Los documentales turísticos para televisión de Ramón Masats: préstamos y estrategias de hipermediación

Abstract

Hybridization, convergence and loans between different media have motivated many reflections on the media environments of the digital age, but are they meaningful when studying previous historical periods? This article is focused on the tourist documentaries for television that Spanish photographer Ramón Masats directed in the 1960s for the TVE series Conozca usted España. The main objective is detecting how loans from other media operate in them, and how the fact of mediation is depicted.

Elements of photography, soundtrack and script will be analyzed, as well as the presence of celebrities, the ideological background of the discourse, and the different modes of documentary used. In addition, this analysis is complemented with data on the production processes of these television documentaries, which are paradigmatic of the moment of consolidation and development that TVE was experiencing during the take-off of its second channel. This information was obtained from a personal interview with the author, Masats. Finally, the context will be crucial: the tourism boom that was used to promote a new image of Spain in the second half of Francoism.