Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory

Camp—Dandyism in the age of mass culture—makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

In All That Heaven Allows (1955), director Douglas Sirk conveys the emotional nadir of his female protagonist Cary as follows: we see her standing alone at a window and looking out. The reverse angle shows a view into a cold, snowy world bathed in blue light. Daily life, the bustle of the Christmas season, which Cary is no longer part of, continues outside and carries on matter-of-factly without her. She is hermetically sealed off from this world by the cagelike lattice of the window, through which we see her in the next shot, now from the outside. The camera slowly moves in on her face until it is all we see in the frame of a windowpane. Her face is surrounded by frost patterns that have formed on the window lattice. The camera lingers for a few moments on this key image.

The wealth of symbolism inherent in this passage is obvious. Multiple symbolic layers overlap simultaneously. This is heightened by the stereotype of the prototypical woman-behind-the-window composition.¹ Although on the surface it appears as an immediate image seamlessly incorporated into the carefully designed realism of the diegesis, as a stereotype of melodramatic staging, the image ruptures this immediacy through its conventionality and formulaic character: an essentialized image as sign that recalls a conventional meaning en bloc. According to Cohen-Séat, this could be read as one of the “happy discoveries” of film; according to Barthes or Morin as an emblem of the “idea of loneliness.”

Here the stereotype becomes symbolic. However, at the same time it remains integrated within the diegesis and subordinate to a “realistic” motivation, which is intended to give an appearance of immediacy and spontaneity. In terms of symbolism, this approach to stereotypes is characteristic of classical genre cinema, not only in Hollywood. This applies to the Western as well as the melodrama.

At the beginning of High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), for example, the three men who ride into the little town to then camp at the train station embody clear (character) stereotypes. As soon as they enter the scene, we know how we are supposed to view them. This is not only explained by their difference to the other characters, who react to the riders with expressions of fear and alarm, but also because we are already familiar with similarly constructed characters with comparable external traits and a similar set of behaviors from a large number of films of the genre, that is, we know that they adhere to a stereotype. We would not have needed the reactions of the people along their path to comprehend the three riders as allegories of evil. This visual motif is subject to a similar symbolic multiplication as in the Sirk scene. And High Noon too is concerned with seamlessly integrating symbolism into a diegetic world at least externally committed to scenic realism, an appearance of immediacy, and a certain psychological verisimilitude in the behavior of the characters within the rules of the imaginary world of the Western.

The concepts and conceptual models elaborated in the previous chapter suffice for the analysis of such use of stereotypes in classical cinema. Around the mid-1960s, however, a different approach to the use of the stereotypes of popular film began to emerge with increasing prominence, in cinema itself. This new approach demanded farther-reaching ideas and a new attitude toward the stereotype. Briefly stated, the shift was characterized by conventional patterns such as those just described no longer being integrated into an illusionary diegesis ruled by scenic realism and psychological coherency. The performance of stereotypes was now more intently focused on creating a nonliteral or allegorical reading, on breaking down the appearance of immediacy, and on emphasizing artificiality.

The tendency to openly reveal stereotypes as such became more influential. Using Christian Metz’s interpretation of the term énonciation as applied to cinema,² one could also say: in the popular cinema of the mid-1960s a style arose that openly revealed the enunciation, that is, demonstratively allowed a film to be recognized as “enunciated,” by making the conventional nature of stereotypes identifiable through the manner in which they were employed and thereby attempting to raise awareness as to their stereotypical quality. In other words, a reflexive or self-reflexive³ treatment of stereotypes became more important.

Reflexivity is understood as the quality of a text to refer back to its status as a text, to display this status by emphasizing medial or artificial elements instead of cloaking it in illusion. The demonstrative presentation of stereotypes is one crucial instance of reflexivity that has barely been dealt with in relevant scholarship on reflexivity/self-reflexivity. Although long common in comedy, this mode of reflexivity rapidly gained importance in the 1960s, far beyond the comedy genre. A systematic treatment of this topic in film theory, however, did not emerge until later, and for a long time—and for the most part still today—it is not associated, or only indirectly, with the concept of the stereotype.

It has been left to this inquiry to remedy the situation and to develop a theory of reflexive stereotypes. Elements of existing theoretical studies can provide a basis for this, ideas developed—not only in respect to film and pertaining to areas outside the narrower scope of film theory—in the 1960s in keeping with a theoretical sensibility paralleling developments in film. Under the circumstances, it therefore makes sense, in contrast to the previous chapters’ historical approach to theory, to first discuss the practical phenomenon in detail by means of an exemplary, a symptomatic example, in order to then analyze the related conceptual and theoretical models of contemporary discourse, which will subsequently be incorporated into the concept of the reflexive and self-referential stereotype. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, Italy/USA, 1968) will serve as the case example, a key film of the new tendency.

A comparison between the previously described opening sequences of High Noon with those of Once Upon a Time in the West immediately illustrates the difference between the two films. The superficial realism of High Noon means that the visual staging of the film relies directly on the audiovisual modes of presentation conventionalized and automatized in classical cinema, while the film simultaneously draws on the habits of perception and the referential framework of daily life. In contrast, Once Upon a Time in the West systematically breaks with an entire series of such habits already in its first sequence.

To be sure, there are definite similarities between the openings of the two Westerns, and indeed the later film alludes to the earlier. Like Zinnemann, Leone too presents a trio of gangsters waiting at the station for a passenger arriving on the next train. The three are even more explicitly recognizable as bandits than those in High Noon. In Once Upon a Time in the West the constellation—already reduced in 1952—clearly undergoes further reduction. Here there is no ride through the city past a row of frightened people along the street. The train station of Cattle Corner is far removed from any settlement, and the scene begins directly with the entrance of the bandits into the station house. The display of terror and fear is focused solely on the station master whom the bandits encounter. This figure is defined by almost caricature-like emotions. An Indian woman, apparently stoically and silently watching the scene, is the only other person present, but she prefers to quickly leave the station. The film forgoes the presence of any other participants in the scene.

Sitting or standing, the men wait for a long time in the empty station, barely moving. The surrounding flat expanse of landscape appears empty; the tracks stretch into the horizon. This simple act of waiting is shown for over six minutes, and the film virtually demonstrates how (stereo)typing involves a reduction of character to a few accentuated traits. The three waiting men are shown in alternation. Each one of them has a quirk, which he stoically performs and each of which is presented in a series of at least three prolonged shots. The most extended shot shows the leader of the group, who sits dozing in the sun while grudgingly and unsuccessfully defending himself against a fly that has landed on his mouth (three long close-ups of his face). Without raising a finger, he tries for what seems like an eternity to shoo away the insect by blowing on it. The second bandit cracks his knuckles with abandon, while the third, whose face is cropped at the bottom of the shot, listens stoically as drops of water fall and collect in the brim of his hat. Finally, in a slow movement he removes the hat and drinks the water. The only spectacular microaction in this passage occurs when the first bandit traps the fly, having landed on the wall, with his revolver in a surprisingly fast movement.

The visual and auditory design play a significant role in the reductionism of the situation. Neither film music nor atmospheric sound accompany the extended, often cropped close-ups of the faces or the inserted shots of the fly and the water drops. Instead, highly amplified individual sounds alternate without overlapping: the buzz of the fly, the crack of the knuckles, the impact of the drops. Only the monotone creaking of a windmill, not yet visible, intervenes in the sound composition.

After minutes of waiting the train approaches. The three men rise to make their appearance, which has clearly been rigorously choreographed. The entering train is seen in a carefully staged tableau, a depth shot showing in the foreground the monumental figure of a gunman in a long dustcoat, his back to the camera. The departing train later appears in another depth shot with a similar foreground-background composition. No one gets in or out; the station remains empty. When the door of a boxcar opens and a large packet is thrown out, we see in response a new series of medium close-ups of the startled and searching glances of the men. As the train is pulling away—the bandits have already turned to leave—“Harmonica” appears behind their backs on the other side of the train after a dramatic delay, announcing himself with his harmonica motif. Although the latter is superficially motivated as diegetic, it is unmistakably studio-produced sound. Then for the first time—after thirteen minutes—a few bars of nondiegetic music are introduced to accompany the confrontation between the men.

There is an extensive exchange of glances and a brief exchange of words, which takes the well-known laconism of language in Westerns to the extreme, again through reduction:

HARMONICA: Did you bring a horse for me?

BANDIT: Looks like we’re shy one horse.

HARMONICA: You brought two too many.

Then guns are pulled, shots are fired, men fall. There is a rapid succession of close-ups, mostly of the faces, and panoramic tableaus, long shots or medium long shots. Among them is a shot showing the bandits from behind immediately before the gunfire: reduced to silhouettes by the back light (and shown at a slightly low angle), they tower formidably over the empty, wide-open landscape. The three meet their end. The windmill, now filling the screen, creaks imperturbably in the silence that follows, now the only sound. “Harmonica” also has fallen to the ground. But then he gets up with some hesitation, one arm hit by a bullet, in a landscape now appearing even emptier. He picks up his bag and walks away. The full duration of the thus concluded sequence is well over fifteen minutes.

Almost everything is geared toward a pronounced stylization, which “derealizes” or deillusionizes the stereotyped characters and conventionalized Western actions and, indeed, the entire audiovisual world of the film. The artificial character of the whole is emphasized and the actions openly celebrated as rituals. How does this occur?

Many of the images and actions of the opening sequence and later of the entire film seem to be reduced to the core set or basic structures of the stereotype world of the Western. They seem to be models in their purest form, stripped of all inessentials—all the reality-conjuring accessories of classical Westerns—in order to display their abstract nature: stereotypes presenting themselves as archetypes.

The skillfully composed tableaus of the shootout at the train station with the figures reduced to silhouettes in front of the empty landscape are visually incisive examples. The plot of the opening sequence is another. It tells the story of an entire Western, which has been “pared down” to an “ideal” stereotype structure, a pure schema: the arrival of the gunmen, waiting for the opponent, his delayed arrival, a short provocative exchange, showdown, death of the bandits, the “right” man survives and walks away. This reductive totality is again enhanced and topped off by the fact that two of the bandits shot already in the first sequence are played not by insignificant minor actors but by prominent actors in the Westerns of the period, Woody Strode and Jack Elam, whom by experience a viewer would have identified as protagonists of the entire film.

In addition to reduction, a second fundamental technique of reflexive stylization is the pronounced slowing down of movement. In later scenes, these were in part coordinated directly with the extradiegetic film score during the shoot. As with the reduction, the principle of deceleration not only applies to the opening scenes but the film as a whole. As is so often the case,⁴ the film’s beginning sets the tone. Initially, movements within the diegesis are slowed down. This goes hand in hand with reduction, since facial expressions, gesture, and language seem to be boiled down to a minimum, as are the repertoires of character and plot. The selected movements, performances, and actions are thus celebrated with slow, deliberate care, with the exception of the exchange of fire.

Analogous to movements within the image, the overarching rhythm of images is also substantially slowed down. The length of the takes seems as extended as the sequences. Against the backdrop of the image and plot rhythms customary in classical cinema and particularly in classical Westerns, this prolongation seems extreme. The emphasis of this differential quality, the defamiliarization achieved through elongation, draws on a device from the auteur cinema of the 1960s,⁵ which is here applied to popular cinema.

Other techniques of audiovisual staging contribute to the openly artificial, stylized nature of the film. Ritual is further pronounced in that gestures or actions are subject to the principle of multiple repetitions, with only slight variations. In the first sequence, the previously described series of images featuring the men’s startled, searching expressions attest to this.

The visual composition of the individual shots contributes its part. Carefully composed tableaus, which appear on screen for a long time and sometimes display their depth of focus in an accentuated contrast between especially close elements in the foreground and the extreme depth of the background, emphasize their own artificiality. One example is the close-up of the face of one of the gunmen in profile. It fills the left half of the widescreen image, while in the right half the train approaches from the depth of the landscape and (after the shot has been interrupted by the insert of a gun being loaded) expands to an almost all-encompassing scale.

The hyperrealism of the extreme close-ups of cropped faces has a similar effect. The initial sequence already shows details that seem especially dramatic when enlarged to the cinemascope format. Harmonica’s eye filling the screen, or extremely enlarged skin surfaces, pores, and stubble have no analogy in extramedial perception, without the mediation by photographic technology. Therefore, they in turn emphasize their artificiality (at least to the extent that they have not become conventional pictorial devices). This procedure corresponds with the selective use of individual sounds (drops of water, cracking knuckles), which seem filtered and amplified as extreme audio “close-ups.”

For the mainstream audiences acquainted with classical Westerns, the abrupt transitions between half shots and total shots and the extreme close-ups or details shots were uncustomary. This and the unmistakable studio sound of the diegetic harmonica and Ennio Morricone’s music score in general all worked to the same effect of enhancing the stylization.

As a result of reduction/selection, enhancement, deceleration, repetition, and hyperrealistic display, a distanced view of an artificial sphere emerges, which allows the “mechanics” of the genre to become visible through defamiliarization. This “world” itself calls attention to the fact that it is not inhabited by “real” or even only seemingly real people but by masks of the imaginary, by artificial beings referring in extremely reduced form to a long line of predecessors and their patterns of behavior. It is a world that does not attempt to create an appearance of realism but indicates that it celebrates a game regulated by conventionalization and based on the system of the Western.

Roland Barthes remarked on myth: “It abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences.”⁶ The essence of stereotypes that constitute modern myths, such the Western, is brought to the fore in Once Upon a Time in the West (as in other Italo-Westerns). Incidentally, in 1969 Sergio Leone described this as his intention in an interview with Horst Königstein: “There are now different possibilities of expressing oneself in a Western than before. I approached the main characters of the Western as symbols; for me they are archetypes like the characters of the Homeric epics. And that’s how I told my tales: I eliminated the old—American—form of storytelling.”⁷

And in the same year, the German film director Wim Wenders described his cinema experience of seeing Leone’s film much in this sense, if with a touch of abhorrence:

I realize that this film … no longer shows the “surface” of Westerns, but rather what lies behind: the inner side of Westerns. The images no longer only mean themselves, something else glimmers through; they are threatening without making their threat visible, they turn the acts of violence into symbols of violence, into primal Western scenes. A close-up of Charles Bronson in this film becomes a close-up of a personification, whose story is no longer that of a revenge, but rather that of revenge itself.⁸

Once Upon a Time in the West not only provides structural references to the genre’s repertoire of stereotypes, which the film discursively examines, but also a many-layered complex of innuendo or direct allusions⁹ to individual Westerns. The three gangsters waiting at the station clearly refer to High Noon, as already mentioned. The form of the train station itself also alludes to this film, although its staging is more monumental, with its large, prominent water tank, the fearful station master, and the stereotypical image of the train tracks stretching into the horizon. Another indication is that the absent boss of the bandits is in both cases named Frank.

Similarly, the impressive panorama shot depicting the drive through Monument Valley in a later sequence can be easily deciphered by any Western aficionado as a reference to John Ford and a classical landscape of the genre. The list of examples could be continued.

Bernardo Bertolucci, the co-sceenwriter of the film, recalled his original intention: “I wrote a huge treatment—about three hundred pages long, full of ‘quotes’ from all the Westerns I love.”¹⁰ And in his book about the European perspective on the Western Christopher Frayling comments: “The final version of the film is so crammed with ‘quotes’ from Hollywood Westerns that it is difficult to imagine how many more Bertolucci could have fitted in.”¹¹

This question aside, intertextual¹² games such as these do in any case contribute to the laying bare the enunciation, or in the words of Brecht, “ ‘something to construct,’ something ‘artificial,’ ‘invented.’ ”¹³ Metz¹⁴ himself had already indicated this, even if only in passing.

It is interesting that despite such demonstrative heightening of conventional forms and precedents, the balance does not tip into the comical. No sense of parody arises, or at least the underlying tone of the film is not primarily aimed at mocking generic forms. This, however, does not preclude humorous nuances. The gangster’s trapping of the fly in his revolver seems to travesty the mythic swift-handedness of the Western’s dueling men. Apart from such examples, the generally predominating tone is one of pathos.

The solitary individual confronting fate and the magnificent expanse of landscape: this is a carefully staged visual leitmotif carried throughout the film, a familiar, and indeed conventional, motif from famous Westerns that here was also systematically singled out and heightened. In the visual arts, this motif has served as a fundamental romantic pathos formula (Pathosformel),¹⁵ at least since Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of The Monk by the Sea.

Instead of a parody, Leone created a distant and simultaneously devoted pastiche.¹⁶ He approached the conventional patterns of the genre with the confidence of knowing the stereotype world of the Western, presenting it as such, and loving it for what it is. The result is a congealed déjà vu, a monumental memorial to the Western.

A comment by Wenders on the film relates to the impact of a monument as a mummifying resume: “This one is the limit, the end of a métier. This one is deadly.”¹⁷ This statement lends an unintended double meaning to the distribution title of the German dubbed version, Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod (in English, Play Me the Song of Death).

This monument achieves two things at once: it is reflexive and openly reveals the stereotypes of the genre; it robs their performance of any semblance of immediacy in deconstructing while simultaneously transfiguring them. This produces a dual effect upon an audience versed in Westerns. On the one hand, the film aims to convey a superior feeling of being able to see through the generic world and its stereotypes, that is, a confident enjoyment of experiencing the conventional patterns that have, for all intents and purposes, long become worn out. On the other hand, the film again provides a—now reflexive—echo of the original pleasure that the stereotypes once provided and the fascination that they held. This double effect of reflexivity is further raised to the level of a memorial by the powerful pathos of the images and music, and the (sometimes manipulative) game played with our expectations adds refinement to the film as a whole.

Favorable reviews and analyses of Once Upon a Time in the West from the 1970s or early 1980s often emphasized the film’s critical commentary¹⁸ on the Western. Bernhard von Dadelsen still insists on this point in Fischer Filmgeschichte. He characterizes the story of the construction of the railroad as a “fable of capitalist critique,”¹⁹ and he sees in the “conflict between Frank and the Mexican Harmonica a glaring allegory of the US exploitation of Latin America.”²⁰ Dadelsen explicitly associates the supposed critical potential of the film with the (approximately contemporary) genre-critical cinema of directors such as Robert Altman or Arthur Penn, whose Little Big Man (1970) “once and for all destroyed the form of the Western and its affirmative ideology.”²¹ He refers, among other things, to a comment that Leone made in an interview: “As always, I used conventional cinema as a basis. Then I focused completely on playing with its codes and destroying them. I wanted to confront all the existing lies about the history of the settlement of America.”²²

Independent of this comment, in looking at the film one is hard pressed to see it as an attack on the deceptive nature of stereotypes, let alone on the ideology of the Western, or as an invocation of historical truth.

Let it be said that Once Upon the Time in the West no longer boasts the perfect heroism of settler myths, which characterized the epic Westerns of the 1920s and 1930s but had already long become an anachronism by 1968. In the development of its story, the film certainly engages with the critical common sense of the late 1960s. However, characters such as the railroad magnate, who intends to see through his plans with the help of a posse of gunmen, do not represent a new truth, a biting critique of capitalism, or an ideological criticism of the genre but instead had already long belonged to the Western’s conventional repertoire. Also, the replacement of the overarching national ideals that formerly propelled the heroes of the epic Westerns by decidedly nonidealistic factors, such as money, power, or revenge as key character motivations, even of the protagonists, is certainly no longer a novelty within the genre, that is, within conventional cinema, by the late 1960s. This contrasting variation of the outmoded imaginary world of the genre had certainly already been introduced by the wave of Italo-Westerns directly preceding the film, if not before.

Irrespective of this shift, Leone does not develop a (counter)world of historical truth, a critical response to the “deceptive” stereotypes of the genre, but rather a celebratory composition based on historically altered premises of common sense—on genre consciousness—and plays with a repertoire of stereotypes as a repertoire of stereotypes. The film takes its (stereo)typization farther than any prior film and thus makes it visible.

The capitalist, for example, becomes a lurid type, a cripple with fantasies of omnipotence. This is a type that has appeared in films ranging from Fritz Lang’s banker Haghi in Spione (Spies, Germany, 1928) to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, UK, 1964) and that today still belongs to cinema’s stereotype repertoire, as demonstrated by the character of Dr. Loveless in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West (1999). With his glaring attributes, the character hardly connotes a reference to some “true” story; instead it is nothing more than the exalted figure of an imagination long become conventional. The protagonists as a whole remain “ahistoric schemata,”²³ in the historical no-man’s land of the genre, as created by conventionalization. Christopher Frayling described this as follows:

Rather he [Leone] chose to portray America’s first frontier using the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a business man, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These stereotypes, which, in Leone’s and Bertolucci’s hands, become fictional “emblems” of a sort, are taken from the dime novel, the Wild West show, the Hollywood film, the pulp magazine, the comic-strip, rather than from American history—parts of a “fixed terminology” or “code” of the fictional genre.²⁴

Leone’s comment—incongruent with other statements made by the director (as above the comment on the figures of Homeric epics)—is possibly attributable to the prevailing rhetoric in the discourse of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which asserted social or ideological criticism as central paradigms of judgment. This same mechanism still echoes in Dadelsen’s writing. The film itself hardly functions in this sense, and this argument against the text fails to understand the film’s aesthetic incentive and thus also its film-historical significance.

Paradoxically, opinions that come closer to understanding the uniqueness and significance of the film are those with a dispraising tone—arising from the same discourse of ideological critique—toward these very qualities. One such voice was the Cahiers du cinéma reviewer Silvie Pierre, who in 1970 aptly remarked that Once Upon a Time in the West is basically not interested in history or ideology but most of all in the genre’s system of stereotypes as a repertoire of variation. Her assessment read: “cinematic narcissism, a cinema only interested in itself and its own mythology.”²⁵ Despite clear undertones of criticism, this formulation describes the aesthetic constitution of the film much more precisely than did the superfluous attempts at refashioning the film as a work of generic and historical critique.

Once Upon a Time in the West is reflexive cinema. The film not only lays bare the generic world of stereotypes it uses. It does more in that its actual theme is the reflection of genre stereotypes as stereotypes. It “addresses” the stereotypes it employs. Stripped of their immediacy, these set pieces serve as both the material and topic of the new composition. Hence, the film is not only to be characterized as reflexive; it is also self-referential, in Kay Kirchmann’s²⁶ sense of the word: “One could categorize a … film as self-referential which no longer displays references an ‘outside’—whatever form this may take—of its own filmic context for which no antecedent mimetic principle is any longer constitutive.”²⁷ If one applies Kirchmann’s formulation (somewhat tempered) to Once Upon a Time in the West, then one is confronted with a film whose references are predominantly based on other films, in particular on the stereotype repertoire or the imaginary world of the Western genre. Any pre- or extramedial (historical) reality lying beyond this medial-discursive reality has become meaningless to the viewer. Through its reflexive, stylized, and artificial treatment of stereotypes, Leone’s film makes clear that it is neither meaningful nor really possible to relate the conventional schemata of the imaginary world of the Western to an original historical “West” or any other reality beyond the Western’s imaginary.

This transparency created by the skillfully produced artificiality of the whole distinguishes the film to a degree from classical Westerns. As strict genre films, the latter were themselves based on the conventionalized fictional world of the genre. In this sense, they had de facto also long been self-referential. However, for the most part they were not yet deconstructive in raising the issue as such. Instead, their illusionary staging was primarily focused on the appearance of immediacy. The epic Westerns of the 1920s to the 1940s even simulated claims to reconstructing historical reality, as in the voiceover framing Dodge City (Michael Curtiz, 1939), for example.

In contrast, the gesture of artificiality, of reflexive self-referentiality, is fundamental to Leone’s film. The metaphor for the Western as a “horse opera” is attributed to William S. Hart, a pioneer of Western films. This traditional opera metaphor takes on additional meaning in view of the new type of openly self-referential and even monumental artificial world stylized with genre-nostalgic pathos. This is what Silvie Pierre was probably referring to in her assessment of “cinematic narcissism.”

The overt self-referentiality of the film and the disclosure of the stereotype as stereotype were, however, viewed positively by other theorists. Writing in 1971, Horst Königstein, for instance, who explicitly uses the term “stereotype,” identified a latently emancipatory dimension. Following Horkheimer and Adorno, he equated commercial cinema (by nature) with alienation, deception, and the mechanism of stereotypization. Within the framework of existing social reality there was hardly a chance for viewers to escape the dominant stereotypes by which they are conditioned. Therefore, an emancipatory, political cinema must be concerned with “initiating [the audience] into the political substance of the medium.”²⁸ An initial step of sorts was to develop an awareness of the all-powerful stereotypes. He regarded the stereotype-conscious Italo-Westerns and particularly Once Upon a Time in the West as at least close to such a cinema, precisely because they presented bare stereotypes and made them recognizable as such but simultaneously refrained from creating any sense of ideal coherence. They can “only discharge viewer into emptiness”²⁹ and so at least avoid gestures of affirmation. Thus this cinema reveals “a ‘shitty’ world, and contempt and cynicism plague any attempt to bring lies into harmony at the end.”³⁰ However, stereotypes are incapable of social anticipation.³¹

At the time quite common, this fascinated, left-wing reading of the Italo-Western underscores—and this is perhaps the most interesting point—the previously discussed ambivalence, openness, and integrative power of reflexively presenting genre stereotypes with respect to different audience groups.

The section “Ways of Emancipation from the Stereotype” outlined three basic variations or means of emancipation. One was entitled “radical critique and renunciation,” another “celebratory revelation.” The latter was largely associated with the retrocinema of the 1970s to 1990s, a cinema meanwhile frequently labeled as “postmodern.”³² Today, this much seems clear: at least in terms of its approach to generic stereotypes, that is, their celebratory revelation as a central and consistent aesthetic principle, Once Upon a Time in the West is an early, pivotal film marking the transition to this influential tendency. In other words, it is an important model case of the reflexive stereotype, and herein lies the film’s significance within the history of the medium, regardless whether one may like the film or not.

This significance tended to be obscured by the misinterpretation of the film as a critique of stereotypes or ideology, especially when viewed in context with the example set by Arthur Penn and Robert Altman, who distinctly represent a different tendency in the approach to stereotypes, namely critique and renunciation.

Considering cinema since the 1980s, especially what Fredric Jameson described as “the so-called nostalgia film (or what the French call la mode rétro),”³³ the relationship to Leone’s Western becomes obvious. Examples include The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982), The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984), Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, France/USA 1997), almost all of the Coen brothers’ films since Miller’s Crossing (1990), and, of course, Leone’s own Once Upon a Time in America (1984). As different as they prove to be in detail, all these works share the practice of revelation and the celebratory reflexive display of genre stereotypes. And one could easily compile a much longer list of films.

Following a trend toward hybridization, in the 1990s the remnants of scenic realism still retained in Once Upon a Time in the West were even more radically broken down. The constant search for new means of defamiliarizing or deautomatizing existing patterns played no small role in the process. In Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), right at the beginning of the film, the protagonist couple drive a convertible not through the landscape of an imaginary reality but through a collage of conventional film and media images, whose material status as media images and their hybrid connections are signaled through new digital technologies of image processing and internal montage. A new gesture of revelation and surrender to the medial patterns of the digital age.

Another sequence in Stone’s film, in which the couple meet for the first time, kill their parents, and drive off, functions similarly. Placed in the middle of the film, the sequence is staged as a parody of the American sitcom I Love Lucy and uses the conventional forms and stereotypes of this TV genre, including canned background laughter. Its fragmentary character is not only marked by the abrupt shift of the narrative code at the beginning and end of the sequence but also through an insertion of the opening and closing credits (of the sitcom) in the middle of the film. The interpolation of this sequence, a diegetic non-sequitur, is a particular form of integration that Metz called the “symbiotic type.”³⁴ The sitcom is not a logically bracketed film within a film, for example, a television program within the diegesis, but: “the film within the film [in this case the sitcom] is the film itself.”³⁵ The main characters pass through constantly changing worlds of medial code, which clamor loudly for attention. This world is literally a media world. Through a constant shift in code Natural Born Killers repeatedly highlights the inhomogeneous, the hybrid, and its imagination as pieced together out of disparate preformed patterns.

Morin had even talked about certain sedimented film images being used as signs representing the “ideas of love,” the “idea of loneliness,” or the “idea of evil,” hence enabling them to be read as a form of symbolism in classical cinema, such as Douglas Sirk’s image of the window in All That Heaven Allows. However, in view of the newer type of cinema, it is necessary to systematically include another level, that of open self-referentiality. The reflexively staged stereotypes in films ranging from Once Upon a Time in the West to Natural Born Killers no longer represent the idea of evil, love, and so on. Instead they present themselves as references to the film-idea of evil, love, and so on, or the media-idea thereof. An empirical world of experience behind the imaginary patterns of the media no longer seems detectable. The intertextual and increasingly intermedial “reality” of the medial stereotypes serves as the sole material reality.

The conceptual stereotype models elaborated in the previous chapter lead the way from a critique of the “standardized cliché” toward an appreciation of the stereotype as a basis for abstraction and symbolism. Although these ideas may still serve as a useful foundation for the interpretation of this kind of reflexive and self-referential cinema as grounded in the revelation and reflexivity of stereotypes, they are no longer fully sufficient.

More or less concomitantly with this new type of cinema, theoretical discourses emerged—as expressions of the same cultural sensibility (even if outside film theory in the stricter sense)—which articulated further-reaching ideas on the approach to stereotypes.

Cultural consciousness develops in waves. Whereas in the early 1920s film theorists avowed the immediacy of gesture as salvation from the conventionality and stereotypical aspects of language—within the context of the discourses of expressionism and empathy theory—in the second half of the decade and at the turn of the 1930s, disillusionment predominated in association with metaphors such as “standardization,” the “readymade,” and “assembly-line” film production. All of these circumscribed the stereotype and were bracketed by or part of contemporary discourses of Fordism/Americanism and New Objectivity. Later, the emerging contexts of semiology, or semiotics, gave impetus to the filmologists’ modified reflection on stereotypes as intelligible forms.

Over the course of the 1960s—against the backdrop of an altered relationship to the conventional—other ideas gained significance, linking the (indeed largely indirect) reflection of the stereotype with a new celebration of nonliteral reading and the transfiguration of the commonplace. Such thinking did not immediately form a dominant tendency but was expressed in a large number of theoretical and artistic statements of the decade, and it paved the way for what would soon become the highly influential discourse of postmodernism, the founding texts of which already stem from this period, such as Leslie Fiedler’s “Cross the Border—Close the Gap.”³⁶

How might one more closely describe these two motifs, the celebration of nonliteral reading and the transfiguration of the commonplace? Is there a connection between the two, and what is the source of their new significance in the 1960s?

A text published by the German writer Peter Schneider in 1965 is illuminating. Although entitled “Vom Nutzen des Klischees” (On the Use of the Cliché), a more appropriate title might be “On the Pleasure of the Cliché.” Schneider vehemently argues against all attempts, both in film criticism and film production, to enhance the status of genre films (he writes about the Western) in contradiction to the stereotypes of the genre, whether this take the form of incorporating substantive historical references or serious real-life problems familiar to the audience or recasting stereotyped figures as individual characters: “Such attempts fail to understand what makes the Western unique: that its subject matter is only enjoyable as self-confident cliché. Any ambition of enhancing the shell of its plot through articulated content is a betrayal of the original Western.”³⁷ And he adds:

If one takes the Western seriously and sheds even one genuine tear for the hero who has been shot through the leg scissors maneuver, then one misses out on all the wonderful minor aspects of the Western, i.e., the leg scissor maneuver. The Western, and also the high-class Western, is then denigrated to the level of the third-class social problem film and immediately swings towards becoming overbearing.³⁸

Schneider therefore favors an attitude toward the genre that takes pleasure in the inherent value of playing with stereotypes in and of itself. “It [the Western] proves its worth in its very renunciation of novelty.”³⁹

Hence Schneider regards the only appropriate approach to conventional patterns as one that makes no secret of being detached from all meanings above and beyond the conventional, imaginary world of the genre. He writes: “Over the course of sixty years the Western’s continuous appetite for repetition has removed the plausibility of all its documentary elements, even if occasionally preserved.”⁴⁰ And: “Everything that serves as a motif in the Western at some point experiences the cold shower of the pars pro toto jargon, which declares the entire world of feigned immediacy to be pure playing material.”⁴¹ In other words, Schneider, like Shklovsky or later Lotman,⁴² refers to the derealizing effect of conventionalization, the fading and shifting of meanings, and the tendency toward ellipsis. Stereotypes could and should be experienced as free and open imaginary factors, as fixed patterns of a pure play world, as in the reflexive manner of Once Upon a Time in the West. He regards questions pointing beyond the artificial world of the genre as meaningless and even as fundamental misconceptions. Such references would only impair the beautiful regularity of the conventional.

Just as the connection to reality is suspended, so too is the relationship to the customary schemata of aesthetic judgment. Here quality has nothing to do with the exploration of the real or critical reason. It is instead rooted in the regulated use of effects and a particular kind of style. To the extent that the imaginary world develops into a repertoire of specific repetitive forms, which present themselves in an “understated distance from dead earnest,”⁴³ so the expert eye appreciates the sometimes grotesque departures of conventional forms from the real. Schneider’s delight is associated with apparent mannerisms (the “leg scissor maneuver”!). The special quality and stylistic challenge of the Western lies in imaginatively varying these mannerisms and celebrating them.

That means that the posited artificiality of the conventional world here provides the condition of affirmation: of the transfiguration of the stereotype. A special aesthetic realm emerges with its own rules and specific criteria. According to Schneider’s dictum, the subject matter of the Western is “only enjoyable as a self-confident cliché.”⁴⁴

Here one might interject that similar statements have been penned by intellectuals in the past. Isolated remarks pointing to similar constructions appear early on, some of which have already been quoted. For example, with respect to stereotyped character patterns Erwin Panofsky argued against the cultural refinement and distinction of popular patterns in film, as did a number of preceding avant-garde writers involved in the early cinema debate (but without reference to the stereotype topic). Also Adorno and Eisler discussed (only marginally and with little consequence for their own concept of film music) how the productions that “follow an established pattern” are in fact superior to “pretentious grade-A films.”⁴⁵

However, a new quality marked the situation in 1960s. Statements such as Schneider’s now assumed a much more conceptual character, and, most significantly, they now played out within a discursive field and media reality increasingly characterized by similar ideas and techniques of cultural production rooted therein. The celebratory play with the nonliterary reading of stereotypes and the open self-referentiality of genre forms constituted one of the decade’s highly conspicuous cultural tendencies, and its influence was felt beyond this period.

It is no coincidence that Schneider’s essay shares key conceptual motifs with a far more famous text, Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” Writing in the United States at almost the same time as Schneider, Sontag described in 1964 the kind of aesthetic sensibility that she called “camp.” The first characteristic of camp ultimately boils down to nonliterary reading: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks…. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”⁴⁶

Like Schneider’s experience of genre film, camp is also described as types of experience “that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason”⁴⁷ but define a special realm in which “the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment”⁴⁸ has been suspended. Whereas Schneider speaks about how the Western may only be appropriately regarded as a “pure play world,” Sontag places similar value on “the difference … between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.”⁴⁹ The latter is equally decisive for camp, and Sontag also emphasizes the importance of time in the production of this effect through fading and decontextualization, in order to “dethrone the serious.”⁵⁰ Sontag writes: “Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility … Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.”⁵¹

Sontag places clearer emphasis than Schneider on instances of inner ambivalence in relation to the camp attitude, and in fact the described de-realization offers a space for various affects. Thus the “nonliteral relationship of meaning,”⁵² as Hans Jürgen Wulff writes more recently, provides the basis for irony. Investigating the constitutive role of irony for parody, Linda Hutcheon similarly notes: “On the semantic level, irony can be defined as a marking of difference in meaning…. There is one signifier and two signifieds.”⁵³ It is therefore no surprise that Sontag identifies a close relationship between camp and irony. Camp not only means “a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’ ” but also “of irony over tragedy.”⁵⁴

But irony is not the only effect grounded in nonliteral reading. The tendency toward transfiguration—such as the nostalgic idealizing of long worn-out stereotypes—is also rooted in the same effect, as the example of Once Upon a Time in the West demonstrates. Essentially every form of transfiguration is paradoxically inscribed with elements of distanciation and displacement.

Sontag’s notion of camp is also related to transfiguration. She articulates a perspective alternating between irony and celebration. In this sense she distinguishes camp from the kind of traditional irony involving derision and “bitter or polemical comedy.”⁵⁵ She observes: “The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness—irony, satire—seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”⁵⁶ An enamored stance toward the “banal” shines through the aloofness of the nonliteral. More consistently than Schneider, Sontag discusses how forms experienced as stylistic excess and mannerism, fantastical exaggerations, melodramatic absurdities, or other peculiarities kindle a true sense of pleasure. Camp is simply “the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”⁵⁷

Busby Berkeley’s ornamental film choreographies are for Sontag a classical example of camp. Although camp is grounded in a nonliteral reading and always carries a tone of mild irony, this sensibility in fact ultimately boils down to a glorification and enjoyment of the given subject matter. Camp loves and glorifies its objects but at the same time flirts with their banality. Overall, it is a complex stance: “Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it.”⁵⁸

In this sense, camp closes the gap between the intellectual and the popular by simultaneously creating a sense of both confidence (through distanciation and insight) and pleasure. Camp delights “in the arts of the masses” and also in their stereotypes, which this sensibility understands “to possess … in a rare way.”⁵⁹ Sontag herself speaks of “gestures full of duplicity”⁶⁰ inherent in the camp experience, which in this sense is also deeply ironic.⁶¹

This form of ambivalence toward the stereotypes of the popular became a medially widespread cultural skill in the 1960s and was not limited to camp (in a narrow sense) as an interpretive mode or sensibility. There arose a wide range of aesthetic offerings with narrative and visual structures organized in a manner to suggest such a reading. The dual tone of camp was equally employed in texts, films, and images. Sontag calls this “deliberate camp.”⁶² Sergio Leone’s both reflexive and transfiguring approach to the stereotypes of the Western, in which nostalgia occasionally turns into mild irony, can—at least in terms of this dual meaning—be regarded as a central example.

Exhibiting a very similar ambivalence in its reflection of popular phenomena, the visual-arts movement of Pop Art flourished—not incidentally—at the same time.

Pop Art was understood as an antiart movement in opposition to the prevailing trend of sublime abstraction. It provocatively embraced representation in incorporating ordinary, everyday objects from industrial society, especially the “banal” systems of representation in advertising, comics, and so on. Particularly in the use of the latter it also addressed the mechanism of “stereotypization.”⁶³

At first glance, the works of Pop Art appeared to present everyday objects simply in enlarged form: Coca Cola posters, Campbell’s soup cans, images from comics. But it essentially operated in a very similar manner to Once Upon a Time in the West. Reduction, isolation, enlargement, and serial repetition (as with Warhol’s photo series of Marilyn Monroe) in Pop Art represented the aesthetic principles of deautomatization, as also employed in Leone’s film. The art historian Walter Biemel remarks on the function of Pop Art’s technique of staging nonliteral reading: “The repetition of advertising … is intended to activate a reflection on advertising, to jolt the immediacy of everyday awareness…. In its naïve manner of expression it aims to counteract naïveté.”⁶⁴

He further states that “the revelation of everyday life as a world of stereotypes” and “seeing through this mechanism” were functions of this form of art.⁶⁵ Biemel also senses the ambiguity that permitted both pleasure and insight. With respect to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book paintings, he talks about the “ambivalent”⁶⁶ effects of Pop Art. His description of this ambivalence is interesting:

These images may be read … in different ways, in a naïve sense in which the representation is taken for real (and the images are then in fact simply monumental comic strips) or in the sense of looking beneath their appearance, and then they lead to critical distance, to reflection. The enjoyment of the images is then no longer immediate but comes from smiling at this former immediacy. In this smile is a slight dread of the world, in which all people must look the same, feel the same, and say the same, desire the same, and despair of the same.⁶⁷

Both readings are in fact possible, since the visual structure of Pop Art is open-ended enough to serve as a screen onto which highly divergent approaches and dispositions can be projected. The comic-strip image, enlarged and displayed in isolation, seems to invite reflection on popular culture and its workings, and especially on the stereotype. Biemel’s critical interpretation is, however, not the only appropriate approach. Instead, there are other voices advocating neutral appraisal and deconstruction, which directly lead to the “transfiguration of the commonplace,” to use the phrase of Arthur Danto.⁶⁸ Hence, another view with entirely different emphases than Biemel’s emerges.

This other perspective associates the pleasure of seeing through the stereotype less with an impulse of dread or critique but more with an acknowledged fascination for and enjoyment of patterns. This is a reading ultimately equivalent to Sontag’s “rare way” of appropriating mass phenomena. From this perspective, camp, Italo-Westerns, and Pop Art are related.

Since then a similar ambiguity in the approach toward the stereotypes of the popular has been consistently emphasized with respect to a wide range of postmodern cinema. In the process, corresponding techniques have also been introduced to popular cinema. A key reason for this is that over the course of the 1960s stereotypes also became commercially interesting across the board. Two functions are significant in this context.

First, there is the function for the reflective spectator who is critically aware of the predominating mass-media stereotypes. Here the dual tone of the nonliteral—oscillating between irony and glorification of the patterns that are played with—forms a kind of bridge between the two. On the one hand, this function does not force recipients to undercut their own awareness of stereotypes but still allows them to experience an echo of the pleasurable, naïve, and direct enjoyment of the stereotype. Using this same logic, Thomas Elsaesser speaks of the “simultaneous co-presence of the desire for the myth and a cynicism about its efficacy.”⁶⁹ In a now famous passage, Umberto Eco offers a particularly vivid description of the circumstances of this tendency, which he considers a central mechanism of postmodernity:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony…. But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.⁷⁰

To apply Eco’s thoughts to cinema, one could say that a film like Once Upon a Time in the West encouraged the number of viewers (by now no means small but truly a mass audience), who in 1968 knew about the “lost innocence” and the stereotypes of the genre to play along and both confidently and nostalgically enjoy the film’s grasp of the repertoire of stereotypes. The dual tone thus enables a recycling of long worn-out generic forms.

The second function is interwoven with the first and of similar significance for postmodern mainstream cinema. This is a sort of sociointegrative function, for productions of this type not only make it possible to address opposing tendencies within a group of recipients but also unite in one film different audience groups with varying aesthetic dispositions—ranging from a critical to a naïve and direct mode of reception. The function is thus a form of closing the gap, as articulated in Leslie Fiedler’s programmatic text of postmodernism.⁷¹

One might counter at this point that both the recycling of worn-out forms as well as attempts to satisfy divergent audience groups with one product have a long history in commercial cinema, and particularly in Hollywood. The classical double plot, which combines elements of a melodramatic love story with action, is considered one technique for addressing both female and male audiences. And forms of parody, for example in comedies, are among the longstanding and tried-and-true techniques of recycling. A film musical such as Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952) with its reflexive and often parodic film-within-film construction, already amounted to a successful attempt to revive forms and stereotypes—long considered overused or old fashioned—from the film musicals of the 1930s as elements of a part ironic, part nostalgic transfiguring of a reflexive, historical staging. In this sense, the film addresses the musicals of early sound cinema.

By the 1960s, however, both the need for recycling worn-out generic forms and audience integration took on new cultural significance. For one thing, not only critics but also the mass audience now came equipped with many years of evolving media experience; they possessed the media literacy that necessarily entailed a heightened sense for the conventional and also a tendency to reflect on stereotypes. For another, the new accessibility of film through television multiplied this effect exponentially. Through this new everyday medium, it was possible to constantly watch cinema films from a whole variety of periods. Again, the United States was a forerunner in this tendency.

By the second half of the 1950s, the already significant number of television companies on the American market had already purchased the rights to the older films of most studios and used them to fill their airtime.⁷² But it was in the 1960s that American households became private film museums,⁷³ at least in the opinion of Robert Ray, who studied the connection between film and television and the changes in film production in the United States. With few exceptions, older films were swept out of the cinemas by the constant flood of new products and sank more or less into (sometimes merciful) oblivion, but since then Hollywood’s past—and of cinema as a whole—has been constantly present on TV, also in Europe, if with some delay.

This new presence was not without consequences. It strengthened the latent film-historical and intertextual awareness of the audience and additionally honed its ability to distinguish stereotyping. The continuous television presence of older movies, including weak films and B-pictures that would have never stood a chance in cinemas, encouraged comparison and produced an acute sense for the stereotype. Conventional patterns became much more noticeable than before due to the deautomatizing effect of the temporal decontextualization of film production and reception, which up until then in the cinema had been the exception. The previously discussed sequential offering of many similar films was now supplemented by this temporal “stacking,” which substantially contributed to the new situation.

Still another factor was that television did not hesitate to use successful narrative patterns from theatrical films in its own productions, that is, TV series. Much in the way cinema once drew on nineteenth-century literary genres, television now used film genres as a similar resource. In order to fill their massive programming schedules, American television companies in particular reproduced almost all the classical film genres: Westerns, gangster and detective films, screwball comedies, musicals, horror films, and so on. These series supplanted the classical production of B-pictures, whereby the number of productions and viewers continued to increase. From a qualitative perspective, this certainly did not mean greater difference or increased complexity in the approach to stereotypes.

As a whole, this supports the thesis that the stereotypical nature of generic forms—some already worn out from decades of use—finally entered the consciousness of a wide audience. This marked the beginning of a new phase.

This new, at very least latent, consciousness was additionally furthered by a special-interest audience, since around this time there was a movement—from the bottom up—toward film studies as an academic discipline. A flood of courses was offered on the ideological critique of the medium or on genres and their conventional forms. Reigning structuralist paradigms contributed to a particular interest in the latter. The establishment of art-house cinemas may also be viewed in this context, a trend contributing to the visibility of film history through retrospectives and other film-historical programs. Additionally, there was new interest in a critique of the culture industry as advocated by Horkheimer and Adorno.

This new situation faced two divergent audience-response patterns, which the film and television industries immediately grasped and incorporated. On the one hand, Ray elaborates (what he calls) a “Left” response of ideological critique, which attempted—in the context of complex social and cultural change—to oppose the classical mythology of the media and develop a counterculture. On the other hand, he identifies a conservative (or, in his words, “Right”) reaction, which developed a persistently nostalgic relationship to the crisis of patterns and myths that accompanied this development and the concomitant economic crisis of Hollywood.

Although both types of responses predominate in different groups of audiences, it seems impossible to make clear distinctions. At this time, the critics still belonged to the first true film and television generation in terms of their frame of experience, and therefore they almost symbiotically adhered to corresponding myths and stereotypes. These had long become discursive elements of daily life, which were inseparable from individual biographies and shaped the repertoires of the personal imaginary. Referring to this generation, Ray observes: “Faced with the need to find suitable lifestyles, its members often appeared to be acting out of a grab bag of movie myth, including even those which the counterculture’s own rational premises had disowned.”⁷⁴ In reverse, one may assume that also the “nostalgics” did not remain unaffected by the medial logic of overuse.

In this situation, the film industry as well as the television companies responded in the mid-1960s with a conspicuously large number of films openly reflecting the stereotypes of their genres—ironizing, reflexively transfiguring, and sometimes even critically questioning them. This included a wave a genre parodies. Possibly the most famous, Cat Ballou (Elliot Silverstein, 1965) is packed with benign irony and plays an utterly reflexive game with the genre, in this case the Western, to an even greater extent than the film Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), which appeared at almost the same time in France. Stereotypes are clearly satirized, for instance, the character of the aging and tired drunken gunman (played by Lee Marvin), who gears himself up for one last fight. The female lead (Jane Fonda) reads Western novels, in which she encounters the figure of the mythic gunfighter before he appears for real. And the entire film narrative is presented as a comic ballad sung by two wandering street singers, who paradoxically have discursive authority despite being diegetic figures. It is telling that the ironic and simultaneously nostalgic film was in 1966 the first genre parody ever to win an Academy Award.⁷⁵

Almost at the same time, ABC began the TV series Batman, which, in Sontag’s terms, follows the rules of deliberate camp, and the James Bond film Thunderball (Terence Young, UK, 1965), also intentionally styled as camp, became the biggest box-office hit of 1966. But also films that critically deconstructed their genres and attempted to foreground their lack of realism, for example, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), now stood a chance at the box office.

Looking back in the early 1980s, Ray remarks that “between 1966 and 1980, an enormous number of films depended on their audience’s ability to recognize them as overt parodies, ‘corrected’ genre pictures, or exaggerated camp versions of Hollywood’s traditional mythology.”⁷⁶ And: “No other period in Hollywood history had produced so many overtly satiric movies.”⁷⁷ This incisive trend demonstrates the wide scope of possibilities of recycling presented by the reflexive approach to generic stereotypes and its play with their ambivalent meanings. It also becomes clear how practical this approach was in terms of mediating between critical and more nostalgic perspectives and their respective audiences. Films critically deconstructing their genres are an expression of the same genre-reflexive tendency, but they were certainly never able to negotiate these two groups as well as the other types of production.

Undoubtedly these circumstances largely explain why the half-ironic, half-transfiguring play with overt stereotypes—now the epitome of postmodern cinema—today remains the predominant form of appropriating genre cinema. However, the filmic forms and techniques of deautomatization have changed in equal measure with the continuous increase in audience recognition of media stereotypes. Various factors have contributed to the multiplication and constant availability of audiovisual products: the introduction of new media, that is, initially video, the expansion and commercialization of television providers in Europe as a result of satellite and cable technologies, and finally digital technology with its multimedia applications. On the one hand, this has created a distinct awareness for signs, which is also founded on filmic stereotypes. On the other, it has produced new means of defamiliarizing stereotypes and continuous hybridization. The previously described dual tone remained characteristic of the approach to genre stereotypes in films intended for theatrical release, and it has meanwhile become the sign of that “multiple encoding”⁷⁸ considered quintessentially postmodern.

Theory has also become more radicalized in the wake of postmodern discourses. In the 1960s, Susan Sontag and Peter Schneider still claimed a special aesthetic realm for an art incorporating the conventional, a sphere set apart from reality and where traditional value schemata (including those vis-à-vis stereotype) did not apply. For postmodern theorists, the perception of the world meanwhile seems so pervasively steeped in stereotypical media simulations, signs, and conventions, and so on that the question of an underlying “real” world is no longer even posed. This further obviates the question of the correspondence of media stereotypes with the real world, and artistic creativity boils down to the ability to virtuously play with patterns, which, in the best of cases, results in a reflexive laying bare of the role that media stereotypes play.

This latter point has been a consistent source of dissent. Intellectual critics of medial perception, such as Gilles Deleuze, insist on searching for the genuinely “new image”⁷⁹ free of the stereotype. In other words, the fundamental ideas on the approach to filmic stereotypes explored and described here are not to be understood as a mere succession of individual, overcome phases, although their order closely corresponds with the evolution of medial experience. Key conceptual motifs from all these theories will certainly continue to inform current discourses.