Q&A with Jan Baetens about the Forgotten Art of Film Photonovels

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Jan Baetens' book The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations is the first study devoted to the hybrid genre of the film photonovel. Baetens applies a comparative textual media framework to a previously overlooked aspect of the history of film and literary adaptation.

Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post–World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications.

Watch the author speak about his work in the book trailer video below, and dig deeper into his personal collection of this forgotten medium in this Q&A.

Could you give us the elevator pitch of your book? 

I have worked largely in the field of adaptation studies as applied to cinema, and I have always defended the idea that film is both a screen- and a print-based medium. Film circulates via all kind of printed formats and related products, and historically speaking, the film photonovel was probably the most intriguing of these print adaptations—most intriguing but, paradoxically, also the most forgotten, for the film photonovel, which was immensely popular in the late 1950s, has fallen into complete oblivion, mainly though the lack of any archive (film photonovels were not kept in university libraries, and the private archives have nearly all disappeared). My book I draws on research based on my private collection of film photonovel magazines—I currently have some 1,400 items—and aims at reconstructing the history of the film photonovel not just as a particular genre, but also as a social medium, that is, a social practice and everything that accompanies it. By doing so, I try to rewrite the history of cinema itself, for the film photonovel is a wonderful tool for showing how films were received and appropriated by popular audiences.

How do you define the film photonovel?

The photonovel is essentially a form of graphic narrative in magazine format, one very popular in pretelevision Europe, that combines sequentially organized photographs, generally six per page, and speech balloons as well as captions to tell a story—a romance in the case of the photonovel and the story line of a film in the case of the film photonovel. Film photonovels are thus a special type of novelization, a type that relies on two major features, both inspired by the photonovel model: first, the priority given to images (at the expense of the text); second, the attempt to reframe all adapted movies, whatever their genre or specific tone, as melodramas, the typical genre of the photonovel. The result is often stunning, for even if a film photonovel does not present “new” images, the selection and layout, the narrative reframing of the stories, and the invented narrative voice in the captions all serve to re-create the adapted movie in surprising and visually very attractive ways.

Why was the photonovel deemed “lowbrow”?

Four elements play a key role in the film photonovel’s cultural disrepute: first, the influence of its model, the photonovel, which was discarded as a kind of silly romance comics with pictures; second, the fact that film photonovels were published only in magazine format, never in book form; third, the association with the world of tearjerkers—in the woman-unfriendly 1950s, certainly not the best way to acquire cultural capital; fourth, the belief that film photonovels adapted only commercial movies, never art-house movies. The rebuilding of the film photonovel archive, however, allows for a completely different reading of the material and the cultural biases that have tended to blind us to its very existence. Today we know that photonovels have a very wide range, that film photonovels sometimes exceed the limits of ephemeral magazine publication, that gendered readings have to be corrected, and that art-house cinema is as well represented in the corpus as is any other type of cinema.

How does your research push the boundaries of adaptation studies?

First, my research discloses a form of adaptation that has been completely ignored, lacking not only prestige but also visibility: no archives, no direct or indirect references, no visual traces. The progressive rediscovery of this material generates a kind of Pompeii experience, for things whose very existence had been ignored suddenly become visible. Moreover, we can now better understand the film photonovel’s importance as a social phenomenon: along with going to the movies (and sometimes instead of doing so!), people read film photonovels, and their ideas on cinema were strongly influenced by their reading. Second, the film photonovel is also an important case in the debate on film adaptation. Adaptation is often seen as a one-way street, going only from book to film. Here and in my previous book on novelization, which has also contributed to this paradigm shift, we can see that this is just half the story and that adaptation does not stop once a book has been turned into a movie. Movies are ceaselessly remade in print format, and the film photonovel is without any doubt the most challenging form of these adaptations (which may also include comics, novels, posters, the “making of” books, games, etc.). At first sight, film photonovels may appear to be the poorest versions of these adaptations, since they cannot produce new images. At second sight, however, the obligation to rely exclusively on existing pictures forces the genre to be extremely inventive, as the many examples and images in the book clearly show.

How did photonovels cross borders and affect audiences in Latin America?

The production of film photonovels started in Italy around 1955 and then moved to France, nut it had also some extensions in other countries, including United Kingdom and, somewhat later, United States. In Latin America, where the photonovel was as popular as in Europe (and where, in certain countries, the medium still thrives), the European models were adapted for and appropriated by local audiences. The publishing world in Argentina was crucial in this regard: many Spanish publishing houses were active there (several companies were created by publishers who had to leave Spain during or after the Spanish Civil War), and European magazines circulated in Argentina as well (even French ones, Argentina being a very Francophile country). Some magazines, such as Secretos. Amiga y confidente de la mujer, published their own film photonovel serializations of European movies, while others, such as Superaventuras, specialized in American blockbusters. All these works were locally produced, in agreement with local distributors, as used to be the case in the film photonovel business in general.

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Stephanie Sauer on Evoking the Royal Chicano Air Force

How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? Employing a creative mix of real and fictive events, objects, and people that subverts assumptions about the archiving and display of historical artifacts, Stephanie Sauer's innovative new book The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force both documents and evokes an arts collective that played a significant role in the Chicano movement.

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The RCAF started as the elusive Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, its ongoing subversive performance stance, and its key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. Reimagining herself as a fictional archaeologist named 'La Stef', Stephanie Sauer documents the plight of the RCAF, suspending historical realities and leaping through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

A cofounding editor of A Bolha Editora, a bookshop and publisher in Rio de Janeiro, and executive editor of Copilot Press, Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary text-based artist and visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. We talked to her about her approach to this project and how institutions should embed experiential learning, i.e.: "embodied knowledge," into pedagogical approaches.

What informed your approach to how you presented this archive, which is described in the introduction as your “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing”? 

Before I conceived of what is now The Accidental Archives, I spent a year writing what I had been expected to write. That is, I wrote a history of the Royal Chicano Air Force as I encountered it in the 21st Century. It was a story one would expect to read. It was a story I had read many times before. I was in Chicago then, a microcosm of a United States obsessed with its divisions, and found myself answering to the expectations of readers who wanted me to translate Chicanismo for them, to act as a type of mediator whose task it was to create a didactic, easily digestible history. This way of writing bored me, and I found it deeply problematic. I saw myself as facilitator to a kind of colonial fantasy that pitted me as an objective, rational (read: white, anthropological) narrator of an RCAF documentary. I didn’t want to perpetuate such ideas of otherness, so I threw out that entire manuscript and started fresh from three scraps, the very first notes I’d written.

Inaugural Flight of LaRuca 2012. With permission of use of Los Files © Juanishi V. Orosco.
Courtesy of Juanishi V. Orosco.

What Dr. Diaz noted in her introduction as “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing” is, for me, the richest way to present any history. Rooted in feminist practices of testimonio, embodied knowledge, “disruptive excess,” and collective witnessing, I found it vital to foreground the multiplicity of voices and their contradictions, the tactile ephemera, and the biases. Otherwise, when one tries to smooth over these elements in favor of a clean, linear narrative, the tremendous violence of silencing distorts the humanity of those making history. It is this type of silencing that alienates us from our own power to impart change. I wanted to offer an alternative. I wanted to upend the so-called logic of traditional, Western, male-centered historiography and imagine what a new kind of archive might include.