From oral myth to audiovisual

An analysis of transposition as narrative experience of regional and subaltern identities

Abstract

In a global context marked by the hegemony of neoliberal communication, in Argentina, during the years 2010-2014, a dozen public contests were developed to promote the production of regional audiovisual content, which sought to democratize, decentralize and diversify the national audiovisual space, historically dominated by the logic of the market and centralization in the capital, Buenos Aires. One of the means of promotion with the greatest impact due to its unprecedent nature, were the federal fiction series, of which popular mythologies turned out to be one of the most recurring themes. In this setting, we question the processes of transposition of popular mythologies into regional audiovisual series, warning that, beyond their capacity for spectacularization, they constitute experiences of narrative, regional and subaltern identities. In that sense, we try to understand the network of political meanings that underlie these procedures. Specifically, from a corpus of ten audiovisual series, in this article we present the interpretive hermeneutic analysis of the Salta fiction “El Aparecido” (2010), which narrates the popular belief about the myth of “El Familiar” from the creation of a new mythology that resignify the culture of belonging. Methodologically, we develop an analysis of the transposition based on three previous operations: the investigation of the context of production of the series, the analysis of the series itself, and conducting interviews with its authors.