Writing in 1927 under the pseudonym Arnold Höllriegel, the Viennese author Richard A. Bermann voiced the conviction in his Hollywood Bilderbuch (Hollywood Picturebook)
that American film cannot be considered “art,” for it is a consumer product for the prodigious masses, much like the canned meat goods which … the people strolling down Broadway eat in the thousands of “cafeterias” there, perhaps ham and beans, perhaps chicken, perhaps a magnificently extravagant turkey, always the same stuff prepared from the can in prodigious amounts for the prodigious masses.1
At roughly the same time, Egon Erwin Kisch stressed the ever-same nature of the mass product of film even more explicitly: “The audience does not notice that it is seeing the same story with the same pictures, as long as the cowboy is the latest cowboy, the hero of all boys, large and small.”2
Both passages indicate the great currency of the idea of film as a stronghold of the stereotype in the critical discourse of the late 1920s and how this was considered a direct reflection of the industrial, mass-cultural production of film in opposition to art. Both quotations offer an initial indication of how the debate on the stereotype in film—which emerged, at least in Germany, in the mid-1920s—had by the beginning of the 1930s not only developed into a conceptual topos much used within the narrower context of film theory but had also become a firmly established conceptual and narrative motif in cultural journalism on cinema. As a narrative motif, it functioned to highlight the principle antithetical to artistic individuality and originality.
How films were aesthetically judged was influenced by cultural criticism, as the latter saw itself provoked by the changes that occurred under the banner of the new media culture—or, more generally speaking, the industrialized mass culture of modernity as a whole. The assessments made in the two spheres of discourse, that is, cultural criticism in general and the aesthetic critique of cinema, were based on the same axioms. As will be elaborated more thoroughly in the chapter on the discourse of standardization around 1930, the great popularity of the topos of the mechanization of life in cultural critique from the mid-1920s on largely explains why the stereotype—considered an expression of mechanization—became a viral topic in writings on film aesthetics of the same period. The descriptions around 1930 of established film stereotypes as “standardized,” “canned,” or “readymade” suggest this correlation. Hence, a world of metaphors predominated, which interpreted the aesthetic phenomenon that critics perceived as stereotypes mainly as a result of the mechanical-industrial mass production ruled by standards: the use value of such production was oriented toward mass consumers, production volume was high, and production was rationalized by the principle of repetition so as to offer prices suitable to mass demand. The assembly line served as a leading cultural metaphor. The 1920s are regarded as the decade that ushered in the era of full mechanization, in which the assembly line played a decisive role and consequently assumed a symbolic dimension.
The social and cultural effects of this development were particularly apparent in Germany. Given the country’s interrupted development due to the cultural upheavals of war and postwar crisis, social and cultural changes were unusually erratic during the phase of economic stabilization and across-the-board modernization. It is therefore no wonder that in Germany more than anywhere else a complex discourse developed on the cultural consequences of the modernization process, which many intellectuals perceived as the “mechanization” of the entirety of social existence. Opposing standpoints evolved: mostly euphoric variations of New Objectivity’s celebration of rationalism and new technology, on the one hand, and a deprecating, skeptical, and even pessimistic viewpoint, on the other. Those subscribing to the latter tended to invoke the submission of the living to the specter of a dead, soulless machine producing ubiquitous uniformity.
The discovery of the stereotype as a topic related to cinema was—in the second half of the 1920s—largely owed to the same sensibility that had spawned the overarching discourse of cultural criticism. After all, cinema was in fact shaped by mechanisms of standardization or a certain seriality. Cinema was backed by an industry, and its films were made for the masses. In the mid-1920s, there was also a surge of rationalization in the German film industry, which attracted further critical attention.
A question presents itself, however, regarding the period leading up to this: All these developments took place in the mid-1920s to an unprecedented extent and degree, but they were not truly novelties of the decade. Both the debate in cultural criticism on the mechanization of life as well as industrial mechanization itself were clearly older phenomena, as were the implications that they bore for culture and cinema. Even America, the ultimate symbolic locus of modernity for German intellectuals of the 1920s, had already long represented this trend, which is why Americanization did not first become a topic of discussion with the emergence of New Objectivity but already prior to World War I was alternatively embraced enthusiastically or painted in a terrifying light.3 Prior to the war, film production had also already exhibited clear tendencies toward standardization.
The question then arises as to why the issue of standardization or stereotype in film attracted attention relatively late, that is, in the second half of the 1920s. An answer one can eliminate is that the theoretical discourse on film only first emerged in this period, because by this time film theories had been developing for a decade. In effect, intellectuals had been debating cinema in the press since 1909—a discussion substantially colored by cultural criticism. This prelude to the discourse on stereotypes in film and especially the question of possible causes of the initial neglect of the issue—discussed so vehemently a decade later—therefore merit closer scrutiny.
The history of the mechanization of production and even of the assembly line extends far back into the nineteenth century. The basic components of this trend developed gradually. On the one hand, mechanical reproduction emerged with the processes of punching, embossing, casting, printing, and so on, accompanied by the standardization of machinery and product and the interchangeability of parts. On the other hand, the work invested in a product was divided into the separate, sequential, and standardized—that is, optimized and then repeated—tasks of a process, which were then synthesized and merged into a cyclical procedure through comprehensive organization and the introduction of the assembly-line principle. As described by as Sigfried Giedion,4 major slaughterhouses, first in Cincinnati and then soon in Chicago, had already introduced the assembly-line concept (in this case, conversely, the disassembly line) into the organization of their operations a half a century prior to Ford, who began the assembly-line production of automobiles in 1913/1914. By 1915, his assembly line in Detroit was in full swing.5
Highly industrialized Wilhelminian Germany was of course affected by this powerful drive for extensive mechanization, even if somewhat less spectacularly than in the case of Ford. At the time, intellectuals already believed that transformation had far-reaching implications for culture; it was considered an essential process of modern capitalism and was discussed—predominantly accentuated by cultural criticism—already prior to World War I.
Walther Rathenau, himself a prominent industrialist, dedicated an entire book to the topic of the mechanization of the world in 1912.6 It pervasively and critically concludes that the primacy of accelerating mechanization had comprehensively altered all aspects of life and the structure of society, from the sphere of production to people’s leisure activities, intellectual life, and the arts. Rathenau developed a remarkably panoramic critique of civilization, which for him amounted to the form of mechanized life in the modern era. Even capitalism and its money economy appeared to him a “side-effect of mechanization itself.”7
The extent to which his panorama of the mechanization of modern life was influenced by the antitheses of “culture versus civilization” and “community versus society” prevalent among German intellectuals of the time8 becomes apparent in his outline of mechanized modernity against the backdrop of a mythical precivilizatory world in which still “the soul and mind of the community” predominated.9 He regarded the mechanical as the core characteristic of a new social and even spiritual state.10 The mechanical is used in a partly metaphoric and partly metonymic sense as an embodiment of everything antithetical to the origins of life, the organic, and to the search for meaning in life, spiritual depth, and contemplative emotionality. Rathenau saw the new world of industrial society as driven by whizzing flywheels, its highest law being: “Acceleration, precision, minimized friction, uniformity and simplification of types, minimization of work.”11
In other words, his writings from 1912 include almost all the elements of what cultural critics described as the “age of mechanization,” which would surface again in the 1920s in the cultural-criticism discourse on the standardization of life—and on film. Rathenau lamented the simplified and simplifying effect of mechanical production: “It creates extracts, monocultures, norms. But such products have no life of their own.”12 Like the many cultural critics who would follow him, he deplored the uniformity incurred by standardization, which remained unaltered even if “mechanized fate, fashion, [knocks] on the door”13 and brings wavelike phases of change.
There are also hints of the notion—later important in Siegfried Kracauer’s “The Mass Ornament”—that an alienated organization rules over people, even dominating them on a global scale. A “mechanized organization” spreads its “invisible nets out over every inch of the world.”14 In concert with reconfigured forms of production, society, and the world, it has an effect on every single life, on the circumstances of the individual. Through the standardized production processes mechanization not only turns people into “living machinery … mass-producible and replaceable … capable of extremely rapid and uniform movement.”15 It affects the very essence of the individual, both mentally and physically, above and beyond the actual sphere of production. What had already taken place as the human adaptation to the social demands of the production process was considered by Rathenau a simple linear extension of mechanization: this adaptation creates “new ideas, tasks, worries, and joys” and forms “the personality much in the way a machine properly sequences the workings of its parts.”16
Thoughts repeatedly voiced in the media age about the change in perception caused by mechanical reproduction are already present in Rathenau’s writings. The mechanical and millionfold reproduction of the image leads to “Bilderflucht,”17 or “fleeting images,” which for viewers is equivalent to a “flood of unrelated impressions.”18 With its speed and diversity, mechanical production facilitates rapid, emotionally superficial perception. What Walter Benjamin later gave a decidedly utopian accent through the catchword “distraction” (Zerstreuung)19 Rathenau described by emphasizing aesthetic impoverishment: “No time remains for contemplation, remembering, or reminiscing.”20
Articulating another topos of contemporary criticism, Rathenau saw this as meeting the needs of the modern “working person,” which “are as extensive as his work.”21 What results are “amusements of a sensational nature, rushed, banal, gaudy.”22 They correspond to a life that seems to be a “cyclical routine without a goal.”23 Rathenau regarded the arts as the opposite of such enjoyments, but once the former get caught in the gears, they too relinquish that ideal function so important to him. According to Rathenau, the arts had “lost their transcendental, their religious, their spiritual content.”24 To him, the secular and confidently nonideal art of modernity appeared to be “the art of the unbridled senses,” which takes the “path of carnivalesque and travestying fashion”25 and forms the deplorable “art ideal of mechanization.”26 That is to say, even the structural transformation of the public sphere27 going hand in hand with new media and the accompanying changes in art introduced by technical reproducibility were considered effects of the mechanization of the world. Mechanization thus became the synonym for the modern era.
It is not surprising that reference was also made to the cinema in this context. Inasmuch as the following could be considered one of Rathenau’s axioms, “Art enriches the soul, amusement belies its impoverishment,”28 he viewed this new leisure institution as an example of the new trend toward amusement culture, as a “mechanical rival” of art or a “mechanical spectacle.”29 He wrote: “One symbol of an utterly inverted sense of art [is] the gangster film of the cinematograph. But even in this madness and over-stimulation there is something mechanical.”30 Here a conceptual construct appears that has resurfaced repeatedly since about 1911 in the debate on cinema. For German intellectuals of the period, film and cinema were veritable symbols of the new civilization. Thus even among authors who made opposing arguments as to the cultural value of film (and the modern age), as did Franz Pfemfert (anti) and Egon Friedell (pro), there was still agreement that cinema was the symbol of modernity.31 Like Rathenau, in 1913 Alfred Kerr also stated that cinema and art have nothing in common and subsequently emphasized the mechanical character of film: “A field unto itself. Plays a role in mechanical developments.”32
Nevertheless, as emphatically as cinema was understood to be a cultural emblem of the age of mechanization, as vague remained the references to what the films actually showed. The medium seemed to represent a symbol of modernity largely because it was perceived as a metropolitan institution oriented to the needs of the masses, a medium based on a mechanical, electrically driven apparatus, technical reproducibility (photo technology), and an industry. Additionally, it was obviously a business segment in the world of capitalism and also corresponded to the new urban dynamic of perception.
In contrast to the discourses of the late 1920s, however, the real “mechanization” of film production was not an issue at this time—that is, the cyclical mode of production based on the division of labor, the accompanying standardization of the medium’s means of expression and of filmic narration, and the correspondence of visual and narrative structures to stereotypes. The tendency toward consolidated repetitive patterns, as in various film genres, for example, went uncommented and did not yet enter into reflections on the “uniformity” of mechanized culture and its worldwide leveling effect.
At first glance this seems perplexing, since Rathenau’s discourse on the mechanization of life seems to lead directly to this question. Also, at the time the production of genre films was in full swing, as was their global distribution. That means that the phenomenon was certainly apparent but simply not yet an issue.
Film historians today agree that standardization was consciously implemented already in the early years of the film industry, particularly in America but also in Europe, even if less intensively. Standardization was already a factor in the era of short films, prior to the transition to longer formats (feature films) in 1910/1911 in Europe and in 1912/1913 in the United States. It was especially pronounced as a trend toward genre films and even more so with serials. It is therefore only logical that important studies on the history of film, and particularly American film, notably by Eileen Bowser33 or Janet Staiger,34 retrospectively focus on the issue of standardization in films after 1907.
This obvious trend toward conforming to certain norms can be explained by the program formats common in early cinema, which consisted of a selection of different short films. The weekly program change in cinemas, already then typical, resulted in a high quantitative demand for such programs. In 1911, the U.S. market alone had a demand for thirty new films per week.35 Film producers were thus faced with the challenge of systematizing, typifying, and cyclically organizing their output, so that a consistent number of productions left the studio on a regular basis—and corresponded with tried and true types of films. This mode of production encouraged the trend toward standardization on all levels, including film style, and culminated in the distinctive mode of genre and serial films. The genre film
as a standardized product would be one that … would be reliably available on a regular schedule, that the exchange and the exhibitor could count on; one that would draw the consumer to brand names, that would be familiar; and one that would be under the control of its producer. The standardized film would make it possible to rationalize production methods and would be more profitable for the producer.36
Between 1909 and 1914, the standardization of production and product was accompanied by a precise internal division of labor,37 the development of individual departments, and the establishment of a large number of specialists contributing to the production of a film who were organized in an overarching hierarchy. The ultimate shift from small, artisan film production to the “film factory” had taken place. Thus a contemporary observer described his impression of the Selig film studio in 1911: “The Selig plant is an enormous art factory, where film plays are turned out with the same amount of organized efficiency, division of labor and manipulation of matter as if they were locomotives or sewing machines.”38
The fact that American studios soon even created the position of “efficiency engineer”39 in order to reorganize production processes illuminates the extent to which this idea of rationalization, so typical of the era, had taken hold in the new industry of filmmaking.
However, the topics of genre, standards, or stereotype and film played as little a role in American film theory and criticism as they did in German debates on film and culture, although American genre films even circulated on the German market. Considering the German cultural criticism à la Rathenau that generally prevailed in journalistic debates on cinema, the reasons for this situation probably were that the phenomenon of cinema as such was so scorned that contemporary film programs or production processes hardly merited the closer examination of cinema’s detractors. Criticism was leveled at the cultural institution of cinema and its apparatus rather than at the specific structures of films. In other words, cultural critics of cinema at the time did not take the pains to carefully examine the films they deplored from the outset and thus made rather sweeping arguments. Hence, the issue of the standardization of film itself initially eluded them.
The period’s typical blindness toward this issue seems all the more peculiar in the case of the German-American Hugo Münsterberg, who published The Photoplay in April 1916,40 the first systematic study on the psychology and aesthetics of film. In preparing this survey, which is distinguished by a precise knowledge of contemporary techniques of filmic narrative and celebrates the new medium, Münsterberg watched a vast number of films, which means that in contrast to many other journalists expressing their opinions on the medium, he had a precise knowledge of the film practices of his era.
As the founder and trailblazer of applied psychology in the United States, Münsterberg was also known for his sharp sense for economic interests and relationships. Within this new discipline, he considered it his task to develop specific psychotechniques (Psychotechnik) for a wide range of life contexts, particularly for industry. Influenced by F. W. Taylor’s ideas on rationalization that were characteristic of the period and based on improving the efficiency of the physical organization of labor, Münsterberg thus sought to further enhance efficiency through a better mastery of subjective, psychological factors.41
Apart from his treatise on film, Münsterberg was therefore certainly interested in the topic of standardization and its translation into the area of psychology and communication. The critique and skepticism found in Rathenau are completely absent in Münsterberg’s work, which is dominated by a pragmatic approach. In his book from 1914, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (The Fundamentals of Psychotechnique), indicative of the psychologist’s self-image as a technician, he even expressly recommends “certain standard forms of communication”42 for business life. For Münsterberg, the communicative dimension of business (for example, conversations with customers or advertising) was still ruled too extensively by “momentary impulses” and showed “hardly any signs of the mechanizations processes of our time.”43 The language used in conversations with customers was compared to “a psychologically developed use of the future form, like skilled labor to factory operations.”44 Whereas Münsterberg considered the solution to be obvious: namely, the application to communication of Taylor’s scientifically optimized standardization workers’ movements in production:
“Once the right form of suggestion or argument has been found, this must be retained and practiced, if one wishes to achieve psychological economy and accuracy.”45 Münsterberg described four aspects of standard communication forms that enhance efficiency:
First, “psychological economy” is achieved by formulating the “right form of argument.” This represents an automatization effect for the speaker, who is thus “psychologically relieved, since he can proceed automatically instead of exerting effort.”46
Second, one can improve “accuracy” by adhering to the “right form of suggestion,” that is, by an adaptation effect oriented toward the recipients of the communication.
Third, a kind of reciprocal adaptation occurs on the part of the consumers, a learning and recognition effect important for product advertising: a “factor in retention [is] the frequency of repetition.”47
Fourth, this is supplemented by what could be described as the pleasure of repetition, which is associated with a “warm sense of familiarity”48 and therefore positive emotions. “The sheer memory value, however, is all the more important for the task at hand, because according to a well-known law of psychology, the pleasure gained from pure repetition is readily transferred to the recognized object.”49
Interestingly, these four aspects regularly resurface in reflections of subsequent theorists on the causes of aesthetic standardization of film. Münsterberg indirectly outlined the basic repertoire of thought on this question—without considering film in this context.
For all intents and purposes, Münsterberg’s aim was also to develop quantifiable “psychotechnical rules” for art. The pleasure of repetition is an important topic, also explored in the context of his “experimental aesthetics of form”—which is obsessed with the idea of quantification—for visual art. In an extensive series of experiments, his Harvard laboratory investigated “the degree to which the repetition of a form is pleasing and the conditions under which genuine pleasure still may be fostered by partial repetition.”50
In this context, it is more than reasonable to suspect that this interest in standard forms of communication would also have been clearly reflected in Münsterberg’s study on film. Especially since he as a psychologist also demonstrated an astute understanding of the needs of the film industry, with which he cooperated. For example, in an incidental remark he matter-of-factly explained the contemporary producers’ lack of interest in newsreels: “It is claimed that the producers in America disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays.”51
Whereas decades later Adorno explicitly described “psychotechnique”52 (to him negatively connoted) at work in the Hollywood film industry, Münsterberg as one of the very founders of psychotechnique does not mention standard forms of communication, stereotypes, or the pleasures of repetition. The reason behind this contradiction can most readily be explained by the fact that The Photoplay is dominated by a strategy of argumentation—typical of the film theory of the period—not served but hindered by such considerations.
The basic aim of Münsterberg’s aesthetic reasoning in his survey was to justify the viability of film as art. This certainly was aligned with the intentions of the film industry at the time, whose marketing strategies were oriented toward elevating its products to art. Both in the United States and in Germany, nationwide advertising campaigns for elaborate major productions—from German “author’s films” (Autorenfilme) as of 1913/1914 to American special features and The Birth of a Nation (David W. Griffith, 1915)—invoke the distinctive value of art. The tension between standard and difference assumed a new dimension with these films, which were emphasized as being unique works. Production and advertising value of difference, that is, of artistic singularity, increased.
Not least against the backdrop of the film industry’s confident ambitions to henceforth produce art it seems logical that the beginnings of a more sophisticated film theory coincided exactly with the rise of long feature films. It is also no coincidence that this theory began as a project seeking to assert cinema’s potential of being an art form capable of adhering to the traditional “laws” of art in new ways specific to the medium.
The Photoplay is a characteristic and outstanding example in this respect. In his wish to validate the artistic potential of film and to ambitiously place cinema in the ranks of what was already accepted as fine art, Münsterberg tended to rely on a range of traditional aesthetic standpoints, as previously formulated in his philosophical work The Eternal Values, in relation to the classic arts.53 These ideas do not spring from the generally American and pragmatic orientation of his psychotechnique but were in the thrall of the idealist thought of German neo-Kantianism. Emphasis is placed on the integral world (selbstseiende Welt) of the work of art, in which the plurality of all parts come together as a whole in complete harmony, as an ideal experience transcending practical interests. Thus corroborated, Münsterberg’s groundbreaking psychological account of central aspects of the film viewer’s disposition—which made The Photoplay a classical text of film theory—takes its place in the film-as-art approach, as discussed elsewhere in greater detail.54 Münsterberg renders an image of a perceptual instrument that absorbs spectators with an all-encompassing hold on their attention, places them in an aesthetic world of perfect harmony and isolation, and makes the everyday world seem far removed. Film is “a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind.”55
His attempt to reconcile an idealist theory of art with a technically and sociologically new medium brought out the inconsistencies that the pragmatist John Dewey had already criticized in reference to Münsterberg’s The Eternal Values. Dewey stated that such discrepancies were inherent to any philosophy “that professes Ultimates, Absolutes, and Eternals.”56 To the classic tradition of aesthetics and cultural philosophy of the era, the notion of standardization was inconceivable as anything but an absolute antithesis to art and individuality. The moment that Münsterberg adopted the idealist patterns of argument, he precluded all ideas of the standard or stereotype in favor of proclaiming the continuity of art. And he did so even though his psychotechnical categories seemed to call for just the opposite. On this point, the aesthetic idealist won out over the psychotechnician.
This emphasis would typify the film-art theories of the following years. Whatever motif of the traditionally accepted arts and art theories such inquiries chose to rely on, they consistently sought to prove the new potential for the realization of art that the technical medium afforded. Celebrated exceptional films with distinct artistic ambitions were upheld as forerunners of the burgeoning culture of film. In contrast, the frictions between the idealist approach and the mass-culture reality of film as a popular medium with industrial origins were barely mentioned in the emphatic proclamations of film as a new art form. There was also a failure to recognize that the new mass culture of media—driven by film—was to change the very nature of art itself. The stereotypes of popular cinema and the tendencies toward standardization in film were persistently ignored.