Cervantes on Screen

April 2016 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, with a noticeable lack of attention paid to the former in relation to the latter, even in Spain. A relative lack of film adaptations of Cervantes’s works has been construed as a symptom and cause of the Spaniard’s lack of visibility at home and abroad. This chapter probes this assertion and explores the dialectic between commemorative culture and Spanish screen fictions based on the life and works of Cervantes. Included are discussions of Francoist appropriations of the symbolism of Cervantes in Spanish national heritage, and the attempts to reappropriate those same images in the democratic era through film.