The adaptation of literature to the silver screen has long been considered a privileged topos for comparing different media and, at least potentially, for thinking through the concept of intermediality. When one turns to the film-literature field for an elaboration of a dialogical and intermedial space, however, one soon finds that the specificity of each medium has been excluded from the relationship supposed to take place between them. Critics see the media in perspective, their receptive positions in the cultural field eclipsed by an institutional gaze that overlooks their mediative role in the transition and transmission of the texts they place in relation. A cursory look at how studies in the film-literature field approach adaptation is not without heuristic value. Their first step entails close scrutiny of the narrative elements that have been altered, excluded, or embellished in the translation of a literary work to the cinema. Surveying the synopsis of narrative differences between printed text and film, the critic proceeds to trace the contours and inner complexities of each medium. Within this common matrix, the two media are defined negatively on the basis of a narrative that exists in neither rendition, a virtual narrative that is comprised of, and reconciles, the differences between the actual narratives that are materially present to the receptor. As such, the media are fixed and unchanging vessels to which the ideal and transcendent narrative accommodates itself in its passage into actuality, receptacles that may vary slightly in their internal form but which are ultimately contingent to the events that are told. Accordingly, the very notion of “adaptation” implies the mobility of the narrative and the stability of the medial context. In these studies, narrative functions as a generic tool that divides literature off from film by underlining one medium’s limitations in relation to the other’s potential. It takes on all the weight of mediation instead of being one element of an operation that also includes the media’s technical supports, their socio-political reach (to literate or non-literate groups, for instance), and their relative institutionalization. Narrative priority neutralizes the medium as a field of action, a middle ground, obscuring the degree to which it participates in the formulation of a story, or the degree to which we read it as much as we do the content it is purported to communicate. This nearly exclusive stress on narrative paradoxically effaces the inter-media it originally set out to explain. Briefly, it loses sight of what McLuhan has taught us: that the media are dynamic and material techniques and practices that circulate in society the same way stories do, messages that carry their own political and ideological implications. Neither the storyteller nor the narrative exists independently of the medium, and neither can be used as a transcendent anchor towards understanding the cultural landscape. In these pages, I propose an approach to adaptation that places the technical support at the center of the storytelling process. This entails, first, analyzing the narrative privilege in current studies of adaptation as an institutional impulse to control the visual regime that surfaces with photographic technologies and, second, outlining the challenge that mechanically produced images present to previously established parameters for reception and agency. After probing two texts that serve as an example of adaptation—Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and the Cortázar short story upon which it is based—and as a theoretical corpus that works through the problem of adaptation, I rearticulate the transition from text to screen in intermedial terms, as a translation taking place in today’s media-saturated cultural landscape. Most research on “adaptation” participates in institutional currents that conceive of photographic technology as …