An adaptation of the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' for the screen

In discussing my adaptation of the Ancient Sumerian Epic ofGilgamesh I am referring to a text which does not exist, a film that has not been made. What does exist is a screenplay with the working title The Game ofUruk where the visual style and features of an envisaged film are suggested through the medium of words and accompanying visual material. Art Historian Erwin Panofsky writing on film has said that 'the screenplay has no aesthetic existence independent of its performance and ... its characters have no aesthetic existence outside the actors' (1934) While this may be debatable, discussion of an adaptation for screen is certainly more difficult without an extant screen text. My adaptation, essentially, exists in the imagination dependent on the unreliability of words to suggest a visual world for the cinema.