“La ventana indiscreta” de Alfred Hitchcock como Cineromanzo. La adaptación como transmedialización

Expanding on the theoretical and terminological framework on inter-  and transmediality proposed by the authors in a previous Tropelias contribution (n.27), this essay explores in a both historical and narratological perspective the genre of the film photo novel or cineromanzo, a widely popular, but short-lived nowadays largely forgotten case of “narrated cinema” or “cinema in print” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Adopting the visual language of the photo novel as well as the countless constraints of the publication context of the women’s magazines of that day, the film photo novel seems at first sight a typical example of what goes wrong when film adaptations are obliged to be as “faithful” as possible. In practice however, the film photo novel proved capable of various innovations. This article offers a close-reading of the Italian film photo novel of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which demonstrates the creative possibilities of a despised creative industry while illustrating a popular transmedialization process which comes before the last generation transmedial narratives.