En un momento de la trayectoria de elaboración de la novela El otoño del patriarca de Gabriel García Márquez, que va del ’58 al ’75, existió un proyecto para la realización de un film sobre el tema del dictador. Se conoce un texto titulado Dios y yo, argumento cinematográfico escrito en colaboración con Luis Alcoriza. El texto muestra la importancia del trabajo para el cine de García Márquez en el ámbito de su obra narrativa entendida como un todo orgánico. Pues se trata de un proyecto para un film político, pero con resonancias simbólicas, sobre un tema central del imaginario literario del autor. En este texto pueden verse con toda claridad algunos elementos fundamentales de la evolución poética que llevó la idea germen de la novela del dictador, concebida en el año 1958, a su forma definitiva en 1975.

Far from being an occasional occupation, García Márquez's film work forms an intrinsic part of his overall aesthetic and literary poetics. The book's primary aim is to present a detailed study of García Márquez's wide-ranging filmography, which has never received a comprehensive, systematic analysis. Rocco argues that it should be recognised as an integral part of the author's narrative output, and brought into the mainstream of studies concerning his literary activity. The first part of the book reconstructs the trajectory of García Márquez's career in cinema and his connections with the world of film. The second part looks at all his screenplays on which actual films have been based. These are examined chronologically, but also analysed according to thematic and aesthetic concerns and placed in relation to the novels and short stories with which they are 'twinned'.

In Mario Vargas Llosa’s opinion, two of the most lasting obsessions of García Márquez’s literary world, were the theme of plague, and the one of violence, that together form a sort of “cataclysmic vision” of history, whose literary sources were Daniel Defoe’s, A journal of the plague year, and Sophocles’, Oedipus Rex. We mention in this article the presence of those themes in García Márquez’s filmic work, beginning with the screenplays of two films: El año de la peste and Edipo Alcalde, adaptations of the cited works of Defoe and Sophocles. Afterwards we present two unpublished film treatments, Para Elisa and Dios y yo. The first is about war in Colombia, and presents an explicit reference to the “Bogotazo” (9th of April of 1948), while the second presents the theme of Latin American dictator, that García Márquez later focused in his novel El otoño del patriarca.