Literature and film have established an interdependent relationship since the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the twentieth century. From the first silent films, which the brothers Lumière and Georges Méliès made and which followed theatre's spatial laws and dramatic structure, to the innovations introduced by David Griffith, which turned cinema into a narrative language structured according to the models of the nineteenth-century novel, cinema invariably appears as a mechanical form of reproducing a story.

Cinema flirted with poetry for a short, intense period of time. The artistic avant-garde discovered film’s potential to break with the old order and “dehumanize art,” as well as its power to express political ideologies. Cinema could summon and mobilize an essentially popular audience through a new medium of mass communication. Cinema also articulated in images the ruptures produced in aesthetics or ideology in the first third of the century, and while continuing to be linked intrinsically to literature, it emerged, as Peña-Ardid writes, as a necessary life raft if one were to “abandon rancid realism.” Thus cinema became a powerful instrument “for expressing the imaginary, the unreal, or the dreamed.”