The Teaching and Method of Jesús González Requena’s Theory of the Audiovisual Text

Abstract

This article examines the teaching and method of Jesús González Requena’s theory of the audiovisual text, understood as a theoretical and methodological approach that conceives the artistic text as a space of subjective experience. Its main purpose is to clarify this theory’s contribution to contemporary audiovisual analysis and to explore how a method whose core is essentially experiential and transferential can be taught at the university level. To this end, the study distinguishes between communicative and artistic texts and presents the three registers—the semiotic, the imaginary, and the real—in their symbolic articulation, showing how they enable the description of the ways in which a text engages the subjectivity of the reader-viewer. Methodologically, the article systematizes the pedagogical work carried out since 1983 in the Textual Analysis Seminar at the Complutense University of Madrid, conceived as a laboratory for audiovisual reading. It describes the Seminar’s pedagogical-clinical dynamics by splitting the professor/student roles into those of reader and analyst, and examines the dynamics of desire, transference, and resistance involved in the act of reading. One of its principal contributions is the identification of a specific methodology—slow spelling-out, shot freezing, repetition, evenly suspended attention, and free association—that brings the formal rigor of analysis into dialogue with the reader’s subjective experience and makes it possible to access the text’s dimension of truth beyond its signifying structures. The article concludes that this theory offers a robust methodological alternative for audiovisual analysis in the humanities and that its pedagogical dimension provides a distinctive educational model, although its dissemination within the university poses the challenge of teaching a practice whose primary foundation is experiential.