It is revealing that the topic of an unpublished doctoral thesis on Buñuel written in Franco’s Spain was the apparently ‘safe’ question of literary adaptations in the director’s work (Lara 1973; see Lara 2001, 9, for a retrospective account of studying Buñuel in this period). If Buñuel has subsequently been recovered by critics, in Spain and elsewhere, as the quintessential cineaste of dissent, film adaptations of literary texts remain shrouded by a suspicious air of conformity. Adaptation studies have consequently languished. The field has been dominated by structuralist critics who adopt an ahistorical approach and literary scholars keen to dabble in a new medium.

Literary adaptations have too long been the Cinderella of film studies. Drawing examples from Spanish cinema and television of the late dictatorship, transitional and democratic periods, this book has sought to demonstrate that these films highlight important questions about cinema and history. I have focused on cinema from the points of view of form, authorship and industry. Close readings of literary texts in comparison with their screen adaptations highlight key formal differences between the media. For instance, with its inevitable focus on the visible, cinema seems predisposed to nostalgia, because the visible is always potentially reducible to mere surface. This study analyses film’s tendency to evoke sentimentally a former politicized past, a lost rural space or a previous period of stability regarding gender and sexual difference. However, it also demonstrates that film may problematize nostalgia by appealing to a discourse of authenticity, for example in La colmena, or by juxtaposing violence and pictorialization, for instance in Los santos inocentes. This book also demonstrates that the manipulation of space is particularly expressive in film. The motif of entrapment may be employed, for instance, to effect political satire, a point illustrated by Tiempo de silencio, or to perform a deconstruction of patriarchy, as in Mario Camus’s Fortunata y Jacinta. Further, the unique combination of ‘visuality’ and ‘hapticality’ in the film medium (space as experienced by the eye or body) enables cinema uniquely to portray rural and urban environments as what Lefebvre terms either ‘absolute’ or ‘abstract’ spaces. This comparison between the media also questions the assumption that film is limited to omniscient third-person narration, whereas literature may manipulate its mode of enunciation at will.