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https://the-past.com/shorts/ideas/pangu-and-divine-intervention/

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A New Understanding of "Land Without Bread"

Julia Merolle

     After going through the readings that relate to the film I saw earlier, Land Without Bread directed by Luis Bunuel, I found points I made that were both similar and different to the readings, “F Is for Phony” written by Alexandra Juhasz, “The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary” written by Fiona Otway, and “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread” written by Jeffrey Ruoff.

     In the first reading, “F Is for Phony” by Alexandra Juhasz, a quote that I found interesting was, “Until very recently this district was completely cut off from the rest of the world—separated by the huge labyrinth of hills which none but climbers could penetrate. There was no means of getting in touch with these mountain vastnesses, and even within the region itself communication was almost impossible between the different villages. And this is not surprising; men make roads only when they want to get somewhere, and Las Hurdes does not lead anywhere. It is a lost land, far from all human succor. Not only is it unfriendly to man; it is opposed to all human traffic.” (pages 91-92). The reason that this quote was important to me is because it demonstrates why Las Hurdes is important to Luis Bunuel. I didn’t understand that when I wrote my first understanding of this film, however, I feel as if I now know why he cares about this region of land.

     In the second reading, “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread” by Jeffrey Ruoff, a quote that I found interesting was, “In the 1920s, following other Spanish artists such as Salvador Dali and Juan Miro, Luis Bunuel moved to Paris, then the center of artistic activity in Europe. He joined in the activities of the Surrealists and shared their obsession with Freud and the unconscious. Like the Dadaists before them, the Surrealists cherished the random phrase, the image recorded as if by accident. They took as their notion of beauty the juxtaposition of incongruous elements.” (page 45). The reason that I found this quote so important to the film is that Luis Bunuel was a surrealist, which means that he followed the style of being random and adventurous in his work, such as films that I saw earlier in this class like Un Chien Andalou.

     In the third and final reading, “The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary” by Fiona Otway, a quote that I found interesting was, “Whether in literature, film, or theoretical essays, the unreliable narrator most often appears in the context of fictional storytelling; far fewer examples of the unreliable narrator have been theorized in nonfiction or documentary filmmaking. Perhaps this is for the obvious reason that the presence of an unreliable narrator suggests a falsification of truth that would seem to invoke a world of fiction. It could be argued that an unreliable narrator works against the very definition of documentary filmmaking; however, documentary filmmaking has always had a tenuous relationship with the ideal of truth. If one accepts the premise that both truth and misrepresentations of truth coexist in the documentary tradition, then the construct of an unreliable narrator can help draw attention to the rhetorical nature of documentary “truth.” (page 3). I wrote about this in my first initial understanding of the film after watching it, which was that the narrator can’t be trusted because of the way that the film was constructed. I stated in my first post, “The school scene with the children seemed very set up because there were multiple angles of these children, and the camera perfectly caught all of the different movements that occurred in the classroom. Another scene like this was the scene with the rooster because it got a lot of close-ups of it, which again isn’t possible unless they had more than one camera, which I doubt they had.” Therefore, my earlier understanding of Life Without Bread actually connected to this theory about the unreliable narrator in a documentary, which I believe to be true.

Overall, all these readings were interesting and taught me a lot about the film Life Without Bread, which furthered my understanding of the film with new insight into Luis Bunuel and the documentary genre in general.

Juhasz, Alexandra, and Jesse Lerner. F Is for Phony. 

Otway, Fiona. The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary. 

Ruoff, Jeffrey. An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread. 

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A Blade in the Dark (1983)

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I’ve never understood the Anti-Plato nonsense of Popper. But here’s an interesting summary of the Contra-Plato by a guy influenced by Pirsig and Castaneda (!!!): “Plato abhors and damns the Sophists … because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth.” The Idea of TRUTH, Ladies and Gentlemen! Don’t leave these cardboard Self-Warriors out in the Reign. Pretty girl below represents the non-sequitur of the Anti-Plato discussion.