Even from the first few pages it is clear that Krull’s method involved adopting cinematic devices such as the dissolve and the cross-cut.
The New Critique
The photonovel began to die away in the 1960s with the rise of television, eventually becoming obsolete when domestic video made films ‘possessable’ and dvd supplied the supplements and commentaries beloved of fans and scholars. But as it waned the page did become the site for new forms of cinematic analysis. European filmmakers, particularly from the French New Wave, took up the book as a means of re-presenting and expanding their films. Alain Robbe-Grillet reworked his scripts written for films directed by Alain Resnais (including L’Année dernière à Marienbad, (1961) into ciné-romans or ‘cine-novels’. Halfway between illustrated script and novelization, he described the form as a detailed analysis of an audio-visual whole that is too complex and too rapid to be studied very easily during the actual projection. But the ciné-novel can also be read, by someone who has not seen the film, in the same way as a musical score; what is then communicated is a wholly mental experience, whereas the work itself [the film] is intended to be a primarily sensual experience, and this aspect of it can never really be replaced.42
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In principle, any translation of a film into illustrated text opens up an interpretive gap. The fixed duration of a film is converted into the more private time of the reader. On the page text and image can be contemplated at will and in the process the film is always ‘laid bare’ to some extent. In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard suggested that ‘one could imagine the critique of a film as the text and its dialogue, with photos and a few words of commentary’.43 Godard published print versions of nearly all his films of the 1960s. Some were straightforward illustrated scripts, others more experimental. The book based on Une femme mariée (1964)