Mapping Public History of Education in Spain: The Treasure Trove of Documentaries

Abstract

The documentary or non-fictional film is a powerful means of dissemination and communication with audiences, making it a cultural product that plays an important part in the construction of a country’s public history. And yet, this research source has been absolutely neglected by historians of education. In this study we offer the first systematic study of documentaries of a historical-educational nature to be carried out in the field of Spanish historiography. Our study consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the exploration of the concepts of «documentary» and «historical documentary» from the perspectives of filmmakers, spectators, institutions, and films itself, the last being specifically related with the taxonomy of documentaries coined by Bill Nichols. In the second part we focus on historical-educational documentaries made in Spain between 1976 and 2023, describing the contextual and conceptual characteristics of these documentaries and comparing them with a set of categories that are derived from our explorations in the first part of this article. The preliminary results of our investigation yield a descriptive inventory of 73 documentaries, this being a novel contribution, given that no such catalogue has ever been published. Our initial analysis of these documentaries, which focused on plainly observable categories – for example, release date, funding sources, directors and producers, duration, language, classic narrative techniques and so on –, allowed us to come to some initial conclusions regarding the role played by documentaries in the Spanish public history of education and to outline our subsequent lines of research.