Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

The Subject-Matter of Audiovisual Historical Fiction in Portugal (1909-2010)Eduardo Cintra Torres & Catarina Duff Burnayhistory and memory, and especially the need to study the politics of memory from a historicalpoint of view has been the subject of several authors (e.g. Olick & Robbins, 1998; PérezGarzón, 2000). Nevertheless, there is a lack, particularly in Portugal, of a line of work on therole of media as “agents”, “producers” and “reproducers” of memory.The development of reception studies from the perspective of Cultural Studies(among others: Alasuutari, 1999; Hall, 1973; Morley, 1986) contributed to the consolidationof a line of work interested in the relationship between the reception, readers, mediatexts and the construction of meanings. From a territorial and socio-cultural context, theseworks allow an understanding of the differences in how individuals perceive and decodethe representations of the national and of the regional, particularly on television, a mediumwith large penetration in the private and family life. If it is possible, through these analyses,to understand how the individuals relate to television fiction programs, an approach to thetitles from the production point of view is important to understand how television enhancesthe symbolic construction of “national family” (Morley, 1992). The emergence of TV serieslabelled as of “quality” since the 1980s in the United States and Great Britain, with a globaldistribution and warm reception, has also contributed to a new approach to television fictionby television, cultural and genre studies.Stemming from this idea, we chose television as a paradigm and the historical fictionalnarratives as case studies. The motivations for this choice are based on the fact that thefictional contents play a functional role on scheduling (Hobson, 2003), and on the observationof an increase of historical fiction contents in recent years. Of complex definition,we can speak of “historical content” in a double meaning: a) narratives developed in pastyears; b) narratives that present discourse and historical figures with direct influence on thedevelopment of the plots.Having this theoretical background, we chose to observe, in the present work, the historicalthemes that gave life to audiovisual titles produced between 1958 and the present (2010).MethodologySince we are breaking ground in this research area, we decided to use simple sourcesand methodology to arrive at a first overview of the subject-matter of audiovisual historicalfiction. We used one of the most reliable surveys of feature cinema (Matos-Cruz, 1999) andthe above mentioned volume of Memórias dos Arquivos RTP for cinema and teleplays coveringthe years 1908-1974. For the television fiction from 1990 to 2010, we used informationprovided by RTP, SIC, TVI, interviews and databasis as IMDb (Internet Movies Database), andalso direct knowledge.The research did not involve viewing of films, teleplays and most TV drama. With theavailable synopsis and search in reference books and sites, we did a survey with the followingvariables: date, title, script (adapted/original), period set and main themes. In televisiondrama, we also considered the TV network responsible for the programmes (production,co-production and presentation).Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches193