М.М. Bakhtin in cinema and adaptation studies. Part I. Cinema as language and utterance: or why should one re-read Bakhtin to study cinema

M.M. Bakhtin didn’t wrote about cinema but his works and those signed by his friends P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov would be later read as a source of inspiration to think of cinema as language in a new way, both by studies dealing with cinema semiotics itself and also by those exploring the links between cinema and literature through the analysis of adaptations (as we will see in the last years the study of cinematic adaptations of literary works has developed into a whole discipline of its own and Bakhtin ideas were pivotal in helping scholars of this discipline to go beyond the dilemmas about “fidelity”). We will sketch here these two developments in two separate parts, although some of the scholars involved in both discussions might be the same. By examining this debates we will find new evidence of the potential of the Bakhtin circle’s theories to understand not only literary texts but any cultural process.