Mateo Santos: from “combat” journalism to “professional” journalism

Abstract

This article proposes a descriptive and interpretative approach to the journalist and filmmaker Mateo Santos Cantero (Villanueva de los Infantes, 1891 – México DF, 1964), which is specifically focused on the beginnings of his career as a “man of letters” in Barcelona during the First World War years. A period little known yet, but essential to understand the unique journalistic idiosyncrasies of who would play a key role in the development of an early film culture in the pre Spanish Civil War, as well as the pioneering introduction of the cinema in the anarchist movement during the Second Republic.