Intertextuality is defined as a by-produce of the semiotic approach to film, and it questions realism by emphasizing the coded and constructed nature of the film artifact. Art is thus seen as responding not to reality but to other discourses. Many films are overtly self-referential, associating their plots with the act of filmmaking itself. Often such associations have a wider significance and relate the work of art to the broader question of what constitutes art and how art is expressed. The film may also be associated with and in part explained by reference to other discourses, such as politics, law, social issues, and so on. Two such movies which reflect on art and politics and the juncture between the two are Kiss of the Spider Woman (Babenco, 1985) and The Name of the Rose (Annaud, 1986). Both films began as novels and so connect with other films produced on that basis and connect in a broader sense with the forms and purposes of the novel.
In the film of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. One is Molina, a homosexual sentenced to eight years in prison for the corruption of minors, and the other is Valent?n, a young Marxist imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Molina tries to pass the time by telling the younger man about films he has seen, recreating the stories with words. It is in the course of these retellings of the different films that the viewer gets to know these characters and sees how they develop as they interact with one another and with the images recalled from films by Molina. Over the course of the film, the two men become much closer, developing a friendship they would be unlikely to have in the "real" world outside of prison. The setting is artificial in that it brings together two people from different class backgrounds and with very different views of the world, holds them together over a long period of time, and leads to a rapprochemen...