THE FILM PHOTONOVEL
WORLD COMICS AND GRAPHIC NONFICTION SERIES
Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzรกlez, editors The World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series includes monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. The books published in the series use analytical approaches from literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among other fields, to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.
THE FILM PHOTONOVEL A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations Jan Baetens
U N I V E R SI T Y OF TE X A S PRE S S AUST I N
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2019 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). ♾
LIBR A RY OF CONGRESS CATA LOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Baetens, Jan, author. Title: The film photonovel : a cultural history of forgotten adaptations / Jan Baetens. Other titles: World comics and graphic nonfiction series. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2019. | Series: World comics and graphic nonfiction series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031172 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1822-5 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1823-2 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1824-9 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH : Fotonovelas—History and criticism. | Film adaptations—History and criticism. | Motion pictures and literature. Classification: LCC PN 6714 .B 35 2019 | DDC 741.5/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031172 doi:10.7560/318225
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTR ATIONS vii
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Excavating the Film Photonovel A Brief History of the Film Photonovel Word and Image, Telling and Showing Clear Grids, Blurred Lines Action? Stop! Pose and Movement Globalizing the Film Photonovel?
A PPENDIX: PUBLISHERS A ND M AGA ZINES 155
ACK NOW LEDGMENTS ix
1 9 41 80 114 145
NOTES 161 REFERENCES 169 INDEX 176
Illustrations
Stagecoach (Stagecoach, 1939, John Ford) 18 “Cuori vagabondi” (Maria Grazia Francia, 1948) 19 FIGURE 2.3. “La Fureur de vivre” (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955, Nicholas Ray) 30 FIGURE 3.1. “L’Adorable Voisine” (Bell, Book and Candle, 1958, Richard Quine) 48 FIGURE 3.2. “La Voix de la conscience” (Crimen y castigo, 1951, Fernando de Fuentes) 57 FIGURE 3.3. “Revoir Florence” (Porta un bacione a Firenze, 1955, Camillo Mastrocinque) 58 FIGURE 3.4. “Las Noches de Cabiria” (Le Notti di Cabiria, 1957, Federico Fellini) 59 FIGURE 3.5. “La Piste des éléphants” (Elephant Walk, 1954, William Dieterle) 65 FIGURE 3.6. “La Belle et la bête” (La Belle et la bête, 1946, Jean Cocteau) 70 FIGURE 3.7. “Moderato cantabile” (Moderato Cantabile, 1960, Peter Brook) 75 FIGURE 3.8. “Arizona” (original unknown) 78 FIGURE 2.1.
FIGURE 2.2.
vii
“L’Amant fantôme” (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 1951, Albert Lewin) 88 FIGURE 4.2. “Cœurs en détresse” (El Indiano, 1955, Fernando Soler) 89 FIGURE 4.3. “Pane, amore e . . .” (Pane, amore e . . . , 1955, Dino Risi) 91 FIGURE 4.4. “Pain, amour, ainsi soit-il” (Pane, amore e . . . , 1955, Dino Risi) 92 FIGURE 4.5. “Pain, amour et . . .” (Pane, amore e . . . , 1955, Dino Risi) 93 FIGURE 4.6. “La Loi” (La Legge, 1959, Jules Dassin) 98 FIGURE 4.7. “La Chartreuse de Parme” (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1948, Christian-Jacque) 102–103 FIGURE 4.8. “Hélène de Troie” (Helen of Troy, 1956, Robert Wise) 106 FIGURE 4.9. “L’Enquête mystérieuse” (The Frightened City, 1961, John Lemont) 110 FIGURE 5.1. “Monte-Carlo” (The Monte Carlo Story, 1957, Sam Taylor / Giulio Macchi) 120 FIGURE 5.2. “Les Voies du Cœur” (Le vie del cuore, 1942, Camillo Mastrocinque) 121 FIGURE 5.3. “Pain, amour et . . .” (Pane, amore e . . . , 1955, Dino Risi) 124–125 FIGURE 5.4. “La Princesse de Clèves” (La Princesse de Clèves, 1961, Jean Delannoy) 127 FIGURE 5.5. “Volupté” (Go Naked in the World, 1961, Ranald MacDougall) 129 FIGURE 5.6. “La Finestra sul cortile” (Rear Window, 1954, Alfred Hitchcock) 132 FIGURE 5.7. “La Finestra sul cortile” (Rear Window, 1954, Alfred Hitchcock) 134 FIGURE 5.8. “La Finestra sul cortile” (Rear Window, 1954, Alfred Hitchcock) 139 FIGURE 5.9. “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 1958, Louis Malle) 143 FIGURE 6.1. “The Curse of Frankenstein” (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, Terence Fisher) 148 FIGURE 6.2. Bhob Stewart, “The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook” (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, Arthur Penn) 153 FIGURE 4.1.
viii L ist of I llustrations
Acknowledgments
Many individuals and institutions have to be thanked for their invaluable help and support. First of all, I thank Frederick Aldama, editor of the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series, who encouraged my project from its first stuttering until its final form. Equal thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript as well as to Jessica Rutherford and Kip Keller for having carefully read and edited the text. It was a privilege to work with all of you. As I was writing this book, many colleagues and specialists in the field generously offered time and space for discussion, and I have greatly benefited from their insights and erudition: Alain Boillat (Lausanne), Geert Buelens (Utrecht), Philippe Capart (Brussels), David Filipe (Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University), Michel Delville (Liège), Giovanni Fiorentino (Viterbo), Guido Furci (Paris), Luke Gartlan (St. Andrews, Scotland), Tara Kreider (Thompson Library, Ohio State University), William Horrigan (Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University), Donata Meneghelli (Bologna), Susan Liberator (Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Ohio State University), David Pinho Barros (Porto), Marie-Françoise Plissart (Brussels), Domingo Sánchez-Mesa (Granada), and Bruno Takodjerad
ix
(Paris). Special thanks to Stefania Giovenco (Paris), who introduced me to the hidden continent of the film photonovel; Clarissa Colangelo (Leuven), who was the first reader of the first complete draft; and Hugo Frey (Chi chester), my partner in crime in so many graphic-narrative adventures. My work on this book has been largely facilitated by a generous grant from the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO Vlaanderen) for a sabbatical leave during the academic year 2016–2017.
x A cknowledgments
THE FILM PHOTONOVEL
1
Excavating the Film Photonovel
T
o most readers, the subject of this book may appear to be a cultural UFO, and with good reason. The film photonovel— the term that I will use to refer to this hybrid genre—and the magazines that specialized in this noncanonical genre ceased to exist many decades ago, and in most cases, they have been not only overlooked but also forgotten. The cultural area where the film photonovel was read was limited: mainly Italy and France, and to a smaller extent neighboring countries, such as Spain and Belgium, as well as certain parts of Latin America. Moreover, the material is not easy to access, for only a very few specialized archives collect it, and the opportunities to find good, diverse, and affordable material remnants of the once-flourishing film-photonovel trade via traditional or online marketplaces—auctions, flea markets, garage sales, retail venues specializing in pulp fiction, and eBay—remain rare. For this reason, without personal contacts, alternative archives maintained by fans, a lot of chance, and, once in a while, a little help from my friends, I could never have written this book. Generally speaking, the film photonovel is a genre at the crossroads of two other genres: first, the film novel, the retelling in prose of a movie’s narrative (sometimes illustrated)—a genre as old as cinema and still alive
1
in various forms all over the world; second, the photonovel—typically a European photographic romance genre published in women’s magazines after World War II. The form enjoyed its greatest success between 1947 (when the first photonovels appeared on the market) and the mid-1960s, when the rapidly increasing penetration of television screens in households dramatically affected the impact and circulation of this much-contested and heavily debated genre. Photonovels still exist, but they no longer have the presence and social influence that they had in their first twenty years. One might consider, therefore, the film photonovel—sometimes confusingly called fumetti in the United States1—to be the photographic equivalent of the novelization, a specialized subgenre of the broader field of the traditional film novel. More precisely, the film photonovel is a film-novel subgenre remediated under the influence of the photonovel. Historically, the genre was short-lived, reaching its height in the period between 1950 and 1964. I address this heyday later on. This book logically builds on earlier studies of the photonovel (Baetens 2010, 2013) and novelization (Baetens 2005, 2008). It is, however, anything but a continuation or expansion of that research, because while working on the photonovel and novelization, I was largely unaware that the film photonovel existed; it was still a hidden continent for me. Back then I did not even identify as unique in their own right the few film photonovels that I knew. In this sense, this book is, for me, a fresh start, and I am grateful to all those—from the anonymous “authors” of the film photonovels to the many friends, colleagues, open-minded antiquarians, and collectors—who helped me build and expand my collection (yes, life sometimes resembles Treasure Island)—and fostered my interest in this new field. The world of the film photonovel regularly proves the value of “rogue archivists” (De Kosnik 2016), who build their collections from the bottom up, fueled by the energy of a gift economy, often heedless of the academic rules of the game—archive building, copyright management, and scholarly detachment, for example—but driven by a passion and a commitment that reshape official history. An example of a radically lowbrow, throwaway pulp subgenre, the film photonovel has not been stored in traditional archives. Many of these works are located in public archives that keep the magazines that published this kind of material, but archivists did not use the tag “film photonovel” in their catalogue cards (this is also the case for novelizations, which are likewise not easy to trace). Commercial archives of the publishers that produced and distributed the film photonovels are incomplete, and most of the companies no longer exist. Smaller publishers did not maintain archives, because of the extreme volatility of the business, in which
2 T H E F I L M P H OTONOVEL
bankruptcy and takeovers were the rule rather than the exception. Thus, there are tremendous gaps in many files and collections. It should be noted that “general” publishers, that is, those that did not specialize in women’s magazines, were often reluctant to mention their production of photonovels in their backlists and promotional material (Bravo 2003, 125),2 and most of them did not capitalize on the popularity of the film photonovel, which peaked around 1955. Their interest in the photonovel was purely financial, and given the smaller sales figures of the film photonovel, most of them did not want to invest in this highly competitive and risky field. Moreover, they were afraid that the poor reputation of both the photonovel and the film photonovel would negatively influence the image of their traditional literary output. At first sight, the film photonovel is an object that, although despised and overlooked, offers plenty to those in film and literature studies who are interested in forms and cultures of hybridization. It raises interesting questions for genre studies and gender studies, too. And the material—as I hope will become clear in the rest of this book—is appealing, even seducing and intriguing. Unlike most other formerly ostracized genres that were eventually included in mainstream scholarship (the best example here is comics, but other noncanonical genres such as science fiction, the detective novel, children’s literature, romance, horror, and pornography come to mind, all of which now have specialized academic journals), the film photonovel has never been central to literary and cultural studies. Hence the question, why has this hybrid genre been historically marginalized from the traditional canons that have come to dominate these fields? It is a paradox, given the commercial profitability of the film photonovel: in the ten years of its existence as a successful format in the popular press,3 the film photonovel was big business. In the period 1955–1965, first in Italy, then in France, and occasionally in Spain and Portugal, a significant number of magazines published film photonovels weekly, semimonthly, or monthly. Around 1955, some twenty magazines were competing for readers at newsstands (Morreale 2007b), but as early as 1957, the market was deep in crisis. At the end of the decade, at least thirty magazines were competing in France (Ghera 2006). These figures are startling, as is the number of readers, which was a multiple of the copies sold at newsstands, since film photonovels and other popular magazines were widely shared. In Italy, the all-time best seller seems to have been the 1954 film-photonovel version of Ulisse/Ulysses, a 1954 Lux/ Paramount peplum film (a sword-and-sandals movie) produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by Mario Camerini, and starring Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano: 500,000 copies were sold in Italy (Amelio 2007, 14).4
Excavating the F ilm Photonovel 3
In France, the monthly print run of one of the market leaders, Nous Deux Film, part of the photonovel empire published by Les Éditions mondiales, was 140,000 copies—a profitable number that had shrunk to 58,000 by 1963, when the publication ended (Antonutti 2013, 145). In comparison with the print runs of the photonovels of that period (Giet 1997; Bravo 2003), these figures are rather modest, but it is necessary to note the number of magazines in this niche and the significant social circulation of the copies. Michele Mercuri, whose father was the CEO of a photonovel company that also “did” film photonovels, mentions the quite reliable figure of “millions of readers” weekly during the mid-1950s in Italy (Mercuri 2007). At the same time, serious limits on distribution may explain the rapid disappearance of the film photonovel from collective memory. First, these magazines were sold mainly at newsstands, which relegated them to the status of other disposable press items. Further, film photonovels were more expensive than photonovels, a comparable type of publication. In 1955, the flagship film-photonovel series Cineromanzo Gigante or I Vostri Film Romanzo cost 150 lire, while the three leading photonovel magazines, Grand Hôtel, Bolero-Film, and Sogno, cost 30, 40, and 30 lire, respectively.5 This difference in price certainly explains the comparatively low print runs of all film-photonovel magazines. On the other hand, as will be discussed in detail later on, film photonovels were used in a variety of ways—for instance, as pinup and poster resources, images that were cut out and transformed into pictures to be put on the wall, an informal appropriation that was also a key factor in the material disappearance of these magazines. To overcome the limitations of newsstand sales, most magazines promoted subscription policies, although other barriers appeared. Not least, this type of purchase was too expensive for the targeted audience, which could afford to buy film photonovels weekly at best, depending on the household’s budget, which was very limited in the 1950s (by the time that popular audiences started benefiting from the economic boom of the 1960s, the film photonovel as a genre had disappeared). In addition, film photonovels, unlike photonovels, were almost never published in installments, but rather as “complete films,” which reduced the need to subscribe. Another problem was that the editorial policy of most magazines was unselective regarding genres and styles: almost anything could end up as a film photonovel. Publishing such a diversity of magazines was not an effective strategy for attracting subscribers, as can be deduced from the heterogeneity of the material sold via used-magazines channels; it is almost impossible to find all issues of a given magazine for a given year. A second reason for the limited flourishing of the film photonovel was
4 T H E F I L M P H OTONOVEL
its circumscribed geographic reach. Although the film photonovel was a virtually universal format, it existed mainly in two countries, with some smaller ripple effects in parts of the world, such as Argentina, that were open to Franco-Italian influences, often thanks to migrant communities. There were examples of film photonovels in non-European countries, both before and after the golden age of the film photonovel, but they were unsystematic and always rather short-lived. For example, in the United States in 1964, James Warren’s Famous Films #2 was a forty-two-page volume titled “Curse of Frankenstein / Horror of Dracula,” which drew on a film-photonovel technique (and the same magazine probably released other similar issues). In the United States in the 1970s (before the VCR), film photonovels, mainly of sci-fi movies, flourished in pocket-book format (Muir 2005). These works were, however, called photonovels, not film photonovels, most likely because the photonovel genre itself did not have any known US equivalent, at least not as it had been popularized in Europe. A similar confusion between photonovels and film photonovels was pervasive in Latin American productions. In a discussion of the fotonovela (photonovel), one reads, for instance: Initially produced in Italy and Spain, fotonovelas were tactile representations of the movie with which they correlated. The documented history of the fotonovela is varied, although the Hispanic/Latino fotonovela dates back to the early 1940’s in correlation with the rise in the popularity of film. Eventually, Latin American countries began developing fotonovelas that featured original stories that were not based on cinema productions. By the 1960’s, approximately 23 movies were featured in the fotonovela format and nearly three times as many fotonovelas with original content were circulating throughout Mexico, Central and South America. Toward the late 1980’s, Mexico was publishing approximately 70 million fotonovelas per month. (Edwards 2016; bibliographic citations in the original have been omitted)
In South Africa, where nonlocally produced television programs were introduced only in the 1970s, popular magazines in the 1960s published film-photonovel serials based on foreign television material.6 Television as a primary resource for these kinds of adaptations was briefly popular in the early 1980s, for example, with the famous Dallas serial.7 In none of these cases, however, was there a direct link with the Italian or the French culture of production of film photonovels, and this gap undoubtedly accelerated the rapid forgetting of the genre. In the absence of an appropriate genre label, it is difficult to acknowledge the continuity and
Excavating the F ilm Photonovel 5
change between all these practices; and because most of the publications came and went without leaving many traces, it becomes nearly impossible to compile a comprehensive archive or even to vaguely suggest what may bring together the diverse experiments and practices in this field. The most important reason for the rapid and lasting disappearance of the film photonovel, however, was its strong association with the photonovel, another noncanonical literary genre that continues to suffer from status problems as well as an almost complete absence from English-speaking countries, which makes it a “bad” object for so-called global literary studies. The photonovel, often discarded as a romance comic with pictures— I will come back to this misreading—has remained an understudied genre subject to sociological and political prejudices. The photonovel is the proto typical example of “bad” reading: one of the worst specimens of the culture industry, an ignominious vehicle for spreading reactionary propaganda and a tool for manipulating its victimized female and semiliterate audiences. For reasons I will discuss further, the film photonovel, which encompassed most of the visual forms and mechanisms of the photonovel, was considered even more embarrassing than its model. According to Emiliano Morreale, currently the director of the Cinemateca Nazionale in Rome, it was seen as the “lumpen” version of the photonovel (Morreale 2007a, 207), a crude judgment by which he hinted at the unacceptable degradation of the filmic original, often an art house movie, by the codes of the photonovel. Romance lovers may have accepted, even encouraged, the transformation of a movie into a melodrama. Cinephiles, on the contrary, raged against the adaptation of their much-loved films in film-photonovel canvases. Morreale’s bleak vision is much more than a personal stance, which he takes great care to nuance and fine-tune. The rejection of the film photonovel is a widely shared a priori in film criticism and theory. As noted by Serge Ghera, there is only one known example of a film journal, Midi-Minuit Fantastique (1962–1972), that acknowledged the existence of these kinds of publications and that used them for a review, in spite of the fact that, in a large majority of the cases, film photonovels were the only possible way to have and to keep a substantial visual trace of a certain movie.8 It should be noted that when the journal was launched, the classic film photonovel was about to disappear from newsstands, surviving only in the niche genres covered by Midi-Minuit Fantastique—science fiction, horror, fantasy—which reduces the impact of the acknowledgment. The general dislike of the film photonovel explains both the quasi absence of serious research in the field and the difficulty of finding reliable archives. This is a problem for many noncanonical genres and practices, but the case of the film photonovel is extreme. At the same time, this book
6 T H E F I L M P H OTONOVEL
is proof of the vitality and resilience of the communities that share a passion for the film photonovel. Even in scholarship, the return of the film photonovel is something that goes beyond the personal taste of certain individuals. The study of under-researched genres such as that of the film photonovel is a necessary complement to official histories that document the relationships between cinema and literature, all too hastily reduced to the subfield of book-to-film adaptations (Quaresima 2004). What, then, is at stake in this book? First, it ties in with the recent broadening and widening of adaptation studies. Thanks to the landmark publications of scholars such as Simone Murray (2012), who has reframed the practice of adaptation as part of the larger cultural industry of global (art house) film production, and Jean-Louis Jeannelle (2016), whose concept of “adaptability” makes a plea for a much broader approach than the one-to-one comparison between book and film in actual adaptations, there is now room for the study of adaptation as a cultural practice—a paradigm shift increasingly visible in translation and literary studies and encouraged by the move toward new, more contextualized approaches in film history. Thus, the first aim of this book is to make a modest contribution to a new reading of the cultural history of the relationships between film and literature. A second ambition concerns a debate in genre and medium studies, which are, in more than one aspect, a single field. No reading of genre should ignore issues of medium structures, and vice versa: medium—in the twofold sense of material host medium and “cultural form” or “cultural practice,” as defined by Raymond Williams ([1970] 1974)—and genre are mutually dependent and inextricably linked concepts. There is no medium without proper content, and genre is an essential parameter of this concept. It is c not a coincidence that chief theoreticians such as Stanley Cavell—ironically?—struggle with the terminology and tend to go back and forth between medium and genre (see Cavell 1979). Conversely, no genre can be thought of without taking into account the medium structure that allows it to socially exist. Genre changes often correspond to medium changes; hence, the rise of the “material-historical medium theory” in literary studies, as Thérenty (2007) calls it, and the implementation of this dimension in genre theory (Baetens et al. 2015). From this point of view, this book participates in the ongoing debate about the material history of the interaction between film and literature. Hence its particular emphasis on a lesser-known genre within this larger history, the film photonovel; on the relationships between this genre and the medium aspects of its form; and on its publication context. To read the film photonovel is one thing; to read it as part of a particular magazine is another.
Excavating the F ilm Photonovel 7
Finally, the specific methodological framework of this book is that of comparative textual media (Hayles and Pressman 2013). This approach is media focused, which requires that all cultural productions, including traditional print documents, be considered media. It is comparative, which means that cultural documents and practices are analyzed via a comparison with other practices and documents, both synchronically and diachronically, and with the help of more than one disciplinary framework. And its emphasis on the textual should not be interpreted narrowly as referring only to print or only to verbal language, but as referring to the fact that the notion of “text” may encompass a wide range of media forms and practices. A last word on the corpus used in this study: as already intimated, the production of the film photonovel was impressive, with an average of at least twenty-five to thirty magazines in business in the period 1955–1965. They poured out works at least monthly—the gaps in the archives are too prominent to allow for firm speculation, but one can easily imagine the exceptional size of the corpus. For this reason, it is necessary to take a closer look at global tendencies within the film-photonovel market as well as to work with a representative and available sample. In the appendix is an overview, as comprehensive as possible, of the magazines active in the photo-film business during the years studied here, as well as a detailed description of the works that I read during the research for this book, which span the gamut in the field. The analysis highlights the types of publishers and series active in the market. The analysis and the case studies on which it is based cross boundaries between European and US films, art house movies and blockbuster cinema, B movies and expensive productions, and purely local and globally released and marketed films. To make connections outside Europe, I end the book with some brief notes on American film photonovels.
8 T H E F I L M P H OTONOVEL