ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a valuable source of testimony to the role of cinema and television in the construction of popular memory in the Transition and beyond: Antonio Munoz Molina's prize-winning novel El jinete polaco. The overt didacticism of Cronicas, with clunky dialogue citing the Fuero, placed somewhat uncomfortably in the mouth of the tolerant and permissive schoolteacher, might be seen as a precursor of the government-led 'pedagogy' adopted by successive Director Generals of TVE under the Transition and beyond. Munoz Molina's encyclopedic novel El jinete polaco is generally considered to be one of the most successful by the popular and respected novelist and was named the winner of the Planeta and National Literature Prizes in 1991 and 1992, respectively. A healthy scepticism towards art movies as privileged witnesses to the historical process of the transition could also be linked to the new interest in television as mirror of and actor in everyday life in Spain.
