Melodramatic Thought in Contemporary Spanish Documentaries

Abstract

One of the most unexpected transformations that documentary cinema experienced by the end of the twentieth century, due to its subjective turn, was the emergence of a melodramatic documentary film. This subgenre has been particularly significant in the field of contemporary Spanish documentary. In general, the trend is distinguished by the use of emotions not only as an aesthetic but also as a hermeneutic factor. In contemporary Spanish documentary, this aesthetic hermeneutics of emotions can be detected in the work of different filmmakers, such as Joaquín Jordà, José Luis Guerin, María Cañas, Isaki Lacuesta, Elías León Seminiani, Andrés Duque, and Vícto­r Erice. In their films, a paradoxical melodramatic impulse is promoted, the paradox coming from the fact that traditional documentary, also called ‘cinema of the real’, has always been considered the audiovisual field most distant from emotions and subjectivity. The exploration of this phenomenon allows for an understanding of the transformation of contemporary documentary, while proposing an innovative concept of realism and the motivation for investigating the relationship between image, emotion, and knowledge.