140 | nº 29, pp. 139-159 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2019
Portrayal of the journalist in Spanish cinema from 1990 to 2010
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
1. Introduction
Journalists are often featured in cinematic plots that take place in press offices, radio and television studios. The unscrupu-lous reporters in the journalism business in the 1990’s and the first 10 years of the 21st century are portrayed in films with unlikely stories and characters that are attractive to filmmakers. Now they have become research material using a novel methodology of the literary narrative that has been s been applied to the audiovisual medium: specifically, we refer to the structuralism of Russian Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928). We have chosen to recover this classic work of text analysis, as most consider it capable of allowing for the establishment of precise functions, and therefore ac-curate conclusions.
Films are responsible for shaping “human communities” and bringing them closer to the general public through the screen, in this case the information professionals at the end of the last century and the first years of the current century. “How would we have come to know the problems of Brazilian peasants or the crisis of conscience of Eastern European youth in those countries if it hadn’t been for the films of such origins?” This is the question asked by Caparrós (2007: 30). The Brazilian Cinema Novo of the 1960s and films of the Khrushchev Thaw from the former socialist republics give us the key to this great cinema epoch.
Films became the successors of painting in the art world. For centuries, painting “had tried to overcome time with its eternal form”, and in the same way, photography and cinema “would later explain in the simplest way using those psycho-logical perspectives the great spiritual and technical crisis of modern painting that began around the middle of the last century” (Bazin, 2001: 24).
Abstract:
The journalist is a regular character in Spanish films, and analysing this role is fundamental in learning more about the profession. The aim of this research is to identify the profile of the journalist in cinema from 1990 to 2010, two decades of drastic changes in the modes of communication in our country. In its empirical phase, one of the fundamental contributions can be found in the recovery of Morphology of the Folktale (1928), by Russian Folklorist-Scholar Vladimir Propp, which can be used to establish the characteristics of the reporter from a structuralist point of view. In this book, the conclusion reached is that the heroes are those in charge of serious journalism, whereas the villains, mainly women, are the stars of the television ‘boom’ with a predominance of morbidity and deceit on the small screen.
Keywords:
Vladimir Propp, Spanish cinema, cinema of the 90s, role of the journalist, structuralism.
Resumen:
El periodista es un personaje habitual en las películas españolas y su análisis resulta fundamental para conocer la profesión. Esta investigación se marca como objetivo identificar el perfil del pe-riodista en el cine desde 1990 hasta 2010, dos décadas de drásticos cambios en las formas de comunicación en nuestro país. En su fase empírica, una de las aportaciones fundamentales se encuentra en la recuperación de Morfología del cuento (1928) del ruso Vladimir Propp para establecer desde el estructuralismo las características del informador. Concluye que los héroes se encargan del periodismo serio y los villanos, sobre todo mujeres, protagonizan el ‘boom’ de la televisión con predominio de morbo y mentiras en la pequeña pantalla.
Palabras clave:
Vladimir Propp, cine español, cine de los 90, rol del periodista, estructuralismo.
Received: 15/03/2019 - Accepted: 20/11/2019
Recibido: 15/03/2019 - Aceptado: 20/11/2019
