Propp’s structuralism in the journalists heroes and villains in the spanish cinema

Abstract

Hero and villain journalist characters occupy a prominent place in Spanish cinema and their study provides a vision of the profession from the perspective provided by the rich kaleidoscope of cinema. This research studies 135 films in seven decades, from 1942 to 2012, which provides an unusual overview of the evolution of the news reporter and the media over the last century in our country. The originality of the methodology is found in the recovery of Morphology of the story (1928) by Vladimir Propp to transfer the structuralism of literature to audiovisual narrative, a semiosis that configures an exclusive morphology of the journalist. The Russian author Propp found 31 matrix functions that are repeated in the folk tales of his country and this work 21 functions in the movies. The detailed analysis of scripts, sequences and frames is synthesized in spheres and actions in which the informants move. Heroes and villains that make up a new reflection on the screen of Spanish journalism with a mastery of the traditional means of communication of the written press, the male character and the journalist involved in a life of emotional chaos and addictions.