Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as ‘cineromanzo’

This chapter discusses a case study, the Italian cineromanzo version of Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window. It introduces some of the general features of the cineromanzo format and gives a taste of the specific answers given by the anonymous makers of this work to the many challenges and difficulties raised by the transmedial adaptation of a film into a cineromanzo having to obey a large number of rules imposed by the global host medium of the photo novel. The cineromanzo offers a self-enclosed story, where nothing essential, storywise speaking, is missing and that functions as a real double of the film. It uses the key characteristics of the photo novel language and the magazine format in a satisfying way. None of these elements copy what happens in Hitchcock’s movie, but the way in which La Finestra sul cortile implements them in an overall strategy of medium-specificity demonstrates what cineromanzi can do.