lose myself, to really totally disappear.” In footage from previous interviews, Sherman reveals more of her working practice – she has a mirror next to the camera and concentrates on “trying to transform that reflection that I see into this other person”. She edits out the pictures where she recognises herself until “finally, I see the one that looks like somebody else”. These somebody elses are a huge cast of characters, from clowns and Renaissance Madonnas and pig-nosed horrors to Hitchcockian heroines and pink-cheeked teenagers and ageing society dames. Even if we weren’t allowed to see Sherman’s process of transformation, it would have been great to have more on where these people came from.

Like most children, Sherman loved dressing up. “I think the whole reason I developed this into an art form,” says Sherman in an older interview, “was that I would get dressed up whenever I was depressed or confused about things, I would go off into my room and turn into somebody else.” An early series shows Sherman transforming herself, shot by shot, from an unremarkable young woman to “this total vamp”. “She shows you,” says Barbara Jo Revelle, her teacher from 44 years ago, “that it’s a decision … how you create your own identity.”

So much of this is wrapped up in Sherman’s experience of being a woman, from the anxiety she feels walking down a dark street to the memories of sleeping with curlers in her hair as a teenager “and how uncomfortable women would make themselves in the name of being beautiful, but beauty at that time was really how men wanted women to look”. Her Centerfolds series, created for the magazine Artforum (but never run, possibly because some of her women looked vulnerable and victimised), “were meant to resemble in format a centrefold, but in content I wanted a man opening up a magazine to look at it in expectation of something lascivious, and then feel like the violator they would be.”

Her stepdaughters (she says she was “lucky” not to have her own children) remember, wonderfully, playing in the scenes Sherman created for her grotesque Fairytales and Disasters period in the 80s, complete with fake bums and boobs and homemade vomit. “She would let us put on all the makeup,” remembers one. This work was a rally, remembers her old boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, against the male artists who were being feted at the time when, he says, it was the women “who were making the most aggressive, toughest art possible”.

Sherman claims not to be political, at least in her personal life, but it’s all there in her work. She made her 2008 portraits of ageing socialites so big “because male artists do it all the time, even when they’re not even well-known”. She is grappling, points out the curator Eve Respini, “with what it means to get older as a woman in a really youth-obsessed culture”.

And now, she’s on Instagram where she plays with filters – not to make herself look pretty, as everyone else does, but to transform herself not just into someone else, but something barely human. “I see them as sketches,” says Sherman, “and maybe some of them will work their way into being real art pieces.” A group of schoolgirls sit outside Sherman’s current London show, scrolling through her Instagram pictures. One wants to know what she really looks like. “Oh wow, she looks quite normal,” says another, finding an undisguised picture, and she sounds almost disappointed.