Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory

At an intermediary level, we see “stereotypes” crystallize: typical objects, typical characters, typical gestures. The screen universe is thus Aristotelianized: objects, characters, and stereotyped gestures make their intelligible essence appear: they are entities of reason.

The culture-critical discourse on the stereotype continued through the end of classical film theory¹ and even persists today, although it is no longer a dominant approach. In parallel with this line of thought, a fundamental shift in theoretical attitudes toward the stereotype began to emerge in the postwar period. These new ideas remained very influential, above and beyond later film semiotics, and introduced a new type of thought.

The roots of this change lie in the 1940s and 1950s. It was largely authors from the ranks of French filmologie and its circle of influence who began to show an interest in the stereotype as a productive entity within film composition, precisely because of its conventionality. In his 1946 Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma,² Gilbert Cohen-Séat, considered the founder of filmology,³ expressed the view that filmic stereotypes were a source of specific possibilities of expression. Ten years later, in 1956, the cultural anthropologist Edgar Morin (who at the time was affiliated with the Institute of Filmology) pursued this idea further in his book Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire.⁴ Whereas up to this point the stereotype had been reputed as being a manifestation of the banal and the worn out, or at least of the naïve and the regressive, the two authors now upheld the stereotype as a condition of a particular and now desired intelligibility of the medium.

This reevaluation of the term signaled a changed theoretical interest in film, a new aspiration: “The cinema frees itself, then, from the cinematograph to constitute itself in an intelligible system.”⁵ And “film fulfills itself and blossoms into rationality,”⁶ the motto of this new rationale as articulated by Morin. It is not without reason that he followed this with a seemingly cognitivist idea: “The intelligence proceeds by the projections of abstract ‘patterns’ and identification with these patterns.”⁷

Most film theorists, positioned between physiognomy and poetic realism, had—sometimes in parallel with the aversions of language skepticism and in opposition to language—affirmed the immediacy of the image in film, the poetry of the photographic, the immediately visible, the nonabstract, the unconventional, the nonformulaic of the visual. In contrast, the new desire for an intelligibility of images fueled an interest in and revaluation of the obviously nonimmediate. There was general fascination for breaching this immediacy and, indeed, for a language-like approach to images.

Arnheim had even rejected the symbol on aesthetic grounds, due to its abstraction, conventional mediacy, and roots in what had long become customary, familiar, and understood by experience: “Thus it follows that symbols are not instruments of art.”⁸ But precisely this was interesting according to the new perspective. This reassessment also applied to formerly disreputable terms, such as “abstraction,” “automatism,” “conventionality,” “formula,” or “pattern,” and also the stereotype—a new emphasis with far-reaching consequences for the thought of the following decades.

Although it may initially seem paradoxical against this backdrop, Morin was in fact greatly indebted to Béla Balázs. That he chose a quotation by Balázs as an introductory motto to his book⁹ was not an expression of misunderstanding but of reverence. The manner in which Morin draws on Balázs, however, exemplifies the underlying shift in emphasis, especially where he resolves one of Balázs’s theoretical incoherencies.

To recapitulate, Balázs had ascribed a decidedly instinctual character to the notion of expressive movement, which was so important to his aesthetics, and he had celebrated the nonconventional visibility of the spirit, the “direct transformation of the spirit into the body”¹⁰ through gesture. However, this theoretical train of thought did not hinder him from occasionally describing certain gestures as having “their own vocabulary of ‘conventional,’ standard forms,”¹¹ which exhibited national differences. The international dimension of the film market contributed to the “normalization” of gestural language and to a “universal language of gesture, which had to be comprehensible in all of its nuances from San Francisco to Smyrna.”¹² In other words, Balázs had very well observed that gestures tended to be subject to conventionalization.

Morin identified the contradiction between Balázs’s two arguments and, in contrast, underscored the aspect of conventionalization. That means that he explicitly argued against the idea of the immediacy of gesture and against the convention-free degree zero of expressive potential entailed in a primal gesture:

If it is not true, as Balázs believed, that the silent film revived a perfect sign language [un langage mimique parfait], abandoned by man since prehistory, for the very good reason that gestures, the smile, even tears have distinct meanings according to civilizations, it is nevertheless true that the American film has spread across the globe a veritable new sign language, a gestural Esperanto that is easy to learn and whose universe, under the sway of cinema, from then on knows the vocabulary. There is a “degree zero of sign language” … but thanks to the cinema.¹³

Significantly, unlike Balázs’s basic idea of immediate emotional expression in film (as a medium of salvation from conventional, mediated language), Morin and, prior to him, Cohen-Séat did not deny analogies between film and language in respect to the phenomenon of conventionality or abstraction. On the contrary, both favored a “linguistic conception of expression,”¹⁴ as Cohen-Séat called it, and they thereby primarily had in mind the elements of abstraction and conventionality constitutive of every language. Different from Robert Musil in the mid-1920s, whose thinking was closer to Morin than Balázs, both French theorists now showed a decidedly positive interest in such analogies. Thus, it is not by chance that they began to programmatically use the terms “film language” in their new interpretations, instead of setting film apart from linguistic conventionality and abstraction in the tradition of language criticism.

This new interpretation of the term should not be overlooked, for “film language” was by no means a neologism within the film-theoretical discourse of the period.¹⁵ The metaphor had, independent of the topic of the stereotype, been popular since the 1920s. Even Balázs, in another contradiction, sometimes spoke of the “language of film,” but he conceived it in essentially antilinguistic terms, free of abstraction and convention. Such vague and incoherent meanings, which suggest little more than that language and film are communication media, were (and still are) common, for example in Spottiswoode’s A Grammar of the Film (1935).¹⁶

Another theoretically more influential interpretation of the language metaphor sought syntactically based analogies between the sequence of words in language and the filmic editing. This articulation of the metaphor was particularly important in the film writings of the Russian formalist school. Under the spell of Soviet cinema’s montage aesthetic, the formalists had developed a theoretical concept of “film language.”

In 1927, Boris Eikhenbaum assigned the metaphor of the “language of film” a significant theoretical function,¹⁷ which he explained as being the most thoroughly relative to the discourse of the period. The analogy between language and film underlying his comparison was based on the succession of individual shots linked through montage to form larger meaningful syntagmas, just as words are joined to make sentences and sentences to make text. Eikhenbaum took this analogy far. He even spoke of the “cine-phrase” and described film sequences as the “linking of phrases.”¹⁸ Just as with the reading of a written text, the recipient thus translated the succession of images into “the language of his own internal speech.”¹⁹ Very much in the spirit of the legendary Kuleshov experiment,²⁰ Eikhenbaum emphasized that the syntactic sequence within this translation effected far more than merely adding up the meanings of each shot. As in language, this translation produced its own meaning, a context-based meaning that is more than the sum of the parts: “The basic semantic role belongs … to the montage, since it is the montage which colours the frames, beyond their general meaning, with definite semantic nuances.”²¹ This is Eikhenbaum’s core statement. Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein’s understanding of film had, after his experience with Bronenosec Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, USSR, 1925) and, above all, its lion experiment, entered a new phase around 1926, as he himself stated: “The phase of approximation to the symbolism of language. Speech. Speech that conveys a symbolic sense … through something that is uncharacteristic of the literal, through contextual confrontation, i.e. also through montage.”²²

This insight ultimately had fundamental significance for Eisenstein’s cinema and particularly for his later concept of intellectual montage. The closeness of Eisenstein’s ideas and Eikhenbaum’s concept attests to what Wolfgang Beilenhoff identified as the “convergence of theoretical discourse and artistic practice in the 1920s.”²³

Whereas the language metaphor as soon as it became more concrete mainly alluded to the phenomenon of linking shots through montage, that is, to an intratextual and syntactical aspect of the analogy, the writings of Cohen-Séat and Morin primarily focused on the process of conventionalization of filmic images and narrative patterns, that is, on an intertextual aspect. What in 1946 generally interested Cohen-Séat about the reference to language for film was the fact that as a result of lengthy processes of conventionalization, film commands a deep-layered repertoire of well-defined and intersubjectively known semantic elements, which point toward a language system. He therefore deemed the conventionality of filmic facts more significant for the abstracting potential of human utterance than the intelligibility of montage. Thereby the stereotype, the conventionalized visual or narrative pattern, became the focus of the language metaphor.

The discursive development and use of fixed schemata on all levels of the filmic diegesis would gradually seep into the consciousness of the participants in cinema’s discourse as semantic, readymade structures, which would be accumulated as a “tacit ‘dictionary’ of images,”²⁴ as Cohen-Séat put it, conscious of the inherent paradox. That, in effect, is what the filmologists’ linguistic analogy aimed toward: “It is easy to foresee that the assimilation of filmic facts [faits filmique] to ‘words’ and the entirety of these signs to a linguistic conception of expression cannot occur without a fundamental change in thinking.”²⁵

One result of this shift in thinking was a changed attitude toward the stereotype. In view of the new accent given the language metaphor, the stereotype became a fixed semantic entity and thus, in a sense, a distant relative of the word, a productive building block in the expressive capabilities of film.

It was the conventionality of the sign, established in filmic discourse through the stereotype, which first offered the possibility of “rediscovering the lessons of conventional language in the brimming agitation of filmic images.”²⁶ This half sentence was programmatic for Cohen-Séat in 1946. In his eyes, the ideal was a film that had abandoned the “age of visual and auditory echoism,”²⁷ mimesis, and the direct attachment to physical reality (as well as to the task of revealing it) and suggested a reading of the “text of film from the image to the idea.”²⁸

Remarkable about this interest of the theorist in film as “a process of our logification”²⁹—as an indicator of the comprehensive shift in emphasis in one area of contemporary film aesthetics, especially in France—is that it to some extent shared the tenor of the famous utopia that Alexandre Astruc extolled soon thereafter (in early 1948) as the agenda of a new film avant-garde. His concept of the “caméra stylo,” or the “camera-pen,” represented as a major advance in the impact of film, aspired to nothing less than asserting the shift from the (seeming) immediacy of the image to a semantics (conspicuously) based on abstraction. Astruc prefaced his brief essay with a quotation from Orson Wells: “What interests me in the cinema is abstraction.”³⁰ Astruc himself wrote: “[The idea of the caméra-stylo means] that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake [l’image pour l’image], from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language…. What interests us is the creation of this new language.”³¹

However, Astruc did not go beyond this proclamation. He remained very vague about the basis of this language and how such abstraction was to be attainted, and he did not explore the dimension of conventionalization as a fundamental principle of every language. Cohen-Séat, however, took up this topic. To him it was essential that the medium of film, aspiring to abstraction, develop a repertoire of specific conventional forms. He discussed how in the intertextual field of film a “conventional stylization”³² was operating to the effect of assigning “every sign a certain established expressive power.”³³

One might argue that in the 1920s Eikhenbaum had already arrived at this assumption: “Cine-language is no less conventional than any other.”³⁴ However, he was primarily concerned³⁵ with preexisting conventions employed in the medium of film. For him the determining idea was: “The basis of cine-semantics is made up of that stock of expressivity in mime and gesture which we assimilate in everyday life and which is ‘directly’ comprehensible on the screen.”³⁶ In relation to the filmic metaphor, or in his words “cine-metaphor,” to which he dedicated substantial attention as a montage-based phenomenon, he emphasized that it was always the visual translation of an afilmic conventional form: “The cine-metaphor is as it were a genuine realization of a verbal metaphor implemented on screen.”³⁷ Eikhenbaum thus touched on precisely the kind of filmic metaphor that Eisenstein concomitantly took to extremes in his film Ten Days That Shook the World/October (Oktyabr, USSR 1927) and that Balázs rejected.³⁸

In contrast, Cohen-Séat’s new perspective on “the forms of conventional language”³⁹ of film emphatically addressed the conventional forms developed by the medium itself as a starting point. What he evidently meant was that stereotypes that had emerged within the “discours filmique”⁴⁰ (a term that Cohen-Séat introduced to film theory through his language of metaphoricity) had become distinct and conventional and could therefore address a corresponding semantic consciousness⁴¹ en bloc.

Even if Cohen-Séat only rarely used the term “stereotype” explicitly, his text bears witness to him being conscious of the extent to which conventionality was grounded in the process of discursive (intertextual) repetition. Consequently the study of the language of film or “filmography,” as he writes, “reveals certain types of repetition. It may be treated as language only if it entails such repetition.”⁴² These repetitions must be “methodically investigated to be defined and classified.”⁴³ Repetition’s pragmatic origin in the imitation of structures already proven successful with the audience and now deemed “serviceable” bothered him as little as the tendency of these structures toward reduced formulas:

Thus it is not impossible that one might discover a natural selection of the means and procedures of filmic expression. This selection arises from the need of making oneself understandable and from the ability to do so with the help of what is entailed in “fixed” signs and expressions. The immediate or gradual assumption of comfortable or suitable forms to express certain things occurs quickly through use. In the process this or that type of sign is assigned a more or less precise accepted meaning. This determination extends beyond the single sign and also applies to the application and synthesis of the signs. In a word, the happy discoveries of film [trouvailles du film] would correspond to those of any language or to the rhetoric of all languages. Isn’t a metaphor that has established itself a good example? What is here called the discoveries of film … contagiously inspires imitation. The sign takes on a role and crosses into the conventional.⁴⁴

Cohen-Séat explicitly went on to elaborate that he did not understand the “discoveries of film,” “signs,” or “fixed expressions” (which he all used synonymously) as concrete images but as schematic-structural phenomena in the sense of the stereotype, which are individually actualized as the repetition of a new idea from a specific film. He did not conceive of repetition as a reproduction of the same but as a production of the similar, and herein he again made recourse to the language metaphor:

Whereas discoveries in common language are commonly repeated in their original form, in film they stabilize almost immediately and adapt to its form. In film, in which exact repetition is as impossible as it is useless, contagion occurs through a closeness and similarity to a new idea, which does not detract from the enrichment and perfection of the sign. The retouches undertaken with each repetition are also similar to the inflections of language.⁴⁵

Even more vividly than Cohen-Séat, Edgar Morin described his observation of how “a general tropism”⁴⁶ in film leads to new “discursive signification”⁴⁷ and intelligibility.

Interestingly, there is a parallel to Rudolf Arnheim, which, as in the previous comparison with Balázs, once again illustrates the fundamental shift in perspective at this time. Whereas Arnheim in 1932 in Film als Kunst had regarded the frequent use of metonymic images, such as “the grandfather clock on which the hours are sped up … the kicking silk-stocking legs with no upper body … the ashtray full of cigarettes,”⁴⁸ and so on as mere banalities, because what were once original film ideas had undergone flatting and wear through imitation, Morin now found precisely in this “abrasive effect of repetition”⁴⁹ an enhancement of the semantic abstraction that he so valued, because it more closely approximated conceptualization. The examples he enumerates to support his observation are astoundingly similar to Arnheim’s list of negatives: “the withering bouquet, leaves flying off the calendar, the hands of a watch spinning around, the accumulation of cigarette butts in an ashtray: all these images that compress time have become symbols, then signs of time passing. The same for the train speeding into the countryside, the plane in the sky (a sign that the film’s heroes are traveling), and so on.”⁵⁰ Morin consistently asserted the, for his concept, productive side of the automatization, conventionalization, and, above all, the accompanying abrasion of intertextually repeated patterns. Sedimentation and wear become conditions no longer for an immediate but an abstract and semiotic reading of filmic images. A reading that thus detaches itself from the surface of the visual as a mere photographic index of the represented. The flattening effect of repetition is reinterpreted as a condition for what one could exactly call, in the context of Astruc’s writings, the release from the tyranny of the concrete or immediate and what Cohen-Séat had described as the “path leading from the real and syncretic thought to understanding … to reason, and ultimately to language.”⁵¹

The process is the same as in our verbal language, where marvelous metaphors have slackened and ossified into “clichés.” In the same way, cinema “stereotypes” are symbols whose affective sap has turned wooden. They accordingly better assert their signifying role and even initiate conceptualization: they are … quasi-ideas (the idea of time passing, the idea of the journey, the idea of love, like the idea of the dream, the idea of memory) that appear at the end of an authentic intellectual ontogenesis. Consequently, we can grasp the continuity that goes from the symbol to the sign.⁵³

Here Morin quite explicitly names the process of stereotypization and the accompanying wearing out of forms as a basis for special processes of sign formation. “In some cases, stereotyping ends up in the crystallization of veritable grammatical tools.”⁵⁴ He viewed “stereotypes”⁵⁵ that had become fixed signs as crystallizing on all levels of filmic diegesis, and he attributed the same effect to all of them: “At an intermediary level, we see ‘stereotypes’ crystallize: typical objects, typical characters, typical gestures. The screen universe is thus Aristotelianized: objects, characters, and stereotyped gestures make their intelligible essence appear: they are entities of reason.”⁵⁶ And: such “techniques of the cinema activate and solicit processes of abstraction and rationalization that go on to contribute to the constitution of an intellectual system.”⁵⁷

The positive accentuation given to the “abrasive effect” of repetition and conventionalization as the basis for a particular sign formation in cinema undoubtedly represented a new and highly productive idea for contemporary film theory. It became an integral component of the film-theoretical shift in emphasis toward the nonimmediate and enabled a positive view of conventionality and abstraction in conjunction with the reinterpretation of the “language of film” metaphor.

What interested Morin and Cohen-Séat most about the stereotype-become-sign was therefore its function as a semantic building block. More precisely, its function as a semantic structure commonly used within a communicative group, a structure no longer needing to be pieced together bit by bit by recipients, but functioning en bloc in a manner comparable to the idea of Gestalt (as understood in Gestalt psychology) and beginning to take on a semantic life of its own as a new unit. In the words of Cohen-Séat quoted above, important were “comfortable or understandable formulas” of expression, upon which not only film composition but also reception could rely. Underlying this idea was the aspiration that film could develop a kind of repertoire of signs coming with a system of references distantly recalling the mechanisms of the language system—even if less complex and far more fluxionary, despite all relative sedimentation.

With all their references to the language metaphor, on this point the ideas of the two French theorists coincide with Panofsky’s largely figure-oriented thesis, according to which in popular film, much like in medieval art, a “method of explanation was the introduction of a fixed iconography which from the outset informed the spectator about the basic facts and characters.”⁵⁸ Panofsky, however, was grounded in a different theoretical tradition, not in the linguistically oriented thought of semiotics but the discourse of iconology based on the pictorial arts and associated with the idea of the power of the conventional.

For Morin, the postulate of semantic elements originating from stereotypes served as a basis for an additional train of thought addressing the idea of abstraction. He noted that, once established, such readymade structures facilitated a particular acceleration of storytelling. The language of film was able, not least on the basis of stereotypes, to establish “shorthand notations” activating an “excess of speed” in filmic narrative, a tendency toward “elliptical multiplications.”⁵⁹

This was an unquestionably accurate observation, since acceleration is in fact made possible through the repetition of highly conspicuous forms within a specific narrative context, which is then gradually subsumed by these forms (in the audience’s perception). It then suffices to only show the conspicuous form, in order to summon the standard context, even in absentia. This is a fundamental mechanism of sign formation and language acquisition.

Against this backdrop, it is to be understood that the development of filmic narration, from the beginnings of the medium through subsequent decades—and hand in hand with processes of conventionalization—was accompanied by an almost steadily increasing elliptical form. This remains unchanged by the fact that opposing stylistics have regularly been employed to offset this trend.

Morin’s interest in abbreviations and the pars pro toto may be explained, on the one hand, as arising within the context of the French traditions of film and film theory (for example that of Jean Epstein). On the other hand, through linking these interests with the topic of the film stereotype he prefigured discourses on the analogy between film and language, which the semioticians of the 1960s vehemently debated. His interest in abbreviation thus parallels the overarching new discourse on intelligible formulas and signs.

Characteristic of the language-analogy trend is a text worth mentioning in this context, little known today despite the later prominence of two of its authors and stemming from the German branch of the “film and language” discourse. In an essay for the journal Sprache im technischen Zeitalter from 1965, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke explored the question of whether one could achieve the abstraction-based “expressive effects of highly organized language”⁶⁰ with film images. The question was in line with the idea that Cohen-Séat had put forward twenty years earlier, of developing a linguistic conception of expression for film. Part of the inquiry also addressed the question of whether film could similarly accelerate, condense, or metaphorically compose its imagery in the manner of prose. The answer, too, reads as if borrowed from Cohen-Séat or Morin: “If narrative forms were to be used in film … for a longer period of time, then after a while one would probably have a filmic world of metaphor, which would facilitate an abbreviated mode of narrative, as do the worlds of metaphor and ideas in language.”⁶¹

Reitz, Kluge, and Reinke desired such a fixed world of signs specifically for auteur cinema, which would only thus be “able to develop generalizations and distinctions similar to those of literature.”⁶² But they also identified such patterns as conventional forms—mainly within American “commercial film” and especially in Westerns—which they immediately associated with the topic of the stereotype (or the “cliché”). By taking recourse to stereotypes as medially “prefabricated conceptual forms” that corresponded to the “prefabricated jargon”⁶³ of mass literature, for instance, the Western had created the necessary “notional world in the minds of the viewers,”⁶⁴ that is, a kind of interpersonally operating system of reference:

Most new Western films live from references to the old Western cliché. The mail coach, the entrance into the saloon, the beginning of the showdown, the new sheriff, the almost masochistic situation of the drunken judge, the Western hero’s list of motives, and the canon to which all are bound are phenomena in which the total aura of all Westerns is present in any individual Western.⁶⁵

On this basis, forms of variation, ellipses, and synecdoches may then be developed in genre cinema. Moreover, Hollywood film could visually employ “concrete clichés,” in order to supply the audience with similarly generalized inspirations and “mental directives … such as those transmitted by the terms ‘pretty as a picture.’ ”⁶⁶

However, true to the German tradition of critical theory, the three German cineastes viewed commercial genre cinema with deep mistrust and were imbued with the ambition of Neuer Deutsche Film to portray radical difference.⁶⁷ With overriding normativism they therefore rejected the use of the described possibilities for not being aesthetically “legitimate.”⁶⁸ What the three sought instead was the emergence of independent conventional forms, a world of conventions specific to auteur cinema, or, ironically speaking, “good stereotypes.”

The notion of the legitimate norm was alien to Morin, whose writings on the potential of stereotypes suggested yet a second perspective in addition to the possibilities presented by automatization and abbreviation. This second perspective also led down the path originally laid out by Cohen-Séat, “from the image to the idea.”⁶⁹ Namely, the stereotype acquires a special symbolic quality, above and beyond the primary semantic function it performs en bloc.

This idea surfaces only briefly, but it is so significant that it is worthy of serious examination. It means that visual stereotypes function as signs—as extensively quoted in the examples of the airplane lifting off into the sky or the close-up of a kiss—but not merely as simple semantic facts or shorthand notations stating that the heroes are going on a journey or that they love each other. Instead they may be read as elevated to a concept of essential meaning, as “quasi-ideas (the idea of the journey, the idea of love …).”

The effect is all the more pronounced the greater the “abrasion” of visual immediacy, which, as previously elaborated, Morin viewed as strengthening the intelligible, mediated reading of images. Morin thus addressed a phenomenon that, with respect to film characters, may be understood as the transition from type to allegory or, in more general terms (since Morin himself did not exclusively think about characters), as a transition from the stereotype to the emblem.

This idea also came to play an important role in 1960s film semiology (by no means as an outgrowth of Morin’s minor comment). In his 1968 book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema,⁷⁰ Peter Wollen discussed this emblematic dimension of cinema at length. For Wollen it was characteristic of the emblem to go beyond the initial iconic meaning of images and unfold its more general meaning, heightened to the symbolic, quasi on a metalevel, where, however, it had a fragile and basically connotative character almost impossible to verbalize. This is the tipping point at which the heightening of what Arnheim would have described as banality, that is, the heightening of the stereotype, definitely becomes intelligible. A point where a new reading, a new sensibility emerges.

Given the logical consequence of this point for Morin’s intelligibility-oriented theoretical perspective, the casual mention it receives is almost surprising. Morin’s observation is indeed not far removed from the thoughts that Roland Barthes (far more systematically and comprehensively, if only peripherally related to film) elaborated one year later in 1957 in his book Mythologies. What Barthes writes about “myth” follows a similar idea, up to a point, and can be applied to the film stereotypes that Morin had in mind.

Inherent to Barthes’s understanding of the visuality of modern myths (he considered cinema a site of the modern world of myth) was the idea that an image that already carried meaning would in toto take on a second, more abstract and distilled layer of mythological significance, for which it then becomes a key cultural sign. A layer of meaning where the image crosses over into symbol and displays “a second-order semiological system.”⁷¹

Barthes was hereby not thinking of traditional symbolic constructs but of a kind of image that presents itself as a “spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image.”⁷² A well-known example of this is the Basque house in Paris, which, similar to one aspect of the process of stereotype formation, accents and inherently unites in pure form the conspicuous traits belonging to the iconography of the Basque house style. In the process, these traits are separated from their original technological order. To Barthes, the house not only seemed to convey an “an imperious injunction to name this object a Basque chalet: or even better, to see it as the very essence of basquity.”⁷³ According to Morin, one could translate “basquity” as the “idea of basqueness” and place it alongside the “idea of love” and the “idea of travel.” Much in this vein, the face of Garbo, conventionalized and reduced to a mask-like form, that is, approximating an “archetype,” revealed to Barthes “a sort of a Platonic Idea of the human creature.”⁷⁴

Barthes viewed this kind of hidden essentialism, “hiding behind the fact, and conferring on it a notifying look,”⁷⁵ from the critical perspective of enlightened reason. The phenomenon produced mythical thinking and allowed the underlying ideological discursive motifs to appear “natural.” Morin, in contrast, did not problematize his observation. He was primarily interested in the tendency of symbols to be formed out of stereotypes, presumably because it supported his idea of the intelligibility of filmic effects.

However, Morin and Cohen-Séat viewed the need for mythic imagination and ritualized fantasy with at least as much import as Barthes assigned it. Independent from the semantic argument just presented, they regarded it as an anthropological constant. A need satisfied by different media over the course of history, and now in modernity cinema was simply the next in line.

Reason, the counterconcept to mythical thinking, could therefore not serve as the sole interpretative criterion in the reception of film. Morin described “the semi-imaginary reality of man”⁷⁶ and stated that the task facing the film theorist was therefore to articulate the ambivalent complexity of the effects of film as posed between mythos and logos and grasping “the profound continuity between magic, sentiment, and reason.”⁷⁷

Cinema offered a virtual space for the imagination, which crosses into the magical with its visions of yearning and desire, into a participation in the “ghost.”⁷⁸ Much in this sense Morin placed great value on the detailed elaboration of the close relationship between film, on the one hand, and the imaginary, the dream, animism, and ritual, on the other. Even the “anthropo-cosmomorphism”⁷⁹ formerly asserted by German physiognomists reappeared (which also had a distinctive tradition in France), but now as a phenomenon openly interpreted as grounded in “projection-identifications.”⁸⁰ The following train of thought is typical of Morin:

Our whole practical world is surrounded with rites, superstitions; the imaginary is still latent in symbols and reigns in the aesthetic…. The cinema effects a kind of resurrection of the archaic vision of the world in rediscovering the almost exact superimposition of practical perception and magical vision—their syncretic conjunction. It summons, allows, tolerates the fantastic and inscribes it in the real.⁸¹

The characters that populate this world without differentiating between the imaginary and the real must consequently function as cyclically appearing, prominent stereotypes and not as distinct, unique individuals from the realm of daily life. If they are to do justice to their purpose as fantastic masks in the ritual-imaginary game, then they too must acquire superimposed layers of empirical experience and the “magical vision” (of desires and idealizations) in the form of stereotypes and must function as formulas reduced in complexity. Morin made an interesting distinction in this respect:

A strange process of decantation distinguishes the primary and secondary roles. The latter, rationalized according to average age, type or genre, veritable “stereotypes,” are “bit parts,” reduced to the rank of objects endowed with vague subjectivity. By contrast, the … heroes. The latter constitute the archetypes of a glorified humanity…. The Star System makes these idealizations blossom into divinations.⁸²

There is an obvious conceptual parallel between the image of the star and Barthes’s view of Garbo, which also ultimately boils down to the archetypical. Morin considers a number of particularly distinctive characters in the ritual game to be a very special kind of stereotype, which become archetypes (a form of heightening the essence of the stereotype into the realm of the elementary and symbolic) of reactions to certain formations of desire or idealization. This brings his ideas full circle to what was previously said about the transition to allegory.

The extent to which Cohen-Séat worked from similar premises becomes clear when one reads, for example, that cinema not only establishes the conventions of film language worldwide but simultaneously pursues a common global “elaboration of myths which are going to please groups of people, which correspond to the anthropomorphism of dreams and the human desires of an epoch.”⁸³ And Cohen-Séat stressed the role of the stereotype in this particular effect of film: “this warpage of a manner of behavior, which is reduced to the most simple, which is endlessly turned and shifted, universally imitated and thus stereotyped.”⁸⁴

If one places Cohen-Séat and Morin’s anthropological ideas (implicitly) invoking the ancient need for myth and the imaginary in relation to Horkheimer and Adorno’s fundamental critique oriented along the ideas of enlightenment and radical reason, an antinomy with a long philosophical tradition is revealed, which at this point, if not earlier, also began to shape traditions in film theory.

In its basic outline, it returns in the polarized theoretical approaches to American genre cinema and its stereotypes, which influenced the film-genre discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the United States.⁸⁵ Here too the advocates of a ritual-based approach were opposed by proponents of ideological criticism. The former understood genre cinema’s world of stereotypes as a space of sedimented symbols, which, similar to an archaic ritual, were cyclically received and therefore could not be said to meaningfully or directly refer (in the realist sense) to afilmic reality but to mythical needs. In contrast, the latter tried to identify the deceptive, manipulative, illusionary aspects of films and to join the critique of the stereotype with criticism of the culture industry, society, and their dominant ideology.

Cohen-Séat and Morin (now almost forgotten and not even acknowledged by this discourse) are clearly part of the prehistory of the later concept of ritual, which would later primarily refer to Lévi-Strauss and his structural research on myth. At least with Lévi-Strauss reference was made to a thinker whose influential research on myth had, by no coincidence, its origins in the same climate permeating French cultural anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s that also influenced Cohen-Séat and, in particular, Morin.

With respect to these two thinkers, it should be remembered that they essentially developed important basic concepts pertaining to cinema that would later reappear in the ritual approach, although they themselves did not yet employ a structural analysis of the individual mythic worlds of specific genres. John Cawelti, Will Wright, and Thomas Schatz, among others (following Lévi-Strauss), later did. As generally characteristic of filmology,⁸⁶ they instead limited themselves to the explication of the idea of situating popular film and its stereotypes per se in the realm of myth.

It stands to reason that the new view of stereotypes, the reinterpreted metaphor of film as language, and the reference to myth went hand in hand with a fundamentally changed attitude toward popular (film) culture. And it seems no coincidence that the arguments of both Cohen-Séat and Morin were primarily anthropological and only then, against this backdrop, aesthetic. Cohen-Séat provided a very vivid description of the difference between two possible approaches to cinema.

The cinema can develop out of its own substance, building upon the original, i.e. naïve and universally valid, elements it contains; but it can also place itself at the forefront of our instruments of expression and their subtlety. Should such “culturism” gain the upper hand, one would not need to change a single word of the formulas that have not been molded to film. Then we would find ourselves in the process of creating the “style of decadence” … which aging cultures bring forth under the light of their setting sun.⁸⁷

There is no doubt that Cohen-Séat’s (and Morin’s) sympathies rested with the first variant. This is already apparent in the way that the alternative is proposed and described in this example. Striving for an intelligibility of expression did not coincide with the aspiration toward a cinema for intellectuals, an anti-Hollywood—in contrast to the culture-critical thought of Reitz, Kluge, and Reinke.

Cohen-Séat valued the worldwide popular culture that cinema had produced for its global “community-building function,”⁸⁸ the core of which he regarded as the worldwide establishment of common myths. His statement that cinema had created “the most extensive group of people resembling one another in the history of the world”⁸⁹ does not convey the fears of commodification, standardization, and lifelessness, which once characterized the German debate on standardization, but instead an almost euphoric counterconcept.

Nevertheless, an affinity of his choice of certain words with the culture-critical model of mass humanity is clearly apparent, for example when Cohen-Séat pointedly describes cinema’s international community of viewers: “They are all one and the same man.”⁹⁰ But instead of deploring the leveling of specific cultural characteristics, he celebrated the progressive internationalization of culture with the argument (quite common today in the age of globalization and a worldwide TV and Internet culture but already present even in the work of Balázs) that global cinema overcame “intellectual provincialism” and “philological particularity.”⁹¹ Cinema thus would enable a global, collective form of worldview.

Ultimately this avowal of modernity itself verges on the utopian and mystifying in moments of exaggeration: for example, when Cohen-Séat evokes the constitutive role of film in a “planetary conscience.”⁹² Whereas in the debate on standardization the reference to the stereotype was a crystallization point for the cultural and aesthetic critique of cinema as mass culture (produced by the culture industry), in the context of this later paradigm the avowal of the stereotypes of popular cinema was a clear indication as to the reevaluation of the mass cultural sphere.

The anthropological premise, however, did not simply dismiss the aesthetic pretension or the question of aesthetics but instead situated the aesthetic challenge within the functional fabric of popular culture. Based on a position oriented toward the need for myth and the universal, that is, the conventional—a stance in which the stereotype was regarded as constitutive—a view emerged that implicitly pointed in the direction of the aesthetics of identity later elaborated by Lotman.

Lotman viewed the principle of the aesthetics of identity as characterizing entire art-historical periods, for example the Middle Ages, and especially the folklore of all cultures. Rather than emphasizing radical difference to the stereotype, the aesthetics of identity was committed to the stereotype and a playful treatment thereof: “Rituals of narration, strictly defined possibilities for plot combinations that are known in advance, and loci communi (whole pieces of frozen text) all form a very special artistic system.”⁹³ Artistic activity takes place within this system. It is interesting that in this context Lotman (writing in the 1960s and 1970s) referred to the effect of reduced immediacy, as did Morin, which was owed to the flattening impact of conventionality:

The films of Germi … shock the audience with their merciless “cynicism.” But we need only recall the language of the puppet theatres and the commedia dell’ arte in which death can be a comic episode, murder—a buffonade, suffering—a parody. The unpitying nature of Italian (and not only Italian) folk theatre is organically connected with its conventionality. The audience remembers that these are puppets or maskers on the stage and perceives their death or suffering, not as the death or suffering of real people, but in a spirit of carnival and ritual.⁹⁴

For Morin as well as Cohen-Séat the challenges posed to artistic creativity were laid out within a quite similarly conceived framework. The two filmologists were concerned with the kind of creativity expressed in an imaginative approach to the stereotypes of popular cinema, in which these stereotypes, as formulas, remain intact. Another comparison suggests itself, if one returns to the linguistic metaphor of the “film language.” One could also say that Cohen-Séat and Morin aimed for a treatment of stereotypes closely resembling what the linguist Karl Bühler had once described in his Theory of Language in reference to conventionalization in language:

But it may be, indeed it must be the case that in some points language (la langue) departs from the stage at which it has an amoeba-like plasticity from speech situation to situation, that it abandons this plasticity in order to make it possible for the speaker to be productive in a new way and on a higher level; the implement of this higher productivity is that which has congealed or solidified … [thus becoming fixed linguistic “structures”].⁹⁵

Particularly in Morin’s text one senses a pervasive enjoyment of “the implement of this higher productivity” as “congealed and solidified”: a pleasure in ellipses, synecdoches, shorthand notations, and metaphors, all only enabled by a reliance on stereotypes, as well as the flash of pleasure that appears in reading a second layer of meaning in allegories and other emblematic forms. This coincides with dialectical ideas about the treatment of stereotypes. The following is typical of Morin’s thought: “the art of the mise-en-scène consists in struggling against the impoverishment that the necessary abstraction involves.”⁹⁶ And in a similar vein, Cohen-Séat had already stated:

The stylization, the proposed convention, the intention of the system simultaneously produce inner impoverishment (the system no longer has the freedom to signify everything or anything it entails) and a relational enrichment (the communicative value is enhanced, the targeted understanding hits its mark more directly and precisely). What remains is a lasting mixture of animosity and exchange between the regime of this stylistic order and the independence of the concrete.⁹⁷

A framework was thus established for the workings of creativity, a framework referring to a fundamental paradigm shift. In the context of cinema, Cohen-Séat and Morin dismissed the absolutism of a creativity primarily seeking a true inner self, the “other condition,” or the genuine representation of physical reality in aspiring to the maximal opposition of creativity and the universal and conventional, or, at most, a compromise between them.

Their dialectical approach, which developed a kind of “aesthetics of identity,” replaced this type of thought. In retrospect, their approach in this sense recalls the parallel logic predominant in auteur theory. Also originating in France in the 1950s, this theory too was ultimately concerned with a dialectical idea, namely the assertion of a personality and its aesthetic identity within (and not primarily against) the world of stereotypes of classical film genres.

Situating both works of Cohen-Séat and Morin in an overarching context illuminates the wealth of new accents that they placed and the theoretical complexity of the manner in which they supported the paradigm shift in relation to the stereotype. Both succinctly brought together a series of arguments, which would be elaborated in later film-theoretical discourses and in some cases were even expanded into veritable guiding ideas. Both texts developed a preliminary history not only of the later ritual or myth approach in genre film theory; the new approach to the metaphor of the language of film also forms part of the early history of semiology.

There is general agreement among historians of film theory that the concepts and terminology of filmology can, in many regards, be considered precursors of the semiology of cinema. Christian Metz, the central figure in French film semiology, himself explicitly acknowledged this fact in an obituary of the filmologist Etienne Souriau (apart from Cohen-Séat and Morin, another key figure of filmology): “Ultimately filmology was in certain respects a very direct precursor of the semiology of cinema.”⁹⁸

Edward Lowry considered the “scientific distance”⁹⁹ that filmology maintained to its subject of study, the cinema, a fundamental indication of a continuity extending through the semiology of the early 1960s. One expression of this was the fact that more consideration was given to fundamental sociological, psychological, and semiological questions pertaining to the medium than to individual films. Frank Kessler recognizes that “perhaps the most important legacy of filmology”¹⁰⁰ for later film theory lies in the vocabulary that filmologists developed, through which they established important analytical terms still relevant today. He particularly refers to a project directed by Souriau¹⁰¹ on the vocabulary of film theory, which coined the pair of terms “afilmic/profilmic,” among others.

What Cohen-Séat and later Morin had written about the language of film struck a chord with fundamental ideas of the semiological concept that began to emerge in the 1960s. However, the connection was by no means seamless. Whereas “film as language” formed the main overarching paradigm of early film semiology, there was an obvious discrepancy between the emphases of different semiologists. Prolonged controversies developed about what was meant by “language” in this context.

However, semiologists did implicitly agree on one fundamental insight, which Umberto Eco articulated in the late 1960s as follows: “even there where we presume vital spontaneity, there exists culture, convention, system, and code.”¹⁰² These codes, which may be interpreted as conventional systems of communication, consequently became central objects of study in the semiology of film, to the extent they were relevant to film’s multilayered system of expression.

Hence, it is not surprising that there is a correspondence between the metaphor of filmic “discoveries” in the sense of Cohen-Séat and Morin, which grow out of the stereotypes semanticized en bloc within larger groups of films, and what Christian Metz, using different terminology, described in 1971 in Langage et cinema¹⁰³ about the “sub-codes” in the “cinematic language system.”¹⁰⁴

For Metz, cinematic subcodes were codes that did not refer to cinema as a whole but had developed in the context of certain groups of films and genres. The parallels between Metz and the filmologists rest on the fact that Metz also regarded cinematic codes as based upon consolidated, conventionalized structures of films, and with respect to subcodes he obviously envisioned family groups of stereotypes, as did Morin: these were narrative or visual film “patterns,” which had become standardized in the context of certain groups of films or genres.

In contrast to Cohen-Séat or Morin, the semiologists usually just assumed the existence of codes. In other words, they were initially less interested in the cinematic process of conventionalization, how something became conventional, for example the process of the codification of images, which only become cinematic stereotypes and thus also cinematic codes by being imitated multiple times within the film medium. Instead, for a long time they concentrated on ordering and classifying different types of codes within film’s pluricodic system of expression, whereby only relatively seldom were individual stereotypes discussed as elements of the codes. Hence, it is to the credit of the two predecessors, whose work was explicitly oriented toward the stereotype, that they called attention to the process by which new semantic patterns were formed and the role that the process of conventionalization played therein.¹⁰⁵

In retrospect, that they used the metaphor of the “language of film” in a casual and open-ended manner simply as one theoretical motif among others and with the language metaphor did not aspire to a systematic, semiological theoretical model (more closely aligned with linguistic categories) is not merely a shortcoming of their work. At least this saved them from some of the possibly unavoidable excesses of their successors. Because fully intent on the order of the code and influenced by structuralism, film semiology suffered, particularly in the 1960s, from the tendency to forcefully impose fixed systems of organization—usually drawn from linguistic categories—onto a complex audiovisual semiosis in flux, which was replete with grey areas, shifts, and blurred boundaries.

One example is Metz’s overemphasis of the defining idea of cinematic specificity in the mid-1960s. Another is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s rather idiosyncratic interpretation of linguistic concepts in relation to film. Both are revealed in one of the famous arguments that Metz carried out with Pasolini in 1966 about the semiological status of cinematic visual stereotypes. In his lecture “Le cinéma de poésie”¹⁰⁶ held in 1965, Pasolini had chosen as an example of a visual stereotype (which he did not term as such) the image of the wheels of a moving locomotive in a cloud of steam.¹⁰⁷ This was a close shot much used in classical cinema and hence conventionalized, and since the 1930s at the latest it appeared with a certain regularity and symbolic force when the narrative of a given film entailed a journey by train.

Much in the vein of Cohen-Séat and Morin’s idea, Pasolini discussed how such conventionalized images, which he called “stylemas,” tended to lead to a filmic language and form “a kind of dictionary.”¹⁰⁸ The latter was much more ephemeral than an actual dictionary but nevertheless genuine “common patrimony.”¹⁰⁹ This quasi-lexicon was then linked to a grammar of style.

Metz responded to Pasolini in 1966 with a counterargument typical of the period,¹¹⁰ in which he pointed out that, first, a semantic element such as the image of the wheels has nothing to do with cinematic language in a narrower (specific) sense, that is, nothing to do with the “properly cinematographic codes”;¹¹¹ second, it was not a grammatical phenomenon. He argued his first objection as follows: “for the image of the wheels of the train (and similar images) most commonly represent cultural stereotypes, which if they are picked up—or even partially varied—by the cinema are picked up and varied by other forms of expression as well.”¹¹²

This thus concerns “in our period, a fixed and codified figure” that “belongs to the iconography and iconology of our society much more than to cinematographic language.”¹¹³ He refused to call the image of the wheels “specifically cinematic,” because the content of the image as a filmed motif was associated with afilmic reality and therefore could also be conveyed by other media.

But this image had indeed undergone conventionalization as a fixed filmic image, as a visual-narrative stereotype, within the context of cinema from the 1920s through the 1950s. Sensational railroad films, such as La roue (The Wheel, Abel Gance, France, 1923), Das Stahltier (The Steel Beast, Willy Zielke, Germany, 1935), La bête humaine (The Human Beast / Judas Was a Woman, Jean Renoir, France, 1938), or perhaps also Pacific 231 (Jean Mitry, France, 1949) helped define the shots of wheels and piston rods immersed in steam that were almost automatically employed (usually as a short, symbolic segment) in classical cinema—from neorealism to genre film—when train rides, speed, train departures, or good-byes at train stations were to be depicted.

In 1966, Metz did not yet accept this progression from conventionalization to established visual formulas of filmic narrative within the context of cinema, a procedure that Cohen-Séat and Morin had considered so important, as a criterion of cinematic specificity. Not until Langage et cinéma did he seem to carefully correct this rigid stance in remarks on cinematic specificity with respect to similar codifications: “Above all, we must, in this regard, make it clear that the only entities capable of being or not being unique to the cinema are codes (systems), so that these codes are only (or at least primarily) manifested in the film, or that the film, to the contrary, is content to ‘adopt’ them from other cultural units.”¹¹⁴

Pasolini had, however, paved the way for Metz’s polemic by identifying the image as a conventional formula in filmic discourse, on the one hand, while simultaneously referring to the existence of the image in reality, on the other, and tending to hold forth on “reality as Language.”¹¹⁵ For Metz (at least in 1966), only the pure structural principles of linkage between segments, that is, syntagmatic relationships, were specifically cinematic. In this he was close to the montage tradition, and at the time his interests were oriented toward different variations of the “stabilized syntagmatic orderings”¹¹⁶ of filmic images. He associated these orderings with the (metaphorical) term “grammar.” Namely: “Grammar has never dictated the content of thought that each sentence should have; it merely regulates the general organization of the sentences.”¹¹⁷ And: “Cinematographic grammar does not consist in prescribing what should be filmed.”¹¹⁸ Metz’s second, more plausible, objection to Pasolini’s argument originated from this idea. The image of the locomotive wheels was not a grammatical fact, as the latter had claimed, but a conventional image, a visual stereotype.

Underlying this reduction of the specificity of cinematic language to the syntagmatic was, on the one hand, Metz’s main interest in the principles behind the sequencing of film shots, that is, the elaboration of la grande syntagmatique (great syntagmatic system),¹¹⁹ through which he attempted to formalize the montage codes of narrative cinema from the classical period. The grande syntagmatique is considered his most important achievement in this phase of his theoretical work.¹²⁰ Then again, it is apparent that he wished to exclude from the analysis of “actual” film language (langage) the problematic questions of judgment accompanying the stereotype: “A grammatical fact can be neither a cliché nor a novelty, unless it is so at the moment of its first historical occurrence; it exists beyond the level where the antithesis cliché/novelty even begins to have a meaning.”¹²¹ In contrast, the use of the wheel image in film encouraged working with “the categories of originality and triteness.”¹²² Hence, for Metz, this image is neither “grammatical” nor, as it once again follows, does it have anything to do with the “specific” language of cinema.

But Morin and Cohen-Séat had been interested precisely in the reevaluation of “banal” and conventional patterns such as the stereotype (or cliché) as the basis of a specific intelligibility. They explored the banal as a potential foundation for originality.

Much in the way that Cohen-Séat and Morin avoided the danger of overextending the specificity of cinematic language (something that still occasionally resurfaces in semiological inquiries today), they also escaped another tendency common among some later film semiologists and film grammarians: namely, the tendency of taking the metaphor of film language too literally, of engaging in what are ultimately and extensively self-serving discussions about the applicability of all sorts of linguistic concepts to film, and thereby all too rigidly applying the model of language to film,¹²³ whose complex semiosis is ultimately not comprehensible by means of overly narrow analogies with language.

The debate on the double or triple articulation of film and the search for the smallest unit of meaning point in this direction. Looking back, one has the impression that sometimes the metaphor of film as language underwent what Fritz Mauthner had once described in his critique of language as a typical fate of metaphors in theoretical discourses. As metaphors, they initially often signify “something relatively clever” until they become “something conventional.” “The former symbol was good as a play on words, but now the word is taken literally. One has forgotten its meaning and therefore takes it mindlessly earnest.”¹²⁴ Cohen-Séat had still quite consciously reflected on how he played with the “language of film” as a metaphor: “We like to place new things in familiar categories, and we trace the unknown back to the known. But we are also aware of such gyrations and thus analogical reasoning has been able to win many adherents.”¹²⁵ And also Morin’s thought (on individual, symbolic stereotypes), which was not further specified, seems even more compatible with the flexible point of view that Barthes later advocated when describing Codes and their fluidity:

Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted. The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures … the units which have resulted from it … are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a virtual digression … they are so many fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already.¹²⁶

A third problem specific to the film semiology of the 1960s was not spared its two “predecessors.” Their theory of the sign-become-stereotype was primarily conceived in terms of semantics, or certainly always then when it was connected with the language metaphor.

Their thought comprised the “adoption … of comfortable formulas for the expression of certain things.”¹²⁷ This is closely aligned with Metz’s idea of the objective of semiotic study: “The fact that must be understood is that films are understood.”¹²⁸ Pragmatic considerations, such as how stereotypes or other filmic structures are simultaneously coordinated with the psychological needs of the viewer (that is, once these needs have been emotionally activated), were initially¹²⁹ ignored by film semiologists interested in processes of comprehension. In the work of the two predecessors, this tendency of concentrating the language metaphor on processes of comprehension and rationality were compensated by the fact that this metaphor represented only one approach among others. Morin, who argued primarily along the lines of anthropology and not semantics, thus additionally explored the “technique of affective satisfaction”¹³⁰ and “aesthetic imaginary and participation.”¹³¹ However, he did not pursue the implications for the stereotype as conveyed in his statement: “The cinema … has adapted itself to all subjective needs.”¹³²

In his essay L’actualité du saussurisme¹³³ from 1956, the same year Morin’s book on cinema was published, Algirdas Greimas criticized Merleau-Ponty for underestimating average behavior and collective structures in a literary study and for instead emphasizing individual, anormal qualities of the creator. In her study on the history of semiotics, Anne Hénault considers Greimas’s critique of Merleau-Ponty an early indication of a burgeoning paradigmatic shift in the discourse of literature and literary studies: “this is probably the first time in French literary thought that an awareness of the institutional, the stereotype, the code, the automatization of representation … was so clearly formulated.”¹³⁴ The relativization indicated by the intelligently inserted “probably” may serve here as an indication that the advance made by Cohen-Séat and Morin, from a position of fundamental critique to positively tinged interest in the stereotype, was highly representative of the intellectual discourse in France in the mid-1950s. The date given by Hénault for a shift in literary thought additionally indicates that Morin and his book—and certainly Cohen-Séat, who had published his position already in 1946—may undoubtedly be regarded as forerunners of this new trend. This is worth emphasizing, since it was largely forgotten in the period following the semiology boom of the 1960s.

Incidentally, it seems only logical that it was film theorists who made this transition so early. Doubtlessly the paradigm shift was propelled by the overwhelming cultural presence of the mass culture or culture-industrial medium of film. It is no coincidence that the film theorists of the 1920s and 1930s considered the popular “average” film the ultimate stronghold of the stereotype. But in retrospect one wonders why this change did not occur sooner and why it took place at a relatively late stage in the development of the medium.

Much suggests that first a certain threshold in the experience of film and the development of film culture had to be crossed, that a quantitative accumulation of stereotypes needed to be present, also in the awareness of film theorists, before the paradigm shift and the search for an also theoretically positive interest in and confident approach to stereotypes could emerge.

In this sense, it is certainly not just mere chance that the discovery of the stereotype as intelligible material by Cohen-Séat approximately coincided with the final resignation of someone like Arnheim, who—given the ongoing cultural accumulation of stereotypes—in the late 1940s finally laid to rest his idea of film art as based on a fundamental opposition to the visual stereotype. It had become ever clearer that a view of film rejecting basic characteristics of the actual development of the medium, whether this be the influence of the culture industry, the “theater for the masses,” or the stereotype, could only have limited relevance as the basis for a theory of film, regardless how productive individual observations may have been. The power of the facts as they stood called for a new theoretical orientation toward a theory of film that no longer regarded the stereotype as a purely negative entity.

Finally, the new paradigm, the initial phase of which was marked by the work of Gilbert Cohen-Séat and Edgar Morin, corresponded well with late classical genre film, the culturally predominant film type of the 1940s and 1950s. While Hollywood genre film had already developed large families of stereotypes of the most diverse nature, it now played with these patterns with steadily increasing confidence. In many regards, the mainstream cinema of the 1950s demonstrated a heightening to the point of the symbolic, also through recourse to stereotypes. What theorists discussed, the way meaning was taken to the extremes of the archetypical, became generally palpable.