What the NO-DO talked about, and in which languages

The NO-DO (Noticiarios y Documentales) was the state newsreel of Francoist Spain, compulsorily screened in every cinema between January 1943 and May 1981. For three generations it was, until television spread, the only moving image of current affairs and the regime's most direct audiovisual voice. The archive is published online today by RTVE and the Filmoteca Española.

The historiography of the NO-DO is large (a recent bibliography lists some 300 works between 1987 and 2023), but the quantitative picture of what it showed rests on manual coding of partial samples: one period, one region, one topic. The archive exceeds 1,000 hours and 30,000 newsreel items. This study asks the whole archive two simple questions: what did the NO-DO talk about, and in which languages. It answers them with speech and text technology and large language models, stressing two things: that every aggregate figure can be traced back to a specific news item and timecode, and that the error of the automatic annotation is measured.

1. A map of the spoken language and of the on-screen caption language across the archive, showing that the existing automatic transcription (forced to Spanish) had translated 84% of foreign speech into Spanish.
2. The segmentation of all 6,607 videos into 39,957 timed news items, each classified into 12 themes and 61 sub-themes, with flags for scope (domestic or foreign) and for Franco on screen.
3. A validation protocol (pilot, review of low-confidence items and a blind random sample) and a comparison with independent manual coding.
4. A description of how the newsreel's themes changed between 1943 and 1981 and of how themes and languages relate.

The corpus is the complete NO-DO archive as RTVE publishes it: 6,607 videos in seven series. For every video the study uses RTVE's summary (a description written by archivists that lists the items in order), an earlier automatic transcription of the narration with timestamps (140,554 segments), OCR of on-screen captions (58,894, newsreel only) and the audio track, downloaded again to identify the language and then discarded.

In a 100-video pilot, Haiku agreed with a classification made with Claude Opus on 82.7% of screen seconds at theme level and 75.6% at sub-theme level. After the review, a simple random sample of 400 items (seed 2026) was drawn and two Opus agents classified them from scratch without seeing the automatic labels.

Of the 564 hours of speech detected in the 5,924 videos with sound, 562.5 get a language. Spanish accounts for 95.8%. Then come English (2.5%, 13.9 hours in 441 videos), French, Italian, Portuguese and German. Catalan adds up to 27 minutes in 14 videos. 665 videos contain at least 5 seconds of a language other than Spanish.

A first finding concerns the archive itself: 84% of non-Spanish speech appears translated into Spanish in the existing transcription. Any language analysis based on the text would miss most foreign speech.

The yearly share of non-Spanish speech is under 5% almost every year, except in 1946–1951, when it reaches 25–55%. The newsreel was not narrated in English: most surviving prints from those years lack the Spanish narration, and what is heard is the original sound of the American and British newsreel reports the NO-DO bought (Signal Corps, Movietone). Anyone using the audio from that period needs to bear this in mind.

What can be read on screen tells another story. There is no Catalan caption before 1968 (21 in all); from the Transition onwards come election posters, banknotes of the republican Generalitat, comarques and exhibitions. The only Basque caption is the text of the 1978 Constitution. Foreign languages are posters, newspapers and signs in international reports.

The newsreel was split into 31,232 items (7.7 per video). Average length grows from about a minute in the 1940s and 1950s to two minutes in the 1970s and three and a half in 1980–81: the newsreel moves from many short pieces to fewer reports. The measure is screen time: a three-minute item weighs three times as much as a one-minute item.

In the 1940s, events abroad take 52.8% of the time; the share falls to 45.5% in the 1950s, 40.8% in the 1960s and 27.2% in the 1970s, and to 7.2% in 1980–81. Colonial territories (Ifni, Sahara, Guinea and the Protectorate) never exceed about 1%.

Crossing both analyses (non-Spanish speech spans of at least 5 seconds inside an item), foreign speech concentrates in culture, international, sport and armed forces. English dominates in sport, international, military and cultural items; German and French are heard mostly in international items, and Italian and Portuguese in cultural ones. Foreign voices enter the newsreel mainly through bought-in sport and world-news footage and through performances.

The series differ a great deal. Revista Imágenes is the most cultural (31% culture and 18% economy); the colour documentaries give a quarter to culture and another to tourism and landscape; in the Royal and Historical Archives the military and official events dominate, and Imágenes del deporte is 90% sport.

For 1943–1956, Gámir Orueta (2026) counted 11,873 items in 1,460 issues from the printed programmes, 40.4% of them about Spain. The automatic segmentation of the 1,365 issues from that period available in the digital archive yields 12,645 (6.5% more, with 6.5% fewer issues), of which 41.1% are domestic. Both studies find Madrid over-represented (27.9% and 32.4% of domestic items).

For Catalonia in 1960–1975, Santacana Torres (2021) finds politics to be 5.2% of items; this study's matching figure is 3.0%. Both confirm politics as a minor theme.

For each theme, the weight of its sub-themes in each decade of the newsreel and the longest confidently classified item of each sub-theme (from any series). The link opens the video on RTVE; the minute shows where the item starts. Item titles are those of the classification, in Spanish.

The figures quantify, for the whole archive, a shift historians had described qualitatively: a newsreel born in the middle of a war as a window on the world, dependent on German and American footage, that gradually turned inward and towards entertainment, heritage and leisure, while sport stayed constant. The stability of Franco's presence and the small weight of explicit politics fit the newsreel as “banal nationalism” (Sánchez-Biosca, 2014): the regime is everywhere as frame and figure, and rarely as subject.

The language map shows a newsreel monolingual by design: Catalan, Basque and Galician are practically absent from both sound and captions. Methodologically, the study shows that a complete, two-level, timecoded thematic annotation of a 1,200-hour audiovisual archive is now possible at negligible cost, and that the main difficulty lies elsewhere: in the taxonomy and its rules, in aligning human summaries with noisy transcripts, and in validation.

The audiovisual material is public on RTVE's website; each video is identified by its RTVE id. The derived data (segmentation and classification of the 39,957 items with timecodes, language segments and aggregate tables), the taxonomy, prompts and scripts are available from the author on reasonable request to review or replicate the study (xavi@sorensen.ai). The audiovisual material belongs to RTVE and the Filmoteca Española.

The preprint is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It has not been peer reviewed. The full text is in Spanish.

Large language models (Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 and Opus 5.5) were used as research instruments for segmentation, classification, review and validation, as described in the method.