Land without Bread: Considering Buñuel’s Use of Reflexive Documentary and its Ethical Implications.
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Course
Introduction To Film Studies
Institution
Amsterdam University College (AUC)
Land without Bread focuses on the communities living in Las Hurdas, Spain, describing how the people there are living far from civilization and thus, how they are different from civilized people. Land without Bread uses material filmed during an unmentioned period of time, edited after one another ...
Land without Bread: Considering Buñuel’s Use of Reflexive Documentary and its
Ethical Implications.
Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdas, Tierra sin Pan (Land without Bread) attempts to document a
Spanish community in the West of Spain; Las Hurdas. Buñuel was a Spanish Mexican film
director, mostly focused on documentary and experimental film. Born in 1900 in Spain, he
traveled the world trying to become successful in making films in several different countries.
Buñuel made multiple experimental films with friends such as Salvador Dalí, however, this
paper will solely focus on the reflexive documentary Land without Bread; made in 1933.
The documentary focuses on the communities living in Las Hurdas, Spain, describing
how the people there are living far from civilization and thus, how they are different from
civilized people. Land without Bread uses material filmed during an unmentioned period of time,
edited after one another in relatively short cuts that create a certain rhythm without a clear
storyline, while Buñuel functions as narrator. He never interacts with the social actors, moreover,
he presumably made the voice over after shooting the film, which gives the freedom to frame the
documentary according to his perspectives. However, Land without Bread is also a reflexive
mode of documentary, meaning that it is critical of documentary itself. Thus, considering
Buñuel’s use of the reflexive mode of documentary and his narration in combination with
images, this paper will examine the social implications of this documentary.
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To be able to discuss Buñuel’s documentary properly, one must first define whether Land
without Bread should be considered a documentary of wish-fulfillment or of social
representation because it changes the perspective through which one judges the documentary.
Initially, Land without Bread seems to clearly be a documentary of social representation, as it
seems to represent a real community in the west of Spain. According to Bill Nichols,
documentaries of social representation “give tangible representation to aspects of the world we
already inhabit and share” (1). Although these documentaries still represent social reality
according to the acts of selection and arrangement carried out by a filmmaker”, what is shown in
the documentaries is considered "[true] if the viewer decides accordingly (Nichols 2). Knowing
absolutely nothing about the communities that live in Las Hurdas, most people take what Buñuel
filmed as true reality. However, looking critically at the visible and audible material, especially
the combination of the two, viewers become unsure about whether what Buñuel is saying is
actually what they are seeing. This is where Land without Bread can arguably be considered a
documentary of wish-fulfillment because Buñuel makes the film fiction through the narration
that does not correlate with the images.
An example of this disjunction between image and narration is the scene where Buñuel
talks about the festivities in La Alberca, saying that the newly wedded men show off the
rooster’s heads that they just tore off and that all the inhabitants are drunk before seven in the
evening. There is, however, no footage showing that this is true.
Throughout the entire documentary, Buñuel focuses on the harsh, uncivilized aspects of
Las Hurdas, mentioning seemingly random facts about the Hurdanos by continuity editing
relatively short shots that each focus on something different. There is a shot of a baby, followed
by a close up of the Christian necklaces that she is wearing, which are according to Buñuel,
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