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).
------------------------------------------
The film starts with a drawing of a map of Europe, followed by a map of the Iberian Peninsula, and a fragment of the Spanish map in which Las Hurdes are positioned in relation to Salamanca, ‘with its old university famous for its literary and scientific traditions’, and the town of Alberca, where the trip begins. Already at this point, an expedition is suggested, if only by exclusion; what is going to be presented does not take place in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy or Savoy (the other places labelled in the first map), but in Spain, more precisely South of Salamanca, halfway between Alberca and Cáceres. This preamble may seem unnecessary, but as the narrator says, Las Hurdes is just one of several ’hidden and little known parts of Europe [where] still exist remnants of the most primitive type of human life.’ The implication of the commentary and the map is: ‘we know; we’ve been there.’
It is interesting that a film called Las Hurdes , about a place called Las Hurdes, starts with a prologue in a different place, the town of Alberca. This is probably due to the coincidence of the filmmakers’ arrival with the celebration of the annual nuptial celebrations, but it also hints the narrator’s position towards its subject matter when the affirmation is made that this ‘quaint, medieval’ village ‘where the feudal system is still in existence’ is ‘comparatively prosperous’ in relation to Las Hurdes and ‘has a decisive influence on the Hurdaños.’
The first actual images from Las Hurdes are from the ‘magnificent valley of Las Batuecas.’ At this point is necessary to clarify the difference between the highlands and the lowlands of Las Hurdes region (Las Hurdes Altas and Las Hurdes Bajas, including Las Batuecas, respectively). In an interview printed in MacDonald and Cousins (1996), Buñuel admits that ‘such poverty [as seen in Las Hurdes ] doesn’t exist in Las Hurdes Bajas’ and recognizes that Las Batuecas is ‘a paradise valley’:
We stayed at an inn that had been a convent managed by a Carmelite brother, who had stayed on as a layman. (p86)
Baxter reports that the inn had ‘nineteen chapels, beds for twenty people, superb orchards and a mineral spring,’ and that Buñuel was so impressed by the place that he tried to buy it but couldn’t because the war broke.
Recurrently through the film, however, both the high and the lowlands are described and presented as a single miserable and impoverished region, and the Carmelite convent as a desecrated ruin where the lone friar coexists with toads, adders, and lizards, after even the Church has abandoned the region. The effect of this remark is augmented by the insertion of a brief shot of a viper, apparently snaking in the surroundings of the ruins. Closer examination of the shot shows, however, a noticeable difference in the soil in the shots: rich, grassy and plane in the surroundings of the convent; barren, rocky and inclined in the shot of the reptile.
The blending of the Altas and Bajas Hurdes facilitates the presentation within the film of an alternative landscape in which besides the ‘real’ inconveniences that the inhabitants of Las Hurdes Altas face, their situation is made the more pathetic, as they seem to live in a very hostile environment but a very beautiful, almost paradise-like one, nonetheless; so, as Durgnat notes comparing Las Hurdes to Buñuel’s previous films, (the) morbid fantasy was created, not by a surrealist unconscious, but by dear old Mother Nature. (op. cit. p56). In a later sequence, for example, the narrator tells how olive trees grow in the more fertile spots (in the valley, obviously), but, in line with the ‘yes, but…’ structure, “the meagre crops are often destroyed by insects.”
Over the first images of a hurdaño village, the narrator explains that a taller hexagonal white building seen at the edge of the town is a ‘recently constructed schoolhouse.’ (Incidently, it is the only ‘modern’ building shown in any of the villages). In accordance with the ‘yes, but…’ structure of the film, the school represents a source of hope; the teacher giving the children bread, but their half starved parents take it from them (According to Durgnat (op. cit.), which is probably based in the French language version of the film, the parents take the bread away from the children not because of hunger but ’fearing the unknown’ (p59) and they throw it away), so the teacher makes the kids eat it in front of him. At the end of the day either the children of their parents will have not eaten anything. This sequence is constructed in a very clever way, giving an almost perfect illusion of continuity thar can only be unmasked after several detailed viewings. It starts with a shot of three very small girls dipping loaves of bread into a small water stream, followed by a shot of a boy in the school’s window ringing a bell, the three girls being led off-screen by an older one, and finally two different angles of a number of children entering a classroom. The images seem to corroborate the narrator’s version, but looked closely, the scene reveals its constructed character: when the girls are guided off-screen, ostensibly towards the school, they’re still holding the bread in their hands, and three other children stand in the background, looking at the camera, immobile. The girls that enter the classroom not only are not grasping anything, but are not even the same girls of the previous shot. In part the distinction is not made because they do look alike and wear similar ragged clothes, but the change goes unnoticed mostly because the spectator is still thinking about the cruelty of the idea of the parents taking the bread from their children.
The scene immediately before this one is interesting in its creation of a vertical imaginary geography. ‘Occasionally we came across a wretched little stream fickling through the village’ the narrator informs us, ‘in summer this is the only water available and man and beast make common use of it.’ The sequence consists of eight different shots of different segments of the stream: a woman washing vegetables, a pig drinking, two little children sitting by the water, a young boy drinking water from the stream, a woman washing a girl’s head, a woman washing a plate, a new shot of the woman washing the girl’s head, and finally the three girls eating bread. All the shots are taken from a high angle, and the whole sequence gives the impression of the camera following the water downstream, emphasizing the unhygienic conditions of the village, where people drink the water after the pigs have been drinking, and probably also defecating in it. Objectively, there is no way of knowing whether the order of the shots corresponds with the trajectory of the water.
The rest of the film consists mostly of sequences in which the main device of counterpoint, complement, or contradiction between narrated text and images support the creation of the substitute reality, which is the dominant goal of the film:
Again, the camera provides no evidence to support these assertions; we have only the narrator’s word for it. And we do not have to believe anything the narrator says just because he says it. Yet for us to believe that the things we are viewing are really horrors, even for us to believe that in the narrator’s eyes they are really horrors, it is necessary to accept what the narrator tells us about what we are viewing. There are no horrors in the face of the camera. (Rothman, op. cit. p33)
There are two more instances in which the use of montage to create an imaginary geography helps achieve an effect, or make a point:
‘We are told that a baby has just died,’ says the narrator over a shot of an infant who seems to be breathing; ‘and here is its mother,’ he goes on to say, over images of an expressionless woman in a kitchen. The lack of emotion in the woman’s face suggests an almost unthinkable cruel indifference, or an extreme inhumanity, but as in many other cases in the film, there is no evidence that this woman is actually the child’s mother, or even that it is a house in the same village. ‘The women of the village all go to the bereaved’s home,’ continues the narrator over a shot of women and children walking on the street which reinforces the remark that ‘death is one of the few events that break the monotony of these wretched lives,’ and insinuates a certain sense of community in the Hurdaño people, but, one more time, it offers no evidence of any direct relation with the dead child and may have been shot in a completely different context.
The last example is used to express Buñuel’s anticlericalism, a sub-theme present throughout the film and pervasive in the director’s filmography. ‘The only thing of luxury in the Hurdaño villages are churches,’ declares the narrator over two copiously illuminated low tilt shots of the interior decoration of a church; ’this one is situated in one of the poorest villages,’ and then two much darker high shots of a poor Hurdaño house the narrator claims to be ‘one of the more comfortable homes.’ Although the intention here is not to create the illusion that the shack and the church are actually adjacent, the juxtaposition of the images certainly leads to assume that they are in the same village, or at least that the church is really in one of the poor Hurdaño towns, but none of the longer shots of the villages has a church, or for that matter a building taller than the houses other than the school in it and, additionally, had the church not abandoned the valley to toads adders and lizards? It is probable that the interior church shots were actually filmed in Alberca, but the editing of the images in the sequence is so strong that it is not relevant and the point that the church in its meaningless opulence is, at least in part, responsible for the life conditions of the hurdaños is made very clear.
Las Hurdes is not an objective document of the hurdaño reality, and it makes no claims in that respect; it is a study in the ethics of ethnographic documentary filmmaking, and especially a parodic critique of the ‘voice of god’ style of narration, which represents the power of the director over the image. The main device used by Buñuel to achieve his goals in the film is the use of an exaggerated narrator (doubling for him) whose comments often diverge from or openly contradict the images shown. Paraphrasing himself, Rothman (op. cit.) concludes:
The film’s “prevailing fiction,” as we have called it, is that the narrator is the filmmaker, that the narrator’s journey into the heart of the Hurdano region is Buñuel’s own journey, and that Land Without Bread “documents” that journey. To fail to recognize this as a fiction is to fail to recognize Buñuel’s film as a parody, to fail to recognize that it mocks conventional documentaries that demand uncritical acceptance of their narrator’s authority. (pp31-32)
In several of the most important sequences of the film, Buñuel also uses the montage technique suggested by Kuleshov to create an Imaginary Geography, in which a single storyline, the narrator’s remarks, are illustrated by the apparently seamless juxtaposition of related shots, which could have been (and probably were) filmed in different places at different times, but create the illusion of spatio-temporal continuity. This device, recognized by Bazin as the carrier of the final significance of the film, similarly operates as a token of the power of the filmmaker over the film, and a challenge to its use in a genre that claims to be based in the objective re-presentation of reality.
Comments