Towards a new “form of knowledge and dissemination”. Introducción al Museo del Prado and the limits of art documentaries in Spain during the eighties

Abstract

Based on Introduction to the Prado Museum, an art documentary from 1987 by the director Basilio Martín Patino, this text explores the relationship between the museum and the audiovisual world in the mid-eighties. The museum is first analysed as an institution interested in redefining itself as something more than a ‘deposit’ of works and reaching other audiences through other means. The emphasis is also placed on how this example helps illustrate cinema entering a period of profound changes and gradual integration into an audiovisual landscape of blurred boundaries. The text presents an analysis of the production materials of this piece, unreleased until 2019, which are preserved at the Spanish National Film Archives Filmoteca Española. Methodologically, it also makes use of some approaches formulated in recent years within the field of media archaeology: thus, beyond the particular circumstances that tie this production to Spanish culture in the early nineteen eighties, Introducción al Museo del Prado can be also read as part of the pedagogical reorientation of a film culture that was breaking with the project of modernity initiated in the second postwar and exploring its limits by redefining its traditional purposes, uses and audiences.