6. Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread (Louis Bunuel, 1933)
People put their faith in the authority and truthfulness of documentaries because they've come to expect the genre to provide them with an educational experience. Such films tend to act as if the camera cannot lie- which is particularly the case for the ethnographic genre (ie. when usually white people from one culture set out to portray their perception of people from another outside culture). The ethnographic film became such an important part of the entertainment complex (as lives of convenience became the norm), that most people have since been conditioned to accept their truth value, if only subconsciously. This is one of cinema's greatest deceptions of all, because ethnographic films have been lying pretty much since their inception (see Nanook of the North circa 1922). Louis Bunuel's film Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread has been labeled a "surrealist documentary"- which may just be a dated way of calling something a mockumentary. Although, as Jeffrey Ruoff points out in his essay on the film, " a parody of non-fiction, though not a fake documentary ... may parody the conventions of documentary yet still be non-fiction". In this sense, it can be placed in a category separate from the totally fictional mockumentary, like was seen in our previous example. In her essay, "Las Hurdes and the Political Efficacy of the Grotesque", Jeannette Sloniowski suggests that Bunuel is exploiting what is known as "the grotesque". "The grotesque has a long history in art and literature as a tool for generating satire, upsetting spectators and subverting classical texts." She puts this forward in contrast to Nicholas Thomas, who argues that Las Hurdes is a "relentlessly denigrating...and distinctly colonialist" portrait of rural people who are clearly held in contempt by the film-maker. Is Bunuel guilty of a smear campaign against the Hurdanos or has he made a completely fraudulent film that exploits the grotesque- while lying about it's very nature- in order to force the viewer to deconstruct the ethnographic genre of film? I personally feel that both Thomas and Sloniowski are correct in their interpretations of the film. You could argue that, on one hand, Thomas has made an exoteric reading of the film, while, on the other, Sloniowski has opted for a more esoteric approach. But if you consider, as Ruoff describes, that Bunuel was basing his film off an ethnographic text that was written by a Christian who looked at the Hurdanos as primitives living in a barren land- whose only hope for a better life was their Christian faith. Then I suppose it comes down to what you perceive Bunuel's intent to be. Ruoff does go on to imply that Bunuel's antagonism towards Catholicism would likely have put him at odds with the text's writer, and driven him to approach the topic with a sense of humour. Either way, Bunuel uses deception in two ways with Las Hurdes. He starts by being literally fraudulent, and if the viewer happens to fall for this ruse they are set up for the overall deception. By utilizing these deceptive tactics, he is exploiting the same sense of authority that the ethnographic documentary has always relied upon- which is why Thomas made the observations that he did. He had essentially fallen for the trap that Bunuel had set - the overall deception. Some explicitly fraudulent aspects of the film include: the falsified scenes, like the mountain goat hunting scene; the contradictory image-to-narration (and musical accompaniment) relationship; and(many of) the generally disparaging remarks made by the narrator toward his subjects. A keen viewer, however, should pick up on at least some of these explicitly absurd elements and start to critically analyze what they are watching. This is how the film was inevitably revealed to lack a certain sense of truthfulness. Now, anyone versed in film history will be privy to the fact that Bunuel was not making just another ethnographic film, but rather a complete mockery of the entire ethnographic genre. Only the initiated viewer could uncover this secret- and that's what makes the film so damn brilliant in the end.