The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations by Jan Baetens (review)

Baetens has long worked at the crossroads of different genres, forms, and media, and has provided us with pioneering studies on the photonovel (Pour le roman-photo, 2010), the film novel (Novelization: From Film to Novel, 2014), and the graphic novel (The Graphic Novel, 2014; The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, 2018). One can thus hardly imagine a scholar better suited to tell the story of the film photonovel, a hybrid or "remediated" (2) subgenre that thrived in France and Italy between 1950 and 1965 before vanishing abruptly into near-oblivion. More than twenty years ago, Baetens pointed out that the photonovel existed in a "complete critical silence," having so far escaped any "attempt at legitimization" (Le roman-photo, with A. Gonzalez, Rodopi, 1996). The silence surrounding the film photonovel surely has been, until now, even more deafening, and Baetens—who is thankfully also a passionate amateur—must be praised for the extraordinary effort made in "excavating" (1) a forgotten cultural artifact too easily "despised" as lowbrow and "overlooked" (3), and for painstakingly putting together a collection and a bibliography that provide us with an approximation of the entire corpus, since no other reliable archive currently exists. Although the film photonovel may initially appear to some as a niche topic of limited importance, Baetens's far-ranging "brief" history (9)—a characterization that seems overly modest—convincingly shows otherwise, and his meticulous analysis of several of the film photonovel's key components and strategies will be of great interest to any reader eager to reexamine the broader "cultural history of the relationship between film and literature" (7) and the age-old interrogation of the interplay between words and images, "telling and showing" (41). Baetens's investigation is particularly riveting when he considers and compares various experiments in "layout formulas" (87) (one did not expect innovation to be one of the stakes when dealing with a commercial genre so strictly constrained), when he suggests that the film photonovel operates a "shift from temporal to spatial montage" since its logic is "less syntagmatic than paradigmatic" (117–18), or when he sheds light on the "creation of new forms of visual mobility" (128) that are non-narrative and non-linear. Several close readings skillfully anchor the demonstration, and Baetens's discussion of works in which literature, film and photonovel intersect to dizzying effect is fascinating (Beauty and the Beast, Moderato Cantabile, The Charterhouse of Parma). A final chapter addresses the globalization of the genre, leaving behind its French and Italian contexts to reveal how the United States "extended the scope" of the film photonovel without ever producing "a real equivalent" (146–47). Baetens concludes with a surprising example—let us refrain here from spoiling the reader's final pleasure—one that proved to be a "one-shot," but also "a complete game changer in global visual culture" (152). It is to be hoped that this first study of the film photonovel will not remain a one-shot in the field. Baetens's book has already proven, however, to be a game changer.