Audiovisual Narratives as a Social and Historical Document: theoretical approaches and analytical methods

Abstract

Film and audiovisual narratives has long been recognized as a legitimate subject of the social and human sciences. They are studied as institutions, as shapers of collective conscience, as social practice, as an industrial goods. In this paper we focus upon their documentary value and capacity for mapping different areas of socio-cultural experience. There is a vast body of bibliography about the social content of films and television programs, although the academic literature concerning the methodological issues related to their analysis is significantly smaller. This disparity underlines the gap between the growing interest for unraveling their social meanings and the lack of awareness of the difficulties involved in linking their contents and formal features to the social, cultural and historical context. Unwarranted generalizations, flawed inferences and reductionisms resulting from mistaken assumptions and unsuitable tools have lead Westwell (2007) to describe this field as a “sub-area in search of a methology”. In order to tackle that issue, the main theories about the relationships between the moving image and reality are discussed in the first part of this article. Next, a catalogue of the methodologies most frequently applied to audiovisual narrative is presented, accompanied by an assessment of their pros and cons. For demostration purposes, the last part is dedicated to articulate those methods in a proposal for interpreting a well-known Spanish television documentary about a highly sensitive period in Spain’s history: La Transición, by Elias de Andres and Victoria Prego.