Intertextuality in the Novel and Film

Abstract

Since the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, cinema and literature, especially the novel, have maintained close ties based on mutual interest and shared passion. This relationship is built through a constant process of adjustment. It is often necessary to rework the novelistic text in order to adapt it to the screen: either the director preserves the original characters and plot, producing a faithful adaptation, or chooses to transform the literary work through a free, semi-faithful, or disruptive adaptation.
In many cases, the novelist appears to be a generous “screenwriter” whose written text facilitates the passage from words to images. Here, the concept of intertextuality helps illuminate the bridge between the two arts and makes it more intelligible.
In literary studies and, by extension, film studies, intertextuality has become one of the major critical tools. Its definitions are not only varied and polysemic, but its limits also remain porous, raising the question: what does this concept really cover? Is intertextuality limited to the objective presence of one or more texts within a single textual space?
By analogy, this dialogue between works also includes dance, painting, and other artistic forms such as cinema, as in the “film within the film,” or photography, whose emblematic form may be quotation. Therefore, what place does adaptation occupy within this vast network?