Las Hurdes (Spain, 1933) Luis Buñuel
*Provocation Through Shock*
Las Hurdes bluntly presents the inhabitants of poor villages in Spain as primitives, using shots that remind us of brutal colonial behaviour. For instance, the camera makes a close-up of the teeth and throat of a sick girl. The camera is examining her from a superior position, suggesting we the viewers are more civilised than she is. We also see the image of a mosquito in a medical book followed by a man shivering of fever, suggesting that we have the knowledge to prevent his malaria, but he doesn’t. These images are shocking from the perspective of ethnographic cinema which, now and in the 1930s, aims for a humanistic, emphatic perspective. But to shock was of course at the core of the methods used by the Surrealists to provoke change in society.
Buñuel insisted on showing things rather than just telling them. He went as far as to shoot a climbing goat to show those goats sometimes fall from the cliffs. He could not wait for such an occasion to happen so he took out his revolver and shot a goat. This was clearly not consistent with the observational method used in the film, but this did not bother Buñuel. He left the shot in the film, even though the smoke of his gun was visible in the frame.
Shocking Music
The shock of the images is exacerbated by the music and voice-over that Buñuel uses. He puts the Fourth Symphony of Brahms under the images, creating again an enormous contrast. The sophisticated musical style combined with the dire circumstances of the Las Hurdes people force the viewer to see ‘them’ as very different from ‘us’, as primitives who do not take part in our civilisation.
Shocking Commentary
The voice-over makes this even worse. It is condescending and sarcastic, and shows indifference that could easily be mistaken for objectivity. To the contemporary viewer this suggests an ironic reading. For instance, when we see a few unidentified objects tacked to the wall, the voice-over says: “Note the flair for interior decorating.” And when we see a picture of an infanta on the wall of a school: “What is this fair lady doing here?” These comments highlight the idiosyncrasy of the voice-over, but most of the time it has a straightforward bluntness. Just after the camera has examined the mouth of the sick girl, it says coolly: “we were told that the girl died two days later.”
A Shocked Audience
The audience of the film in the 1930s was “extremely displeased” (ibid., p. 29), which is exactly what Buñuel had hoped for of course. He wanted to shock people out of their comfortable notions of the world around them, and provoke them into thinking for themselves.
Moving Beyond Stereotypes Through Shock
Bunuel's tactic might still work today in design research, because we often find that it is perhaps even more difficult to unlearn or forget the stereotypes we have of groups of people than learning new things about them. If one exagerates the stereotype, like Bunuel does by presenting poor village people as primitives, it becomes harder to take the stereotype seriously and forces you to look beyond your own certainties and knowledge.
About the film
Luis Buñuel, surrealist and eager to critique the status quo in society as well as in filmmaking, took a far from neutral stance with his film Las Hurdes (Land without bread) (1933). Not unimportantly, he did not have his hands tied by financers as he financed his films through a friend who had won the lottery and did not make any demands. Before Buñuel made his documentary Las Hurdes, he had already made his two short Surrealist films Un chien Andalou (1929) and (with Salvador Dali) L’age d’or (1930). To him, Las Hurdes is similar to his two earlier films and equally much Surrealist:
Of course the difference was that this film was based on a concrete reality. But it was an exceptional reality, one that stimulated the imagination. Furthermore the film coincided with the social concerns of the Surrealist movement which were very intense at the time.
Buñuel did not use a script for the film. He had read a book about the region that meticulously documented many aspects of everyday life in the arid mountains. Ten days before the shooting he visited the region and wrote down words like: ‘goats’, ‘a child sick with malaria’, ‘anopheles mosquitoes’, ‘there are no songs, there is no bread’, and he shot the film pretty much in agreement with those notes.
Quotations from an interview with Buñuel in: MacDonald and Cousins (1996) Imagining Reality, Faber and Faber, London.
I found a french spoken (no subtitles) copy of the film as an extra on Buñuel's Los Olvidados DVD at the DVD Bargains shop on Ebay.
Las Hurdes (Spain, 1933) Luis Buñuel
*Provocation Through Shock*
Las Hurdes bluntly presents the inhabitants of poor villages in Spain as primitives, using shots that remind us of brutal colonial behaviour. For instance, the camera makes a close-up of the teeth and throat of a sick girl. The camera is examining her from a superior position, suggesting we the viewers are more civilised than she is. We also see the image of a mosquito in a medical book followed by a man shivering of fever, suggesting that we have the knowledge to prevent his malaria, but he doesn’t. These images are shocking from the perspective of ethnographic cinema which, now and in the 1930s, aims for a humanistic, emphatic perspective. But to shock was of course at the core of the methods used by the Surrealists to provoke change in society.
Buñuel insisted on showing things rather than just telling them. He went as far as to shoot a climbing goat to show those goats sometimes fall from the cliffs. He could not wait for such an occasion to happen so he took out his revolver and shot a goat. This was clearly not consistent with the observational method used in the film, but this did not bother Buñuel. He left the shot in the film, even though the smoke of his gun was visible in the frame.
Shocking Music
The shock of the images is exacerbated by the music and voice-over that Buñuel uses. He puts the Fourth Symphony of Brahms under the images, creating again an enormous contrast. The sophisticated musical style combined with the dire circumstances of the Las Hurdes people force the viewer to see ‘them’ as very different from ‘us’, as primitives who do not take part in our civilisation.
Shocking Commentary
The voice-over makes this even worse. It is condescending and sarcastic, and shows indifference that could easily be mistaken for objectivity. To the contemporary viewer this suggests an ironic reading. For instance, when we see a few unidentified objects tacked to the wall, the voice-over says: “Note the flair for interior decorating.” And when we see a picture of an infanta on the wall of a school: “What is this fair lady doing here?” These comments highlight the idiosyncrasy of the voice-over, but most of the time it has a straightforward bluntness. Just after the camera has examined the mouth of the sick girl, it says coolly: “we were told that the girl died two days later.”
A Shocked Audience
The audience of the film in the 1930s was “extremely displeased” (ibid., p. 29), which is exactly what Buñuel had hoped for of course. He wanted to shock people out of their comfortable notions of the world around them, and provoke them into thinking for themselves.
Moving Beyond Stereotypes Through Shock
Bunuel's tactic might still work today in design research, because we often find that it is perhaps even more difficult to unlearn or forget the stereotypes we have of groups of people than learning new things about them. If one exagerates the stereotype, like Bunuel does by presenting poor village people as primitives, it becomes harder to take the stereotype seriously and forces you to look beyond your own certainties and knowledge.
About the film
Luis Buñuel, surrealist and eager to critique the status quo in society as well as in filmmaking, took a far from neutral stance with his film Las Hurdes (Land without bread) (1933). Not unimportantly, he did not have his hands tied by financers as he financed his films through a friend who had won the lottery and did not make any demands. Before Buñuel made his documentary Las Hurdes, he had already made his two short Surrealist films Un chien Andalou (1929) and (with Salvador Dali) L’age d’or (1930). To him, Las Hurdes is similar to his two earlier films and equally much Surrealist:
Of course the difference was that this film was based on a concrete reality. But it was an exceptional reality, one that stimulated the imagination. Furthermore the film coincided with the social concerns of the Surrealist movement which were very intense at the time.
Buñuel did not use a script for the film. He had read a book about the region that meticulously documented many aspects of everyday life in the arid mountains. Ten days before the shooting he visited the region and wrote down words like: ‘goats’, ‘a child sick with malaria’, ‘anopheles mosquitoes’, ‘there are no songs, there is no bread’, and he shot the film pretty much in agreement with those notes.
Quotations from an interview with Buñuel in: MacDonald and Cousins (1996) Imagining Reality, Faber and Faber, London.
I found a french spoken (no subtitles) copy of the film as an extra on Buñuel's Los Olvidados DVD at the DVD Bargains shop on Ebay.