The film of the Land Without Bread
Introduction
The film of the Land Without Bread was created on 1932-33, a period that most Spanish artists emerged from the surrealism movement. Luis Bunuel presented the surreal documentary that explored the extreme human misery of people from a region he was quite familiar with. According to Ibarz (27), the film was “regarded as one of the most important experiments of all his work and a decisive one in documentary cinema at the beginning of the sound era.” The film was at one point “radically” altered, but Bunuel decided to resurrect the film. Does it mean Bunuel was not capable of producing a different documentary? The artist wanted to develop the film into a new dimension with surrealism features and themes that will meet his intended message to Las Hurdes people. I agree with Ibarz that “Bufiuel’s guiding principle was not to look for ‘exotic’ place that would be unknown to the spectator”(31). The artist also wanted the documentary to cover notions of anthropology. Apart from been an artist, Bunuel had studied ethnographic.
Body
Both Land Without Bread and Nanook (1922) had similar styles such as fictional elements, absurd imagery, and creative imagination but I think Bunuel opt for the first film because he was quite familiar with both the prehistory and culture of the main subjects in the film, the Las Hurdes. One similarity between the two films was they tried to reveal the construction of culture within the subject area. Unlike Nanook (1922), Bunuel’s documentary appeared like a mythic story with narrative forms, and I agree with Ibarz (Ibarz, 30) that “narrates the past more than the present” of the Hurdanos traditions. Like the incident of the death of the goat in the film depicted “collective rituals of death and the presence of animals in everyday life”(Ibarz, 29) in Las Hurdes. There were various reasons why Bunuel wanted to “draws the viewer’s attention to the location of Las Hurdes” (Ibarz, 29) and how Hurdanos were constructed.
Conclusion
Bunuel found the Hurdanos as more resourceful subjects who help him cover not only ethnofiction documentary but also exposed some of the social changes the people deserved. The artist also found Las Hurdes “a place with strong echoes of prehistoric culture” (29). These two aspects, traditions and social change, remained to be some of the motifs of surrealism. Bunuel tried to expose human misery situations in Las Hurdes, and from the film, I noted the Hurdanos went through “impossible living conditions” (Ibarz, 20) poverty, injustice, diseases and death. The film was to send a message to the targeted viewers so that they can push for a “radical revolution.” Land Without Bread was the best choice for Bunuel because it stuck entirely to surrealism motifs. Unlike Nanook (1922) that concentrate only on cultural construction.