NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.  For the sources and further details, see chapter 6.

2.  Fülöp-Miller, “The Motion Picture in America: A History in the Making” [German 1931], in The American Theatre and the Motion Picture in America: A History in the Making, ed. John Andersen and René Fülöp-Miller (New York: The Dial Press, 1938), 111.

3.  Ibid., 117.

4.  Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 166.

5.  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [French 1973], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 40.

6.  John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

1. THE STEREOTYPE IN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMANITIES

1.  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1961).

2.  This phrase is already used as the title of the introduction.

3.  Lippmann, Public Opinion, 95.

4.  Daniel Katz and Kenneth W. Braly, “Racial Stereotypes of One Hundred College Students,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 28 (1933): 280–290; Daniel Katz and Kenneth W. Braly, “Racial Prejudice and Racial Stereotypes,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 30 (1935): 175–193. Concerning an important precursor in this respect, see Stuart Arthur Rice, “Stereotypes: A Source of Error in Judging Human Character,” Journal of Personality Research 5 (1926/1927): 267–276.

5.  A detailed critical overview of this line of research up to the mid-1960s is provided by Wolfgang Manz, Das Stereotyp. Zur Operationalisierung eines sozialwissenschaftlichen Begriffs (Meisenheim: Anton Hain, 1968). For later developments, see Bernhard Six, “Stereotype und Vorurteile im Kontext sozialpsychologischer Forschung,” in Erstarrtes Denken. Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. Günther Blaicher (Tubingen: Narr, 1987), 41–54.

6.  Katz and Braly, “Racial Prejudice and Racial Stereotypes,” 181.

7.  Alexander Mitscherlich, “Die Vorurteilskrankheit,” Psyche 16 (1962): 241–245.

8.  S. I. Hayakawa, “Recognizing Stereotypes as Substitute for Thought,” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 7 (1950): 208–210.

9.  Adam Schaff, “Sprache und Stereotyp,” in Sprechen—Denken—Praxis, ed. Gerd Simon and Erich Straßner (Weinheim: Beltz, 1979), 164.

10.  The influence of American psychology in postwar Germany had a bearing on this shift. Its most prominent advocate was Peter R. Hofstätter, Das Denken in Stereotypen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960). However, there are earlier indications of a developing pragmatic position: Peter R. Hofstätter, Die Psychologie der öffentlichen Meinung (Vienna: Braumüller, 1949); and Kripal Singh Sodhi and Rudolf Bergius, Nationale Vorurteile. Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung an 881 Personen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1953). For the corresponding developments in the United States, see Manz, Das Stereotyp, 8–9.

11.  Lippmann, Public Opinion, 80.

12.  Ibid., 81.

13.  Ibid., 88.

14.  Ibid.

15.  Ibid., 119.

16.  Ibid. Lippmann believed that our surroundings provide a sufficient number of “uniformities” for stereotype-based perceptions to function (see 89–90).

17.  Ibid., 84.

18.  Ibid., 125.

19.  Ibid., esp. 119–126.

20.  Ibid., 124.

21.  Ibid., 81; my emphasis.

22.  Ibid., 119.

23.  Ibid., 95.

24.  Ibid., 96.

25.  Ibid., p. 95.

26.  Ibid., 3, 104.

27.  See, for example, Francisco J. Varela, Kognitionswissenschaft-Kognitionstechnik. Eine Skizze aktueller Perspektiven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), esp. 110. The German edition is the translation of an unpublished English manuscript titled Cognitive Science: A Cartography of Current Ideas.

28.  Lippmann, Public Opinion, 90.

29.  Ibid., 90–91.

30.  Hofstätter, Das Denken in Stereotypen, 7. Hofstätter brings the idea of interconnectedness into play: “Strictly speaking, a stereotype is a complex of prejudices, which often appear in concert, rely on each other and thus form a gestalt-like whole” (8).

31.  Ibid., 7.

32.  Ibid., 32.

33.  Ibid., 13 (insertion by J. S.).

34.  Ibid, 34. Elsewhere (17) Hofstätter writes: “Inhuman heterostereotypes are borderline cases; one should always refrain from entertaining them, because ‘holding on to’ them poses a serious challenge to one’s own humanity.”

35.  H. Tajfel, “Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice,” Journal of Social Issues 25 (1969): 79–97; and H. Tajfel, “Soziales Kategorisieren,” in Forschungsberichte der Sozialpsychologie, ed. S. Moscovici (Frankfurt: Fischer Athenäum, 1975), 1:345–388.

36.  Waldemar Lilli, Grundlagen der Stereotypisierung (Gottingen: Hogrefe, 1982).

37.  Ibid., 13.

38.  Ibid.

39.  Daniel Bar-Tal, Carl F. Graumann, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Wolfgang Steobe, eds., Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions (New York: Springer, 1989).

40.  Walter G. Stephan, “A Cognitive Approach to Stereotyping,” in Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions, ed. Daniel Bar-Tal et al. (New York: Springer, 1989), 37.

41.  Ibid.

42.  For a critique of the cognitivistic computer metaphor, see Varela, Kognitionswissenschaft, 37–53.

43.  See for example, Helge Gerndt, ed., Stereotypenvorstellungen im Alltagsleben. Beiträge zum Themenkreis Fremdbilder, Selbstbilder, Identität. Festschrift für Georg R. Schronbek zum 65. Geburtstag (Munich: Vereinigung für Völkerkunde, 1988).

44.  Walter Lippmann writes in Public Opinion: “Thus there can be little doubt that the moving picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole experience of the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the cinema…. Your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks to Mr. Griffith, takes vivid shape when you see The Birth of a Nation…. I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than Mr. Griffith will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen” (91–92).

45.  In constructivistic terminology, this kind of analytically almost impossible to isolate reciprocity between mental and medial constructs is aptly described as “structural coupling.” On the term “coupling,” see the work of H. R. Maturana, “Biologie der Sozialität,” in Der Diskurs des radikalen Konstruktivismus, ed. Siegfried J. Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 287. The term “medial coupling” is also common. See Peter M. Spangenberg, “TV, Hören und Sehen,” in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 778–792.

46.  Franz W. Dröge, Publizistik und Vorurteil (Münster: Regensburg, 1967). In particular, see part 2: “Stereotypen im publizistischen Prozess,” 214–225.

47.  Ibid., 121.

48.  Peter Pleyer, Nationale und soziale Stereotypen im gegenwärtigen deutschen Spielfilm. Eine aussageanalytische Leitstudie (Münster: Institut für Publizistik, 1968).

49.  Steve Neale, “The Same Old Story: Stereotypes and Difference,” in The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture, ed. Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins (1979/1980; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41–47.

50.  Irmela Schneider, “Zur Theorie des Stereotyps,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft, 43 (1992):129–147.

51.  Ibid., 43:140.

52.  Ibid.

53.  Ibid.

54.  Ibid., 143.

55.  Ibid., 142.

56.  Ibid.

57.  W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 298.

58.  Ibid., 29.

59.  Ibid., 296.

60.  Ibid.

61.  Ibid., 298.

62.  Ibid.

63.  Ibid., 296.

64.  Blaicher, ed., Erstarrtes Denken.

65.  Ibid., 9.

66.  James Elliot, Jürgen Pelzer, and Carol Poore, eds., Stereotyp und Vorurteil in der Literatur. Untersuchungen zu Autoren des 20. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978).

67.  Ibid., 7.

68.  Ibid. My emphasis.

69.  Ibid., 11.

70.  Uta Quasthoff, “The Uses of Stereotype in Everyday Argument,” Journal of Pragmatics 2 (1978): 6. See also Uta Quasthoff, Soziales Urteil und Kommunikation. Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse des Stereotypes (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Fischer, 1973), 28.

71.  Angelika Wenzel, Stereotype in gesprochener Sprache. Form Vorkommen und Funktion in Dialogen (Munich: Max Hueber, 1978), 30.

72.  Primarily objecting to Quasthoff’s concept of judgment, Wenzel attempts to render her definition more precisely: “A stereotype is the verbal expression of a belief which is directed towards social groups or single persons as members of these groups. The stereotype has the logical form of a general statement, which ascribes or denies certain properties to a set of persons in an unwarrantably simplifying way, with an emotionally evaluative tendency.” Ibid., 28.

73.  Ibid., 30. My emphasis.

74.  Ibid.

75.  Adam Schaff, for example, considers the “stereotype” a fact of social psychology, but it is “like the concept, always associated with a word.” Adam Schaff, “Sprache und Stereotyp,” 162. And “it is, in fact—particularly in relation to social problems—a matter of the word content, which most often conveys simplified and false opinions; these, in turn, are not based on one’s own experiences but on a belief [sic] in the authority of the public opinion of a given milieu. This is why such opinions are so persistent and hard to overcome” (163).

76.  Florian Coulmas, Routine im Gespräch. Zur pragmatischen Fundierung der Idiomatik (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1981), 3.

77.  Ibid., 55.

78.  Ibid., 10.

79.  Ibid., 66.

80.  Ibid., 15.

81.  Ibid., 13.

82.  Ibid.

83.  Ibid., 68.

84.  See ibid, 10, 68–69.

85.  Ibid., 14.

86.  For example, Harald Scheel similarly defines the stereotype: “Linguistic stereotypes are lexeme combinations, which—due to the linguistic-communicative standards and expectations of the communicators in a communication situation—represent common standardizations of both form and content; and because of their ability to trigger mental subroutines such stereotypes entail elements of mental economy. As fixed collocations they represent a specific form of repeated speech, and as elements of vocabulary are part of the language system.” Harald Scheel, Untersuchungen zum sprachlichen Stereotyp (thesis, Leipzig, 1983), 57.

87.  Michael Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).

88.  Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [French 1982], trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), esp. 14–15, 78–79. However, Genette only uses the term in passing and without discussing it explicitly.

89.  Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology [French 1964] (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973). Here Barthes specifically mentions “stereotyped syntagms” (62). However, the concept of the stereotype has key significance for him within a substantially broader understanding of the term, as some of his other writings articulate (as will be discussed further on).

90.  See Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale, 163. “Il importe de bien souligner que la stéréotypie à elle seule ne fait pas le cliché: il faut encore que la séquence verbale figée par l’usage présente un fait de style, qu’il s’agisse d’une métaphore comme fourmilière humaine, d’une antithèse comme meurtre juridique, d’une hyperbole comme mortelles inquiétudes, etc. Toutes les catégories stylistiques son susceptibles d’entrer dans des clichés.”

91.  Ibid. “Son effet est donc, si j’ose dire, en conserve.”

92.  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [French 1975] (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 43.

93.  Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale, 171.

94.  Ibid., 163.

95.  Ibid., 171.

96.  Genette, Palimpsests, 79.

97.  Ibid., 15.

98.  Ibid., 79.

99.  Yuri M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text [Russian 1970], trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), 290.

100.  Ibid., 286.

101.  Ibid., 290.

102.  John G. Cawelti, “The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature,” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 3 (1969): 381–390.

103.  Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979), 117.

104.  Coulmas, Routine im Gespräch, 3.

105.  Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 290.

106.  Ibid., 75.

107.  Ibid., 288.

108.  Ibid., 290.

109.  Ibid., 291.

110.  Ruth Amossy, Les idées reçues. Sémiologie du stéréotype (Paris: Nathan, 1991).

111.  Ruth Amossy, “Stereotypes and Representation in Fiction,” Poetics Today 5, no. 4 [1984]: 691.

112.  Ibid., 690.

113.  Ibid.

114.  Ibid., 692–693.

115.  Ibid., 694.

116.  Ibid., 693.

117.  Ibid.

118.  Ibid., 694–695.

119.  Ibid., 700.

120.  Ibid., 699.

121.  Amossy, Les idées reçues. In this later text, she clearly places emphasis on other ideas and views the criteria of such assessments themselves as products of history.

122.  Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (1951; repr., New York: Routledge, 1999), 1:56.

123.  Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art [German 1974], trans. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 29–31.

124.  Ibid., 30.

125.  Ibid.

126.  Ibid., 30.

127.  Ibid., 21.

128.  Hauser, The Social History of Art, 56.

129.  Ibid., 54.

130.  Ibid., 53.

131.  Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; repr., London: Phaidon, 1977), especially the chapter “Truth and Stereotype,” 55–78.

132.  Ibid., 76.

133.  Ibid., 53.

134.  Ibid., 148.

135.  See ibid., 19–20.

136.  See ibid., 61.

137.  Ibid., 76.

138.  Ibid., 61.

139.  Ibid., 124.

140.  Ibid., 61.

141.  Ibid., 76.

142.  For example, in relation to the stereotype, Dröge talks expressis verbis about “composite traits” (Merkmalsvergesellschaftung). See Dröge, Publizistik und Vorurteil, 211.

143.  The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.vv. “stereo-” and “type.”

144.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [German 1953], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), §66–67, p. 36.

145.  I am drawing on the model of a classification of facets, which was introduced in film studies by Hans Jürgen Wulff (who employed it in genre analysis) in opposition to hierarchical classification. See Hans Jürgen Wulff, “Drei Bemerkungen zur Motiv- und Genreanalyse am Beispiel des Gefängnisfilms,” in Sechstes Film- und Fernsehwissenschaftliches Kolloquium/Berlin 1993, eds. Jörg Frieß, Stephen Lowry, and Hans Jürgen Wulff (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 1994), 149–154.

146.  Amossy, “Stereotypes and Representation in Fiction,” 685.

147.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice [French 1980] (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 87.

148.  Francisco J. Varela, Kognitionswissenschaft, 88ff. Varela, however, talks about “patterns” rather than schemata.

149.  See Siegfried Schmidt and Siegfried Weischenberg, “Mediengattungen, Berichterstattungsmuster, Darstellungsformen,” in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 214–215.

150.  Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media [German 1995], trans. Kathleen Cross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 109.

151.  This is described in greater detail in Schmidt and Weischenberg, “Mediengattungen,” 213.

152.  On the term “emergence,” see Varela, Kognitionswissenschaft, 60–67, 70–76. Somewhat further on (93–94) Varela explains such overarching co-operation by using the example of language: “One must know the language as a whole in order to understand the multiple meanings of an individual word, and this understanding in turn influences the meaning of all other words. The categorization of any one aspect of our natural environment does not permit sharp delineations of any kind.”

153.  See T. E. Perkins, “Rethinking Stereotypes,” in Ideology and Cultural Production, ed. Michèle Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 135–159. Perkins gives an example on 139: “to refer ‘correctly’ to someone as a ‘dumb blonde,’ and to understand what is meant by that, implies a great deal more than hair colour and intelligence. It refers immediately to her sex, which refers to her status in society, her relationship to men, her inability to behave or think rationally, and so on. In short, it implies knowledge of a complex social structure.”

154.  See Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Categorization,” in Cognition and Categorization, ed. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Hilsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum, 1978). Lakoff, however, discusses it in more detail. See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 48–49.

155.  This the title of article by Ivan Pavlov, “Dinamicheskaia stereotipiia vysshego otdela golovnogo mozga [The Dynamic Stereotype of the Higher Section of the Brain],” in I. P. Pavlov, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, 2nd ed., enlarged, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1933), 240–244. This text is not included in the English collections of his writings. A particularly incisive definition of his theory is presented in “Uslovnyi Refleks” [The Conditioned Reflex], in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Enziklopediia 56 (Moscow, 1936), 322–337.

156.  Pavlov, “Uslovniy Refleks,” 330.

157.  Pavlov, “Dinamicheskaia stereotipiia,” 244.

158.  Ibid., 243–244.

159.  This is the chosen subtitle of Peter Wuss, Filmanalyse und Psychologie. Strukturen des Films im Wahrnehmungsprozess (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1993).

160.  Ibid., 62.

161.  Ibid.

162.  Ibid., 60–61.

163.  Umberto Eco, “The Role of the Reader,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979), 3–43.

164.  Peter Wuss, Cinematic Narration and Its Psychological Impact: Functions of Cognition, Emotion, and Play (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 40.

165.  Ibid., 60.

166.  Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 40.

167.  Coulmas, Routine im Gespräch, 16.

168.  Cf. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (1981; repr., Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 16.

169.  Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 41.

170.  Ibid.

171.  Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 110.

172.  Rüdiger Kunow, Das Klischee. Reproduzierte Wirklichkeiten in der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur (Munich: Fink, 1994), 110.

173.  Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology [German 1991] (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 2.

174.  Ibid., xiii.

175.  See, for example, Eco, “The Myth of Superman.”

176.  Textual schemata ultimately are always also mental constructs, even if they specially refer to texts and are, in turn, actualized in texts, which are subject to a unique dynamic (detached from the individual) in the intertextual sphere.

177.  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [French 1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 162.

178.  Ibid., 287.

179.  Kunow has published the previously mentioned comprehensive study on the terminology of the cliché in literary analysis. See Kunow, Das Klischee. Worthy of note is that Kunow presents a broad and nuanced interpretation of the term “cliché,” similar to the treatment and semantics of “stereotype” in this volume.

2. SOME ASPECTS AND LEVELS OF STEREOTYPIZATION IN FILM

1.  Irmela Schneider, “Zur Theorie des Stereotypes,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 43 (1992): 129–147.

2.  Steve Neale, “The Same Old Story: Stereotypes and Difference,” [1979/80], in The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television. Culture, ed. Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41–47.

3.  See Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping,” in Gays in Film (London: BFI, 1977), 27–39. Also see Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. 11–18 (“The Role of Stereotypes”).

4.  Neale, “The Same Old Story,” 41.

5.  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 13.

6.  This was the title of a dossier compiled for teaching purposes. See Richard Dyer, The Dumb Blonde Stereotype: Documentation for EAS Class-Room Materials (London: BFI, 1979).

7.  Umberto Eco, “Die praktische Anwendung der literarischen Person,” in Apokalyptiker und Integrierte. Zur kritischen Kritik der Massenkultur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), 169. This essay is not included in the partial English translation (Apocalypse Postponed, 1994) of Eco’s Apocalitticie e integrati (1964).

8.  Ibid., 171.

9.  Ibid., 175.

10.  Ibid., 173.

11.  Ibid., 177.

12.  Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse (Munich: Fink, 1977), 234.

13.  See Bernhard Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), 96–98.

14.  E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel [1927] (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1985), 67.

15.  Ibid., 69.

16.  Ibid., 78.

17.  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 13.

18.  Eco, “Die praktische Anwendung,” 178–179.

19.  See Robert Müller, “Von der Kunst der Verführung: der Vamp,” in Diesseits der ‘dämonischen Leinwand.’ Neue Perspektiven auf das späte Weimarer Kino, ed. Thomas Koebner (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2003), 259–280.

20.  See Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse, 88.

21.  This corresponds to the etymological relationship between the words. Like “stereotype,” type also derives from printing terminology. The “type” was originally the image on the coin die and then later the actual print it created. See Heinrich Lauseberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998), §901.

22.  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 33.

23.  Ibid.

24.  Ibid.

25.  Ibid.

26.  This may be due to the context of his argument, which criticizes one of Panofsky’s theses. The latter had argued that with the introduction of sound the naive, clear-cut iconography of the types already introduced and visually easily recognizable now lost significance, because the public no longer needed the explanatory element inherent to them. Cavell objected to this argument: “Films have changed, but that is not because we don’t need such explanations any longer; it is because we can’t accept them” (ibid.). This should mean not that types disappear, but only the stereotypes, the intertextually established figures.

27.  Paul Loukides and Linda F. Fuller, Beyond the Stars (1): Stock Characters in American Popular Film (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990).

28.  The same applies to every kind of fictional narration, not just the cinematic.

29.  Siegfried Kracauer, “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1949): 53–72.

30.  Howard Good, The Drunken Journalist: The Biography of a Film Stereotype (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000).

31.  Yuri M. Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema [Russian 1973], trans. Mark Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 22.

32.  This does not mean, however, that one should disclaim any relationship that a figure might have to conventional ideas directly based on reality.

33.  Ernst H. Gombrich, “Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art History and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals” [lecture 1963], in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), 96.

34.  Ibid.

35.  Ibid., 98.

36.  See Florian Coulmas, Routine im Gespräch. Zur pragmatischen Fundierung der Idiomatik (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1981).

37.  See Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1979).

38.  See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1987), 2.

39.  Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse, 99.

40.  See Margrit Tröhler and Henry M. Taylor, “De quelques facettes du personnage humain dans le film de fiction,” Iris 24 (1997): 48.

41.  Viktor Shklovsky, “Tarzan” [in Russian], Russkij sovremennik 4 (1924): 253.

42.  Joachim Paech, Literatur und Film (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 48.

43.  Yuri Lotman, “Proiskhozhdenie siuzheta v tipologicheskom osveshchenii [The Development of the Plot from a Typological Perspective],” in Stat’i po tipologii kul’tury (Tartu, 1973), 10.

44.  Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale [Russian 1928], trans. Laurence Scott (American Folklore Society Publications, 2003).

45.  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces [1949], Bollingen Series 17 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

46.  Ibid., 21.

47.  Ibid., 35.

48.  Ibid., 12.

49.  Ibid., 13.

50.  Ibid., 19.

51.  Ibid., 11.

52.  Ibid., 18–19.

53.  Ibid., 19.

54.  Ibid., 38.

55.  Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd ed. (Studio City, Calif.: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007).

56.  This is the title of a subchapter. Ibid., 3.

57.  Campbell, The Hero, 13.

58.  Ibid., viii.

59.  Britta Hartmann discussed this several years ago in regard to American gangster films. Britta Hartmann, “Topographische Ordnung und narrative Strukture im klassischen Gangsterfilm,” Montage AV 8, no. 1 (1999): 111–133.

60.  See François Truffaut, Hitchcock [French 1966], with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 79–80.

61.  Yuri Lotman, “Beseda o kinematografii [A Conversation on Film]” [in Russian], Kino 1 (1986).

62.  Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 18.

63.  Ibid., x. Elaborating further, he, however, places value on emphasizing the specific character of fictional worlds in relation to the possible worlds of logic and philosophy and in articulating features “that are special for the fictional worlds of literature, that is, those features that cannot be derived from the possible worlds model” (16).

64.  Ibid., 16.

65.  Ibid.

66.  Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula. Die Mitarbiet der Interpretation in erzählenden Texten (Munich: dtv, 1990), 157. This is a translation of the German text, which is a reworked version of “Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations of Semiotic Texts (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979).

67.  Knut Hickethier, Die Fernsehserie und das Serielle des Fernsehens. Lüneburger Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 2 (Lüneburg: University of Lüneburg, 1991), 44.

68.  Ibid., 45.

69.  This is certainly related to the etymology of “myth” or “mythos,” whose relevance in antiquity is described by Wellek and Warren: “Its antonym and counterpoint is logos. The ‘myth’ is narrative, story, as against dialectical discourse, exposition; it is also the irrational or intuitive as against the systematically philosophical: it is the tragedy of Aeschylus against the dialectic of Socrates…. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Age of Enlightenment, the term had commonly a pejorative connotation: a myth was a fiction—scientifically or historically untrue. But already since the Scienza Nuova of Vico, the emphasis has shifted to what, since the German Romanticists, Coleridge, Emerson, and Nietzsche, has become gradually dominant—the conception of ‘myth’ as, like poetry, a kind of truth or an equivalent of truth, not a competitor to historic or scientific truth but a supplement. Historically, myth follows and is correlative to ritual.” René Wellek and Austin Warren, The Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1949), 169.

70.  Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

71.  Ibid., 22.

72.  See ibid., 20.

73.  Ibid., 48–49.

74.  John G. Cawelti, “The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature,” in Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 3 (1969): 390.

75.  Barbara Flückiger, Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Filmes (Marburg: Schüren, 2002), 182. See also Barbara Flückiger, “Sound Effects. Strategies for Sound Effects in Film,” in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (London: Continuum, 2009), 151–179, esp. 160.

76.  Flückiger, Sound Design, 181.

77.  Corinna Dästner, “Sprechen über Filmmusik. Der Überschuss von Bild und Musik,” in Sound: Zur Technologie und Ästhetik des Akustischen in den Medien, ed. Harro Segeberg and Frank Schätzlein (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), 89.

78.  Herbert Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees,” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 2, no. 30 (1912/1913): 487–488.

79.  Ibid., 487.

80.  Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” [1947] in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), 39.

81.  Herbert Jhering, “Der Schauspieler im Film” [1920], in Von Reinhardt bis Brecht. Vier Jahrzehnte Theater und Film, ed. Edith Krull (Berlin: Henschel, 1958), 1:382.

82.  See Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema [German 1990], trans. Inga Pollmann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). See esp. the chapters “Excursus: Henny Porten, or, The Realism of Melodrama” and “Contradictions of Social Drama.”

83.  Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees,” 487.

84.  See Ruth Amossy, “On Commonplace Knowledge and Innovation,” SubStance 62/63, special issue, “Thought and Motivation” (1991): 146–147.

85.  Carl Michel, Die Gebärdensprache dargestellt für Schauspieler sowie Maler und Bildhauer, part 1: Die körperliche Beredsamkeit: Gebärden–Seelenzustände–Stimme. Rollenstudium–Spielen (Cologne: DuMont-Schauberg, 1886), 96–97.

86.  Wilhelm Scheffer, “Mimische Studien mit Reißzeug und Kamera,” Der Welt-Spiegel. Halb-Wochenschrift des Berliner Tagesblatts 10 (February 1, 1914): 2.

87.  Ibid.

88.  Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees,” 488.

89.  See Knut Hickethier, “Das Zucken der Mundwinkel. Schauspielen in den Medien,” TheaterZeitSchrift 1, no. 2 (1982): 15–31; “Schauspielen in Film und Fernsehen,” in Kinoschriften. Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Filmtheorie (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1990), 2:45–68; and “Poetik des Kleinen,” in Schauspielkunst im Film, ed. Thomas Koebner (St. Augustin: Gardez!, 1998), 37–48.

90.  Knut Hickethier, Film- und Fernsehanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 163.

91.  See Kristin Thompson, Yuri Tsivian, and Ekaterina Khokhlova, “The Rediscovery of a Kuleshov Experiment: A Dossier,” Film History 8, no. 3 (1996): 357–364. See Hans Beller, Handbuch der Filmmontage. Praxis und Prinzipien des Filmschnitts (Munich: TR-Verlagsunion, 1993), 157–159.

92.  Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 38–51.

93.  Joseph August Lux, “Das Kinodrama” [1914], in Prolog vor dem Film, ed. Jörg Schweinitz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 320.

94.  Joseph August Lux, “Menschendarsteller im Film. Porträts. I. Asta Nielsen,” Bild und Film 3, no. 7 (1913/1914): 165.

95.  Ibid.

96.  Hickethier, Film- und Fernsehanalyse, 163.

97.  Herbert Jhering, Werner Krauss. Ein Schauspieler und das neunzehnte Jahrhundert, ed. Sabine Zolchow and Rudolf Mast (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1997), 43.

98.  Ibid.

99.Karl Prümm, “Klischee und Individualität. Zur Problematik des Chargenspiels im deutschen Film,” in Der Körper im Bild: Schauspielen—Darstellen—Erscheinen, ed. Heinz B. Heller, Karl Prümm, and Birgit Peulings (Marburg: Schüren, 1999), 99.

100.  Ibid., 101.

101.  Ibid.

102.  Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees,” 487.

103.  Albert Klöckner, “Das Massenproblem in der Kunst” [1928], in Medientheorie 1888–1933. Texte und Kommentare, ed. Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 304. See also 302.

104.  Heike Kühn, “Zwischen Überfluß und Mangel. Die 37. Internationalen Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen,” Frankfurter Rundschau 104 (May 6, 1991): 21.

105.  Vladimir Nilsen, The Cinema as a Graphic Art [Russian 1936] (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 177.

106.  Ibid., 179.

107.  Ibid., 176.

108.  Ibid., 177.

109.  Ibid., 179.

110.  Jean-Loup Bourget, Le mélodrame hollywoodien (Paris: Stock, 1985). English quotation from Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 50.

111.  Heinrich Koch and Heinrich Braune, Von deutscher Filmkunst. Gehalt und Gestalt (Berlin: Scherping, 1943).

112.  An exhaustive study of this visual stereotype and its variants has been undertaken by Christine Noll Brinckmann. See Christine N. Brinckmann, “Das Gesicht hinter der Scheibe” [1996], in Die anthropomorphe Kamera und andere Schriften zur filmischen Narration, ed. Mariann Lewinsky and Alexandra Schneider (Zurich: Chronos, 1997), 200–213. This key image will be examined again at the beginning of chapter 8.

113.  Yury Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution” [Russian 1927], in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Champaign-Urbana: Dalkey Archive, 2002), 70.

114.  Yury Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact” [Russian 1924], in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff, trans. Ann Shukman (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2000), 32.

115.  Ibid., 46

116.  Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution,” 69.

117.  Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact,” 35.

118.  Ibid., 34.

119.  Ibid., 35.

120.  Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

121.  See Cawelti, “The Concept of Formula.”

122.  Christian Metz, Language and Cinema [French 1971], trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 130.

123.  Teun A. van Dijk, Tekstwetenschap. Een interdisciplinaire inleiding (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1978).

124.  Stuart Kaminsky, American Film Genres, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1985), 7.

125.  Ibid., 9.

126.  Peter Wollen writes about the “master antinomy” between “the wilderness left in the past” and “the garden anticipated in the future.” Edward Buscombe similarly describes “stories about the opposition between man and nature and about the establishment of civilization.” See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema [1968] (London: BFI, 1998), 66; and Edward Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema,” in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 16.

127.  Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre,” 14.

128.  Ibid., 14–15.

129.  Wright, Sixguns and Society.

130.  Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre,” 13.

131.  For an articulation of the concept of “emergent networks,” see the section “First Facet: Schema, Reductionism, and Stability” in chapter 1.

132.  Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981), 16.

133.  Rick Altman, “Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 9.

134.  Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [French 1970], trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 13–14. Also Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17. In both of these texts, Todorov expresses his belief that it is possible to analytically establish a correspondence between “theoretical” genre constructions, which are based on commonly shared characteristics, and a historical awareness of genre. In Genres in Discourse, 17, he writes: “The study of genres, which has as its starting point the historical evidence of the existence of genres, must have as its ultimate objective precisely the establishment of these [common] properties.” And: “I am ultimately more optimistic than authors of two recent studies…. Lejeune and Ben-Amos are prepared to see an unbridgeable gap between the abstract and the concrete, between genres as they have existed historically and the categorical analysis to which they can be subjected today.”

135.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [German 1953], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §77, p. 40e.

136.  Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact,” 34.

137.  Steve Neale, “Melo Talk: On Meaning and Use of the Term ‘Melodrama” in the American Trade Press,” Velvet Light Trap 32 (1993): 66–89.

138.  Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” [1972], in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 512–535.

139.  Ibid., 532–524.

140.  Neale, “Melo Talk,” 69.

141.  Quoted from Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 186.

142.  See Lang, American Film Melodrama.

143.  Tom Gunning, “ ‘Those That Are Drawn with a Fine Camel Haired Brush’: The Origins of Film Genres,” Iris 20 (1995): 55.

144.  Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 242.

145.  For an instructive overview of his film-genre theory, see Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999).

146.  Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” [1984], in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 26–40.

147.  Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987).

148.  I already discussed this in greater detail in Jörg Schweinitz, “ ‘Genre’ und lebendiges Genrebewusstsein,” Montage AV 3, no. 2 (1994): 99–118.

149.  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 36e.

150.  George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

151.  Ibid., 5.

152.  Ibid., 8.

153.  Ibid., 6.

154.  Ibid., 84.

155.  David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148.

156.  Lev S. Vygotsky, “Thinking and Speech,” in The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky [Russian 1934], ed. Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton, trans. Norris Minick (New York: Plenum Press, 1987), 1:136.

157.  Ibid., 1:138.

158.  Ibid., 1:140.

159.  Irmela Schneider, “Von der Vielsprachigkeit zur ‘Kunst der Hybridisation.’ Diskurse des Hybriden,” in Hybridkultur: Medien, Netze, Künste, ed. Irmela Schneider and Christian W. Thomsen (Cologne: Wienand, 1997), 13–66.

160.  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [Russian 1975], trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358.

161.  Ibid., 359.

162.  “Hybrid” is understood similarly when the term “hybrid culture” surfaces in debates. See Irmela Schneider, “Von der Vielsprachigkeit,” 57; and Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius, and Therese Steffen, Hybride Kulturen. Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1997).

163.  Schneider, “Von der Vielsprachigkeit,” 57.

164.  Ihab Hassan, “Postmoderne heute,” in Wege aus der Moderne. Schlüsseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion, ed. Wolfgang Welsch (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1988), 52.

165.  Ibid., 53.

166.  Frank Gruber, “The Western,” in TV and Screen Writing, ed. Lola G. Yoakem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958).

167.  Russell’s photograph “East and West Shaking Hands” is printed in Michel Frizot, ed., Neue Geschichte der Fotografie (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 216.

168.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies [French 1957], trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

169.  In this case, a kiss with the “wrong” partner, who is ultimately eliminated in the next sequence.

170.  Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact,” 34–35.

171.  See Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution,” 69–70.

172.  In Germany, Ines Steiner, Marcus Erbe, and Andreas Gernemann have analyzed the hybrid narrative structure and referentiality of this film, largely in regard to sound design. See Claudia Liebrand and Ines Steiner, eds., Hollywood Hybrid. Genre und Gender im zeitgenössischen Mainstream-Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2004), esp. 297–316.

3. THE INTELLECTUAL VIEWPOINT VERSUS THE STEREOTYPE IN MASS CULTURE

1.  Dieter Prokop, Faszination und Langeweile. Die populären Medien (Stuttgart: Enke, 1979), 77.

2.  Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology [German 1991] (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3.

3.  Peter Bächlin, Der Film als Ware [1947] (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Fischer, 1975), 162.

4.  Ibid., 164.

5.  Ibid., 163.

6.  Vinzenz Hediger, Verführung zum Film. Der amerikanische Kinotrailer seit 1912, Zürcher Filmstudien 5 (Marburg: Schüren, 2001), 209. See also 52.

7.  Bächlin, Der Film als Ware, 164.

8.  Ibid, 171 (my emphasis).

9.  David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Staiger’s section is part 2, “The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930,” 85–154.

10.  Ibid., 92.

11.  Bächlin, Film als Ware, 185.

12.  Ibid., 186.

13.  Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 97.

14.  Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” [Russian 1916], in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24.

15.  Richard Avenarius, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes. Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1903).

16.  Ibid., 17.

17.  Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 13.

18.  Ibid., 12.

19.  Ibid., 13.

20.  Ibid., 22.

21.  Ibid., 18.

22.  Ibid., 13.

23.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Second Version” [French 1936], in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.

24.  Viktor Shklovsky, “Plot in Cinematography” [Russian 1923], in Literature and Cinematography (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2008), 42.

25.  Viktor Shklovsky, “Tarzan” [in Russian], Russkii sovremennik 4 (1924): 253–254.

26.  Ibid, 253.

27.  Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” [German 1919], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 139.

28.  Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” [German 1927], in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 80.

29.  Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shop-Girls Go to the Movies” [German 1927], in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291–306.

30.  Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” p. 80

31.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Ein feiner Kerl. Analyse eines Ufa-Films” [German 1931], in Von Caligari zu Hitler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 507.

32.   Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments [German 1947], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

33.  See Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979).

34.  In this context, “myth” is an emphasis on phantasmagoria and is understood not as the eternal repetition of the same, that is, not as an ahistoric or suprahistoric structure.

35.  Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory [German 1980, papers published posthumously], in Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 23:642.

36.  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 270.

37.  Helmut Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit 1924–1932. Studien zur Literatur des “weißen Sozialismus” (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970), 420.

38.  Hermann Broch, “Evil in the Value System of Art” [German 1933], In Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age—Six Essays, trans. John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 37.

39.  Ibid., 16.

40.  Ibid., 17.

41.  Ibid.

42.  Ibid., 18.

43.  Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung. Studien zur Geschichte des modernen Kitschbegriffs (Munich: Fink, 1971), 26.

44.  Broch, “Evil in the Value System of Art,” 37.

45.  Ibid., 34.

46.  Ibid., 33–34.

47.  Ruth Amossy, Les idées reçues. Sémiologie du stéréotype (Paris: Nathan, 1991), 77.

48.  Peter Zima, Moderne—Postmoderne: Gesellschaft, Philosophie, Literatur (Tubingen: Francke, 1997), 272.

49.  Himself rooted in this mode of thought, Zima, for example, is irritated by the stance of the postmodernist Leslie Fiedler primarily because he does not seem “to be bothered by … standard stereotypes.” He also objects to Jim Collins’s position: “The idea does not occur to Collins that this aesthetic and cultural plurality could be a superficial plurality orchestrated by the cultural industry, which eternally varies the countless ideological and commercial stereotypes.”

50.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 119.

51.  Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” [German 1942, in manuscript], in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 91.

52.  Miriam Hansen, “Ein Massenmedium konstruiert sein Publikum: King Vidor’s The Crowd,” Die Neue Gesellschaft. Frankfurter Hefte 40, no. 9 (1993): 843.

53.  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality [1960], with an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 309.

54.  Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 18.

55.  See Kracauer, Theory of Film, 287–300.

56.  Ibid., 46.

57.  Ibid.

58.  Ibid., 48.

59.  My choice of words is intended to indicate a parallel to Roland Barthes’s aesthetics of photography. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [French 1980], trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).

60.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image [French 1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 20.

61.  Roberto Rossellini, “A Discussion of Neorealism. An Interview with Mario Verdone” [Italian 1952], in My Method: Writings and Interviews, ed. Adriano Aprà (New York: Marsilio, 1995), 36.

62.  Ibid, 35.

63.  Ibid., 36.

64.  Roberto Rossellini, “L’idée néo-réaliste,” in Roberto Rossellini, ed. Mario Verdone (Paris: Édition Seghers, 1963), 28.

65.  Ibid.

66.  Yuri Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema [Russian 1973], trans. Mark Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press/Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1976), 20–21.

67.  Stanley Cavell pointed out that despite schematic conceptions about European cinema in America, even classical European directors (he mentions Renoir and Vigo, among others) do extensively use character types in their narratives. This by no means diminishes their artistic achievement, since the latter is not based on the creation of (individual) characters rather than types. See Stanley Cavell, “More of the World Viewed,” Georgia Review 28 (1995): 582.

68.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image [French 1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), 215.

69.  Herbert Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 2, no. 30 (1912/1913): 488.

70.  See André Bazin, “Extract from André Bazin, ‘La politique des auteurs’ ” [French 1957], in Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge, 1981), 44–46.

71.  Joachim Paech, “Gesellschaftskritin und Provokation—Nouvelle Vague: Sie küssten und sie schlugen ihn,” in Fischer Filmgeschichte, ed. Werner Faulstich und Helmut Korte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 377.

72.  See François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema” [French 1954], in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:224–237.

73.  Bazin, “Extract from André Bazin,” 45–46 (my emphasis).

74.  Ibid., 45.

75.  Ibid., 46.

76.  Ibid.

77.  Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 585–588.

78.  Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 12.

79.  Ibid., 13.

80.  Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 11.

81.  Ibid.

82.  Ibid., 12.

83.  Yury Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution” [Russian 1927], in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2002), 69.

84.  Yury Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact” [Russian 1924], in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff, trans. Ann Shukman (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2000), 34.

85.  Pauline Kael, “Some Speculations on the Appeal of the Auteur Theory” [1963], in Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1965), 315, 311, 319.

86.  Mast, Cohen, and Braudy, Film Theory and Criticism, 580. This quotation appears in the introduction to chapter 6, “The Film Artist.”

87.  See Siegfried J. Schmidt, Der Diskurs des radikalen Konstruktivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).

88.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1996), 12.

89.  Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death [French 1976] (London: Sage, 2002), 2.

90.  Jameson, Postmodernism, 15.

91.  Vilém Flusser, “Typen und Charaktere,” in Die Revolution der Bilder. Der Flusser-Reader zu Kommunikation, Medien und Design (Berlin: Bollmann, 1995), 194.

92.  Ibid., 195–196.

93.  See the analysis in part 3 of this book.

94.  On the term “self-referentiality,” or Selbstreferentialität in German, see Kay Kirchmann, “Zwischen Selbstreflexivität und Selbstreferentialität. Überlegungen zur Ästhetik des Selbstbezüglichen als filmischer Modernität,” Film und Kritik 2 (1994): 23–28. The phenomenon of openly self-referential stereotype worlds will be discussed in more detail in chapter 8.

95.  Jameson, Postmodernism, 9–10.

96.  Viktor Shklovsky, “Chaplin” [Russian 1923], in Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2008), 67.

97.  Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Jane Feuer sees the “myth of entertainment,” as connected with the interplay of demystification and remythicization, at work in reflexive classical film musicals. This idea can be expanded to include the self-reflexive treatment of the genre’s stereotypes. See Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 331.

4. PRELUDE: WALTHER RATHENAU’S CULTURAL CRITICISM, HUGO MÜNSTERBERG’S EUPHORIC CONCEPT OF FILM AS ART, AND THE NEGLECT OF THE STEREOTYPE

1.  Arnold Höllriegel, Das Hollywood Bilderbuch (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1927), 9 (my emphasis).

2.  Egon Erwin Kisch, (beehrt sich darzubieten) Paradies Amerika [1929] (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994), 109.

3.  This is described by Deniz Göktürk, Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912–1920 (Munich: Fink, 1998).

4.  Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 115.

5.  Ibid., 116.

6.  Walter Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Fischer, 1912).

7.  Ibid., 81.

8.  See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations [German 1939] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). See in particular vol. 1, part 1, pp. 5–30 (“Sociogenesis of the Antithesis Between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage”).

9.  Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 16.

10.  Walther Rathenau, Zur Mechanik des Geistes (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1913). The cinema is relegated to the category of a “soulless place” (43).

11.  Ibid., 58.

12.  Ibid., 62.

13.  Ibid., 63.

14.  Ibid., 75.

15.  Ibid., 76–77.

16.  Ibid., 86.

17.  Ibid., 89.

18.  bid., 94.

19.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Second Version” [French 1936], in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 39–41.

20.  Ibid., 89.

21.  Ibid., 94.

22.  Ibid.

23.  Ibid., 106.

24.  Ibid., 116.

25.  Ibid., 118.

26.  Ibid.

27.  Drawing on Habermas’s terminology, Heinz B. Heller studied the German intellectual discourse on cinema during the era of silent film from this vantage point. See Heinz B. Heller, Literarische Intelligenz und Film. Zu Veränderungen der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1985).

28.  Walther Rathenau, “Vom Werte und Unwerte des Kinos” [answer to a survey by the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1912] in Kino-Debatte, ed. Anton Kaes (Munich: dtv, 1978), 66.

29.  Ibid.

30.  Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 94–95.

31.  See Jörg Schweinitz, ed. Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992). The original German texts of Franz Pfemfert, “Kino als Erzieher,” [1911] and Egon Friedell [1913] are reprinted in Prolog vor dem Film, part 3, pp. 145–222.

32.  Alfred Kerr, “Kino” [1912/1913], in Kino-Debatte, 76.

33.  Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915, vol. 2, History of the American Cinema (New York: Scribner, 1990), esp. 167–190.

34.  David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 85–153.

35.  Ibid., 121.

36.  Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 54.

37.  Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 54.

38.  Cited in ibid., 121. The quotation originally stems from Motography (July 1911).

39.  Ibid., 124. Staiger describes corresponding activities in the Triangle-Fine-Arts-Studio in 1916.

40.  Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study [1916], in Hugo Münsterberg on Film, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002).

41.  See Jörg Schweinitz, “The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer: Hugo Münsterberg’s Theories of Perception, Psychotechnics and Cinema,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (Eastleigh: Libbey, 2009), 77–86.

42.  Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1914), 435.

43.  Ibid.

44.  Ibid.

45.  Ibid.

46.  Ibid.

47.  Ibid., 424.

48.  Ibid., 423.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Ibid., 650.

51.  Münsterberg, Photoplay, 55.

52.  The passage reads: “Advertising and the culture industry are merging technically no less than economically. In both, the same thing appears in countless places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product is already that of the same propaganda slogan. In both, under the same dictate of effectiveness, technique is becoming psychotechnique.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 133.

53.  Hugo Münsterberg, The Eternal Values [German 1908] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 204–253.

54.  Jörg Schweinitz, “Psychotechnik, idealistische Ästhetik und der Film als mental strukturierter Wahrnehmungsraum: Die Filmtheorie von H. Münsterberg” [foreword], in Hugo Münsterberg Das Lichtspiel. Eine pschologische Studie (1916) und andere Schriften zum Film, (Vienna: Synema, 1996), 9–26.

55.  Münsterberg, Photoplay, 160.

56.  John Dewey, “The Eternal Values. By Hugo Münsterberg” [review], The Philosophical Review 19 (1910): 190.

5. BÉLA BALÁZS’S NEW VISUAL CULTURE, THE TRADITION OF LINGUISTIC SKEPTICISM, AND ROBERT MUSIL’S NOTION OF THE “FORMULAIC”

1.  The term “high culture” is here not intended as a value judgment but indicates the self-image of a specific cultural discourse.

2.  Béla Balázs, “Visible Man or the Culture of Film” [German 1924], in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1–90.

3.  Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films. Seine ästhetischen und metaphysischen Grundlangen (Leipzig: Meiner, 1926).

4.  Gertud Koch, “The Physiognomy of Things,” New German Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987): 167–177.

5.  Hanno Loewy, Béla Balázs—Märchen, Ritual und Film (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003).

6.  Joseph Zsuffa, Béla Balázs. The Man and the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

7.  See Joachim Paech, “Disposition der Einfühlung. Anmerkungen zum Einfluss der Einfühlungs-Ästhetik des 19. Jahrhunderts auf die Theorie des Kinofilms,” in Der Film in der Geschichte (GFF-Schriften 6), ed. Knut Hickethier, Eggo Müller, and Rainer Rother (Berlin: Sigma, 1997), 106–121. In addition to discussing more general concepts, Paech specifically deals with the influence of Ernst Iros on film theory.

8.  Theodor Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik [1903] (Leipzig: Voss, 1923), 1:112.

9.  See Knut Hickethier, “Der Schauspieler als Produzent. Überlegungen zur Theorie des medialen Schauspielens,” in Der Körper im Bild. Schauspielen—Darstellen—Erscheinen (Gff-Schriften 7), ed. Heinz B. Heller, Karl Prümm, and Brigitte Peulings (Marburg: Schüren, 1999), 9–30, esp. 12–14; and Frank Kessler, “Lesbare Körper,” KINtop 7 (1998): 15–28.

10.  See Klaus Kreimeier, ed. Metaphysik des Dekors. Raum, Architektur und Licht im klassischen deutschen Stummfilm (Marburg: Schüren, 1994); and Hermann Kappelhoff, Der möblierte Mensch: G. W. Pabst und die Utopie der Sachlichkeit—ein poetologischer Versuch zum Weimarer Autorenkino (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1995).

11.  Max Bruns, “Kino und Buchhandel” [1913], in Prolog vor dem Film, ed. Jörg Schweinitz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 275. The text is a response to a survey on cinema and the publishing industry.

12.  Franz Pfemfert, “Kino als Erzieher” [1911], in Prolog vor dem Film, 165–169.

13.  Konrad Lange, “Die Zukunft des Kinos,” [1914], in Prolog vor dem Film, 114.

14.  Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [German 1985], trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 229.

15.  See Thomas Koebner, “Der Film als neue Kunst—Reaktionen der literarischen Intelligenz. Zur Theorie des Stummfilms (1911–24),” in Literaturwissenschaft—Medienwissenschaft, ed. Helmut Kreuzer (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1977), 1–31; and Heinz B. Heller, Literarische Intelligenz und Film. Zur Veränderung der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1985).

16.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter [German 1902], trans. Russell Stockman (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1986).

17.  Ibid., 23.

18.  Ibid., 19.

19.  The German Begriff unifies the meanings of “term,” “concept,” and “idea” in English. In this chapter, these words will be used interchangeably to refer to Begriff.

20.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Eine Monographie,” 266.

21.  Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos, 22.

22.  Walter Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1912), 146–147.

23.  Hofmannsthal, “Eine Monographie. Friedrich Mittenwurzer, von Eugen Guglia” [1895], Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, Prosa I (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fucher, 1950), 265.

24.  Ibid., 266.

25.  Ibid.

26.  Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos, 21.

27.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Second Version” [French 1936], in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24.

28.  In a letter to Leopold Freiherr von Adrian zu Werburg from January 16, 1903, Hofmannsthal remarks on the arguments he has Chandos articulate: “the content should by all means be a matter of interest to me and those close to me.” Cited in Karl Pestalozzi, Sprachskepsis und Sprachmagie im Werk des jungen Hofmannsthal (Zurich: Atlantis, 1958), 117.

29.  Mauthner and Hofmannsthal corresponded in October and November 1902, in which they mutually confirmed their agreement on a language critical position in regard to The Lord Chandos Letter and Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. Both letters can be found in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 31:286–287.

30.  Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 1, Zur Sprache und zur Psychologie [1901/1902] (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1982), 115.

31.  Ibid., 114.

32.  Ibid., 421.

33.  Ibid., 695.

34.  See Kristina Mandalka, August Stramm und kosmischer Mystizismus im frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Herberg: Bautz, 1992).

35.  Already Rathenau was disgusted by the popularity of such words as “synthesis” in colloquial language. They appeared to him semantically hollow and indicative of the mechanization of the world, which was the theme of his cultural criticism: “Never has one used the word ‘synthesis’ so frequently as today; but what are syntheses? Similarities, analogies, images, symbols, contexts; the more exotic, the better-known, the more presumptuous, the more trivial, always presented, explained, defended, and proven according to the same recipe.” Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 147. This kind of language critique still prevails. Seventy-five years after Rathenau, Uwe Pörksen dedicated an entire book to similar concepts, which he calls “plastic words” and associates with “recent changes of vernacular language.” Uwe Pörksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language [German 1988], trans. Jutta Mason and David Cayley (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), xvii. Interestingly, in a second survey Pörksen addresses similar phenomena in the sphere of visual media as “visiotypes”: “I use the word ‘visiotype’ in parallel with ‘stereotype’ and what I mean by this is … this type of quickly standardized visualization.” Uwe Pörksen, Weltmarkt der Bilder. Eine Philosophie der Visiotype (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 27.

36.  That metaphors ultimately become inconspicuous as metaphors and turn into words no longer considered metaphoric is a much-studied phenomenon in linguistics. Karl Bühler, for one, pointed out that “much that was originally metaphorical gradually stops being felt to be such in the course of the history of the language.” Karl Bühler, Theory of Language—The Representational Function of Language [German 1934], trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1990), 393.

37.  Mauthner, Kritik der Sprache, 131.

38.  Thus, according to Fritz Mauthner: “Every single word has been impregnated by its own history, every single word intrinsically comprises an endless development from metaphor to metaphor. If someone using a word were aware of but a small part of this metaphorical development of language, he would not manage a single utterance for the very copiousness of its history; but he is not aware of this, and so he uses every single word only according to its current value, as token.” Ibid., 115.

39.  Ibid., 131–132 (My emphasis).

40.  Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes [French 1975], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 89.

41.  Hofmannsthal, “Eine Monographie,” 265.

42.  Hofmannsthal, “The Substitute for Dreams” [German 1921], in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal, trans. Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 2004), 54.

43.  Egon Friedell, “Prolog vor dem Film” [1913], in Prolog vor dem Film, ed. Jörg Schweinitz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 205.

44.  Ibid., 205–206.

45.  Alfred Baeumler, “Die Wirkungen der Lichtbildbühne. Versuch einer Apologie des Kinematographentheaters” [1912], in Prolog vor dem Film, 192.

46.  As Balázs elaborates in Visible Man: “In close-ups every wrinkle becomes a crucial element of character and every twitch of a muscle testifies to a pathos that signals great inner events” (37). Later he coins the term “microphysiognomy” to describe this phenomenon. See Béla Balázs, “The Spirit of Film” in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (see note 2), 103.

47.  It is therefore no coincidence that precisely Balázs, with his affinity to Marxism, would use the word “race” to describe cultural differences in repertoires of expressive movement. However, Balázs’s arguments were seldom coherent: at another juncture he raises the possibility of changing culturally based modes of expression through the international impact of film, which he remarkably considers a positive process of “normalization.” See Balázs, “Visible Man,” 14–15.

48.  Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 1:108.

49.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology” [Lecture, French 1945], in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 48–59.

50.  Ibid. Merleau-Ponty rejects all semiotic mediation of expressive movement (as signifier) and meaning (signified), arguing that they “should not be considered two externally related items … the body incarnates a manner of behavior.” Instead of assuming that successive conventionalization produces (via automatization) a fiction of the natural, Merleau-Ponty too retreats to a vague notion of the naturalness of expressive movement, of organic unity, which renders the distinction between the signified and signifier meaningless. Although he did admit (somewhat inconsistently with his thinking) that “we recognize a certain common structure in each person’s voice, face, gestures, and bearing” and that this plays a role in the perception of another person’s expressive movement, for him this structure has nothing in common with the conventional, on the one hand, and it does not concern recognition but a metaphysical transference, on the other: “The new psychology has, generally speaking, revealed man to us not as an understanding which constructs the world but as a being thrown into the world and attached to it by a natural bond. As a result it re-educates us in how to see this world which we touch at every point of our being” (53–54).

51.  Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 108.

52.  Carl Hauptmann, “Film und Theater” [1919], in Kinodebatte. Texte zum Verhältnis der Literatur und Film, ed. Anton Kaes (Munich: dtv, 1978), 125.

53.  On the affinity in German film theory of the period for the mythical notion associated with the prefix Ur- (“primal,” “primeval,” “original,” or “ancient”), see Loewy, Béla Balázs, 300–302.

54.  Hauptmann, “Film und Theater,” 127.

55.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 11.

56.  Ibid., 13.

57.  Ibid., 9.

58.  Béla Balázs, “Sensationsfilme” [review 1924], Der sichtbare Mensch. Kritiken und Aufsätze 1922–1926. Schriften zum Film, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs and Wolfgang Gersch (Berlin: Henschel, 1982), 1:266.

59.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 9.

60.  Ibid., 10.

61.  Georg Simmel, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face” [German 1901], in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. K. H. Wolff (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 276–281.

62.  Ibid., 83.

63.  Baeumler, “Wirkungen der Lichtbildbühne,” 190–191.

64.  Robert Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film” [German 1925], in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 193. See also Arno Rusegger, “‘Denn jede Kunst bedeutet ein eigenes Verhältnis des Menschen zur Welt, eine eigene Dimension der Seele’—Béla Balázs’ Filmtheorie als Paradigma für eine meta-fiktionale Poetik bei Robert Musil,” in Kinoschriften (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1990), 2:131–144.

65.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 198.

66.  Ibid.

67.  See Frank Kessler, “Photogénie und Physiognomie,” in Kinoschriften (Vienna: Synema, 1996), 4:125–136.

68.  Benjamin, The Work of Art, 37.

69.  On Bazin, see Margrit Tröhler, “Film–Bewegung und die ansteckende Kraft von Analogien: Zu André Bazins Konzeption des Zuschauers,” Montage AV 18, no. 1 (2009): 49–74.

70.  Balázs, “The Spirit of Film,” 128.

71.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, Aus der Zarathustra- un Umwerthungszeit 1882–1884 (Munich: Musarion, 1925), 22.

72.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 46–51.

73.  Ibid., 53: “Landscape is a physiognomy, a face that all at once, at a particular spot, gazes out at us, as if emerging from the chaotic lines of a picture puzzle.” Joachim Paech has pointed out the close relationship between these ideas and Rilke’s concept of the thing (Ding). See Joachim Paech, “Rodin, Rilke—und der kinematographische Raum,” in Kinoschriften (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1990), 2:150.

74.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 41.

75.  Both Gertrud Koch and Sabine Hake discuss the advantages of Balázs’s typical essay style of the period, which, on the one hand, produced theoretical inconsistencies and incoherencies but, on the other, conveyed actual observations and the spirit of contemporary cinema with great transparency. See Gertud Koch, “Béla Balázs: The Pysiognomy of Things,” 174; and Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 246.

76.  Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt [French 1952] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 11.

77.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 51.

78.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 198.

79.  Mikhail Iampolski, “Neozhidannoe rodstvo: Rozhdenie kinoteorii dukha fiziognomiki [The Birth of Film Theory out of the Spirit of Physiognomy],” Iskusstvo kino 12 (1986): 94–104. “Die Geburt der Filmtheorie aus dem Geist der Physiognomik” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 27, no. 2 (1986): 79–98.

80.  In her study on August Stramm, Kristina Mandalka has exhaustively elaborated the correlation between linguistic skepticism and a mystical notion of the cosmos. As she states: “The invocation of cosmic reality was a favorite theme in the period of Lebensmystik (life mysticism) and Lebenspathos (life pathos), the period of the monistic notion of utter unity. Mombert and Däubler are the main representatives of a cosmically oriented poetry, which validated the age-old idea of the one pervading all as the innermost principle of the world, which put forth the gnostic equation light = Weltinstinkt (world instinct) = soul = love.” Mandalka, August Stramm, 14.

81.  Iampolski has also studied this tradition of cinematic utopia. See Mikhail Iampolski, “Die Utopie vom kosmischen Schauspiel und der Kinematograph,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 29, no. 34 (1988): 177–191.

82.  Hauptmann, “Film und Theater,” 126.

83.  Ibid.

84.  Paul Scheerbarth, Die große Revolution [1902] (Leipzig and Weimar: Kiepenhauer, 1983).

85.  Harms, Philosophie des Films, 185 (my emphasis). From the written assessment of Harms’s doctoral thesis Untersuchungen zur Aesthetik des Spielfilms (Studies on the Aesthetics of Film) by Johannes Volkert (dated June 19, 1922, and preserved in the archives of the University of Leipzig), such passages apparently provoked the following judgment: “What the writer ultimately presents as a metaphysics of film I can only deem fantastic ideas.” The handwritten dissertation submitted in May 1922—of which apparently later revised typed copies were made for the library of the UFA-Lehrschau film institute (today preserved in the HFF Library Babelsberg), among others—served as the basis for an expanded text published in 1926 in book form. The common opinion that Harms’s book is merely an unoriginal repetition of a number of theses from Balázs’s Visible Man (1924) does not do the text full justice in light of the dates when it was written.

86.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Bücher vom Film,” in Frankfurter Zeitung 71, no. 505, Literaturblatt 60, no. 28 (July 10, 1927): 5.

87.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 38.

88.  Ibid., 84. This idea was thoroughly characteristic of the physiognomic discourse in film theory. As Heinz B. Heller observes: “For literary intellectuals it was … their own sense social alienation, manifested in language, that was prefigured by the myth of gesture in silent film.” Heinz B. Heller, Literarische Intelligenz und Film. Zu Veränderung der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Filmes 1910–1930 in Deutschland (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1985), 179.

89.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 84.

90.  Kracauer, “Bücher vom Film,” 5. At first glance, it may seem paradoxical that Kracauer, who mistrusted all abstraction and argued so phenomenologically in his later Theory of Film, to a certain extent evinced a different style of thinking in this polemic dating from 1927. Most astonishing is his attack on the interpretation of film as a medium of new visibility and his plea theory. In this context, Kracauer exhibited a way of thinking that displayed a clear preference for analytical knowledge and an understanding of the interrelationships behind the appearances of reality. In contrast, the later Kracauer would glorify the surface.

91.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 199.

92.  Ibid., 201.

93.  Ibid., 202.

94.  Ibid., 200.

95.  Already during his studies and work on his doctoral thesis with Carl Stumpf in Berlin, Musil came in close contact with Gestalt theory. On the influence of Gestalt theory on Musil, see Matthias Bauer, “Der Film als Vorbild literarischer Ästhetik: Balázs, Musil und die Folgen,” in Grauzonen: Positionen zwischen Literatur und Film, 1910–1960, ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Fabienne Liptay (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2010), 41–79.

96.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 201.

97.  Ibid. (My emphasis).

98.  Ibid., 198. (My emphasis).

99.  See Hartmut Winkler, Der filmische Raum und der Zuschauer. ‘Apparatus’—Semantik—‘Ideologie’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1982). See chap. 3, esp. 164–173.

100.  Umberto Eco, Einführung in die Semiotik, ed. Jürgen Trabant (Munich: Fink, 1972), 202–203. See also the subchapter “Ist das ikonische Zeichen konventionell?” (200–214). This German book is a reworked and expanded translation of La struttura assente (1968). The English volume, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1976), is essentially a new work written directly in English—which was later translated into Italian as Trattato di semiotica generale. See the introduction to A Theory of Semiotics, vii–viii.

101.  Ibid., 254.

102.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 203.

103.  Ibid., 201.

104.  Ibid., 202.

105.  Ibid.

106.  Ibid.

107.  Here I am referring to Petra Löffler’s term sekundäre Inszenierung. See Petra Löffler, “Eine sichtbare Sprache. Sprechende Münder im stummen Film,” Montage AV 13, no. 2 (2004): 54–74. Löffler uses it to differentiate between primary, or everyday, facial expressions and the medial transformation thereof that comes with secondary staging. “Thus the question presents itself as to how one can here [in silent film] regard the human figure as simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘artificial,’ as a primary phenomenon and a secondary effect of medial transformations. Obviously film forces us to tolerate the discrepancy between a familiar and therefore unquestioned appearance and the staged version thereof” (73). The notion of the acting stereotype may help to further illuminate some of the aspects of the conundrum described here.

108.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 203.

109.  Ibid.

110.  Ibid.

111.  Ibid.

112.  Ibid.

113.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 4. On this Sabine Hake comments: “Here the most advanced technology of mass entertainment makes possible the (imaginary) return to a preindustrial culture and an idealized definition of folklore.” Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 228.

114.  Balázs, “Visible Man,” 30.

115.  See Rusegger, “Béla Balázs’ Filmtheorie,” 56.

116.  Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” 206.

117.  Albert Klöckner, “Das Massenproblem in der Kunst. Über Wesen und Wert der Vielfältigung (Film und Funk)” [1928], in Medientheorie 1888–1933. Texte und Kommentare, ed. Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 303.

118.  Ibid., 302.

119.  Ibid., 305–306.

6. THE READYMADE PRODUCTS OF THE FANTASY MACHINE: RUDOLF ARNHEIM, RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER, AND THE DISCOURSE ON THE “STANDARDIZATION” OF FILM

1.  The German term Konfektion is associated with the industrial production of readymade/ready-to-wear garments.

2.  See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 85–153.

3.  Henry Ford, My Life and Work [1922], in collaboration with Samuel Crowther (New York: Arno Press, 1973). Published in Germany as Mein Leben und Werk (Leipzig: List, 1923).

4.  Helmut Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit 1924–1932. Studien zur Literatur des “Weißen Sozialismus” (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970), 29.

5.  See Harro Segeberg, Literarische Technik-Bilder. Studien zum Verhältnis von Technik- und Literaturgeschichte im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 198ff.

6.  Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 121.

7.  Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit, 58.

8.  One of the most prominent representatives of this line of thought was Antonio Gramsci, who placed his hopes in Fordism. See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), § 52.

9.  Adolf Behne, “Kunstausstellung Berlin,” Das Neue Berlin. Monatshefte für Probleme der Grossstadt 1 (1929): 150.

10.  Ibid.

11.  Ibid., 152. The ambivalence of Behne’s argument is revealed by a sentence that he adds to this passage: “Apart from the moving assembly line is a world unto itself, the still laboratory of researchers and critics” (ibid.).

12.  The series of images beneath Behne’s text (ibid.) originally stems from the satirical newspaper Punch (September 1, 1926).

13.  Kurt Karl Eberlein, “Januskopf und Maske” [1928], in Medientheorie 1888–1933. Texte und Kommentare, ed. Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 285–298.

14.  Ibid., 20. Eberlein here alludes to the widespread media stereotype of the “girl.”

15.  See Jörg Schweinitz, ed., Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 223–230.

16.  Stefan Zweig, “The Monotonization of the World” [1925], in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 397–400.

17.  Stefan Zweig, “Die Monotonisierung der Welt” [1925], in Weimarer Republik. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1918–1933, ed. Anton Kaes (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 272. The German original is cited here, since the published English translation (see note 16) is abbreviated.

18.  Stefan Zweig, “The Motonization of the World,” 397.

19.  Ibid., 398.

20.  Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 54.

21.  Charlotte Lütkens, “Europäer und Amerikaner über Amerika,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 62 (1929), 2:625.

22.  Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und Amerikanismus. Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europäers (Jena: Diederichs, 1928), 97.

23.  Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), 44.

24.  See Wilhelm Pocher, Die Rezeption der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur in Deutschland in den Jahren 1918–1933 (thesis, University of Jena, 1972).

25.  Erhard Schütz, “Fließband—Schlachthof—Hollywood. Literarische Phantasien über die Maschine USA,” in Willkommen und Abschied der Maschinen, ed. Erhard Schütz and Norbert Wehr (Essen: Klartext, 1988), 125.

26.  Ibid., 122. See also Erhard Schütz, Kritik der literarischen Reportage (Munich: Fink, 1977), 17–116; and Peter J. Brenner, Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), 609–628.

27.  See Schütz, Fließband, 74–75.

28.  Halfeld, Amerika, 104.

29.  See Kurt Pinthus, ed. Das Kinobuch [1913/1914] (Zürich: Arche, 1963). Here he published individual scenarios under the name Arnold Höllriegel (a pseudonym) and under his real name, Richard A. Bermann, respectively. In January 1913, Höllriegel’s novel Die Films der Prinzessin Fantoche (The Films of Princess Fantoche) was serialized in Der Roland von Berlin. A new edition of the novel was published in 2003, ed. Michael Grisko (Berlin: Aviva, 2003). See also Jörg Schweinitz, “Von Automobilen, Flugmaschinen und einer versteckten Kamera. Technikfaszination und Medienreflexivität in Richard A. Bermanns Kinoprosa,” in Mediengeschichte des Filmes, vol. 2, Die Modellierung des Kinofilms, ed. Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (Munich: Fink, 1998), 221–241.

30.  Arnold Höllriegel [Richard A. Bermann], Hollywood Bilderbuch (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1927), 15.

31.  Ibid., 9.

32.  Bernhard Goldschmidt, Von New York bis Frisco. Ein deutsches Tagebuch (Berlin: Reimer, 1925), 56–57.

33.  Egon Erwin Kisch, (beehrt sich darzubieten) Paradies Amerika [1929] (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994), 108. The passage reads as follows: “In every mid-sized city in America either a collegian picture or a Western picture is shown before the main feature. The collegian picture always follows the same plot: the awkward student, ridiculed by his colleagues and spurned by the popular crowd, enters a competition or game at the last minute, secures the victory for his team, and wins fame and the girl for himself. However, the Western pictures are more elaborate, not all having one and the same plot, but instead there are at least two different kinds of plots, ha-ha-ha!”

34.  Ibid., 113.

35.  See Kristin Thompson, “Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-gardes,” Film History 5, no. 4 (1993): esp. 392–396.

36.  See Thomas Elsaesser, “Kunst und Krise: Die Ufa in den 20er Jahren,” in Das Ufa-Buch, ed. Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1992), 96–105.

37.  Ibid., 98.

38.  Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin. American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 117.

39.  See ibid., 54. Whereas in 1923 there were still ninety-four domestic productions in contrast to 149 imports from the United States, by 1927 only three German short films made it onto the market, which was flooded with 394 U.S. short films.

40.  Peter Bächlin, Der Film als Ware [1947] (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Fischer, 1975), 174.

41.  Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 121.

42.  Ibid., 118.

43.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Film 1928” [German 1928], in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 308.

44.  Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 [German 1992], trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). See the chapter “The Balance After Liquidation: The Cathedral in Crisis,” 121–131.

45.  Elsaesser, “Kunst und Krise,” 104. See also Anonymous, “Die Organisation der Ufa-Produktion,” Lichtbildbühne 20, no. 290 (December 5, 1927).

46.  Thompson, “Early Alternatives,” 395.

47.  Rudolf Leonhard, “Zur Soziologie des Films,” in Der Film von morgen, ed. Hugo Zehder (Berlin and Dresden: Kaemmerer, 1923), 101.

48.  Ibid.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Ibid., 103.

51.  See Das Tagebuch (Berlin, 1928), first six months. In addition to Kurt Pinthus (574–580), other contributors included Willy Haas (713–714), Béla Balázs (759–760), and the Hollywood producer of German descent, Carl Laemmle (969–970).

52.  Herbert Leisegang, “Sprechfilm—Rundfunk—Bildfunk—Filmfunk—Zukunftstheater,”Freie Volksbildung 4 (1929): 15–16.

53.  See Willy Haas, “Die Film-Krisis,” Das Tagebuch 17 (1928): 714.

54.  Ibid., 715.

55.  Ibid.

56.  Kracauer, “Film 1928,” 308.

57.  Ibid., 312–313.

58.  Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” [German 1927], in The Mass Ornament (see note 43), 80.

59.  Ibid.

60.  Ibid, 81.

61.  Ibid, 78.

62.  Ibid, 80.

63.  Ibid.

64.  The contexts and details of this concept have been elaborated more fully by Inka Mülder, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur. Seine frühen Schriften 1913—1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), esp. 56–57.

65.  Kracauer, “Film 1928,” 308.

66.  Ibid., 313.

67.  Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shop-Girls Go to the Movies” [German 1927], in The Mass Ornament (see note 43), 294.

68.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Neue Filmliteratur” [1932], in Kleine Schriften zum Film, vol. 6.3, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 15–19. The three books were also reviewed together by Carl Dreyfuß in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932) 1/2, 227–228.

69.  Already discussed in the introduction, the parody of the genre-film stereotypes in Alexander Granowski’s film Die Koffer des Herren O.F., which appeared at the same time (1931), offers further evidence of this.

70.  Ilya Ehrenburg, Die Traumfabrik. Chronik des Films (Berlin: Malik, 1931). A note in the first edition states: “written from February to April, 1931 and published in November of the same year.”

71.  René Fülöp-Miller, Die Phantasiemaschine. Eine Saga der Gewinnsucht (Berlin: Zsolnay, 1931). This book is an expanded version of an essay by Fülöp-Miller from the same year: “Das amerikanische Kino,” in Joseph Gregor and René Fülöp-Miller, Das amerikanische Theater und Kino. Zwei kulturgeschichtliche Abhandlungen (Zurich: Amalthea, 1931). In the article “Neue Filmliteratur” (see note 68), Kracauer, otherwise commendatory, criticized Die Phantasiemaschine for bringing “in quotes from all possible directions, which do more to fill pages than offer illumination.” This may be due to the expansion of the original essay into a book.

72.  Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst [1932] (Munich: Hanser, 1974), 185–205. Arnheim’s Film as Art (first published in 1957 by the University of California Press) is not a complete translation of Film als Kunst (originally published in 1932) but instead includes selections from the original German and four additional essays. The chapters mentioned above were omitted in the U.S. publication. For this reason, citations are made exclusively from the German text.

73.  René Fülöp-Miller, “The Motion Picture in America. A History in the Making,” in John Anderson and René Fülöp-Miller, The American Theatre and the Motion Picture in America. A History in the Making (New York: Dial Press, 1938), 104–189. This English edition of Fülöp-Miller’s original essay was published the year he emigrated to the United States (see note 71). Quotations in the following are taken from the English edition.

74.  Ehrenburg, Traumfabrik, 142.

75.  Ibid., 169.

76.  Ibid., 310.

77.  Kracauer, “Neue Filmliteratur,” 16.

78.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 111.

79.  Kracauer, “Neue Filmliteratur,” 17.

80.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 117.

81.  Ibid., 134.

82.  Ibid., 148.

83.  Ibid., 147.

84.  Ibid., 153.

85.  Ibid., 158.

86.  Ibid., 156.

87.  Ibid., 146.

88.  Ibid.

89.  Ibid., 149.

90.  Ibid.

91.  Ibid., 148–149.

92.  Kracauer, “Neue Filmliteratur,” 17.

93.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 186.

94.  Ibid., 193.

95.  Ibid., 189.

96.  Luis Buñuel, for example, played with this kind of chart: “In my frequent moments of idleness, I devoted myself to a bizarre document—a synoptic table of the American cinema. There were several moveable columns set up on a large piece of pasteboard; the first for ‘ambience’ (Parisian, western, gangster, war, tropical, comic, medieval, etc.), the second for ‘epochs,’ the third for ‘main characters,’ and so on. Altogether, there were four or five categories, each with a tab for easy maneuverability. What I wanted to do was show that the American cinema was composed along such precise and standardized lines that, thanks to my system, anyone could predict the basic plot of a film simply by lining up a given setting with a particular era, ambience, and character.” Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh [French 1982], trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 131–132.

97.  As early as 1923, Shklovsky polemically referred to a “machine that produced plots”: “Imagine a row of films wound on special spools. One of the reels contains people’s professions, the second one—countries of the world, the third one—various ages, the fourth one—human acts (for example, kissing, climbing a pipe, knocking someone down, jumping into the water, shooting). A person takes hold of the cranks leading to these reels and spins them. Then he peers through a special slot and reads the resulting gibberish. The machine is rather strange, but apparently it gives American brains the jolt they require.” Victor Shklovsky, “Plot in Cinematography” [Russian 1923], in Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 42.

98.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 186.

99.  Ibid., 190.

100.  Vladimir Nilsen, The Cinema as a Graphic Art [Russian 1936] (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 177.

101.  Bächlin, Film als Ware, 171.

102.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 193.

103.  Ibid., 191. My emphasis.

104.  Arnheim’s obtained his doctorate in 1928 with the thesis Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem (Experimental-Psychological Investigations on the Problem of Expression) at the University of Berlin, where he had studied art history, musicology, and psychology with Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Lewin.

105.  See Gertrud Koch, “Rudolf Arnheim: The Materialist of Aesthetic Illusion—Gestalt Theory and Reviewer’s Practice,” New German Critique 51 (Fall 1990): 164–178. Regarding Gestalt psychologists in general and Arnheim in particular she specifically emphasizes: “their compatibility with modern thinking which they joined, perhaps sometimes on trivial grounds, later on, crowded by stronger, logic based assumptions of ‘system,’ ‘structure,’ or ‘form.’ ” (178).

106.  This was described in greater detail in chapter 1.

107.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Il cifrario del successo,” Cinema (Rome) 38 (January 25, 1938): 44.

108.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 219–220.

109.  Ibid., 220. My emphasis.

110.  Ibid.

111.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 11.

112.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Die Kunst im Volke,” Weltbühne 24, no. 3 (1928): 100.

113.  Ibid.

114.  Kracauer, “Neue Filmliteratur,” 18.

115.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 12.

116.  Rudolf Arnheim, “In Praise of Character Actors” [German 1931], in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 52–54. The translation of the German title “Lob der Charge” is a bit misleading.

117.  Kurt Pinthus, “Die Film-Krisis,” Das Tagebuch 14: 579.

118.  Rudolf Arnheim, “For the First Time” [German 1931], in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 15.

119.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Die Zukunft des Tonfilms” [circa 1934], in Rudolf Arnheim, Die Seele in der Silberschicht, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 239.

120.  The title of a text written in 1938 (and first published in Italian) on sound film explicitly refers to Lessing. See Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 199.

121.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 187. The original title of the mentioned film is Les nouveaux messieurs (France 1929).

122.  Gottfried Böhm, “Die Krise der Repräsentation. Die Kunstgeschichte und die moderne Kunst,” in Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900–1930, ed. Lorenz Dittman (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985), 113.

123.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 158.

124.  Ibid., 184. This viewpoint is expressed more forcefully in Fülöp-Miller’s Die Phantasiemaschine (see note 71), cf. esp. 121–139.

125.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 171.

126.  Ibid., 187.

127.  Béla Balázs, “Die Film-Krisis” [1928], in Béla Balázs, Schriften zum Film, vol. 2, Der Geist des Filmes, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs and Wolfgang Gersch (Berlin: Henschel, 1984), 232.

128.  Ibid.

129.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 163.

130.  Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Lawsuit” [German 1931], in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silbermann (London: Methuen, 2000), 165. (My emphasis).

131.  Ibid., 162.

132.  Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947] (New York: Continuum, 2005), 16–17.

133.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Substitute for Dreams” [German 1921], trans. Lance W. Garmer, in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52–56.

134.  The corresponding passage in Fülöp-Miller (Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 80–81) reads like a summary of sections 4, 5, and 6 from Münsterberg’s The Photoplay. Even the sequence of arguments is the same. Given that Fülöp-Miller’s text was written after studies undertaken in the United States, it is possible that he was familiar with Münsterberg’s work.

135.  Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” [French 1975], in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–318.

136.  Fülöp-Miller, “Motion Picture in America,” 150.

137.  Ibid., 117.

138.  Ibid., 188.

139.  Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” [German 1942], in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2003), 92.

140.  I describe this more extensively in Jörg Schweinitz, “Der selige Kintopp (1913/14): Eine Fundsache zum Verhältnis vom literarischem Expressionismus und Kino,” in Film, Fernsehen, Video und die Künste. Strategien der Intermedialität, ed. Joachim Paech (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1994), 72–88.

141.  Georg Lukács, “Thoughts Toward an Aesthetics of Cinema” [German 1913, 2nd version], in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (New York: Continuum, 2004), 15.

142.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 193.

143.  Ibid., 195.

144.  Ibid.

145.  Ibid., 194.

146.  Ibid.

147.  Ibid., 13.

148.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America” [1968], in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, ed. and trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 216.

149.  The result was the study: Rudolf Arnheim, “The World of the Daytime Serial,” in Radio Research, 1942–43, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 34–85.

150.  Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” [German 1938], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 274.

151.  In addition to the already mentioned texts, see in particular the study that Adorno wrote for the radio project. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” with the assistance of George Simpson, in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941), 9:17–48.

152.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments [German 1947], ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 119.

153.  Ibid., 65.

154.  Ibid., 98.

155.  Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 66.

156.  Ibid., 67.

157.  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 108.

158.  Ibid., 106.

159.  Ibid., 132.

160.  Ibid., 125.

161.  Ibid.

162.  Arnheim, “The World of the Daytime Serial,” 34.

163.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Il cinema e la folla,” Cinema 25 (October 30, 1949): 219.

164.  Ibid., 220.

165.  Ibid.

166.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Erich von Stroheim” [German 1934], in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 223.

167.  Rudolf Arnheim, “Il cinema e la folla,” 219.

168.  Ibid.

169.  Ibid.

170.  Ibid.

171.  Ibid.

172.  Ibid.

173.  See Thomas Y. Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, N.J.: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995). At the beginning of his text, Levin provides a detailed overview of the development and publication history of Panofsky’s film essay.

174.  Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” [1947], in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995).

175.  Ibid., 95.

176.  Ibid.

177.  Ibid., 112.

178.  Ibid.

179.  Ibid.

180.  Ibid.

181.  Ibid., 113.

182.  Ibid.

183.  Ibid.

184.  Ibid.

185.  Walter Hasenclever, “Der Kintopp als Erzieher. Eine Apologie” [1913], in Prolog vor dem Film (see note 15), 221.

186.  Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 96.

187.  Ibid.

188.  Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 94.

189.  Levin, “Iconology at the Movies,” 324.

190.  Ibid., 321–322.

191.  Ibid., 325.

192.  Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 94.

193.  Ibid., 100.

194.  Ibid.

195.  Ibid., 96.

196.  Ibid., 123.

197.  See Regine Prange, “Stil und Medium. Panofsky ‘On Movies,’ ” in Erwin Panofsky. Beiträge des Symposiums Hamburg 1992, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 171–190.

198.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 11.

199.  Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 123.

7. THE STEREOTYPE AS INTELLIGIBLE FORM: COHEN-SÉAT, MORIN, AND SEMIOLOGY

1.  The last significant contributor to classical (prescriptive) film theory is considered to be Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality [1960] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

2.  Gilbert Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1946). Simultaneously with the publication of this essay, the Association Française pour la Recherche Filmologique was founded in Paris in 1946. Cohen-Séat’s essay is a founding text of filmology.

3.  On the movement of filmology and Cohen-Séat’s role therein see Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985). On the influence of filmology on German film scholarship, see Joachim Paech, “Die Anfänge der Filmwissenschaft in Westdeutschland nach 1945,” in Zwischen Gestern und Morgen (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1989), 266–281.

4.  Edgar Morin, Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (Paris: Minuit, 1956). The English edition, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), will be quoted henceforth.

5.  Morin, The Cinema, 176.

6.  Ibid., 180.

7.  Ibid., 181.

8.  Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst [1932] (Munich: Hanser, 1974), 220.

9.  The quotation reads: “Film art … aspires to be an object worthy of your meditations: it calls for a chapter in those great traditions where everything is talked about, except film.” Introductory motto to Morin, The Cinema.

10.  Béla Balázs, “Visible Man” [German 1924], in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn: 2010), 13.

11.  Ibid.

12.  Ibid., 14.

13.  Morin, The Cinema, 198. (My emphasis.)

14.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 119.

15.  On the history of the metaphor of “film language,” see Karl-Dietmar Möller-Naß, Filmsprache. Eine kritische Theoriegeschichte (Munster: MAks, 1986).

16.  Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of the Film Technique (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).

17.  Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cine-Stylistics” [Russian 1927], trans. Richard Sherwood, in The Poetics of Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1982), 5–31.

18.  Ibid., 23.

19.  Ibid., 12. Incidentally, this idea would resurface decades later in a very similar fashion in Branigan’s narratology, in which “verbal (re)description” is a central activity in the reception of narrative films. See Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 111, see also 112.

20.  On the Kuleshov experiment, see Kristin Thompson, Yuri Tsivian, and Ekaterina Khokhlova, “The Rediscovery of a Kuleshov Experiment: A Dossier,” Film History 8, no. 3 (1996): 357–364; and Hans Beller, ed., Handbuch der Filmmontage (Munich, TR-Verlagsunion, 1993), 157–159.

21.  Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cine-Stylistics,” 29.

22.  Sergei Eisenstein, “Béla Forgets the Scissors” [Russian 1926], in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. and trans. R. Taylor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 147.

23.  Wolfgang Beilenhoff, “Filmtheorie und -praxis der russischen Formalisten,” in Poetik des Films. Deutsche Erstausgabe der filmtheoretischen Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Wolfgang Beilenhoff (Munich: Fink, 1974), 139.

24.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 124.

25.  Ibid., 119.

26.  Ibid., 120.

27.  Ibid.

28.  Ibid., 123.

29.  Ibid., 144.

30.  Orson Welles, quoted in Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-Stylo” [French 1948], in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Timothy Corrigan (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 158–162.

31.  Ibid., 159–161.

32.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 121.

33.  Ibid.

34.  Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cine-Stylistics,” 28.

35.  Eikhenbaum did occasionally state that “we are already used to a whole series of typical clichés of cine-langage” (ibid., 30), but he was thinking about “the basic devices of montage” and not genre stereotypes (18). He also mentions in passing that “even the very slightest innovation in this sphere strikes us with no less force than the appearance of a new word in language itself” (30). His actual theoretical interest in connection with the language metaphor did not, however, concern the semantic and pragmatic potential of such stereotypization as produced by intertextual repetition.

36.  Ibid., 28.

37.  Ibid, 31.

38.  In this context, Balázs writes in The Spirit of Film, “When a statue falls from its pedestal in Eisenstein’s October, this is intended to signify the fall of Czarism. When the broken fragments are reassembled, this is supposed to signify the restoration of bourgeois power. These are signs that have a meaning, just as the cross, the section sign, or Chinese ideograms have a meaning. But images should not signify ideas; they should give shape to and provoke thoughts that then arise in us as inferences, rather than being already formulated in the image as symbols or ideograms. For in the latter case the montage ceases to be productive. It degenerates into the reproduction of puzzle pictures. Images of the filmic material acquire the status of ready-made symbols that are, as it were, imported from elsewhere.” Béla Balázs, “The Spirit of Film” in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (see note 10), 128. In reference to this idea, Getrud Koch discusses a conflict between Balázs and Eisenstein, which was never fully elaborated. See Gertrud Koch, “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 175–176.

39.  “Les formes du langage conventionnel,” the title of the chapter cited here. Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 120.

40.  “Le discours filmique” is even the title of chapter 9.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 134.

41.  Ibid., 138.

42.  Ibid., 123. (My emphasis.)

43.  Ibid.

44.  Ibid., 123–124.

45.  Ibid., 124.

46.  Morin, The Cinema, 174.

47.  Ibid.

48.  Arnheim, Film als Kunst, 190.

49.  Morin, The Cinema, 173.

50.  Ibid.

51.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 139.

52.  Morin, The Cinema, 172.

53.  Ibid., 173–74.

54.  Ibid., 180.

55.  Ibid., 174.

56.  Ibid.

57.  Ibid.

58.  Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” [1947], in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), 112.

59.  Morin, The Cinema, 194.

60.  Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, “Wort im Film,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 13, special issue: Die Rolle des Wortes im Film (1965): 1018.

61.  Ibid., 1019.

62.  Ibid.

63.  Ibid., 1021.

64.  Ibid., 1019.

65.  Ibid.

66.  Ibid.

67.  Neuer deutscher Film (New German Cinema) is a term used to describe West Germany’s “other cinema” represented by young directors working outside of established commercial cinema who sought to radically renew German film in the 1960s. Influenced by Nouvelle Vague, they attempted to set their work apart, in terms of style and content, from the commercial genre films of the Adenauer era of the 1950s, which was perceived as restorative. A main concern in the era leading up to the 1968 movement was the filmic articulation of critical and nonconformist thinking, and the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 is considered a programmatic document of this position. Directors who emerged from this decade of upheaval, also known as the era of Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Cinema), include Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

68.  Ibid., 1012.

69.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 123.

70.  See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, expanded edition [1968] (London, BFI, 1998), 103–105.

71.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies [French 1957], trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 114.

72.  Ibid., 118.

73.  Ibid., 124–125.

74.  Ibid., 56.

75.  Ibid., 125.

76.  Morin, The Cinema, 201.

77.  Ibid., 181.

78.  Ibid., 115.

79.  Ibid., 112

80.  Ibid.

81.  Ibid., 154.

82.  Ibid., 167.

83.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 21.

84.  Ibid., 23.

85.  See Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), 93–94.

86.  Joachim Paech describes the unique quality of filmology as being dedicated to an “interdisciplinary basic research (as we would say today) into cinema and thereby managed to almost never talk about individual films.” Joachim Paech, “Von der Filmologie zur Mediologie? Film und Fernsehtheorie zu Beginn der 60er Jahre in Frankreich,” in Körper—Ästhetik—Spiel. Zur filmischen écriture der Nouvelle Vague, ed. Scarlett Winter and Susanne Schlünder (Munich: Fink, 2004), 31.

87.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes, 31.

88.  Ibid., 20.

89.  Ibid., 19.

90.  Ibid.

91.  Ibid., 35 and 36.

92.  Ibid., 34.

93.  Yuri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text [Russian 1970], trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 289.

94.  Yuri Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema [Russian 1973], trans. Mark Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 22.

95.  Karl Bühler, Theory of Language—The Representational Function of Language [German 1934], trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin (Amsterdam: Benjamins B.V., 1990), 161.

96.  Morin, The Cinema, 175.

97.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur principes, 138.

98.  Christian Metz, “Sur un profil d’Etienne Souriau,” in L’art instaurateur: Revue d’Esthétique 3/4, p. 144.

99.  Lowry, The Filmology Movement, 169.

100.  Frank Kessler, “Etienne Souriau und das Vokabular der filmologischen Schule,” Montage AV 6, no. 2 (1997): 135.

101.  See Etienne Souriau, “La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 7–8 (1951): 231–240.

102.  Umberto Eco, Einführung in die Semiotik (Munich: Fink, 1972), 225. Here I have chosen to cite the German text for reasons already explained (see chapter 5, note 100).

103.  Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971). The English edition will be quoted in the following: Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).

104.  Metz, Language and Cinema, 130. See also chaps. IV.1 and V.3.

105.  Winkler takes a similar view; see Hartmut Winkler, Der filmische Raum und der Zuschauer. ‘Apparatus’—Semantik—‘Ideology’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1982). “Morin … outlines a mechanism of conventionalization, which impacts the level of filmic techniques of representation and the subject matter of a film in an completely parallel fashion.… Morin thus also described a mechanism of the genesis of signs, which is solely grounded in factual repetition” (139). However, Winkler probably underestimates the incisiveness of Morin’s thought in stating: “Various indications in Morin’s text and, most of all, the relative isolation of the quoted passages suggest that Morin himself did not fully become aware of the significance of this idea” (ibid). That the fundamental concept of the formation of signs in cinema through repetition/conventionalization was indeed so emphatically articulated in the work of Cohen-Séat indicates that the filmologists had a far-reaching understanding of their work’s implications.

106.  Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry” [Italian 1965], in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 167–186.

107.  Ibid., 170. The passage reads: “It is true that a kind of dictionary of film, that is, a convention, has established itself during the past fifty years of film. This convention is odd for the following reason: it is stylistic before it is grammatical. Let us take the image of the wheels of a train which turn among puffs of steam: it is not a syntagma, it is a stylema…. [The filmmaker] must be satisfied, insofar as rules are concerned, with a certain number of expressive devices which lack in articulation, and which, born as stylemas, have become syntagmas. On the positive side of the ledger, the filmmaker, instead of having to refine a centuries-old stylistic tradition, works with one whose history is counted in decades. In practical terms this means that there is no convention to upset by excessive outrage.”

108.  Ibid.

109.  Ibid., 171.

110.  Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema [French 1968], trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). The chapter “The Modern Cinema and Narrativity” is based on the 1966 essay “Le cinéma moderne et la narrativité.”

111.  Ibid., 214.

112.  Ibid., 222.

113.  Ibid., 214.

114.  Metz, Language and Cinema, 41–42.

115.  Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Nonverbal as Another Verbality” [from a letter interview with S. Arecco, Italy 1971], in Heretical Empiricism (see note 105), 261.

116.  Metz, Film Language, 223.

117.  Ibid., 222.

118.  Ibid., 223.

119.  Christian Metz, “La grande syntagmatique du film narratif,” Communications (Paris) (1966), 120–124. An expanded version of this text was incorporated into chapter 5  in Film Language, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” 108–148.

120.  An instructive overview of Metz’s theoretical work and its phases may be found in Dominique Blüher, “Sensibilisierung für die Konstruktion der Filme,” Filmbulletin 2 (1990): 47–55. See also Dominique Blüher and Margrit Tröhler, “‘Ich habe nie gedacht, dass die Semiologie die Massen begeistern würde,’ Ein Gespräch mit Christian Metz,” in Filmbulletin no. 2: 51–55.

121.  Metz, Film Language, 222.

122.  Ibid. In this context, Metz also wrote: “The image of the wheels of the train … is a cliché, a stereotype. And it can be so only because it is a singular fact. Grammar has never dictated the content of thought that each sentence should have; it merely regulates the general organization of the sentences. 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—that is to say, it remains confined to the stage of the initial idiom and not to that of the secondary language of art. The present of the indicative, as used by Robbe-Grillet, is still a vulgar present of the indicative, entirely ‘banal,’ and yet no one accuses it of being a cliché. And no one accuses Malherbe of triteness for using the objective predicate, or Victor Hugo for using the relative clause, or Baudelaire for the conjunction of two adjectives. The image of the wheels of the train is in no way the filmic equivalent to these examples; rather it would correspond to Malherbe’s metaphorical comparison of a young girl to a rose, which is a singular construction (formal and semantic) and must accordingly be judged according to the categories of originality and triteness. As long as one considers such examples, one will have the elements not of a ‘stylistic grammar’ of the cinema, but of a pure rhetoric that has nothing grammatical” (ibid.).

123.  Christian Metz must be largely exempted from this statement. Dominique Blüher aptly remarks that in Metz’s work “concepts from the theory of language [are] not simply applied to film (as one certainly does find in film grammars), but in contrast precisely the dissimilarities [are] laid out in addition to any possible correspondences among the given ‘languages’: the sign system of film is juxtaposed with the sign system of natural language.” Blüher, “Sensibilisierung,” 48.

124.  Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 1, Zur Sprache und zur Psychologie [1901/1902] (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1982), 51.

125.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur principes, 79.

126.  Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay [French 1970], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 20.

127.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur principes, 123.

128.  Metz, Film Language, 145.

129.  Roger Odin later argued in favor of semiopragmatics. See Roger Odin, “For a Semio-Pragmatics of Film,” in The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, ed. Warren Buckland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 213–226.

130.  Morin, The Cinema, 112.

131.  Ibid., 97.

132.  Ibid., 112.

133.  Algirdas Julien Greimas, “L’actualité du saussurisme (à l’occasion du 40e anniversaire de la publication du Cours de linguistique générale)” Le Français Moderne (Paris) 24, no. 3: 191–203.

134.  Anne Hénault, Histoire de la sémiotique (Paris: PUF, 1997), 36.

8. IRONY AND TRANSFIGURATION: THE POSTMODERN VIEW OF THE STEREOTYPE

1.  On the melodramatic visual stereotype of the woman behind the window, see the section “Acting, Image, and a Brief Consideration of Sound” in chapter 2.

2.  See Christian Metz, L’énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991).

3.  In German, and to some extent in the English, the terms “self-reflexivity” (in German: Selbstreflexivität) or autoreflexivity are commonly used. However, film theorists such as Christian Metz or Robert Stam, who have investigated this topic more closely, instead use the term “reflexivity” to refer to the same set of facts and circumstances. Ibid. See, in addition, Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Hans J. Wulff agrees in so far with Metz and Stam that the “auto” in “autoreflexivity” is redundant. See Hans J. Wulff, Darstellen und Mitteilen (Tubingen: Narr, 1999), 62–76. Similar arguments have been made regarding the “self” in “self-reflexivity.” Here I subscribe to Metz’s argument.

4.  Britta Hartmann describes how the beginning of a film provides an initiatory program: “In its initial phase, every film organizes and constructs its own learning and experiential program. If one comprehends film reception in this sense, as a textually-driven process of learning and experience, then the beginning is the place where the specific conditions of this process are rehearsed.” Britta Hartmann, Aller Anfang. Zur Initialphase des Spielfilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), 101.

5.  On the basis of quantitative analyses, Salt confirmed that “the young European makers of ‘art films’ used even longer takes … the use of long takes is … associated with high artistic ambition.” Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1992), 266.

6.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies [French 1957] (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 143.

7.  Horst Königstein, “Es war einmal ein Westen: Stereotyp und Bewusstsein,” in Visuelle Kommunikation: Beiträge zur Kritik der Bewusstseinsindustrie, ed. Hermann K. Ehmer (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1971), 318.

8.  Wim Wenders, “From Dream to Nightmare: The Terrifying Western Once Upon a Time in the West” [German film review 1969] in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Sean Whiteside (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 24.

9.  Here the term “allusion” is intended to indicate this form of reference. “Quotation,” on the other hand, is reserved only for the direct transfer of material from another film. In this I am following Metz, who also associates “quotation” (citation) with the use of entire segments from other films, which are intended to be recognized as such. See Metz, L’énonciation, 95–96. Metz thus ascribes to the philological logic according to which the “quotation” refers to an acknowledged literal appropriation, whereas “allusion” indicates a less explicit and less literal appropriation, that is, a statement “whose full meaning presupposes the perception of a relationship between it and another text, to which it necessarily refers by some inflections that would otherwise remain unintelligible.” Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [French 1982], trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 2.

10.  Quoted in Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 195.

11.  Ibid.

12.  The term “intertextual” is here understood in Genette’s sense “as a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts … as the actual presence of one text within another,” especially in the form of quotation, plagiarism, or allusion. Genette, Palimpsests, 1–2. It should be noted that intertextuality is also realized in relationship to entire series of texts, whereby the relationship is established by recourse to stereotypes.

13.  Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Lawsuit,” in Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 165.

14.  See Metz, L’énonciation, 110–111. Metz otherwise does not discuss intertextuality as a basis for enunciative disclosure. But he does indicate at least one—in his opinion usually indirect—connection, without elaborating further: “ ‘Behind’ and not ‘within’ film there can also be invisible, physically absent films which are still in a way very present. These concern a different manner of playing with memory that is not directly connected with enunciation, because they do not double it, and the film remains free of any external elements…. We have thus arrived at the well-known problem of transtextuality, in particular that of the hyper- and architext, as defined with exceptional clarity by Gérard Genette.”

15.  Aby Warburg uses this term to denote poses and forms that have become conventional for the expression of emotions in the visual arts. He traces these forms through different genres in his famous Mnemosyne image atlas of 1929. In view of the concept of the stereotype, the Pathosformel appears as a specification thereof.

16.  Here “pastiche” is used in the second sense articulated by Dyer, namely “pastiche as imitation.” See Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2007), 21–51.

17.  Wenders, “From Dream to Nightmare,” 24. The published English translation reads: “This one is the limit. This one is a killer.” However, this does not convey the full sense of the German, which has therefore been translated differently here.

18.  See Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 40, 215.

19.  Bernhard von Dadelsen, “Höhe- und Wendepunkte klassischer Genres: Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod (C’era una volta il West, 1968),” in Fischer Filmgeschichte, ed. Werner Faulstich and Helmut Korte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 4:161.

20.  Ibid.

21.  Ibid., 4:163.

22.  Quoted in ibid., 4:159.

23.  Königstein, “Es war einmal ein Westen,” 320.

24.  Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 194.

25.  Silvie Pierre, “Il était une fois dans l’Ouest,” Cahiers du cinéma 218 (March 1970): 53–54.

26.  Kay Kirchmann, “Zwischen Selbstreflexivität und Selbstreferentialität. Überlegungen zur Ästhetik des Selbstbezüglichen als filmischer Modernität,” Film und Kritik 2: 23–37.

27.  Ibid., 28. (My emphasis.)

28.  Königstein, “Es war einmal ein Westen,” 330.

29.  Ibid., 312.

30.  Ibid.

31.  Ibid., 331.

32.  I use “postmodernity/postmodern” not as a conceptual term in accordance with postmodernity’s own understanding but rather in the sense of a borrowed label. It has become customary as a designation for a type of cinema that is described here in terms of its conspicuously reflexive, self-referential, and often hybrid treatment of stereotypes. The term is therefore not taken literally, and I do not intend to enter into discussing philosophical and cultural theories of (questionable) binary concepts such as postmodern versus modern.

33.  Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1996), 19.

34.  Metz, L’énonciation, 103.

35.  Ibid.

36.  Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border—Close the Gap” [1969], in A Fiedler Reader, ed. Leslie Fiedler (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1977), 270–294.

37.  Peter Schneider, “Vom Nutzen des Klischees. Betrachtungen zum Wildwestfilm,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 13, special issue: Die Rolle des Worts im Film (1965): 1105.

38.  Ibid., 1092.

39.  Ibid., 1105.

40.  Ibid., 1093

41.  Ibid., 1104. (My emphasis.)

42.  See the section in the previous chapter, “Stereotypes Form Codes: Filmology and Semiology.”

43.  Schneider, “Vom Nutzen des Klischees,” 1103.

44.  Ibid., 1105.

45.  Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947] (New York: Continuum, 2005), 16. See also chap. 3 of this book.

46.  Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 275–292.

47.  Ibid., 276.

48.  Ibid., 286.

49.  Ibid., 281.

50.  “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.” Ibid., 288.

51.  Ibid., 285. Ellipsis in original.

52.  Wulff, Darstellen und Mitteilen, 262.

53.  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 54. See also by Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1995), 57–88.

54.  Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 287.

55.  Ibid., 288.

56.  Ibid.

57.  Ibid., 283.

58.  Ibid.

59.  Ibid., 289.

60.  Ibid., 281.

61.  Wayne Booth distinguishes between stable and unstable irony. The latter, whose semantics and value system cannot be clearly resolved, is closely related to ambiguity. See Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. chap. 1, “The Ways of Stable Irony” (1–31) and chap. 3, “Is it Ironic?” (47–86).

62.  Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 282. She distinguishes between deliberate camp and naive camp, that is, productions read as camp in contradiction to their original intention.

63.  Walter Biemel, “Das Problem der Wiederholung in der Kunst der Gegenwart,” in Sprache und Begriff. Festschrift für Bruno Liebrucks, ed. Heinz Röttgers, Brigitte Scheer, and Josef Simon (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1974), 290.

64.  Walter Biemel, “Pop-Art und Lebenswelt,” in Ästhetik, ed. Wolfgang Heckmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 160.

65.  Ibid., 172.

66.  Biemel, “Problem der Wiederholung,” 289.

67.  Biemel, “Pop-Art und Lebenswelt,” 172–173.

68.  See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

69.  Thomas Elsaesser, “Specularity and Engulfment: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 193.

70.  Umberto Eco, “Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable,” in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), 67–68.

71.  See Fiedler, “Cross the Border.”

72.  “In 1955 and 1956, all the major Hollywood studios (except MGM) had sold the bulk of their pre-1948 films to distributors who promptly rechanneled them to local stations. In the early 1960s, the major networks followed.” Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 263–264.

73.  See ibid., 264.

74.  Ibid., 256.

75.  The Oscar for Best Actor was awarded to Lee Marvin in the leading role.

76.  Ray, “Certain Tendency,” 257.

77.  Ibid., 260.

78.  Norbert Bolz, Chaos und Simulation (Munich: Fink, 1992), 102.

79.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [French 1983] (London: Continuum, 2005), 215.

9. MCCABE AND BUFFALO BILL: ON THE CRITICAL REFLECTION OF STEREOTYPES IN TWO FILMS BY ROBERT ALTMAN

1.  Within postclassical cinema I distinguish—loosely and in a heuristic sense—between modernist and postmodern(ist) tendencies in the treatment of stereotypes from classical cinema. Whereas modernist films tend to destroy or criticize classical cinematic stereotypes and myths, postmodern films instead tend toward a mildly ironic but celebratory and, indeed, even glorifying approach to such elements (as demonstrated with respect to Leone’s film in chapter 8). A reflexive approach to stereotypes characterizes both tendencies. The distinction between the two does not follow a sequential progression from modernist to postmodern film, since both tendencies appear almost simultaneously with the emergence of postclassical cinema. Also, this differentiation has little to do with the established categorization of “modernity” versus “postmodernity,” which also encompasses classical cinema.

2.  David Denby, ed., Film 71/72 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 127.

3.  Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1977), 77.

4.  This and the following film dialogues stem from film transcriptions.

5.  See Neil Feineman, Persistence of Vision: The Films of Robert Altman (New York: Arno Press, 1978). Feineman draws a similar conclusion about Altman’s films between 1969 and 1975: “Perhaps most constant in the nine films are Altman’s beliefs about society. From the beginnings of modern America, he tell us in McCabe, the individual has been a helpless, if willing, victim of civilization” (189).

6.  Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema [1968], exp. ed. (London: BFI, 1998), 66.

7.  Thomas Elsaesser, “Notes on the Unmotivated Hero—the Pathos of Failure: American Films in the ’70s,” Monogram 6 (1975): 13.

8.  Philip French, Westerns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 124.

9.  See Hans Günther Pflaum and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds., Robert Altman (Munich: Hanser, 1981), 93.

10.  Ibid., 94.

11.  Thomas Elsaesser, “Nashville: Putting on the Show,” Persistence of Vision 1 (1984): 39.

12.  Robert T. Self, Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 91.

13.  Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 258.

14.  Norman Kagan, American Skeptic: Robert Altman’s Genre-Commentary Films (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1982). Kagan’s excellent analysis of Altman’s films from the 1970s has served as an important source of inspiration for this study.

15.  Feineman, Persistence of Vision, 195.

16.  This is difficult to determine from today’s perspective, since the status of the unconventional has been gradually exhausted, as has the effect of reflexivity.

17.  This corresponds to the structural model that Wright developed for the Western hero. See Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

18.  See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, vol. 1, History of the American Cinema (New York: Scribner, 1990), 78.

19.  William Frederick Cody, An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (New York: Cosmopolitan, 1928).

20.  Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts; The Life Story of Col. William F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) as Told by His Sister Helen Cody Wetmore (Duluth, Minn.: Duluth Press Printing Co., 1899).

21.  David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 49–53.

22.  The theory and history of decentered character constellations in multiple-protagonist films has been exhaustively studied by Margrit Tröhler in her postdoctoral thesis. See Margrit Tröhler, Offene Welten ohne Helden. Plurale Figurenkonstellationen im Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2007). For a comprehensive overview in English, see Margrit Tröhler, “Multiple Protagonist Films: A Transcultural Everyday Practice,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralph Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 459–477.

23.  Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis [1983] (London: Starword, 1992), 281.

24.  See ibid., 281–282.

25.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [French 1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), 215.

26.  Ibid.

10. ENJOYING THE STEREOTYPE AND INTENSE DOUBLE-PLAY ACTING: THE PERFORMANCE OF JENNIFER JASON LEIGH IN THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

1.  Herbert Jhering, “Schauspielerische Klischees,” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters (Berlin) 2, no. 30 (1912/1913): 488.

2.  James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

3.  Her filmography as an actress in the Internet Movie Database (as of July 2010) lists over seventy major roles in films for the theatre and television since 1973, her television debut. Since 1980, she has appeared on average in at least two productions a year.

4.  A typical viewer response to one of Leigh’s characters, Sadie in Georgia (Ulu Grosbard, 1995), from the “user comments” section of the Internet Movie Database reads: “Jennifer Jason Leigh is an incredible actress … making you feel what the character feels. She accomplishes that to an intense degree as Sadie Flood in Georgia. The problem is that I don’t want to feel what Sadie felt. She scared and disgusted me … it felt like more an assignment than entertainment.” From a theoretical perspective, such characters tellingly confirm how important it is to distinguish, in Murray Smith’s terms, between “alignment” and “allegiance” with respect to spectatorial participation, that is, between the attention given to a character (alignment) and recipients’ positive or negative evaluations of a character (allegiance). See Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

5.  Lizzie Francke, “All About Leigh,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 2 (February, 1995): 8.

6.  In addition to the skyscraper references and the fall from its heights, with which the film begins, The Hudsucker Proxy also borrows from the slogan of Dmytryk’s film “The future is here” with its motto “The future is now.”

7.  See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [French 1982], trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 5–10. “Imitation, too, is no doubt a transformation, but one that involves a more complex process: it requires … a previously constituted model of generic competence … drawn from that singular performance … one that is capable of generating an indefinite number of mimetic performances. This model, then, introduces between the imitated text and the imitative one a supplementary stage and a mediation that are not to be found in the simple or direct type of transformation” (6).

8.  Ibid., 24–28.

9.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1996), 21.

10.  Ibid.

11.  On the architecture of the film see W. C. Odien, “The Rise and Fall of Norville Barnes,” Cinefex 58 (June, 1994): 66–81.

12.  For a survey of German reviews, see Daniel Kothenschulte, “The Hudsucker Proxy,” in Joel and Ethan Coen, ed. Peter Körte and Georg Seeßlen (Berlin: Bertz, 1998), 141–164.

13.  This is a reference to the terminology of Genette, who introduced the binary terms “extradiegetic” and “intradiegetic” as well as “heterodiegetic” and “homodiegetic.” Extra-/intradiegetic refers to the location of the narrator with respect to the diegesis, the fictional narrative space (first- or second-level narrator). In the same sense, Sarah Kozloff speaks about framing or embedded narrators. Genette’s second pair of terms distinguishes whether or not the narrator appears as a character in his or her own story. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [French 1972], trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 227–237, 243–247; and Sara Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 42–43.

14.  François Truffaut, “Frank Capra, The Healer” [French 1974], in The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (London: Allen Lane, 1980), 69.

15.  Ibid.

16.  Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 172.

17.  See Katherine Hepburn in the prison scene of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938).

18.  Nicholas Yanni, Rosalind Russell (New York: Pyramid, 1975), 56.

EPILOGUE

1.  Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, “Dogme 95: The Vow of Chastity” [1995], in Technology and Culture: The Film Reader, ed. Andrew Utterson (London: Routledge, 2005), 87–88.

2.  Ibid., 88.