Introduction: Hall of Shame

Susanita reads photoromances—a form of graphic storytelling, including captions and balloons but using photographs instead of drawings (figure I.1).1 Mafalda, and many people like her, considers them cheap and trite narratives of love relationships—in a word, stupidities. Demeaned and chastised in public opinion, photoromances have not received much attention in scholarship either: dismissed as accessory or derivative forms of women’s literature or attacked as tools of cultural domination, especially in leftist critiques of mass culture, in Italian and Latin American Studies.2 To counter such negative responses and lack of interest, the goal of this book is to demonstrate the relevance of Italian photoromances in a transnational market. Significantly, strategies of narrative production across media platforms (comics, cinema, pulp fiction), business synergies between cultural industries (publishing, film, television, music), and participatory culture have all defined these hybrid texts, I argue, in ways that anticipated by a few decades the dynamics of production, distribution, and reception thriving under the current digital revolution. Further, this book aims to review the role female readers have played in the making and success of the photoromance industry, and to defy the social stigma historically attached to reading photoromances. Throughout the globe, critics did not grant readers like Susanita any agency, consistently attributing the stultifying and/or corrupting effects of sentimental narratives (in either moral or political terms) to the passivity, naïveté, or blunt stupidity of their consumers, particularly women. These critics also historically constructed the image of a victimized and helpless female fan, looking to escape her daily life in the fantasy of romantic plots (as in Susanita’s own response to Mafalda’s comment).3 My research demonstrates that derogative portrayals of female fans ultimately reveal not only cultural anxieties toward the spread of mass culture, but also political resistance to the possible appropriation of this culture by female audiences.

I am using the term fan here to indicate the affective as much as irrational bond that characterizes the relationship between readers and photoromances in their negative representations. It is fandom that left- and right-wing Italian and French politicians anathematized, especially in the 1950s and 1960s; fans whom films and newsreels, television hosts and journalists ridicule, until today, in Italy and abroad. When involved in the business, directors or performers (especially when they already had or wished for a film career) felt the need to justify their decision on economic needs or argued that they thought of embarking on a pedagogical mission.4 In both cases, the effect is to create a hierarchy between producers and consumers in the name of proximity: the latter are too close to both texts and celebrities to be able to critically approach them. In this respect, the photoromance fan is inevitably feminized: women are both the privileged subjects of representation, in parodies or critique, and the main target audience; moreover, the media itself is labeled as “feminine” for it prompts shallow, emotional, and irrational behaviors. In this book, I show how female fans of photoromances embody the culture of consumption that is nurtured by this industry and that is threatening to authors (both writers and film directors) and their intellectual and political allies. Neither emancipated nor coopted by the media system, these fans, I argue, undermined the patriarchal order of Italian culture and society, particularly in the fifties and sixties, as well as the aims of radical feminist groups in the 1970s.

A Controversial Medium

Also known as roman-photo (in French) and fotonovela (in Spanish), the so-called fotoromanzo was born in Italy in 1947 and then successfully exported all over the world, selling millions of copies per week.5 The Italian neologism has different translations in English; although sometimes referred to as photonovel, I prefer to use photoromance in this book since the term appears in the title of Darling and Kiss, the two magazines that first introduced the genre in the United States, in the late seventies.6 The first photoromance appeared in the Italian weekly magazine Sogno (Dream), published by Angelo Rizzoli and Co. (from now on, Rizzoli).7 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore’s illustrated magazine Bolero Film, the first to use the term, came out a few months after, while Edizioni Universo’s Grand Hotel, already popular for its drawn romances, followed a few years later in 1950.8 In the early fifties, Grand Hotel, Bolero Film, and Sogno each sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and about one and a half million altogether.9 These numbers do not include those readers who did not buy the magazines themselves, and who either listened to the stories during communal readings or who shared the issue among friends (in this case, reaching a number above four million).10 Several other publications with a focus on photoromances came out concurrently or a few years later, most noticeably Cino Del Duca’s Intimità (Intimacy) and Mondadori Editore’s Confidenze (Secrets), which also included narratives of so-called “real-life” experiences modeling the American magazine True Story, created by Bernarr Macfadden in 1924. By the early 1960s, 10.8 million Italians read a photoromance each week; in the 1970s, this number declined but remained high, around seven million.11 All magazines feature various columns from relationship counseling to cooking advice, as well as romantic novels published in installments and illustrated news. Among others, Bolero Film defines itself on the cover page as a “weekly publication of photoromances, short stories, entertainment,” while Confidenze’s original title is Confidenze di Liala, using the name of the most popular romance writer in Italy, Liala, so that the magazine’s content would be immediately familiar to buyers. However, Bolero Film and the others eventually became known simply as fotoromanzi, and today are still called this. Initially, the term was used in the press to distinguish them from other women’s magazines, despite the fact that the latter also included photoromances (also employed was fumetto, the Italian word for comics). Such distinction pertained more appropriately to the economic and cultural strata of their respective (preferred) readership. Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, while women’s magazines were directed at middle-class housewives, photoromances targeted working-class women with little or no education.12 In fact, data collected through the decades show that a good percentage of this audience was masculine: in the mid-1970s, 30 percent of readers of Bolero Film and Grand Hotel were men.13 There were also considerable differences between readerships of the main series: both younger and older readers from all parts of society bought Grand Hotel; mostly young girls between sixteen and thirty-four years old and from the lower-middle classes read Bolero Film and Sogno. Lumping together such variety of readers under the feminine and working-class labels was indeed a marketing strategy and, at the same time, a cultural bias. Publishers sought to tap the increasing purchase power of women and established long-term partnerships with advertisers of cheap personal or household products (including soap, toothpaste, detergents) and small appliances. Critics from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum (intellectuals, journalists, Communist politicians, Catholic government officials) intersected gender and class definitions with the intention (or the effect) of demeaning the reading material. Roba da servette (“stuff for female servants”) is the derogative (at times condescending) expression used in the copious news and journal articles that debated the cultural and moral value of photoromances, in Italy and abroad, and that became a widespread opinion still seen today in the press and used in everyday conversations. These attitudes were common throughout the fifties and sixties in other national contexts and fit into a current broader debate against popular culture, in both Europe and the United States.14 The same treatment given to pulp romances and film melodrama in this period applies in greater scope to fotoromanzi, fotonovelas, and roman photos: all of which are considered repetitive and shallow in content and, moreover, using techniques borrowed from other media (film, comics, photography) in cheap and standardized packages to indoctrinate or stultify women.15

Depictions of photoromance readers in Italian films ranged from pathetic or ironic perspectives that attempted to downplay the phenomenon to bitter, dramatic, or sarcastic visions of the end of civilization.16 Among others, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, dir. Federico Fellini, 1952, written by Fellini and Antonioni) attacks the photoromance industry (its improvised, inefficient, unprofessional mode of production) through the story of a female fan who is, according to Jan Baetens, “brainwashed by the exotic dream world of the first photonovels.”17 In the film, the protagonist Wanda believes that her favorite photoromance hero (interpreted by comic actor Alberto Sordi) could save her from the dull existence of a petty-bourgeois wife in provincial Southern Italy. While in Rome with her husband for their honeymoon, Wanda looks for her idol only to find out that he is, in fact, neither romantic nor heroic but rather a fake, like the whole industry. The film satirically represents a day on the set at a Roman beach, supposedly the exotic landscape of a romantic story, where actors are totally incompetent and the director a frustrated boss. Wanda even attempts to commit suicide, once her dream is shattered, although she jumps in the Tiber where the water is only up to her knees. But in the end, she goes back to her spouse and the film closes with them getting a special meeting with the pope. Wanda’s agency as a fan is sporadically addressed in the story, for example, when she first goes to visit the publisher not only to meet her favorite celebrity but also to hand in the manuscript of a photoromance she had written. Ultimately, though, Wanda appears as a gullible woman mystified by the fantasy of her own emancipation, and unable to break through the conformism of her marriage. In sum, The White Sheik participates in the public shaming of women who read photoromances. This is evident in the film’s reception; according to film critic Ezio Colombo, writing soon after its release at the Venice Film Festival in 1952, The White Sheik represented “a very widespread mentality of the time” precisely through its female protagonist and her “limited existence.”18 To quote Mario Dal Pra in an interview for Corriere della sera: “It is not by any chance that women are especially passionate towards fotoromanzi, [since] there is always in them a need for abandonment that is typically feminine.”19

Italian film directors and critics parodied or mocked the photoromance industry and its female readership on the basis of cultural biases that were the very same ones used to attack film melodramas as products of entertainment, with respect to art cinema. In 1952, journalist Giorgio Capua, from the pages of the fan magazine Hollywood, claimed that “fumetti killed cinema” (by which he meant photoromances).20 In the same article, he insisted that “fumetti” were to be blamed because they were responsible for diverting audiences from appropriate behaviors. According to Capua, rather than engaging in discussions on film form, as they did in the past, Italians now wasted their time in gossiping about the whereabouts of photoromance’s diva.21 The “evil of the century,” as he calls it in another article, was responsible for the degradation of film viewers.22

And yet, Hollywood was devoted, for the most part, as its title conveys, to the discussion of American films and the private engagements and public commitments of movie stars (both Italian and foreign). In this sense, the rhetoric used in Capua’s tirade with regard to the photoromance industry and its stars ironically corresponded to the same that had been employed to derogate fan magazines and the film industries that supported them. Indeed, those who loved Raffaello Matarazzo’s weepies, starring film stars Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari (often featured in fan magazines), had the same appreciation for photoromances. It is well known that his Catene (Chains, 1949) and Tormento (Torment, 1950) were titles of likewise lucrative products published in Bolero Film before being explosively successful films, and that both Matarazzo and Bolero Film were looked down on by film critics who promoted cinema as an art or as the political tool to emancipate the masses and build a national identity. In other words, if photoromances were threatening the predominant role occupied by cinema in the cultural hierarchy, they were in good company with genre movies.

Hollywood films, Matarazzo’s melodramas, and photoromances were similarly blamed for escapism and as tools of capitalist domination. In a revealing comment to a reader’s letter, the leftist film journal Cinema Nuovo explicitly rejected the idea that some attention should be given to the analysis of photoromances. Writing to Guido Aristarco, editor of the journal and well-known film critic, Dario Magno from Lucca narrated that he had borrowed from a fellow soldier a copy of a photoromance based on the film La notte (The Night), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1962.23 He noticed that the story emphasized conservative ideas that were absent in the film, such as the superiority of marriage over fleeting occasions of infidelity. In his conclusion, which is worth quoting at length, Magno complained about a typical disregard of popular audiences: “I imagine your resistance towards this kind of popular literature, and I agree with you. But don’t you think that, in the context of complex interests in cinema that move beyond aesthetics to connect to sociological and political issues, it could be useful to examine features and nature of the influence that [this literature] exercises on your readers? I think it’s unfortunate that crime and sci-fi fictions, comics and photoromances have so many clueless readers and that no critic would take them into consideration, on the other hand, so that to study their affect—and its mode—on the audience.”24 The interesting point is that not only did Magno blame Cinema Nuovo for ignoring the social and political relevance of “popular literature,” but he also criticized the idea that its audiences were necessarily “clueless” and therefore not worth any critical support by the experts in the field.

Aristarco did not publish his response; instead, Magno’s letter is followed by a message from the “Italian Film Circle.” According to this message, a film series will soon promote “lo spirito del cinema di autore” (the spirit of auteur cinema): “Films that only from complete independence from the economic structure in place, which is too binding, they can get that degree of freedom and inspiration to influence deeply their time, the culture of their time, instead of being subjected to the worst myths.”25 This statement does not answer Magno’s request directly, but rather sends a clear message: since photoromances are not independent from the market, they are not free and thus able to really have an impact on culture, in its historical development. In the Italian Film Circle’s words, Magno is wrong in believing that pulp fictions actually mattered (i.e., they can have historical relevance) and, perhaps, he is as “clueless” as any other reader of photoromances. Cinema Nuovo’s negative account went hand in hand with the idea that consumers were helpless victims in the hands of the cultural industry.

This position was not unique among film critics and artists, even when they had something to do with its success, like screenwriter and director Cesare Zavattini. In fact, the engagement of figures such as Zavattini in the photoromance industry addresses a broader issue at stake here, and fundamental to the postwar period: the question of the popular as belonging to the working classes, to the nation, and to the People, in light of Antonio Gramsci’s theorization, on one hand, and that of the indoctrinating role of the cultural industry, on the other hand, as in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis.26 Zavattini’s ambiguous position toward the photoromance as popular reading exemplifies the conundrum that is inherent in the historical use of this term, particularly on the left, in the context of a postwar industrialized society. The binary between popular and mass culture was politically unsustainable, albeit it granted the industry complete power over its audiences who could not emancipate themselves without the help of the enlightened (male) intellectual.27 It is well known that Zavattini was somehow involved in the birth of the photoromance as a medium (paternity then contested by Luciano Pedrocchi, editor of Bolero Film) and that he had authored a script on which the photoromance “La colpa” (Guilt) was based, published in the same magazine in 1962. The story of a young girl who is raped and gets pregnant was then published under a different author’s name (Cesare Altieri), but a recent exhibition has shown that Zavattini was indeed willing to enmesh in a culture dictated by the market, if it was for an educational cause.28 At the same time, the so-called father of Neorealism did not give much credit to readers and ultimately aligned with Cinema Nuovo in evaluating their intellectual abilities, as stated in an interview with Antonio Cifariello in the documentary Il mondo dei fotoromanzi (The World of Photoromances). Broadcasted by the Italian public channel RAI 1 in 1962, the goal of the film was precisely to undertake an objective inquiry into the factors that brought so much success to the magazines, as Magno had recommended to Aristarco. Among other intellectuals interviewed, Zavattini is the most explicit in his considerations on the naiveté of readers. He states, “the majority can identify themselves [in photoromances], find their own sentiments, which means that unfortunately these are problems of underdeveloped people.”29 For this reason, Zavattini continues, intellectuals should learn how to speak to these people, not only to the elites; however, they should never “vulgarize” literature.30

Throughout the decades, condescending attitudes toward photoromance readers such as that of Zavattini worsened into political condemnation. While Aristarco basically ignored the importance of the phenomenon, filmmakers like Giuseppe Ferrara argued that “i fumetti sono le regioni sottosviluppate dei nostri sentimenti” (photoromances are the underdeveloped regions of our feelings).31 With the advent of radical movements, the sexual revolution, and second-wave feminism, photoromances signified the rise of consumerist culture and the role that the latter played in the oppression of women (specifically of the working classes). Critics maintained the argument that publishers mystified the capitalist system and embedded in readers’ minds the patriarchal logic that sustained it. In the words of Arturo Quintavalle, “The photoromance has a specific, mythical function that is the projection of the ego against the superego, a projection that takes place within the limits established by the bourgeoisie: economic growth, marriage among equals, competition and, then, at the affective level: eternal feelings, paternalistic familial relationships, servile understanding of the woman inside the house.”32 Further, at a time when critics of popular culture were divided between “apocalyptic” and “integrated” to use Umberto Eco’s 1964 expression with regard to the strenuous antagonists and the mildly accepting critics of the cultural industries, photoromances were singled out as the commercial product specifically responsible for—in the words of Italian writer and journalist Luigi Compagnone to the director of Bolero Film Luciano Pedrocchi—Italy’s cultural backwardness.33 Even to someone like Quintavalle, who was otherwise open to pop culture, no doubts were left when it came to reading photoromances politically: “For these kinds of comics, we can only talk about fascism.”34

A Worldwide Success

This univocal condemnation in national public debates is striking when one considers the global market in which photoromances thrived, beginning in Italy and across the Alps, and to the farthest shores of Latin America. Not only had photoromances been published both in Italy and in France since the late 1940s, but soon they were also exported to other European countries and to Argentina and Brazil, followed by Mexico, Columbia, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Cameroon, South Africa, and the United States.35 The personal tales behind the proliferation of photoromances in French- and Spanish-speaking countries are fascinating in and of themselves. After World War II, emigration of key figures in the Italian publishing industry during the Fascist period generated international business transactions between Italy, France, and Latin America. Two entrepreneurs are especially significant: Cino Del Duca and Cesare Civita, who acquired copyrights and created franchises of the two most important Italian photoromances, respectively, Grand Hotel and Bolero Film. Del Duca (brother of Domenico and Alceo, owners of Grand Hotel’s Edizioni Universo) moved to Paris in 1932 for political reasons, and from there he continued to work as founding member of La Moderna, publishing pulp fictions (romantic novels, adventures) as well as the first Italian youth comics Il Monello (1933) and L’Intrepido (1931).36 In 1947, soon after his brothers created Edizioni Universo, Del Duca’s Les Editions Mondiales launched Nous Deux, modeled on Grand Hotel, and publishing its photoromances in translation. As Sylvette Giet writes, the French magazine “frenchized” the Italian original, by translating toponymies and anthroponyms, modifying or eliminating names of writers and drawing artists.37 Del Duca soon became the leader in the French market of women’s magazines (the so-called presse du cœur, literally “heart’s press”), producing fifteen different titles. As previously mentioned, he also maintained business in Italy, publishing the women’s magazine Intimità. According to correspondence with Arnoldo Mondadori, he also had in mind a project for a German franchise named Mondial Verlag, which would have published a photoromance similar to Bolero Film. Eventually, Del Duca and Mondadori could not come to an agreement, but Mondial Verlag did publish a German version of Grand Hotel, with the title Bei Dir, in 1954–1955.

South America had its own counterpart to Cino Del Duca: Cesare Civita.38 The two men’s paths are similar insofar as they both were involved in transnational business relations, between Italy and their respective countries of residence. As Eugenia Scarzanella maintains, Civita created a publishing empire not only from his own efforts but also by leveraging a network of family and business relations that connected his company to the local Argentinian-Italian and Jewish community, on one hand, and to the Italian publishing industry on the other.39 Born in New York, his parents both Italian, Civita began his career in Milan where, in 1936, he was the director of Walt Disney Italy and a top manager in the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (from now on, Mondadori) corporation. After the promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws in 1938, Civita moved to the United States and then to Buenos Aires, with the goal of exporting Walt Disney characters to that country.40 In Buenos Aires, in 1941 he created Editorial Abril with partners Alberto Levi and Paolo Terni, initially publishing children’s books and Disney comics, and later expanding with an innovative women’s magazine (Claudia), an automobile publication (Corsa), illustrated weeklies Sietes Dias and Panorama, and the comics magazine Cinemisterio, with the collaboration of famous graphic artists such as Hugo Pratt and Hector German Oesterheld. Around the same time, Civita’s brother Victor created a branch in Brazil; a franchise opened in Mexico and distribution facilities in other Latin American countries. Editorial Abril thus became the largest editing corporation in Latin America. In 1948, Abril published the first issue of Idilio, which included two photoromances from Bolero Film in translation (“Amor dulce embriaguez” by Damiano Damiani and “Tormento” by Francesco Cancellieri), in addition to stories created and performed by Argentinean artists.41 Abril soon expanded its market of photoromances in Brazil with the magazine Capricho and with another publication in Argentina, Nocturno, which published the same photoromances that appeared serially in Idilio in single issues. Mondadori had an exclusive copyright agreement for its photoromances and comics with Surameris, the in-house syndicate of Abril, following Civita’s trip to Europe in 1947. These imports constituted the majority of photoromances published in both Argentinean and Brazilian magazines. Surameris and Mondadori may also have coproduced some stories, as some photoromances published in Bolero Film explicitly state in the opening titles.42 The cultural importance of these business transactions is explained in Scarzanella’s analysis. In her words, “the Italian fotonovela accompanied the last Italian immigration wave in Argentina and was vehicle of integration.”43

The Photoromance in Scholarship

Despite their international success and cultural value, photoromances have been at best ignored in academia, in Jan Baetens’s words, because they are stupid, poor, and repetitive; or condemned, because they are ideologically “highly suspect.”44 Italian scholars have dismissed photoromances as samples of “para-letteratura” (“adjacent literature”) and excluded them from historiographies. It is enough to mention that in his six-hundred-plus-page history of publisher Arnoldo Mondadori, Enrico Decleva only gives half a page of attention to both Bolero Film and Confidenze, even though he contends somewhere else in the same book that periodicals were in fact pivotal to the well-being of the company.45 In total, photoromance scholarship consisted until very recently of a few monographs and articles in Latin American studies of popular culture, French semiotics and cultural studies, and Italian literary studies. In the last ten years, Baetens is the first author to have undertaken a study of the “photonovel medium,” while Anna Bravo’s Il fotoromanzo (2006) and Silvana Turzio’s Il fotoromanzo: Metaforfosi di storie lacrimevoli (Metamorphoses of Tearful Stories, 2019) are the first important historical commentaries on the cultural phenomenon of the photoromance in Italian. Sylvette Giet’s feminist reading of Nous Deux and Isabelle Antonutti’s broad analysis of Cino Del Duca’s publishing empire are other important contributions to the field that move beyond depictions of photoromances as tools of indoctrination (and in the case of imported magazines from Western countries to Latin America, as instruments of cultural imperialism).46 Alternatively, like pulp romances, these illustrated magazines are a means for women to find refuge from an everyday life of sorrow: a quite common perspective among Italian and French scholars such as Evelyne Sullerot, Ermanno Detti, and Serge Saint-Michel.47 In La presse féminine (1963), Sullerot blames her male colleagues for not taking photoromances seriously and roughly dismissing them as bourgeois ideology (despite not having read them). According to Sullerot, women reading photoromance are not, for the most part, “in charge of their own lives” and thus, they find an escape in romantic stories that celebrate “the revenge of masochism”—that is, the success of the same behavior that made them accomplices in their own oppression.48 These interpretations are largely based on the understanding that readers are feminine and passive receptacles of popular culture. In her report to the UNESCO on Women and the Cultural Industries in 1981, Michele Mattelart had questioned this idea and argued that women could be aware of the alienating structural features of the messages of the cultural industries, yet the visual-textual narratives continued to fascinate them. The question becomes, in Mattelart’s words: “What mass masochism, what suicidal class attitude can explain this fascination?”49 Her analysis concludes (once again) that romantic narratives function as compensation for women’s dissatisfaction not simply as vehicles of capitalist ideology or patriarchy, or both, and that the mechanism of fascination may be due to the satisfaction that narrative devices can provide to delighted readers.50

However, Mattelart arrives at her conclusion, in Janice Radway’s words, “on the basis of a performance of that text, which no individual in the group [of readers] would recognize.”51 With these words, Radway referred to common critiques of the effects of romantic pulp fictions on American female readers that did not take into consideration what the entire act of reading meant to the actual women who bought them. Radway’s ethnographic study of women reading romances in Midwest America (1984) considered not only the individual’s negotiation of the text, but also the social dimension of reading practices. According to Radway, the habit of finding space to read romances sustained a kind of mild defiance to patriarchy because it denied (albeit temporarily) the demands of a family, it was seen by readers as the signs of a woman’s ability to do something for herself alone, and it provided the same readers with the opportunity to indulge in positive feelings about a heroine and women in general.52 In the words of Joost van Loon, the desire of women reading romances is “at once an expression of women’s agency and a discursively constructed node of (patriarchal) power-relations.”53

In the case of photoromances, there are only a few studies that approach the question of their political and cultural relevance either by looking at its reception or through audience research methodologies.54 To my knowledge, only Giet has considered the role of readers as active participants in the cultural and social experience of reading, although her analysis is limited to the case of Nous Deux. Milly Buonanno’s inquiry on women’s magazines of 1975 demonstrated an attempt to expand textual analysis into a sociological inquiry on the composition of readerships and their habits of consumption. Buonanno highlighted the necessity of considering the gendered object constructed by so-called women’s magazines not as a universal subject but as a target audience, whose desires were nurtured and affected by the publishing system of production and consumption. The imagined “woman” that allegedly homogenized the readerships of magazines as different as Grazia and Bolero Film actually changed in relation to the different economic, social, and cultural background of the women who bought, borrowed, and shared the issues. By quantitative surveys, Buonanno showed that photoromances specifically targeted women of low income and education, who lived in provincial towns and identified as housewives or working class. Therefore, she argued (again, once again) that these particular magazines among the many considered for and about women were tools of domination in the hands of capitalism. Female readers were oppressed first as members of the working classes, and not only as women, by means of the ideological content spread via the romantic narratives.

Buonanno attempted to historicize the readership and thus to address the question of the texts’ politics of gender more specifically; however, she dismissed the role played by readers in meaning making. Considering Stuart Hall’s definition of “reading” as negotiation, Buonanno’s account of the social and cultural dimensions of photoromances failed to investigate how Italian women negotiated their relationship with the texts.55 Furthermore, given that magazines were also shared and discussed among readers, in the words of Henry Jenkins, “we have to think about negotiation differently—not in terms of how an individual negotiates their relationship with a text but rather how community members negotiate interpretations (and rules for forming interpretations) among each other.”56 I am not arguing here that Italian women who read photoromances necessarily understand the universal model of womanhood constructed and promoted in their narratives in ways that were radically different from those explained in Buonanno’s or Sullerot’s analyses; rather, that neither Sullerot nor Buonanno considered the importance of what the very practice of buying, sharing, finding the time to read, and talking about these stories meant for them. Instead, I agree with Giet who argues that the photoromance magazine Nous Deux becomes an “objet d’une consommation socialisatrice” (object of socializing consumption).57 To put it another way, in light of current feminist scholarship in cultural studies, we cannot simply read photoromances as tools of capitalist and patriarchal domination while knowing that the women who read them actually enjoy them. In addition, since reading is one practice within the larger context of fandom, we need to understand the importance of a common identity and a shared culture in relation to individual responses to mass-produced cultural texts. Finally, I claim that we are bound to review the active role that fans have played and continue to play vis-à-vis not only the texts but also the industry.

The Photoromance and Convergence Culture

In an article published in the Washington Post in 1979, American journalist Alan M. Kriegsman blamed the Roman publisher Lancio for invading the U.S. market with publications that were, in his words, “TV soap operas in magazine format.”58 “At long last,” wrote the journalist, “we can read and watch television at the same time.” Kriegsman ironically aimed to minimize the impact of these Italian-imported products on American culture while, in fact, he pinpointed the business and narrative strategies that made them a profitable, international product of consumption. In this book, I show that the success of photoromances was due to their belonging to a system of media convergence that (1) exploited storytelling across platforms, (2) branded characters and artists, and (3) nurtured fandom and readers’ participation. These dynamics are at the core of what Jenkins has called convergence culture, at whose dawn, I argue, we should place the rise of the photoromance.59 “Media convergence—the coming together of forms that were previously separate—has come to dominate contemporary understandings of the models through which popular culture is produced industrially,” writes Matthew Freeman.60 At the same time, Freeman points out, since the mid-eighteenth century magazines are devised as a strikingly interactive medium, “in much the same way as the internet in the contemporary media landscape.”61 As I show in this book, the photoromance fits the model of convergence culture because the magazine’s content consists of the concurrent use of multiple formats and generic conventions, but also because the magazine’s reception is based on the flowing of this content across multiple media and thus on the active engagement of readers across these platforms.62 In this respect, the Italian case, where publishing groups had invested in other media since the 1930s, is distinguished by comparison to other European contexts.63 Therefore, my focus in this book will be on unraveling how the dynamics of convergence culture developed in Italy, with the understanding that products as much as editorial strategies and business practices were adopted beyond the national borders. These interrelated aspects must be taken into consideration vis-à-vis the global market within which this hybrid medium thrived. Further, whereas scholars interested in convergence rarely address the gendered aspects of production and reception, my approach gives specific attention to the relationship between media productions and industries, and the discourses of gender and sexuality.

The photo-textual narratives of photoromances combined technical elements of the comic strips and the cinenovella or film-novel (a photo-textual object based on an existing movie), and they imported narrative tropes and generic conventions from film melodramas, the feuilleton, and romantic novels. Photoromances and comics were both financially and stylistically connected (as I previously mentioned, in Italy, the word for comics—fumetto—was frequently used to refer to both genres) (figures I.2–I.3). While from the business perspective Mondadori, Edizioni Universo, Les Editions Mondiales, and Abril all invested both in comics (or drawn romances) and photoromances, from the formal point of view, the latter imported from the former the use of captions and balloons as well as the element of closure, that is, the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.”64 Similarly, in both cases, readers must create connections between panels (photographs, in this case) and fill in the gaps between them (the white lines that Scott McCloud calls “gutters”). The relationship with cinema was also important, if not even more determinant. First of all, there are striking similarities between film and photoromance narratives of the same period (going through several issues of Bolero Film at the Mondadori Foundation, I could hardly distinguish between stories that I knew from movies and those that I just read in the magazines). Furthermore, some film stars and stage performers, such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Vittorio Gassman, played also in photoromances, or appeared in the photo-textual versions of movies in magazines (the so-called cinefotoromanzi or cineromanzi).65 In Italy and France, examples of film novelization have existed since the 1930s, once the rotogravure was imported from the United States.66 However, the cinenovella used only a few still photographs and captions, while the cineromanzi (cineromances) were proper photoromances that employed (instead of original narratives and photos) still photographs taken on the set and film stills captured from strips as well as original dialogue from the script, to retell the film in its entirety, more or less faithfully. Cineromances turn a wide variety of films into readings for popular audiences who may or may not have been able to see them in the theater, including art films such as Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist, 1955); politically engaged movies such as Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (The Big Night, 1959); and Hollywood hits such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) (figure I.4).67 Invented in Italy but short-lived in that country, where by the late fifties cineromances were not sold anymore at newsagents, the genre was also very popular in France, where fans could buy them until the mid-1960s (not only Italian translations but also original French productions). Agreements between publishers and producers bypassed the artists, whose intellectual and artistic work was not protected by copyright laws at the time, despite the fact that stars were the main commercial attraction and that directors were increasingly regarded as a film’s authors, in light of the so-called politique des auteurs of the Cahiers du Cinéma. In the case of obscure small publishers and foreign movies, it is not even clear whether permission to publish was at all established via legal routes. In between commercial extensions and bootleg productions, the “cineromanzo question” (as it is called in the Italian legal literature of the 1950s) thus anticipated convergence culture in yet another way, that is, by challenging restriction to public access in the face of unregulated appropriation of industrial products.68

Whereas cross-media strategies form the basis of the photoromance business, which promoted synergies between publishing houses and film producers, cross-media characters and fictional story-worlds and media branding are the basis of the profitable association with the record, television, and advertisement industries. Photoromances functioned as big containers of shared content: TV personalities starred in their narratives and columns, as well as in television series and advertisements; popular singers also appeared in the magazines as actors and interviewees, while their songs and records were thereby advertised (and often, lyrics were published along with the advertisements). According to Pedrocchi’s 1964 letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, special editions of records by famous singers such as Gigliola Cinquetti were released “exclusively for Bolero Film readers.”69 Not only did the same character star in multiple media, but he or she was also associated with the same fictional world. For example, actor Franco Volpi took part in several TV series such as Orgoglio e pregiudizio (Pride and Prejudice, 1957) and Il romanzo di un giovane povero (The Romance of a Poor Young Man, 1957), both adaptations of nineteenth-century European novels. The same historical setting served as a background for many photoromances, such as Confidenze’s “Gli occhi che non sorrisero” (Eyes That Never Smiled, 1960), in which Volpi costarred with actress Lidia Costanzo (who went on to become protagonist of the successful television crime serial Le avventure di Laura Storm [The Adventures of Laura Storm, 1965–1966]); and for the TV advertising for Martini and Rossi (which Volpi appeared in with another famous theater actor and regular presence in TV advertisement, Ernesto Calindri).70

In the pre-Internet era, Italian publishers also engaged individual readers as fans and stimulated collective forms of fandom to promote cultural consumption of media franchises (i.e., interconnected products of the publishing, film, television, and music industries). In particular, this book will examine Bolero Film and the Lancio series as two main case studies in point, vis-à-vis publishing innovations in participatory culture. In open letters and private correspondence, editors Pedrocchi (Mondadori) and Barbara Mercurio (Lancio) made a point to acknowledge and value customers’ satisfaction and engagement. In the fifties and sixties, Bolero Film’s open contests and requests for submissions sustained and nurtured artistic aspirations of all kinds, such as becoming prospective writers, actresses, and celebrities. Among other initiatives, the magazine sponsored the music festival “Castrocaro” for “new voices” (very much in the same style as American Idol or The Voice), whose winners not only participated in the famous Sanremo Music Festival but also starred in at least one photoromance.71 And Lancio was at the forefront of transnational markets in the 1970s, the first to do business in the United States, and the creator of in-house celebrities that ensured the success of its series by fostering an object-specific fandom still thriving today on social media, despite the company officially closing in 2011.72

Further, it is because of the peculiar historical situation in which Italy found itself in the postwar period that publishers happened to have the right (female) audience to make a profit, exploiting the liberties women gained through democracy and the capitalist system. The birth of photoromances cannot be separated from the socioeconomic changes that brought Italy from the postwar Reconstruction to the so-called economic miracle, but also fostered the kind of female emancipation that Angela McRobbie would later define “faux feminism:” deeply connected to modernization, grounded on consumption and sexual freedom, and yet traditional in its articulation of gender roles in the private and public spheres.73 In Italy, the growth of a popular female audience of moviegoers and magazine buyers fostered the same kind of “faux-feminist” discourse. However, as opposed to other Western European democracies such as the UK, on which McRobbie bases her argument, Italian society and politics remained fundamentally patriarchal until the late seventies, on both the right and the left side of the political spectrum. From a gendered perspective, I claim in this book, photoromances threatened the status quo without promoting a radical break with tradition, by means of the modernizing power of consumerist culture, against the national political project of return-to-order (which officials across the political spectrum felt to be necessary to solve the social crisis caused by World War II), in spite of a male-dominated cultural sphere, and in opposition to a society ruled by Catholic morals. In this sense, I disagree with Baetens, Van Den Bergh, and Van Den Bossche in their compelling and yet binary analysis of the photoromance: a complex and rich phenomenon from a mediological and cultural-historical point of view, according to them, yet poorly made and ideologically backward.74 In the chapters that follow, I will show that backwardness and silliness are actually more aptly the attributes of representations of female readership and fans of photoromances, in ways that reveal underpinning anxieties toward the democratization of culture, on one hand, and grassroot extensions of the products of the cultural industries, on the other.

Finally, to review photoromances in the paradigm of convergence means to realize that new media do not kill the old ones but rather, in Jenkins’s words, “Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media.”75 While the photoromance was blamed for “killing” cinema, at the time of its birth, the “death” of the photoromance normally is associated with the rise of television as a form of entertainment and, more specifically in Italy, with private channels broadcasting in the seventies.76 Historians of the Italian press Lombardo and Pignatel claim that a general crisis of the illustrated magazine business was determined by the Kippur war (1973), when the price of paper rose 60 percent.77 In some countries, the fate of photoromances is connected to political events, for example in Argentina, where the closing of Abril’s Idilio followed the establishment of the military dictatorship (1976). In fact, still booming worldwide at the end of the 1970s, photoromances continue to be sold today in Italian newsstands, and the parabola of their success did not really decline until the mid-1980s.78 More relevantly, I argue that, as the photoromance did not kill cinema but rather imported its generic conventions and plot devices and forced the latter to share the same popular audiences, in the same way, television soap operas inherited stylistic and narrative features from their photo-textual foremothers. While an in-depth study of continuities between the photoromance and the soap opera formats are beyond the scope of this book, my analysis of the Lancio fandom will take into consideration the nomadic and yet loyal fanship of photoromance readers from the seventies to today’s digital platforms. The phenomenon of the contemporary Lancio fandom epitomizes the way in which the photoromance has had an impact on the development of popular culture in Italy throughout the postwar period, and how it participated in the “celebritization” of Italian society (that is, the permeation of celebrity culture to the depth of dominant social and cultural discourses).79

The Photoromance is divided into six chapters. In chapter 1, I examine the case of Bolero Film to demonstrate the prominent place that female readership had, in the midst of corporate demands and social changes, in the development of the photoromance. The degree to which this readership actually mattered (and thus to which we can talk about participatory culture before the digital revolution) depended on the power struggle between publisher Arnoldo Mondadori and editor Luciano Pedrocchi. My argument is that the success of Bolero Film was determined not only by how much women liked stories, characters, and photographs. The appeal of photoromances also lies in their media franchise extensions and as such they need to be studied in order to understand their cultural and social relevance.

Chapters 2 and 3 concern the interrelationships of magazines, female stardom, celebrity culture, and the film industry. Chapter 2 explores the connections between stardom, fandom, and the cineromance. Popular in 1950s Italy and France, cineromances are the precursors of 1970s American fotonovels, adult comic books that feature still images from movies or television series such as Grease (1978) and Star Trek (1977–1978). I argue that cineromances are hybrid texts in between commercial extensions and grassroots productions and thus at the origins of contemporary fan appropriations of popular movies. In the chapter, I focus specifically on Dino De Laurentiis’ publishing branch Edizioni Lanterna Magica and discuss how the series Cineromanzo gigante and Cineromanzo per tutti, in their twofold identity of tabloids and storytellers, functioned as peculiar marketing tools for stardom, both nurturing the spread of celebrity culture and channeling rules of moral and sexual conduct.

Current studies in film and media history show that film novelization was both an extension of viewers’ experience and a promotional tool. At the same time, existing documents regarding legal battles concerning cineromances in Italy problematize historical accounts of these magazines as straightforward product packaging. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that by looking into the literature on Italian copyright laws, we can not only address the legal question of film novelization on historical grounds, but also contribute in a unique way to the history of auteur cinema as tool of the industry, and to that of producers as authors of films. My claim is that at the core of judicial accounts on the cineromance was not the validation of the artists as copyright holders but the need for normative rules that could extend the disciplining power of producers (and of their main financer, the Italian government) on publications that were deemed to be influential among their female readership.

In light of their relevance as educational tools, chapters 4 and 5 examine the use of photoromances outside the realm of commercial entertainment, to advocate for political, religious, and social causes. In particular, I study the cases of the Catholic publisher San Paolo, the Information Agencies of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and the Italian Association for Demographic Education (AIED), three organizations that similarly used photo-textual stories of love relationships as the means to promote their respective agendas. Catholic, Communist, and AIED photoromances popularized, respectively, the preaching of the Gospel, Marxist ideas, and sexual rights for both men and women. However, as I discuss in chapter 3, despite the evident attempt to engage with the commercial model in order to persuade female audiences, Catholic and Communist texts ultimately fail to address the social and cultural changes that determined the success of the photoromance formula. About a decade later, in the mid-1970s, AIED continued but innovated the use of photoromances for propaganda purposes, which were simultaneously adopted across the Atlantic by American agencies such as the Peace Corps in their efforts to educate Latin American populations about various health and social issues. In chapter 4, I show how the AIED campaign for “birth control in comics” demonstrated a deep understanding of what made the medium so successful among the general public by engendering the migration of celebrities into the space of civil activism.80

In chapter 6 I conclude my analysis of photoromances and their fandom by a netnographic study of contemporary social media platforms. Based on data collected through online surveys and communication with users and extensive reading of web posts on Facebook and other online materials, this study focuses on women users, readers, and collectors of photoromance series published in the seventies by the Roman company Lancio (while fans speak or understand Italian, they are not necessarily located in Italy, according to their Internet profiles). By looking at data comparatively to the historical analysis of the magazines themselves, I claim that Lancio’s editorial strategies in the 1970s resulted in a distinct realm of celebrity culture and an object-specific fandom similar to that of American television soap operas. Lancio engaged in what Jenkins calls the logic of “affective economics,” so that the customer is “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked.”81 In this context, contemporary Lancio fanship (including digital archiving at the fringes of copyright laws) reveals the importance of a common identity and a shared culture to explain individual responses to mass-produced cultural texts.

This book is based on extensive archival and library research that I conducted at the Mondadori Foundation in Milan; the National Film Library (Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini), the Gramsci Foundation, the Umberto Barbaro Library, and the Central State Archives in Rome; and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. But above all, it is the product of endless negotiations and passionate exchanges with collectors and fans whom I had the privilege to virtually encounter via email communication, social media, and electronic markets. Thanks to them, I was able to read (and enjoy) the photoromances that are the objects of this study, and to learn about the consumers who are the subjects that made it possible. In the process, I became an “acafan” (not simply an academic scholar but also a fan myself); it is from this position of personal attachment and intellectual curiosity that I eventually began to write the fascinating history of the photoromance and its audiences.82