Trasvases entre la literatura y el cine is an academic journal aimed at the research community. Its thematic focus revolves around the relationships between literature and cinema, and it is dedicated to exploring the multiple connections between both artistic disciplines, especially cinematic adaptations or transpositions of literary texts, the influence of cinema on novels, their thematic connections, and theoretical and methodological reflection on how to approach their comparative study, without establishing hierarchies between the two arts or employing the equivocal and sterile concept of "fidelity" to conduct the analysis. Given that these connections with cinema affect literature from all periods and languages, and that dialogue can be established in both directions (from literature to cinema, and also from cinema to literature), we aspire to create with this journal a multidisciplinary and international meeting point (aimed primarily at philologists, but also, among others, at experts in Film, Art History, and Translation and Interpretation) so that researchers interested in this field of study can make their work known.
All authors published in this journal accept the following copyright terms: a. Authors retain their authors´ rights (copyright) and grant First Publication Rights to the journal, which whill be published under a the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. All about this license is available in the following link: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0> b. Authors may separately establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (e.g. including it in an institutional repository, or publishing it in a book) with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. c. Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their work electronically (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their own website) as this can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and more extensive citation of published work. The author is responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder when using copyrighted materials. This electronic journal is published by University of Málaga (UmaEditorial), thus it is necessary to cite the origin of any partial or total reproduction.
La controversia de Valladolid entre Las Casas y Sepúlveda y su reflejo en la pantalla: una asignatura pendiente
The controversy of Valladolid (1550-1) had Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda as protagonists. It is one of the most relevant milestones in the discussion on religious and power relations between the conquerors and the natives of the New World carried out by the former. Beyond the world of specialists, this article takes as the core of its analysis the contribution of Jean-Claude Carrière, screenwriter of the film about that debate most used in teaching and author of the most read novel and drama most represented throughout the world. After presenting a summary of what happened in Valladolid, he reviewed the film's equipment, to later focus on its contents and its correspondence with reality. I conclude by pointing out other informative proposals about Las Casas and valuing the interest of cinema, novels and theater for historical knowledge and for current inter-ethnic relations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisco Castilla Urbano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Adaptación y creatividad en Un amor de Isabel Coixet
In November 2023, Isabel Coixet's film Un amor, based on a novel by Sara Mesa published in 2020 by Anagrama, was released in Spain. The film was a great success with critics and audiences, but it was not without controversy, mainly because of the disturbing sexual consent it raises. In decanting the novel to film, Coixet had to deal with what she called two “servitudes”: the expectations of a part of her audience, readers also of Sara Mesa, and the concern not to disappoint the writer even while affirming her own authorship. The article does not assess the accuracy of the adaptation, but rather proposes an analysis of how Coixet has managed to maintain a balance between all these factors. To do so, she uses, on the one hand, the incorporation of at least two intertexts, which add a depth to the story barely noticed in most of the reviews that have been published about the film. On the other hand, the mise-en-scène and focalization, the locations, the actors and their interpretation, as well as the nuances she gives to certain characters and how all this influences the reception of the story.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gemma Suñé Minguella https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Rise and Fall of a Decent Hero: The Recreation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in the Iranian Film Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) (2011) by Asghar Farhadi
The Iranian film Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation, 2011), directed by Asghar Farhadi, marked a milestone by winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, in addition to a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. This article argues that the film evokes structural and thematic elements of Greek tragedy, particularly Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (429 BC). From this classical perspective, it explores how Farhadi’s narrative strategy recreates essential motifs: the hero’s downfall, the tragic flaw, dramatic irony, the quest for truth, and final catharsis, thus revealing the enduring relevance of the tragic model in contemporary cinema.
Copyright (c) 2025 Zahra Nazemi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Ventas Prison in Madrid. The Voices of Women Inmates in Literary and Filmic Representations of (Post)Memory
Literature and film have been fundamental in reconstructing the memory of the Ventas women’s prison in Madrid, giving voice to its inmates—victims of Franco’s repression. Testimonies from former political prisoners, novels such as La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón and Las trece rosas (2003) by Jesús Ferrero, along with their film translations, as well as various documentaries, have helped recover and reimagine these experiences. Within these narratives, prison is configured as a place of repression, but also of resistance and sisterhood. This study analyses how these representations have contributed to the vindication of these women’s legacy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Verónica Ripoll León https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The voices of the Spanish Civil War on film:
Abstract: This article quantitatively analyses the technical specifications and critical reviews of 21 film adaptations about the Spanish Civil War released since 2000. The results show that, although these films are primarily produced in Spain, their distribution is heavily dependent on USA platforms: Amazon Prime, Disney+ or Netflix. Women barely participate in the creative process —men appear up to six times more in directing, writing, and original works— even though their titles are more valued by the audience. The specialized press, unlike the general public, seems to be less benevolent toward them, but more so toward adaptations representing the Republican side.
Copyright (c) 2025 Manuel García-Borrego, Yaiza Ceballos, Ángel Gallardo-Agudo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Post-gothic female monstrosity rewritings
The article focuses on stablishing a relationship between the film Lisa Frankenstein (2024) by Zelda Williams and the gothics elements of the canonical novel Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. In addition, it examines the cinematic work as a post-gothic feminist reformulation of the monster figure in the coming-of-age horror tradition, exploring a conflict of fractured, marginalized, and posthuman identities. Therefore, the following fundamental axes are addressed: the female role in gothic fiction, the monster as a psychic double, the abhuman figure, and the reappropriation of corporeality in material feminisms.
Copyright (c) 2025 Camila Gordillo Varas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Fear on the Screen: Jaume Balagueró and His Adaptations of Literary Horror
Horror is one of the most frequently adapted genres in audiovisual formats. It encompasses, thus, all possible cases: from the most faithful versions of the original work to those that significantly diverge from it, adhering to the unique vision of a director or screenwriter. This article examines Jaume Balagueró’s adaptations of horror literature: The Nameless (1999), Muse (2017), and Venus (2022). Dedicated to the art of storytelling through the camera, the article explores how these adaptations blend the source material with the recurring themes and motifs in Balagueró’s films.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miguel Carrera Garrido https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Spanish post-Civil War period as a melodramatic setting and a space of female representation in the television adaptations Lo que escondían sus ojos (Telecinco, 2016) and La sonata del silencio (TVE1, 2016)
This article examines the representation of the historical context of the Spanish post-Civil War period and of women in two television adaptations: Lo que escondían sus ojos and La sonata del silencio. A qualitative methodology is applied to the reading, viewing and analysis of both projects and their topics. Both series generate entertainment using the past, but their ways of making historical memory are divergent: in the first, the post-war period is only a luxurious setting for a melodrama of forbidden love, while in the second, the adaptation operates in a more subtle way by addressing various social issues.
Copyright (c) 2025 María José Higueras-Ruiz, Santiago Lomas Martínez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Análisis ideológico de la adaptación: el mundo de posguerra de Pa negre (2010), de Agustí Villaronga
Este trabajo analiza desde un punto de vista formal e ideológico el proceso de adaptación de las novelas de Emili Teixidor al cine por parte de Agustí Villaronga, que da como resultado la película Pa negre (2010). Se divide en dos bloques: en el primero, se explicitan los cambios técnicos efectuados y sus implicaciones internas; en el segundo, se examinan los cambios más llamativos adoptando una perspectiva ideológica, esto es, en relación con el momento de producción de la adaptación y subrayando los efectos ideológicos de visionado de la obra nueva.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Ayete Gil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ekphrasis and Memory in El lápiz del carpintero (1998) by Manuel Rivas and Its Adaptation by Antón Reixa (2003)
This article analyses ekphrasis as an effective strategy for articulating memory in fiction. In El lápiz del carpintero by Manuel Rivas (1998), it is possible to detect numerous vivid descriptions that awaken the memory of its protagonist, Herbal, and condense the central message of the story. The analysis of this rhetorical and literary resource allows us to go deeper into the relationship between the novel and the film adaptation by Antón Reixa (2003) based on the dialogue that vertebrates the narrative and offers some valuable reflections on the filmic ekphrasis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alain Iñiguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Postwar, Violence and Queer Narrative Focalisation in El mar (Blai Bonet / Agustí Villaronga)
El mar, the debut novel by Blai Bonet, was successfully adapted for the screen by Agustí Villaronga, who significantly expanded upon the text’s homoerotic dimension, granting it a centrality that in the original was often merely implied or suppressed. In the film, this sexuality is portrayed in a transgressive manner, shaped by the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the influence of religious doctrine. This article adopts a narratological approach to examine the reconfiguration of the male body’s representation, challenging patriarchal norms. It further considers whether the adaptation constitutes a form of rewriting, according to José Antonio Pérez Bowie.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mario de la Torre-Espinosa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The printed letter and the sea. The recovery of the teacher Benaiges' promise
The story of the teacher Antoni Benaiges, repressed in the first days of the military uprising against the Second Republic in 1936 was discovered by the photographer Sergi Bernal in 2010. Since then, multiple creations have been produced of the story The teacher who promised the sea in a sort of adaptations and narrative transfers ranging from photography to historical research, facsimiles, novels, biography, theater plays, film —documentary and fiction— graphic novels or music. In this paper we aim to analyze how the recovery of historical memory through cultural creation becomes relevant in the contemporary context.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marta Martín Núñez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
On the Spanish Civil War and nonsense. The film adaptations of La higuera, Noche de difuntos del 38 y On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes
Recent Spanish films such as La higuera de los bastardos (2017), Malnazidos (2020) y Tratamos demasiado bien a las mujeres (2024), all adaptations of earlier novels, offer a comic-grotesque vision of the Civil War or the immediate post-war period, far removed from the realist standards of their conventional representation. Although they are not works that truly seek to problematise memory, the (post)war is not employed as a mere environmental frame. In fact, their humour, perceived as «nonsensical», stems from the historical-political references of the period. Consequently, in order to analyse their possible findings and mismatches, this article analyses the transformations they make with respect to the source material.
Copyright (c) 2025 Álvaro López Fernández https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
La voz dormida, from Literature to Cinema: representation and memory of the female prison experience
This paper analyses the relationship between Dulce Chacón’s novel La voz dormida and its homonymous film adaptation by Benito Zambrano. Starting from their respective overlapping in the literature and cinema of memory, as well as the tension between reality and fiction that they manifest, the paper focuses its interest on the memorial dimension of the works, centred on the configuration of the character of the republican woman as an active political subject, and on the way in which they undertake their representation of the female prison space, through which the repressive power of Franco’s regime is shown.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Sánchez Zapatero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
La Guerra Civil española en las adaptaciones de la literatura al cine del siglo XXI (coord. por Elios Mendieta y Juan García-Cardona)
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan García Cardona, Elios Mendieta Rodríguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
José Eduardo Villalobos Graillet, La Celestina y el cine. Censura y recepción (1969-1996),
Review of José Eduardo Villalobos Graillet, La Celestina y el cine. Censura y recepción (1969-1996), Madrid/Frankfurt am Main, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2025 Álvaro Pastor Hernández-Pinzón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
La voz de los creadores: entrevista a Manuel Pazos
Manuel Pazos (Santander, 1975) is a retro video game developer who, in 2016, after two years of development, launched Extensum with Daniel Celemín, La abadía del crimen (The Abbey of Crime). This is a reinterpretation and expansion of Paco Menéndez and Juan Delcán's 1987 video game, which includes elements from the video game itself, Umberto Eco's novel (Il nome della rosa) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's film (Der Name der Rose). However, it was published non-profit and can be downloaded for free on their website and platforms such as Steam. Extensum was very well received upon its launch and continues to be a subject of interest today, having accumulated nearly 218,000 downloads, and continues to be the subject of interest in international media and academic research due to the unique nature of its conception and development, as well as initiatives to translate it into various languages.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marta García Villar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This study presents a catalog of Argentine fiction films adapted from literary works between 2001 and 2024. Alongside this inventory, it offers a critical analysis of the evolving relationship between Argentine cinema and literature, tracing its shift from traditional adaptations to more complex intermedial dialogues. In the 21st century, this relationship has diversified: alongside conventional adaptations, hybrid forms have emerged, including essay films, free reinterpretations of literary works, and transmedia projects. The study concludes that the film-literature connection no longer adheres to a unidirectional model (literary text / film) but has evolved into a space of creative exchange where both languages mutually enrich one another. While conventional adaptations persist, the most innovative approaches explore conceptual, poetic, and transmedia connections, redefining the boundaries between these two artistic fields.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Zangrandi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The adaptation of Le Mépris (Moravia/Godard): architectural aspects
Il disprezzo, novel by Alberto Moravia, and Le Mépris, film by Jean-Luc Godard. There is always an intermediate step: it is the script, written but already prefiguring moving images. We can consider it both hypotext of the novel and hypertext of the film. In Liliana Cavani’s film La pelle, the Malaparte house is necessarily the same as in its owner’s autobiographic novel, where it appears and is explicitly described. However in the case of Le Mépris it is a choice of Godard, since the reference to the house in the novel only prefigures that the house is in Capri and has nice views to Punta Campanella. As we will see some of the locations, when adapting to the configuration of the Malaparte, extract from its architecture specific original possibilities of the film and in some way they bring new approaches of greater plasticity to the scenes while, however, the dialogues between the characters remain almost intact. One example is the way in which a singular element such as the upper terrace of the house replaces the beach where Molteni, the screenwriter, finds his wife Emilia. The same terrace appears as well as the set of the Odyssey version that begins to be shoot precisely at the end of Le Mépris.
Copyright (c) 2021 Español https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Through the eyes of Sam Gifford in The day the Century Ended: his vision of World War II in contrast to that adopted by American war cinema
This paper explores how the novel The Day the Century Ended, by Francis Irby Gwaltney, provides such a realistic view of World War II by refusing to glorify the army and revealing a psychology of military and political figures difficult to digest, especially today, given their likeness to those of the present. Through film and literary analysis, the paper suggests that Gwaltney was inspired by his fellow writer Norman Mailer when creating his novel's main character, Sam Gifford, and not only when imagining the soldier Bernard L. Meleski as believed until now. The novel’s cinematographic adaptation managed to dodge the rigid American censors by employing a language which neither critics nor the army were able to understand.
Copyright (c) 2024 Enric Mas Aixalà https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Evolution of a Myth in the Adaptations of Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872):
The novel Carmilla, written by Sheridan Le Fanu in the second half of the 19th century, has been the subject of film adaptations as Vicente Aranda's 1972 feature film La novia ensangrentada and the Canadian film The Carmilla Movie (Spencer Maybee, 2017). The story is about the relationship between two young women: a mortal and a vampire. Both adaptations place this Victorian myth in the present and claim aspects of gender and female homosexuality in the context of its actuality.
Copyright (c) 2024 Váleri Codesido Linares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Spider: The hallucination as a spring of reality
The objective of this article is to show the way in which Cronenberg addresses the question of hallucination, in the particular case of Spider, as well as to situate it in the whole of his work. From a comparative analysis between McGrath's novel and Cronenberg's adaptation, the role of hallucination in both proposals will be observed, focusing on the fact that it goes beyond being a simple effect of schizophrenic symptomatology. At the same time, it will be analyzed, as a conclusion, how Spider, based on the axis of hallucination, will become the culmination of the series begun in Videodrome, and subsequently continued by Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and eXistenZ and which shows in in what way Cronenberg's ontology is gestated by the indefinition of reality.
Copyright (c) 2024 Oriol Alonso Cano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Cronenberg Adapts (Us to) McLuhan: Watching "Videodrome", Reading "Understanding Media"
This article argues that Videodrome and the film’s novelization can both be said to adapt McLuhan’s account of television in Understanding Media. Cronenberg’s film adopts McLuhan’s style of thought by rendering figurative language as visceral cinematic image; Martin’s novelization, in turn, uses the literary device of ekphrasis to depict the protagonist’s TV-possessed inner world. Videodrome the film and Videodrome the novel express, respectively, the cinematic imaging and the synesthetic verbal description of media as «the extensions of man». The essay concludes that attending to the ways in which both the film and the novel adapt McLuhan’s writing not only attests to the intermedial nature of the interpretive act, but helps delineate the contours of the contemporary media landscape.
Copyright (c) 2024 Leonid Bilmes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Fly (1986): Science and Body Horror in David Cronenberg’s Cinema
George Langelaan's story The Fly (1957), has had four film adaptations, the first in 1959 and the last in 1989, but the adaptations by Kurt Neumann (1959) and David Cronenberg (1986), have been the most important film adaptations. Both the story and Cronenberg's film present the subgenre of horror body horror cinema. In it, the human body appears as an imperfect machine, a receptacle of genetic and anatomical malformations. A grotesque metamorphosis is configured by the search for new body forms. The aim of this paper is to map the fragmentation of the body and the mind that brings into play the notion of the New Flesh in The Fly (1986) and to raise the differences in the discourses on the body and technology in the story and the film.
Copyright (c) 2024 Xavier Brito Alvarado, Ana Sedeño-Valdellos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Intertextual interferences between Lovecraft, Sartre, and Cronenberg
In 2002, philosopher Eduard Punset interviewed David Cronenberg on the television program Redes. In this interview, the Canadian filmmaker claimed to have been influenced by an amalgam of writers and thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and H.P. Lovecraft. In this article we analyze the intertextual interferences as well as the differences and similarities between Sartre's work and the principles of Lovecraftian cosmic horror in Cronenberg's cinema. Likewise, we trace the ideological precepts on which this intertextuality has been able to influence body horror, the horror subgenre of which Cronenberg himself disavows, although he is considered the pioneer and main exponent.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alfonso Freire-Sánchez, Maria Fitó-Carreras, Montserrat Vidal-Mestre https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Realistic comparisons: La isla de las mentiras by Paula Cons and La nostalgia de la mujer anfibio by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade
In 2020 Paula Cons wrote and directed the film La isla de las mentiras. In 2022, Cristina Sánchez-Andrade wrote the novel La nostalgia de la mujer anfibio. Both texts, from their semiotic registers, have been in charge of representing the shipwreck of the steamship Santa Isabel, «the Galician Titanic», on the coast of Sálvora, in January 1921. This article analyze the similarities and differences that both texts present in the representation. While the rhetoric used by Cons reveals a realistic intention (mimetic-plausible paradigm), Sánchez-Andrade transcends this and goes beyond the poetic and the allegorical.
Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Leonardo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ontology of Impact: A History of the Future in Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
In 1996, David Cronenberg released the adaptation of Crash, a novel by J. G. Ballard published in 1973. The film portrayed a cold and dystopian universe where affections were replaced by injuries and caused car accidents. The purpose of the article is to analyze how the director adapts Ballard's moral approaches through narrative procedures that try to translate into images the ominous world imagined in the novel and what is the effect of certain creative decisions adopted in the film. It is also intended to analyze how this dystopian future responds to the tradition of a subgenre that, in its most critical variants, has always behaved as a thermometer of our social concerns and a warning about our inalienable future.
Copyright (c) 2024 IVÁN GÓMEZ GARCÍA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Masks and Shadows. The construction of the self in A Dangerous Method (2011)
A Dangerous Method (2011) is a historical drama directed by David Cronenberg about the relationship between some of the first proponents of psychoanalysis: Carl G. Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein. This article engages with the work as a character study, based on several elements of analytical psychology as founded by Jung. The film’s narrative is interpreted as part of the process of «individuation» of which he wrote, in which the individual must contend with archetypes such as «the persona», «the shadow», «the anima» or «the father». A Dangerous Method serves as a dramatization of Jung’s personal crisis between 1904 and 1913, and how it became crucial for his ensuing theories.
Copyright (c) 2024 Guillermo González Hernández https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Spanish postwar in rural western terms
Contemporary Spanish cinema on historical memory has renewed its models with techniques and motifs of westerns. Two notable cases are the adaptations of Sordo (Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas, 2018) and Intemperie (Benito Zambrano, 2019). In this way, the comic by David Muñoz and Rayco Pulido (2008), about a soldier in Operation Reconquista, become a sort of chase between gunmen through the Pyrenees. Meanwhile, the film based on Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco (2013) will set its plot in post-war Andalusia to offer a reflection on the subalternity and violence during Franco’s regime . In the following, we will analyse the combination of these two recognisable structures for the audience, and their formal consequences.
Copyright (c) 2024 Álvaro López Fernández, Raúl Molina Gil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Carlos Pranger and Rafael Malpartida, Literatura, pop-rock y cine. Un diálogo intermedial, Sevilla, Renacimiento, 2023.
Review of Carlos Pranger and Rafael Malpartida, Literatura, pop-rock y cine. Un diálogo intermedial, Sevilla, Renacimiento, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2024 Patricia Díaz-Arcos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0