Forms of Transmediality: the Film Photonovel

Who is your favourite Belgian comic artist, and what is your favourite film photonovel? Not necessarily the most important, perhaps just the most fun or the one you love the most.

When it comes to comics, that’s fairly simple. It has to be Hergé. I mean, Hergé should have indeed received the Nobel Prize – he was truly a genius. That doesn’t mean all his books are interesting, but some of them definitely are. I like very much, for instance, Le Secret de la Licorne (1943), which is the first half of a double album. It has been “adapted” by Steven Spielberg as a movie in 2011, but let’s not talk about that, I’m still traumatized by that adaptation. Hergé is something that I reread regularly and each time I continue to discover new things. It is also an excellent example of constraint writing. When you buy the album today, it’s in full colour and nicely printed, but it was first published during the war in a newspaper: every day a single small strip, and due to paper shortage, the quality of the paper was very bad and so the available space was constantly shrinking. Therefore, Hergé had to make sure to achieve an immediate readability of his drawings. Hence the extreme stylized form, a reduced form which later has been called ligne claire. The term itself only appeared in the 1980s, but the technique was already fine-tuned much earlier, thanks to that horrible material constraint. In the end, the images were barely bigger than a stamp. Imagine trying to tell a story in that way! You really have to know extremely well what you want to say, how you want to say it, etcetera.

The question about the film photonovel is different. The adaptation of Orson Welles’ film Touch of Evil, published as La Soif du mal in the magazine «Amor Film» (no. 163, 1st November 1958), for instance, is one I really like. But it’s so completely marginal compared to the entire production that it would be unfair to simply state that I prefer that particular one. In the case of the film photonovel, I would rather propose a selection of extremely classical, perhaps somewhat mechanical adaptations, which can be very functional and well-made. And then, some more bizarre ones as well. The same applies to the photonovel in general. People often ask me which kind of photonovel I recommend, but I can’t pick one because they are all more or less the same. For comics it’s different though, and that has to do with the fact that in this field we have an author. In the world of photonovels and photonovel magazines, even when the author’s name appears, they are usually just following the magazine’s editorial rules. With film photonovels and photonovels in general, there’s such a wide spectrum that it’s not really possible to read everything. But it is always possible to make a selection. One of my possible projects – something I’d like to write – is a book on the film photonovel. I already wrote such a book (The Film Photonovel. A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations, 2019), but now I’d like to write a different kind of history: a history made of something like twenty close readings of twenty different pages, but copyright-wise, it might be difficult: I will have to discuss it with a publisher. Anyway, to get back to the original question, I can say with confidence that, for comics, my favourite artist is Hergé.

When you read a graphic novel, a comic, or a film photonovel, are there elements that immediately strike you as a reader, and others that instead activate your analytical gaze as a scholar? What do you look for while covering each of those roles?

First of all, I’m a simple reader as well. I read for fun, and fun is part of daily life. I will never analyse something that I’m not interested in or that I don’t like. There are comics that I’m rereading all the time just for fun. I adore, for instance, Terry and the Pirates: it’s an adventure strip created in the 1930s by Milton Caniff. It’s like Les aventures de Tintin, but with a stronger Haddock-like character. In Tintin, you have of course Tintin, but the real protagonist is actually Haddock. He is a grown man, his behaviour is sometimes deplorable, but there is one big difference with the Caniff strip: in Tintin there is no kind of romantic interest. As in Tintin, the character of Terry in Terry and the Pirates is a boy who travels the world with an older, already mature – and rather sexist – man. The latter is constantly “pursued” by women, hides from them, and so on. That’s a big difference from other adventure strips. It’s similar to Flash Gordon, but not in a sci-fi context – more in a colonial adventure context. It’s also a very well-made comic: beautifully drawn and often very funny. I reread it just for fun.

When I was still teaching graphic novels and comics, I used to ask students to do this exercise: take the first page, turn it upside down, and forget about the story. At this point you immediately see certain formal patterns. After that, you go back to the normal reading process and see how these formal patterns interact with the story and with the text. That’s the starting point of everything. I always emphasize the relationship between the story and the things you can find in the rest of the magazine. This relationship can be very deep. Often, let’s say, the story continues outside of its margins, and the outside of the story is integrated within the story. In literature – and especially in comic books – I’m extremely sensitive to typography, page layout, and other similar elements. It is not just a matter of organizing the isolated pages, but the way in which these layout mechanisms change – or don’t – over time. Even the simplest mechanical differences can be very functional, especially when you have the same strips and panel structure repeatedly throughout the work. In Belgium, they call this the “waffle iron technique”, and it is applied to comics as well. It can be extremely effective, for instance, to repeat images but always with different framing or cropping – it gets a really wonderful result.

You have explored the concept of novelization on several occasions – not only as a shift between narrative forms, but also as a process of rewriting and remediation. How do these adaptations influence the perception of the original work?

That’s an important and fundamental point, because in this context, the notion of “original” no longer makes sense, actually. For example, you can read a novelization before seeing the movie, or you can do it the other way around. You might even ignore the movie entirely and just read the novelization. And the funniest thing is that, in certain cases, there’s genuine confusion between the novelization – which in principle comes after the movie – and what we might call a screenplay, which can also be novelized or written as a novel.

A famous example is King Kong. The 1933 movie by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack has been novelized. One of the screenwriters – together with James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose – was Edgar Wallace, an author who, in the 1930s, was considered the male competitor of Agatha Christie. While Christie was considered a writer of detective novels for women, Wallace composed similar stories for a male audience. Today, his work is difficult to read, because it feels very “old-fashioned”. He was constantly in need of money, losing a lot while betting on horse races, and he drank heavily, so he had to make a living by working for the Hollywood industry. He contributed to the script for King Kong, and at the same time, he wrote a novelization of the film – a very good one, actually, probably better than the movie. Interestingly, many people think the novelization is the novel on which the movie was based (due to last-minute postproduction issues, the release of the movie was postponed, and thus the novelization appeared before the movie itself). And certain publishers explicitly “falsify” that by publishing a novelization and labelling it as “the book on which the movie was based”. When a movie is adapted from a book, the book is considered the element that gives cultural prestige.

This is how the notion of “origin” becomes problematic. The existence of novelizations and other kinds of adaptations deepens the theoretical debate around the notions of “origin” and “original”. I’ve read quite a few novelizations and even collected many myself. Of course, that’s not the kind of material you’ll find in a university library – it’s not considered serious. You won’t find it in most public libraries either, because in every public library, after five years, the books are thrown away. That’s the reason why a public library cannot function as a heritage archive. So, all of these books disappear, unless you collect them yourself. I ended up donating my collection to the Belgian National Library.

The notion of origin is absolutely fascinating. There’s always something that comes first – or it seems to. Of course, writing and creating is a sequential process, but what we find at the beginning is often already a repetition or transformation of something else. However, I believe that many novelizations have their own value, because they make the movie more explicit – and, in some cases, even more interesting.

Both comics and film photonovels originated as forms of popular literature before becoming subjects of critical inquiry. How did you personally come to engage with these two genres? What similarities and differences do you see in the ways they are read? And how have they influenced one another over time?

The first – but incorrect – answer to this cluster of questions would be that the two genres are completely separate. In reality, that’s not true. At the peak of their success in the 1950s and 60s – which was also the peak of popularity for film photonovels – comics were considered reading material for kids, while film photonovels were intended for women. So, in principle, they are completely different. In practice, quite a few people – including myself – read both. I have been reading comics and photonovels since about age six, up until today.

Actually, a photonovel, as a genre or as a medium, is an adaptation of a kind of comics, the so-called “drawn novel” («Does Every Picture Really Tell a Story? Film Photonovel Magazines and the Question of Visual Sequentiality», 2023), an example of which are the melodramatic stories that were published in Grand Hôtel, an Italian magazine launched in 1946. At that time, everyone was reading Grand Hôtel. Overnight in 1946, it launched a new genre – the drawn novel – which combined cinema and, let’s just say, everything else. All the stories were adaptations of movies, and the characters looked like movie stars. This new form gathered cinema, the 19th century romantic melodrama and comics: all these genres were brought together in the drawn novel. Anime incatenate (1946), for instance, is an interesting case of fictive relationship between movie, novel and drawn novel. The success of Grand Hôtel was due to this kind of story, created by specialists of illustrated literature in Italy. These people had worked for Mussolini’s approved press, and among them was Walter Molino, the man who made most of these novels in Italy, and who became famous for creating all the covers for La Domenica del Corriere. The Corriere della Sera had a kind of weekly supplement with spectacular coloured images. After the war, Molino started working for Grand Hôtel. The drawn novel was so successful and well done that there were not enough artists who were able to do it, until someone came up with the idea to replace drawings with photos. That was the beginning of the photonovel.

You can see that there is, although forgotten, a relationship between the two genres – comics and film photonovels. In those years, when an artist worked on a comic, the page layout was determined before the drawings. The artist received an already defined page. The same process was applied to the creation of film photonovels. The first ones didn’t really look like photonovels: they give the impression that everything is drawn, because the pictures of actors were only taken in front of a white wall and then the settings were added. Since it was too expensive to build real sets – and, in popular culture, everything is about money – , this process was much cheaper. It is by studying the history of these genres that you discover other connections.

Today – or better, in recent times – one of the new forms of comics is based on a combination of photographs and drawings. This is not new either, since already in 1930s comics, when there wasn’t enough time to make all the drawings, they simply added pictures. Having to produce comics every week, those artists had to deliver three pages a week, according to the contract they had signed: if they were ill or unable to finish their pages, the publisher would simply add pictures. Comics today are no longer a popular medium: they have been gentrified. The most popular comics today are manga. So the notion of “popular” is very complex and has to be contextualised yet again.

In your opinion, what expressive or epistemic dimensions open up in a phototext or a transmedial work that instead a novel – bound by its formal unity – cannot fully achieve? What possibilities arise, more precisely, from the gap – or the tension – between different artistic codes?

I would like to start by saying something about the phototext as a transmedial work. You seem to suggest that a phototext broadens or enlarges what a novel or a text is capable of doing. Let me start by discussing the resistance to the phototext. There is, historically speaking, a strong resistance against this genre – you can notice it by studying the history of the novel. There were very few phototexts, which could be found only in so-called marginal genres: can you imagine, for instance, La coscienza di Zeno accompanied by photos? This resistance has to do with the fact that people, for a long time, have been thinking that adding a picture narrows down what a text is doing. A text can be very suggestive and leave a lot of things open to interpretation. So when you add a visual representation to the description, for instance, of a character, many readers will think that the idea of the character they created in their minds while reading the text is much richer than what they can see in the image, and therefore they won’t appreciate the presence of the image. While this claim has been hegemonic for a long time, today this perception is changing, although that does not mean that all phototext combinations are appreciated in the same way.

In this context, there is also an idea of fidelity which is considered negative. To produce a phototext in which pictures merely illustrate the text is generally considered useless. At the same time, the fact that one is not allowed to simply reproduce the text faithfully can be a wonderful creative constraint. While normally, the general rule is that what you show should not be completely separate from what you tell, but different enough to make it creative. Yet there are artists who truly show what they tell. Having a perfect match between the object in the text and the image can seem silly, but it can also be a stimulating challenge. Instead of showing something entirely different, the artist tries to depict exactly what is described, and the very effort to be faithful can sometimes produce results that are odd, yet surprisingly interesting. W. G. Sebald is playing with that, since – after all – everything that he shows is also described. But he succeeds in doing something which is, at the same time, very faithful and slightly different. So, in my opinion, it’s a good way of playing with that hegemonic rule that you have to do something radically different.

The case of Nadja (1928) by André Breton is just as fascinating. Breton explicitly says, at the very beginning of the book, that he’s not writing a novel – which is totally false. Then he claims that it’s a document, which has no descriptions because descriptions are boring and readers tend to skip those, hence he states that all the images replace descriptions. These images are never artistic images: he uses postcards and a very banal photography, but it’s extremely important to point out that all these pictures have a caption. Normally, these captions shouldn’t be there, so they already create a contradiction. In addition, through the pages of Nadja, he does not simply insert images but he actually explains them himself. So instead of having photographs that take the place of absent descriptions, the images somehow replace the text but they are still described in another way. The discussion that originates from this example is similar to the one about originality.

To summarize: there is a very ancient resistance to illustration in general, except for the so-called “non-illustrative” illustrations. There is a very, very large number of novels which are usually illustrated by photographs. But all these illustrated novels, or even illustrated versions of novels, were almost always limited editions. This means that, once a book had a lot of success, there were other publishers who asked the authorization to make a kind of semi-deluxe reprint of the normal publication adding pictures.
All that phototextual tradition is completely absent from literary history, even though some of these phototexts are extremely interesting. It’s a kind of hidden content that has to do with the way in which the publishing industry and also the academic system collaborate with the publishing industry to promote a certain type of formal presentation, which excludes illustrations and therefore phototexts. This process has only recently begun to change, but it’s absolutely amazing that so little of the phototextual tradition remains in general literary history. The case is comparable to that of the film photonovel in the history of cinema, and there’s much to rediscover as well. From here, we can return to the question of which version is the original: the illustrated or the non-illustrated?

In the novel Faire sécession (2017), you seem to play with different literary genres (novel, reportage, letter). The visual component, on the other hand, consists only of illustrations created specifically for this book, while other potential visual elements such as photographs and figures are merely alluded to. Why did you choose to leave them out?

The main reason is that the text itself is already a kind of hodgepodge of very different things. And if I had tried to do something similar at the level of the visual part, then it would have become somewhat chaotic. Nevertheless, I think I’m quite explicit in identifying other visual sources («“Faire sécession”, un roman historique entre procédé et bricolage», 2019). For instance, there’s a collection of more or less one hundred bubble-gum cards of the American Civil War called Civil War News which dates back to the Sixties. When I was a child – about five or six years old – I used to buy bubble-gum not for the gum itself, but for the images. You could find these kind of cards for anything you could imagine: from football stars to movie stars, in very different products. There were also didactic series like this one about the story of the Civil War in the United States between 1861 and 1865. It was published in America on the occasion of the centenary, and the unsold material was dumped on the European market. At that time, I didn’t speak a single word of English, but I gathered the complete collection.

Another series worth mentioning is Mars Attacks, a story about a Martian invasion. The movie Mars Attacks! (1996) is a kind of variation of the film The War of the Worlds (1953), but a little known fact is that it was originally a bubble-gum series which has been subsequently transcribed into a movie. In fact, the movie is a transposition of the bubble-gum card collection Mars Attacks (1962). Once again, the notion of original becomes problematic. Moreover, the texts of Mars Attacks is a plagiarism of the story narrated and directed by Orson Welles in The War of the Worlds (1938), a radio play where he invented a Martian invasion in the late Thirties, adapting the H. G. Wells novel of the same name (1898) – as would later do the movie.

I know the iconography of that period quite well: it’s very wide, very diverse, and absolutely fascinating, but if I would have inserted all that material, as well as the photographs, in my book, I don’t think it would have worked. It’s kind of a stylistic decision, if you want. The same goes for the typography of the text, which is very homogeneous since I decided not to play with it, combining a different typography for each different genre. But in the end, I preferred to have images which are not illustrative in the immediate sense.

What roles do spatiality and temporality play in your poetry? What marks the shift from a generic place to a specific, resonant endroit? I’m thinking of the poetry collection Mon jardin des plantes. Poèmes et photographies (2024), which conveys a distinctive sense of time. Would you say that different places in your poetry function, in a sense, as chronotopes? How do space and time intertwine in these places, and what kind of temporal experience do they create for the reader?

The notion of “chronotope” is originally developed by Bakhtin in relation to the novel, and it is rarely applied to poetry: its use in this context involves a certain conceptual shift. The notion itself is also quite complex when you read Bakhtin closely. A term which is more used is what Foucault calls “heterotopia”, namely an endroit, a specific place where two different logics, spatial and temporal, are conflicting or meeting. So my answer would be something like this: in poetry, these places “become” endroits.

My interest in – and enjoyment of – walking around narrows down to very specific places which, for me, almost inevitably possess a kind of temporal thickness. So I’m drawn to the attempt of playing with temporal layers in specific places that, at first sight, may seem very flat and deprived of history – very banal places, in many cases. And then, time enters, and that’s really what I want to explore.

Let me give you one silly example. Parma houses the wonderful Museo Bodoniano, a collection which includes an interesting section on typography. The work of Bodoni, as a typographer, is still widely regarded, certainly in poetry. And right near the museum, in the piazza in front of the palace, there’s an open space which is the result of the bombing during the war. Around it there are several cafés, and in the one I went to for a sandwich, the walls were covered with film posters of neorealist movies set in the Parma area. I love this kind of situation: in a specific endroit, you suddenly fall through time, finding the past.

I’ve forgotten most of my Latin, but I still feel very close to that language. Latin has a structure that offers something we no longer have in French – nor in Italian or in English: declensions. The different forms of a word – in accusative or genitive case, for instance – have been replaced by prepositions, which makes the language heavier, slower, more explicit, less concise. Whereas in Latin, you can say many things with very few words – Dura lex, sed lex. Describing something in a few short words is something I’m also trying to do, since in a verse, the number of words is limited – and their position is forced, to a certain degree – or else you lose tension. If, as soon as you start reading a word, you already know how the line or the sentence will end, then poetry is not functioning at its best: you should be surprised by every new word – like in English, which can rely on the use of a lot of monosyllabic words. It’s not something you can fully calculate, but ideally, every letter counts. Still, to the reader, it shouldn’t appear as the result of hard work or as an artificial effort. Latin helps me compensate for this specific problem I experience with French – and I think it’s a problem of Italian as well. In French, we say “ça sent la sueur” (“you can smell the sweat”), and it’s not a good thing. The reading should feel more or less fluent, yet not so immediate that you do not want to reread the poem, because each time you go through the text you should, theoretically speaking, continue to discover new things. And with long words, that simply doesn’t work, unless you play with the contrast between short and long words – that’s also possible, but then you really have to do something creative with it.

In conclusion, if you were to recommend a work – poetic, visual, or hybrid – to a young student to begin thinking critically about the interaction between word and image, which one would you choose?

I would certainly recommend the 1962 short film La jetée by Chris Marker. The film’s genre – besides science-fiction – can be defined as photo-roman. In French, roman-photo is the common term. However, when you try to elevate or experiment with the format, the term photo-roman is used instead of roman-photo, at least in those years, so the choice of the term photo-roman for La jetée already makes it a kind of manifesto. For most of the film – with a few exceptions – there are no moving images: it’s like a slideshow, but not just an alternation of one image after another, because the duration of each image varies. There are overlaps, black screens, and other expedients. Furthermore, the story is really touching. The juxtaposition of the text – the voiceover narrating the story –, the images and the soundtrack, the relationship between what you hear and what you see: all of this creates a sort of photo-text interplay. There is a book version of the film – with text in both English and French – called La jetée: ciné-roman (1992), which is totally different from a typical film photonovel (or photo-roman). In this book, all the images are presented as a string, so you have the possibility to read all of them from left to right, one after another. Even though the book is bilingual and may seem to offer the same text in French and English, a closer look reveals significant differences between the two language versions. Furthermore, compared to the film, the images have been selected and edited in order to make the reading as fluent as possible.

As an example, there is one scene – which is already something special from a directorial point of view, that starts with a close-up of the female protagonist sleeping; she then very, very slowly opens her eyes and looks at the camera. How would you transpose that from film to a photo or novel format? The answer is in the book, which proposes a very different solution. Try to think about what you would do: it’s always a good exercise. It’s always interesting, before discovering a new version, to think about how you would do it, how others do it, what the genre conventions are, and so on. Phototexts never exist in just one original format – they circulate.

Once again, a remarkable case is offered by W. G. Sebald. My favourite book by the German author is his first novel, Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle., 1990). The very first chapter of Vertigo is about Stendhal crossing the Alps with Napoleon’s army. Stendhal recounts it as part of his autobiography, but he wrote it when he was already an aging man, who did not always remember very faithfully his experiences as a young man. He had run away from home because he couldn’t stand his father, joined Napoleon to go to Italy, and then also went to Russia. Later, he rewrote his memoirs about thirty years afterwards, but by that time he had forgotten almost everything; hence, to compensate for his memory, he added drawings. Although he claimed that these drawings were showing what he described, they are actually memories of other visual representations of the same events he had seen. This whole process is absolutely fascinating: Sebald plays with all these elements, as did Breton with Nadja – both absolute masterpieces. Breton’s book is avant-garde literature, but he writes it in the style of eighteenth-century French. When Breton gave radio interviews, he only agreed to do so if the journalists gave him the questions beforehand, so that he could prepare the answers and then perform them on air (in fact, exactly the opposite of what we are doing now). The performed version is yet another form that complicates the conception of the original, the question that we discussed several times during our talk and which brings it to a logical conclusion.

Padua, May 7, 2025

Interview conducted and edited by Vera Marson, Leonardo Guizzetti, and Giacomo Bottura