Not One but Many "Hypos"

In his essay “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Robert Stam applies to film studies Gerard Genette’s relational concepts hypo- and hypertext, to indicate an intertextual an relationship between an anterior (hypo)text and posterior (hyper) text which “transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends” the former (66). The usefulness of Genette’s and Stam’s reflections for the course is obvious. Film adaptations are by definition hypertexts of the literary hypotexts they adapt.
However, Kiss of the Spider Woman can be seen, at least in part, as a case in which film or, better said, films, become the hypotext(s) for a literary hypertext. After all, Molina’s telling of film stories are themselves adaptations of film into literary terms. (In class, Peter noted that the narrative situation is particularly complex in that the novel, a written text, reproduces what are meant to be “oral” adaptations of the films The structure of the narrative is, therefore: film Molina’s narration novel’s representation of Molina’s narration and its contexts). Moreover, the novel does not imply one hypotext, but many. Cat People, The Enchanted Cottage, and I Walked with a Zombie are minor Hollywood classics which are incorporated or cannibalized, to use a word and concept dear to Stam. Kiss of the Spider Woman is comprised, therefore, of adaptations of film into literature.
But even the made-up movies are not without film precedents which Kiss of the Spider Woman interprets and modifies. Not only because as Puig has pointed out, his Nazi “film” was inspired by Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love), directed by Rolf Hansen in 1942 and one of the greatest hits in wartime Germany, or because the Mexican Cabaret “film” was, in turn, modeled on Aventurera (Adventuress), directed by Alberto Gout in 1950, but because regardless of these influences , the made-up “movies” are responding to the general traits of the film genres which they are then reproducing and modifying as they do so. In fact, one could argue that the film genres are here a kind of critical hypertext constituted out of numerous specific filmic hypotexts, which would, in turn, both the actual films and the generic abstractions, become hypotexts referred to in the novel.