Abstract
Imagine you open a thin, large-format book in your hands, eager to discover the story it tells. The title, Une fille comme toi, is not particularly revealing. After a discreet white cover, you suddenly encounter an uncanny visual archive: on the second page, a colour-saturated Brigitte Bardot looks you in the eye, and you recognize old visual codes. It looks like the cover of a popular vintage magazine. You continue further, discovering several pages in which photographic images and text are organized in a familiar grid layout. Your common sense tells you that you must be holding a photonovel. But the title corrects you: it is a film photonovel. But which film is it about? Things get a bit more confusing as you turn the pages trying to find out. Ingrid Bergman here, Jean-Paul Belmondo there; Rita Hayworth, Tippi Hedren, Marcello Mastroianni, all sharing the same fictional space.
We immediately suspect that some kind of visual play is at hand. While one identifies many of these actors, films and characters – and there is a ludic element in this finding – we fail to recognize the actual film being ‘told’. The front flap provides a useful key. Une fille comme toi is the product of a particular rewriting that creatively rethinks the overlooked medium of the film photonovel. Drawing on his private collection of hundreds of magazines, the author, Jan Baetens, selected and recombined around 300 previously published images (from different films and genres) to create an intriguing film story that never existed but that is, nevertheless, strangely familiar. Exploring the tension between invention and authenticity, stereotype and surprise, Une fille comme toi is a daring exercise in which the story may be visually agitated by the combination of originally unrelated scenes, but in which the narrative – even if humorously challenged – remains steady and familiar.
Curiously, this invented multi-panel photographic storytelling is occasionally interrupted by a mix of other editorial elements, combining a playful and serious tone. These paratextual intermissions include: references to texts by Jan Baetens, reviews of different titles and collections of the same publisher, a short ‘celebrity-interview’ with the author timely reflecting on the future of the film photonovel in the digital age, a large pin-up colour image of Gina Lollobrigida, and so on. Flirting in a lively manner with the codes of fan and popular amateur culture, Une fille comme toi is a hybrid publication, an artistic montage within which an authorial voice can easily be sensed (Baetens is an award-winning poet, too). On the one hand, the book overtly quotes and critically reactivates the materiality and language of an old and almost extinct editorial genre into the present. On the other hand, it also allows for a parallel and lucid reflection about questions of social mimesis and gender representation in visual culture – ultimately leading to the idea that cinema is constantly retelling the ‘same’ stories, and that we are not merely ‘reading’ a film, but rather navigating a whole, deeply rooted, cultural imaginary.
While these aspects may already convey strong enough reasons to make Une fille comme toi an enticing work, this would be, however, only half of the story. The other half may only stand out in its full significance – that was, at least, my experience – as we learn that this book is also a sort of revisitation. Baetens is a recognized scholar of cultural and literary studies, who has worked throughout his career on so-called minor genres like comics, photonovels, novelizations and, more recently, film photonovels. His most comprehensive work on the topic is indeed The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations, a very different but equally compelling reading, published just the year before, in 2019. In this academic work, Baetens offers a refreshing and valuable contribution to visual culture studies by examining and historicizing, with great sophistication and theoretical depth, this long-forgotten hybrid medium.
If we are to describe them briefly, film photonovels were a popular type of magazine publication that recreated an existing cinematic story through the combination of photographic elements (normally film stills or set pictures) and words (captions or juxtaposed dialogue balloons). Despite the popularity and considerable social impact they enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s, for a number of different reasons, film photonovels have been fragile materiality, with difficult access to complete collections, absent from libraries and archives, with insufficient cultural recognition, confusing classification, generalized social and scholarly neglect, and finally they have been tragically condemned to oblivion. Therefore, illuminating this fascinating unknown territory is a first and crucial achievement of this research work, especially considering that the film photonovel’s history seems all the more necessary as it is also virtually impossible to retrieve. Furthermore, the book has the virtue of writing that history not only in close reference to the broader economies, constraints and institutions in which these publications emerged and operated, but also in connection to several related film and literary genres, media and formats. Even for audiences considerably acquainted with the expanded field of word and image studies, there is plenty to learn from this well-informed cultural investigation.
Identifying the film photonovel as a popular yet short-lived practice that emerged in Europe (most notably in France and Italy) and Latin America, Baetens describes it as a peculiar genre that ingeniously appropriated and reinvented elements of preceding typologies, such as graphic novels, film novelizations and, naturally, photonovels (from which film photonovels openly borrowed the traditional grid layout and a melodramatic exaggeration of the narrated stories). Despite these affinities, however, the book also highlights more unpredictable aspects. It reviews common misunderstandings, importantly explaining why film photonovels are not exactly photonovels and should be regarded as a genre in their own right. Unlike the latter, film photonovels did not produce their photographs from scratch; rather, they resorted to pre-existing photographic materials like glamorous set pictures and film stills, further participating in the growing celebrity culture. Moreover, film photonovels were published as complete stories (and not in instalments) resorting to a well-defined yet frequently anonymous editorial voice. They appealed to a different readership, too. A remarkable aspect the book highlights is that film photonovels had a significant percentage of male readers and, even if generally despised as ‘bad’ variations of ‘good’ cinema, they were consumed – for the stories, pictures and paratextual materials – not just in popular, but also in educated and cinephile circuits. Through eloquent close readings of different examples, Baetens underlines as well how, in a mostly photographic genre, images occupy after all a strikingly subordinate position in relation to words and texts. Passionate in nature and elegant in style, it is the field-expanding conclusions to The Film Photonovel that constantly captivate the reader, conclusions that result from Baetens’ sophisticated cultural, semiological, material and narratological analysis of this prolific genre.
What is interesting to note as we look back is that many of the aspects examined in the scholarly The Film Photonovel have been delightfully reinterpreted and reconfigured by Baetens into the more artistic pages of the aforementioned Une fille comme toi. Specific features of classic film photonovels – ranging from the 3x2 grid format, the house style narrator, the posed portrait pictures of celebrities, the usage of repeated images in the same sequence, the inclusion of poor-quality photos, the presence of paratextual elements such as interviews, critiques, short articles, gossip-like sections, advertisement, or the coloured pin-up poster of the starlet begging to be pulled out from the centre – have all been meticulously reactivated into the pages of Une fille comme toi. While both works assess the film photonovel as a central topic, they do so in distinctive terms. Thus, reading these radically different books next to each other functions as a sort of diptych: demonstrating how in this case, the artistic and academic discourses effectively interlink, feed on, and complement each other. Une fille comme toi materializes as a contemporary variation on a cultural field formerly scrutinized by Baetens. But it does more than that. First, it shows that bright ideas in visual culture can be communicated in many forms and dialects; and, second, that it takes a resourceful mind to let go of academic ‘certainty’ and embrace a more risky and subjective territory, adapting equally well to both. As Vilém Flusser (2002: 192) once suggested, ‘two different sentences are two different thoughts’, even if they originate from the same place.
Finally, I believe that the double reading of Une fille comme toi and The Film Photonovel offers yet another valuable lesson. It makes clear that you first need to know how something is constructed before you can disassemble and reconstruct it meaningfully. This is what these two books on the film photonovel finely demonstrate: we must understand our topic very well first, so that our choice to remove or replace specific pieces does not end in plain destruction, but instead, results in renovated intellectual spaces for us to inhabit and decode – with pleasure.