The documentary genre and the construction of reality and collective memory of tourist destinations: the case of Serra da Estrela

O caso da Serra da Estrela, Portugal

Abstract

Modern societies have come to recognize an increasingly central role for the mass media in the process of forming public opinion on most everyday issues. This has been the case since the pioneering theories and studies on the effects of the media, and it continues to be the case with the most recent theories that denote a renewed look from behavioural, affective, and cognitive perspectives. This work was theoretically based on recent theories of communication, particularly the Theory of Social Construction of Reality articulated with the Theory of Collective Memory. Our purpose was to reflect how the media, particularly seventh art, can contribute do build the tourism destinations image, focusing analytical attention on the effect of the representations they convey, on the subjective perception of the reality of their audiences. We sought to assess how the most frequent stories, the most common issues, the most iconic images of characters, events, and places, present in a set of documentaries about Serra da Estrela, can be reflected in the collective perceptions about these territories. For this purpose, 11 documentaries shot in Serra da Estrela, between 1965 and 2020, which took the highest Portuguese mountain as the main actress, were analysed.