Why Film for the Study of Literature

Abstract

This article, first part of a comparison between two semiotic systems, narrative and film, stops at the two most important semiotic systems of film to be analyzed: image, audio, theatre, story, and edition. My basic assumption as hypothesis is that films among other approaches to narrative analysis offers the best methodological instrument and/or tool for the study of literature. I make allusion to the common elements to film and to the literary narrative trying to compare, contrast and confirm the support that one medium allows the one to understand the other through three moments. First, the not polemic elements (and in them I stop for the moment). Second, those not easily acceptable (to be studied in a second turn or part of this study). And in third place, the really polemic series (last time of this study). The shared elements in film and in literature are: beginning, image, sound, time, space, edition narrator, narration, misse en scène, gender, language, intertext, ideology and finally the end. The comparison starts from the perspective of the didactics of language and literature. Theoretical mark corresponds mainly to the postulates by Lauro Zavala in his courses about the Theory of literature and film, those classic studies in film like Bazin, Casetti and Di Chio, Sánchez Noreiga. I also make reference to the classical theories in narratology: Aristotle, Genette, Greimas, Todorov, among others.