Land Without Bread: A film that never stops ringing

If Land Without Bread today remains the most important film ever made in Spain, it certainly owes it to the power of its gaze on a thorough misery to the bone, to a light whose cruelty, deliberately distanced, aims to shake up a satiated public, but even more to the acute intelligence of the relation that it establishes between sights and sounds. This may seem paradoxical for a film that was shot as silent, but it is precisely the disjunction between the operations of shooting and sound recording that has probably helped a real philosophy of sound to unfold in this extraordinary film. The aural aspect of Land Without Bread gives the film its unique appearance; a composition that is singular to say the least; the most striking strangeness? The absence of noise! We know that noise in cinema acts as proof of reality; to go without for a film documentary is a first challenge. To remove this base is already to destabilise perception. If Buñuel has erased the usual carpet of sound, it is to create a new rapport between the two others poles of film sound: speech and music. The heightened tension developed between speech and music is the undercurrent that gives the film its meaning through its form. What makes this tension inimitable? A warm-cold Buñuelian cocktail: heat overflowing with music, yet a disconcertingly cold voice. In the film, meaning is first born out of the combination of distinct elements, and this is particularly true in sound. This is how Buñuel works: for the musical illustration (if we dare say so), he chose a work that didn't illustrate his images at all: plains of dry Hurdes overwhelmed by the almost raw light, it juxtaposes the weight of Romanticism at its northernmost, the Fourth Symphony by Johannes Brahms (retaining only the dark movements, the first, second and especially the terrifying fourth, the Passacaglia), which is played by musicians from the Germanic tradition (they used the 78 rpm recording made in 1930 by the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Max Fiedler). As for the speaker (this is the term used in the sonorisation of the film)¹ in charge of the commentary, it is modelled not without cynicism-play on the tone of the speakers of the time, in news or scientific films, striking a somewhat declamatory pose, indifferent to the horrors being described. The explosive nature of this juxtaposition of romantic music and detached voice is heightened by an unexpected mixing, which becomes a source of deep unease and installs a competition between the two entities, the level of the music being almost equal to that of the voice and thus threatening its intelligibility. A clarification: what we have ideally described corresponds to one version of the film, the first sound version, which was in French, screened in Paris in November 1936 - the only version of Land Without Bread that can truly qualified as Buñuelian. This film has had a chaotic history, from its conception until its multiple versions.

Back to the evidence: Buñuel has always had an open design creation process, involving many different energies in the service of his work; this great author develops the film to be the result of the involved talent. While remaining Buñuel's most personal film, Land Without Bread is essentially a collective work. Luis Buñuel is not the source of the project (Yves Allegret had had the idea but could not carry it out), it is an adaptation of the Maurice Legendre book of human geography on Hurdes, published in Bordeaux in 1927, and calls for images from the cinematographer Eli Lotar, who had previously worked with Jean Painlevé for his scientific films.² The external inputs, critical to the soundtrack, prove equally decisive: the text of biting commentary was written by Pierre Unik, the choice of subtle musical montage (the selection of the recorded version and the passages for specific sequences) is the work of filmmaker Jean Grémillon (who was located in Spain in 1934,³ and whose work was produced by Bu...