Abstract

In 1969, the film-maker Luis Bunuel--arguably the best movie director born in Spain and one of the most representative of the Surrealist Movement in the history of world cinema--filmed Tristana, based on the same titled book published in 1892 by Benito Perez Galdos--the most representative author of Spanish literary Realism and one of Spain's best novelists. These two high quality works offered an excellent opportunity to investigate the connections between movies and literature--often the film version defrauds the literary text. ;This dissertation is divided into three parts, each one having a certain autonomy. In the first part--the longest one--I study cinema and literature in general, to see which elements they share. This approach allowed me to establish a common ground for making a comparison between them and to use the same theoretical approaches: semiotics, Bakhtin, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches, reader response theories, etc. In the second part, I sum up what the critics have said about Galdos's and Bunuel's Tristana--and about both authors in general. ;In the third part, I apply to these two works some of the concepts seen in the theoretical part. Both works are texts, where we perceive intertextuality, polyphony, and dialogism. Also I consider reflexivity through which the novel and the film reveal their status as representation. Both works are open and ambiguous, which makes possible different interpretative directions on the part of readers and spectators. Irony and parody contribute to this rupture in the text. Both works deny a single central meaning, by rejecting an origin and getting lost in a universe of discourses and quotations. Also, a dialogic interplay between the movie and the novel will be set in motion