IC Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación

Archive, Communication, and Culture: Shaping Memory through Images

Manuel de la Fuente Soler — 2024-12-30

Presentation text of the monograph "Archive, communication and culture. The construction of memory through the image".

The Belarusian migrant crisis (2021) told by Euronews and Sputnik: a comparative framing analysis based on citations of political sources

María Luisa Azpíroz Manero — 2024-12-30

The coverage of Euronews and Sputnik of the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarus border in November 2021 is comparatively analyzed, carrying out a content and framing analysis based on the sources cited. The results show biases towards the European or Belarusian side of the conflict, but both media also give voice to the opposing positions. A simple and replicable framing analysis system is offered.

A framing analysis of electoral news generated and translated using generative artificial intelligence (ChatGPT-3)

Elisa Alonso Jiménez — 2024-12-30

The impact of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has become stronger in all fields of knowledge and human activity – including journalism and translation- since the release of various generative AI conversational systems such as ChatGPT-3 for citizens from November 2022. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the application of this kind of technology throughout a study on the creation of political news in Spanish and their translation into English using ChatGPT-3. For this purpose, a corpus analysis approach based on the Framing Theory and a mixed methodology (quantitative and qualitative) using the CAQDAS (Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software) tool, Atlas.ti, was used. In January 2024, ChatGPT-3 was asked to create some news items about a topic for which it has no information: The Spanish General Elections of July 23, 2023. Using different prompts, it was asked to create some news about a possible electoral victory of different Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, VOX and SUMAR) in these elections – as if it was a real event - to be published in different Spanish newspapers (El País, ABC, La Razón, La Vanguardia, El Mundo). A total of 68 news items were generated and translated by the same AI into English, forming a corpus of 136 news items. It has been identified the framings that AI prioritises in this study: The electoral victory of the parties is narrated in a context of a positive emotion, almost euphoric and utopian (political-fiction), with large majorities, an overwhelming citizen participation, and positive reading by political analysts regarding the electoral triumph, no matter which party was called as the winner and for which newspaper it was to be published. AI creates news items in which the framing codes linked to political actions (mostly related to economy, social policy, and sustainability) stand out. ChatGPT-3 can create news items that resembles the genre of the usual news, but they are more superficial. AI tries to emulate elements such as the use of sources (authoritative voices, figures, or data) in order to give credibility to the pieces of news that it creates. However, it does not always do so accurately, due to its lack of pragmatic knowledge. Moreover, it has also been observed that the translations of news items into English are, in general terms, literal and correct versions of the Spanish ones, in which the technique of direct translation has been applied unfailingly.

Beyond storms and coffee liqueurs: a critical look at cultural journalism based on the coverage of Robert Plant's show in the newspaper La Region

Fábio Cruz — 2024-12-30

From a critical perspective on the current moment in cultural journalism, this article analyzes the coverage on the Spanish regional newspaper La Región’s portal of the English musician Robert Plant’s concert in the city of Ourense, Galicia, Spain. In total, 10 articles related to the event were analyzed. The proposed reflections result mainly from the theoretical and epistemological assumptions of Roland Barthes and the concept of fait divers applied to contemporary times.

Restitutive and poetic documentary in Alain Resnais' Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Adela Cortijo Talavera — 2024-12-30

Among the filmmakers belonging to the Rive Gauche group, with a marked tendency towards essay films and literary documentaries, Alain Resnais is perhaps the most recognized for his interest in memory, both in his fiction feature films and in his documentaries. Alain Resnais’s documentaries are restorative and poetic, since in them he combines archival, restorative, reintegrating images, with his own aesthetic linked to his innovative montage proposals, his endless travellings, his framing with pronounced vanishing points, his use of voice and off-screen music and his studied presentation of figures and objects in the spatial parameter, giving his films a particular texture. We will focus the analysis on Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), a short film in which it pays tribute to the temple of memory, to the National Library of France, which becomes, as a container and content, a metaphor for the mental capacity of classify, store and retain in a fragmentary and labyrinthine structure.

Drawing on memory: trauma, reconstruction and archive in animated documentaries. The cases of Waltz with Bashir (2009) and Flee (2021)

Jordi Revert Gomis — 2024-12-30

The animated documentary poses a problem that refers to the ontological foundations of the documentary. If the documentary discourse seeks to endorse itself in the nature of a document, how can this intentionality be reconciled with the substitution of the bioscopic image by the animated one? How can a reconstruction of the memory of the traumatized subject be founded in the context of this dialogue? This article aims to answer these questions from the cases of Waltz with Bashir and Flee.

Archive, memory and african american consciousness: Traveling While Black (Roger Ross Williams, 2019)

Beatriz del Caz Pérez — 2024-12-30

In this paper, the rhetorical and formal foundations of Traveling While Black (2019) are analyzed. By placing the user in Ben’s Chili Bowl, an authentic site of memory, the experience offers a review of African American history from the second half of the 20th century. The juxtaposition of historical archives on discrimination with current testimonies emphasizes the use of memory as an instrument for social action in the present.

Le peuple migrateur (2001) or the wildlife documentary as a spectral archive

María Teresa Lajoinie-Domínguez — 2024-12-30

The aim of this article is to analyze the archival value of the wildlife documentary genre by analyzing Jacques Perrin’s film Le peuple migrateur (2001). We will look at the value of non-human animals by studying the implications derived from the title. Next, the narrative of the film will be analyzed based on the notions of circular temporality, emotional identification and imprinting, as well as the implications that derive from them. Finally, it will conclude by proposing the documentary as a spectral archive of images.

Archive and family in contemporary spanish cinema: examining the fictionalization in My Mexical Bretzel (Nuria Giménez Lorang, 2019)

Manuel de la Fuente Soler — 2024-12-30

Documentary cinema has, from its beginnings, engaged with the debate around the relationship between referentiality and fictional construction. Here, the consideration of the archive becomes significant, whether through the use of pre-existing audio visual materials to construct the filmic text or by establishing the film itself as an archive with its own status. Documentary film has also traditionally questioned the neutrality of family relationships. Building on these ideas, we examine the case of My Mexican Bretzel, the debut film by Nuria Giménez Lorang, constructed from her family’s home movie archives. In the film, the director uses this material to create a fictional narrative that challenges the supposed objectivity of documentary film and invites the viewer to take an active role in the communicative process.

Isabel Coixet and the Me Too moment: denouncing sexual violence in The Yellow Ceiling (2022)

María Isabel Menéndez Menéndez — 2024-12-30

This article approaches the documentary film The Yellow Ceiling, by Isabel Coixet (2022), which received the Gaudí Award for Best Documentary the year that it was released, as part of the Me Too moment as defined by Karen Boyle (2019). The movie deals with the sexual abuse suffered by nine women, when they were teenagers, at the Lleida Theatre School. It sustains the thesis that the use of testimony via haptic resources facilitates the denunciation of the structural quality of gender violence in its various manifestations, as well as the reinforcement of the victims’ credibility. In this regard, the documentary becomes a discourse of resistance that contributes to the current wave of feminist testimonial practices about sexual violence. In line with the Me Too moment, which has launched the Fourth Wave of feminism, Coixet’s work is characterized by ethical commitment, active listening, a demand of reparation for the survivors, and the displacement of responsibility onto the perpetrators.

Discourses on the marging: testimony, activism and sexual dissidence in contemporary spanish documentary filmmaking

Silvia Guillamón Carrasco — 2024-12-30

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a significant number of documentaries that aim to give visibility to sexually dissident subjects, a group that is hardly represented in the Spanish film scene. This trend has taken place in a context marked by new feminisms, the demands of LGTBIQ+ groups, legislative advances and the gradual normalisation of gender diversity in contemporary Spanish society. In this article, we will review the different trends in LGTBIQ+ documentaries in the Spanish context and then focus on the analysis of Guerriller@s (Montse Pujantell, 2011) and Alteritats (Alba Cross and Nora Haddad, 2023), two filmic texts that we consider symptomatic of the influence of queer activism within the contemporary feminist movement. Both documentaries aim to explore the conditions of representation of non normative genders, sexualities and bodies through the testimony and verbalisation of various counter-hegemonic experiences (such as gender transition or performativity).

The performative value of photography in the resignification of the memory of the LGTBIQ+ elderly. Construction of self-stories through the family album

Awatef Ketiti — 2024-12-30

This article aims to explore the scope of the visual archive in the reconstruction of the life history of LGTBIQ+ elders. In it we investigate the transformations that have marked the representation of their sexual and gender orientation before and after the Spanish democratic Transition. The objectives are: to study the link between sexual politics and the construction of subjectivities through the narration of individual trajectories and to explore the methodological potential of the family album as a privileged documentary source for reconstructing individual and collective memory. The methodology of photobiography has been used to create the life stories of four elders from the LGTBIQ+ collective through photographs. The results show, on the one hand, the link between the engendered subjectivities and the political and social context, providing a historical reading of the Transition through life itineraries and, on the other hand, they affirm the research potential of family album photography in the revitalisation of memory and the analysis of the process of the formation of subjectivities determined by sexual politics and biopolitics.

The Making of Images: trauma and borrowed memory in documentary cinema

Isadora Guardia Calvo — 2024-12-30

The 20th century is home to a large production of documentary film works framed by the different dictatorships developed in the Southern Cone. It is possible to perceive the logics of a collective gaze in the production and reception of the works through which the documentary is constructed as an attentive witness that can confirm what happened, thus fixing in the retina pieces such as La batalla de Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1971). At the beginning of the 21st century, a series of aesthetic and discursive transformations took place that led both cinematographic and photographic images to explore new uses beyond their documentary value. Themes related to trauma, memory and identity occupy mainly these spaces of creation and a change in the production processes with respect to the models of the political and social documentary cinema of the 60s and 70s can be observed. The purpose of approaching the work of images in contemporary Latin American artistic and cinematographic practice is to identify the strategies of configuration of a borrowed memory crossed by trauma. “The image of” corroborates the presence of an absence that permeates the construction of the self. Sons and daughters of the disappeared, tortured or murdered during the dictatorship in both Argentina and Chile use artistic and audiovisual practice as a tool to reconfigure the self, distancing themselves from the dynamics of the past 20th century. The visual works by Lucila Quieto (Arqueología de la memoria, 1999-2001) and Verónica Maggi (El Rescate, 2007) as well as the documentary piece by Lissette Orozco (El pacto de Adriana, 2017) allow us to analyze and delve into how to work image and memory in new political and social contexts. The documentary Desaparecer (Isadora Guardia, 2022) is proposed as an exploration in itself of the image in the construction of the family album as a producer of political image.

Archive (audio/visual) and memory of colonialism in Latin America: Buscando a "Isla de Pascua". La película perdida (2014) and Apenas el sol (2020)

Karen Genschow — 2024-12-30

The documentaries Buscando a “Isla de Pascua”. La película perdida (Chile, 2014) and Apenas el sol (Paraguay, 2020) deal with colonial histories situated in the 20th century in two regions on the Latin American periphery, both legible in terms of internal colonialism. The respective histories are (re)constructed through the use of audio/ visual archives - precarious and fragile - produced in one case previously, in the other simultaneously with the production of the documentary. The article analyses the use of the archive, which technically appears as remediation and politically reveals itself as part of a project of decolonisation.

A matter of forms: notes on the cuban documentary relationship between archives and dissidences

Silvana Florencia Santucci — 2024-12-30

The article explores the relationship between “archive” and “dissidence” in two Cuban short films: P.M (1961) by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Alberto “Sabá” Cabrera Infante and Gente en la playa (1960) by Néstor Almendros. Both question the way in which the documentable is aestheticized and dispute the representative regime of the Revolution. On the other hand, we explore how these shorts reinforce the thesis of the destabilization of the archives in the face of official narratives.