The Subject-Matter of Audiovisual Historical Fiction in Portugal (1909-2010)

Resumo

Every era reconstructs social memory, the media becoming one of the main instances of selection, production and presentation of the past to each new generation. In this research, we intend to compare the production of audiovisual fictional memory in Portugal since 1909, looking for continuities and contrasts in the fictional subjects in the dominant audiovisual mass media in each period: cinema, in the period 1909-1957, theatre for television in RTP (Rádio e Televisão de Portugal / Radio and Television of Portugal) in the period 1958-1970 and TV drama in national generalist TV channels from 1990 to 2010. The survey through synopsis of cinema, TV theatre and TV drama productions (series, miniseries, serials, telenovelas and films for television) will allow for an understanding of what the media elite in each period considered as the past that was worthwhile to (re)create, remember and (re)integrate in the present and the novelists and playwrights that were worthy of adaptation to the screen. Based on a diachronic basis, the survey
suggests a combined analysis of the hegemonic proposal of “preferred past” in each period with the respective political situation (1909-1931: silent cinema in an underdeveloped country, looking for mass success with the new media; 1930-1945: triumphant Estado Novo dictatorship and integrated cultural policy, through the SNI (Secretariado Nacional de Informação / National Secretary of Information); 1958-1970: post-War Salazar regime in a slow decadence; 1990-2010: consolidated democratic regime). Besides establishing the results of the empirical analysis, this research wishes to verify the validity of the applied methodology, simple and of rapid completion, for the development of the study of audiovisual social memory.