DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

Appendix 6

667 Land without Bread: A shot Analysis and commentary Note: I focus this analysis on the relation of the sound to the image, with the purpose of showing that inconsistencies among the elements of the film (and especially in its sound-image relations) imply a diegetic incoherence (similar to that which our analysis of Un chien andalou revealed)—both films convey the texture of reality but actually offer an impossible real. In the case of Las Hurdes, this impossible real constitutes a reflection on documentary and its authority (key topics for the Documents circle). To keep the descriptions of the sound and image in sync with each other, I often break the narration in the middle of a sentence and then pick it up in the next part of the transcription , starting in the middle of a sentence. Credits—white letters against a sky with clouds: UNPROMISEDLAND(UnpromisedLandwastheAmericantitleforthefilm.) Directed by LUIS BUNUEL Photography: ELIE LOTAR Assistants: PIERRE UNIK SANCHEZ VENTURA 6 Appendix Appendix Six 668 Notes on the personnel: Buñuel’s cameraman on Las Hurdes, Eli Lotar, had collaborated with Antonin Artaud in his theatre, worked with the left documentarian Joris Ivens, and had published in Documents 6 an immensely horrific series on the slaughterhouses of Paris (whose Bataillean themes, of the common abjectness of animal and human life and the resemblance between the abbatoir and the place of worship, reappear in this film). Lotar first went to Spain in 1932, with the Trotskyite Yves Allégret, to make a film of Legendre’s Las Jurdes, but Spanish authorities expelled them (and Lotar made a film on the fishers of Tenerife instead). Around that same time, he helped form the group Octobre, around the left Surrealist poet Jacques Prévert. Co-writer Pierre Unik was an active Surrealist and belonged to the Communist Party in France. In 1932 (around the time the film was made), the precocious Unik, along with Aragon, quit Breton’s circle as a result of differences arising from the 1930 Kharkov Congress for Intellectuals of the Revolution—there, Aragon proclaimed the primacy of Socialist Realism over Surrealism. Buñuel, for the most part, sided with Aragon. Assistant Rafael Sánchez Ventura was a labour organizer, an educator, and an anarchist. Funding for the film was provided by the artist Ramón Acín, also an anarchist. For many years, film historians accepted Buñuel’s testimony and maintained that the film was shot on location between 23 April and 22 May 1932, and was shown to the press in December of that year. However, as a result of examination of Buñuel’s correspondence with Charles Voailles, it has been established that the film was shot in 1933—this is significant because the political situation that year was fraught, and conservative forces rejected the Republican authorities’ proposals for agrarian reform and secular education. The script, by Buñuel and Unik, was completed in March 1934. In 1936, the film was approved for screening. Following the credits, the screen fades to black and the narration begins. Narration: The Hurdanos were unknown even in Spain until a road was built for the first time in 1922. Nowhere does man need to wage a more desperate fight against the hostile forces of nature. In light of this, the film may be considered as a study of human geography. Commentary: There had grown up around Documents, the journal of the dissident Surrealists who congregated around Georges Bataille, an interest in the confluence of ethnography and Surrealism. The notion that the film is an exercise in human geography was probably also the result of Maurice Legendre’s influence. Land without Bread: A Shot Analysis and Commentary 669 Eli Lotar’s camera work is scrupulous in its efforts to preserve the relationship between the figure and the environment, so as to affirm this work is an essay in human geography. If Un chien andalou had dealt with a bourgeois couple and the irruption of passion in their overly conventional life, Las Hurdes deals with a very different order of existence. IMAGE 1 Map of Europe. IMAGE 2 (fades in) Map of Spain. Narration: In certain hidden and unknown spots in Europe, there still exist remnants of the most primitive type of human life; a typical example is to be found in Spain. Commentary: The narration, together with the first map, establishes that Las Hurdes is not singular, that it...