Este ensayo estudia el uso del concepto de "Geografía Imaginaria" (definido por Lev Kuleshov con relación a uno de sus famosos experimentos) para crear significados en contraste -o en abierta oposición- con la realidad capturada por Luis Buñuel en su documental "Las Hurdes" (Tierra sin Pan).
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Montage, as used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not give us the event; it alluded to it. Undoubtedly they derived at least the greater part of the constituent elements from the reality they were describing, but the final significance of the film was found to reside in the ordering of these elements much more than in their objective content. (Bazin, A. 1967. p25)
The power of cinema resides in montage. It is what makes it different from other art forms, and what allows filmmakers to effectively create the illusion of a ‘parallel universe,’ a reality within the film, alternative to that of the spectator. Be it a woman that, like Frankenstein’s creature is made of parts of other women, or a city in which all the landmarks of the world are packed and to go from the Eiffel tower to the Pyramids one just has to cross the street. This concept of an imaginary geography has important implications when used in a film like Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (1933), ostensibly a documentary about the harsh reality of that region of Spain, but in fact a re-creation of that reality in the form of a (fictional) travelogue.
The expression Imaginary Geography is traditionally understood in terms of montage in relation to the experimental work of Russian filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970). In 1917, at the age of eighteen, Kuleshov had already begun publishing articles in film magazines. After a short period as the director of a group of cameramen in the Eastern Front immediately after the Revolution, Kuleshov was recruited to the teaching staff of the recently opened State Film School, and given his own ‘workshop.’ Notable pupils of Kuleshov’s workshop included Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Around January 1923, after a mission on the Western Front from which the film On the Red Front (1920) resulted, Kuleshov found himself back to his teaching duties, surrounded by a number of enthusiastic pupils, but without any possibilities of getting raw celluloid, due to the blockade. It is in these conditions, reediting existing material, that Kuleshov’s ‘films without film’ were created and the first of his famous experiments on montage took place (Kuleshov himself (1973, p69) admits that montage was, chronologically, used first by Griffith, although the credit for theorizing the concept and systematising its experimental study goes to the Russian filmmaker). The most famous of such experiments is what is now called the ‘Kuleshov effect.’ It consisted of the same shot of the actor Mosjoukin in a neutral expression edited together with different images, producing contrasting situations and different apparent emotions in each case. Shortly afterwards, with access to limited amounts of film, Kuleshov shot and edited three other experiments. The second and third experiments derived from the results of the first one, and consisted respectively of close shots of different fragments of the bodies of different women put together to create a new ‘virtual’ personage (Kuleshov described this experiment as ’the creation of a woman who had never existed’ (ibid, p70)), and an attempt to show that nuances in the acting of similar sequences (a man in prison is fed - the same man is released) are imperceptible, and that the meaning of the scene is created in the editing. Leyda notes (1983, p165) that this last experiment is too dependent on the actor’s individual quality to be repeated under ’scientific’ conditions, whereas the others have become standard practice for the experimental editor.
The most interesting of Kuleshov’s experiments, however, is the first one he shot with the members of his workshop. In this experiment, without the use of any tricks or effects like double exposures, Kuleshov created, in the montage of individual shots, a new map of the city of Moscow, in which five of the city’s landmarks, and the White House in Washington, are artificially represented adjacent to each other in the simple sequence of a meeting between workshop members Khokhlova and Obolensky. Kuleshov (quoted by Leyda, ibid.), explains that
In the first experiment, we had arbitrarily created our own geography, against which a single line of action was played. (p164)
Although the significance of the implications of this result were well understood by Kuleshov, his pupils and montage theorists and historians, little regard is given beyond this quote to the determining role of the single line of action, the meeting between the two actors, in the successful creation of the new, imaginary geography: without the recognizable presence of the actors in the different planes, the sequence would be reduced to a series of unrelated shots of different places, but it is in the apparent temporal continuity of the sequence created by their movement across the spaces that the illusion of spatial proximity is created. Furthermore, it is thanks to the actors’ position and orientation within the different compositions and the direction of their off-screen looks, that the relative position of a place to the others is established, and the new map is effectively created (i.e. Gogol‘s monument is positioned between Petrovka and the embankment, along the same imaginary road, and in front of the White House - Cathedral staircase).
It is worth noting that the spatial continuity in this example is only horizontal, with different places artificially put besides or in front of each other but not above or below, and that temporal continuity is achieved by the presence of the same actors (wearing the same costumes) in different shots. It is also possible to attain spatio-temporal continuity by juxtaposition of thematically related shots in similar spaces: a shot of a deer eating grass, followed by a shot of a crouching leopard and another shot of the deer lifting its head and looking around will, putting them together in the same space and time, convey the simple idea of the ruminant becoming aware of the presence of the predator, although both may have been shot in different places and with a difference of years between them.
Early examples of the use of the concept of imaginary geography can be found in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925), Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1928), and, in the realm of documentary, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the opening of Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (1929), and throughout Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes.
Las Hurdes was Buñuel’s third film and his only documentary. Shot between April and May, 1933, it follows the two surrealist films made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d'or (1930), and is the last film Buñuel would direct for 14 years (Until Gran Casino (1947), made in Mexico), and his last Spanish film until Viridiana (1961).
Thematically, Las Hurdes is based on ‘Les Jurdes: Etude de Géographie Humaine,’ (Las Hurdes: a study on human geography) written in 1927 by Maurice Legendre as a doctoral thesis for the School for Advanced Spanish Studies. The film was financed by anarchist leader Ramón Acín, and the story goes that the money given to Buñuel (20000 pesetas) was part of a larger sum that Acín had won in the lottery. According to Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter, however,
The story of Acín’s lottery win, despite its surrealist overtones of chance, sounds thin. The anarchists had much to gain from a film which highlighted conditions among the rural poor, where most of the power lay. They almost certainly supported and funded the film, via Acín. (1994 p143)
The film takes the form of a travelogue documentary. Comparing it to Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Rothman claims that:
All of these films assume the form of a literal and/or mythical journey in which the camera penetrates deeper and deeper into an ostensibly alien region […] at once geographical and spiritual (1997, p xiii).
[…] initially, Las Hurdes had no sound track [which] suggests […] that it was intended for public meetings where a lecturer would read [co-writer Pierre] Unik’s didactic commentary and answer questions afterwards. (op. cit.)
In the English language version currently available, which according to Rothman (op. cit.) was prepared by Buñuel himself when the Spanish government banned the film (p24), a narrator tells, in the first person, the story of the trip from which the film resulted.
As a travelogue, the most narrative documentary genre for Guynn (1990), Las Hurdes attempts to attach ‘images from the observer’s [the narrator‘s] memory to the precise chronology of his peregrination’ (p61); but the narrative structure of the film goes beyond the mere chronological recount of dates places and events in two different ways:
Durgnat (1997) cites Ado Kyrou’s point that the film’s narrative structure is based on the phrase ‘yes, but…’: Buñuel begins by presenting a harrowing fact, shows the glimmer of hope, and then reduces the hope to something derisory. (p58)
The Hurdaños , for example, the narrator tells us, have no industry other than the exploitation of beehives, but those beehives produce ‘a very poor and very bitter type of honey.’ Moreover, the hives actually do not belong to the Hurdaños but to the people from Alberca and Hurdaño men and beasts risk their lives bringing the poor, bitter honey back to its owners.
The other way in which Las Hurdes transcends the conventions of the travelogue documentary is in the creation of an Imaginary Geography: it tells the chronology of a peregrination that never occurred, to a place that never existed, as narrated by a fictional entity, using the images shot during the two months of Buñuel’s party's trip to Las Hurdes.
The verbal notations of the movements of the “observer,” the film party, from one village to the next produce the spatial and temporal articulations. The visual sequences have an ambiguity of outline: lacking clear spatio-temporal references, the image-text fails to produce a sense of diegetic continuity. (Guynn, op. cit.)
However contentious and lacking strong empirical evidence his assertion regarding the film’s fortune in creating a coherent narrative continuity, Guynn is right in signalling the ambiguity of the spatio-temporal diegesis of the images in the film without the narration, and the concealed and apparent contradictions between text and visuals. It is in this sense that conventional critical tradition sees Las Hurdes as a (and the first) mock-documentary, as Rothman explains:
To fail to recognize that the prevailing fiction of Land Without Bread is indeed a fiction is to fail to recognize that the film is a mock documentary. But to recognize its prevailing fiction as a fiction we must recognize that for all we know nothing the narrator claims is really true. (p32)
Nevertheless, the recognition of Las Hurdes as a mock documentary does not necessarily imply that the images in it are false or artificially constructed (although some of them are, like the sequence of a goat falling from a cliff. See Rothman op. cit pp34-36) nor that the story presented is in any way lacking structure, coherence or completeness; it does not deny reality or creates its own, but rather, in the editing and narration, it re-creates (using Kuleshov‘s definition of imaginary geography) the bare reality captured by the camera into an alternative interpretation; in much the same way that the single line of action in Kuleshov‘s experiment is complete within itself, and none of the planes of the actors or the landmarks are false.
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