Intermediality between Comics and Films in the Digital Age: the Zack Snyder Case

Abstract

The technological advances and the development of the digital image have allowed the latest cinema to approach comic as it never did before. With the new digital tools, filmmakers who didn’t found before the right way to emulate on screen the language of comics, have found new expressing possibilities for the cinematographic image. Thanks to the digital technology, the film frames find meeting points with the comic frames through the acceleration, deceleration and the freezing of the image, among other resources. Qualitative research and content analysis will be used in this essay to study the different ways in which cinema, with the complicity of the latest technological advances, comes closer to the comic frames, trying to reach its capacity of synthesis and overcoming the grammatical differences that exist between one media and the other. For such purpose, there will be studied the acceleration and deceleration of the image in the films “300” (2006) and “Watchmen” (2009), both directed by Zack Snyder and both based upon best-sellers graphic novels signed by two major comic authors: Frank Miller and Alan Moore.