The twentieth century was the century of the cinema. Its establishment as an art form is inseparable from the rich dialogue it has maintained with literature. The relationship between author, work, and society that informs all art has a particular relevance for the cinema, since it is both a stage for artistic performance and a mass medium. There are also strong links – ideological, aesthetic and economic – between cinema and the novel, as indicated by Rafael Utrera's remark that: ‘by providing characters and stories for the screen, novels shape the themes and modes of expression in popular cinema’ (1985: 20). In Spain, the long cultural drought of the Franco years had a real affect on the development of independent cinema, dictating the relationship between word and image. As Sally Faulkner observes: ‘twentieth-century Spanish history teaches us nothing if not that creative activity is embedded in its ideological context, especially during the Francoist dictatorship and subsequent democratic emergence from that era’ (2004: 7).

The input of literature into ‘the field of collective [film] performances’, says Francisco Ayala, popularized the written word through a mass medium, where it became more accessible to an audience more inclined to watch than to read. In addition, the alliance between film and literature had helped cinema to overcome its early status as a kind of lowbrow spectacle, or sideshow.

While some writers like Machado, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Blasco Ibáñez enthusiastically celebrated the relationship between film, drama and the novel, others like Unamuno, convinced of the written word's superiority over the image, refused to become involved. Blasco Ibáñez was given the Hollywood red-carpet treatment because of his huge international success as a novelist. He sold the film rights to several of his novels, among them *Entre naranjos (1900) and *La barraca (1917). He even directed, in collaboration with Ricardo Baños, the 1922 adaptation of his *Sangre y arena (1908) starring Rudolph Valentino, of which there was a 1941 version featuring Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power. Both Azorín and Antonio Machado's brother, Manuel, remained open on the question of the new art form and praised its capacity for creating a sensation of reality and bringing images to life. In the 1950s, Azorín published many articles about film in the Madrid newspaper ABC, and these were collected together in two volumes, El cinema y el momento (1953) and El efímero cine (1955).