This article outlines a dynamic model whose goal is to make a contribution to the understanding of the genealogy of media. We will suggest a few avenues of investigation which may be able to account for the identity processes followed by different media. In this respect we think it is important to understand how a new medium gradually finds its 'identity' while at the same time expressing, in a more-or-less unique manner, a quality of intermediality, whose presence is constant and irrepressible. When a medium appears, an intelligible media culture already exists. When a medium comes into the world, it must also get to grips with pre-established codes (genres, institutions, other media, etc). What we hope to demonstrate here is the extent to which the very concept of the birth of a medium is problematic and paradoxical, at least if we consider birth as a unique and circumscribed event that punctuates the unfolding of history. Our task here is thus to propose a dynamic model that can contribute to our understanding of the genealogy of media.

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Adaptation, mediality, and intermediality: these are the issues engaged in our text. Our original aim was to demonstrate that, in moving from one medium to another, the "subject" of a story -we will return to the issue of what we mean by "subject" -would necessarily undergo a series of informing and deforming constraints linked to what might be called the new medium's intrinsic configuration, since each subject would be presumably endowed with its own configuration. This configuration, in our original conception, would be always already more or less compatible with a particular medium and would thus preprogram, as it were, any process of adaptation. Beginning from these early intuitions, we decided to develop a deeper reflection concerning adaptation, rewriting, transécriture, and trans-semioticization. The first question we confronted is at the very kernel of the whole problematic: is it possible for the story (fabula) to exist outside any and all media? Or, to put it differently, is it possible to imagine a story in a kind of original virgin state, prior to any mediatic incarnation?

There are no stories without a storytelling instance. Virtually all narratologists agree on this point. Films differ, however, from novels in that a film can show an action rather than tell it. In that regime of showing (monstration), notably in theatrical staging or in the "documentary" recordings of the LumiGre Brothers, the discursive instance is less apparent than in a written tale. Events seem to tell their own stories. Yet this is misleading, because without any mediation there would have been no recording and we would not have seen the events at all. This perception of events recounting themselves, which some spectators might have (for example in watching a surveillance video) or certain critics might argue for (such as Andre Bazin, when he invokes the "impartiality of the camera" or "the fragment of 'raw reality' in Italian neorealism" [Bazin 1981: 280-l]), does not stand up to analysis.We are confronted with a key question: should narratology start from spectatorial perception, however flawed, or look for a system of narrative instances capable of explaining the textuality of film? This question was posed at a time when the possibility of a film as a narrative was no longer accepted as a postulate and after the decline of the euphoria of those who believed there was a necessary correspondence between messages sent and messages understood in a communication system where every message encoded by a sender was supposed to be received intact, or almost intact, by a receiver.Since then, narratologists have responded diversely to this methodological question. T o simplify what is at stake, consider this image: a ventriloquist and his dummy, for example the impertinent Hugo of Dead o f the Night (Albert0 Cavalcanti, 1945). Here, the dummy has a monologue, confiding his love for this or that well-known singer. If the situation seems comic, that is because the spectator believes (or pretends to believe) that the dummy is responsible for what it "says". But if it turns to the man holding it on his knee to begin a dialogue, the spectator momentarily adheres to the fiction that these two figures are autonomous subjects, sometimes in disagreement with one another. That belief will be strong or weak, depending on whether the viewer is a child or an adult, a "good"