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LAS HURDES: A Film By Luis Bunuel
LAS HURDES: A Film By Luis Bunuel
LAS HURDES: A Film By Luis Bunuel
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LAS HURDES: A Film By Luis Bunuel

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LAS HURDES (1932), the third film by Spanish director Luis Buuel, is now regarded as the first ever surrealist documentary'. Buuel's view of the impoverished and disease-stricken land of the blighted Hurdanos is filled with grotesque and repellent images. This special ebook companion to LAS HURDES features the first-ever English translation of the film's ironic commentary, accompanied by rare photographic illustrations; plus two revelatory essays on the art of film-making by Buuel himself.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 4, 2015
ISBN9781909923409
LAS HURDES: A Film By Luis Bunuel

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    Book preview

    LAS HURDES - Jack Hunter

    Credits

    LAS HURDES

    EDITED BY JACK HUNTER

    AN EBOOK

    ISBN 978-1-909923-40-9

    PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

    COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

    www.elektron-ebooks.com

    No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

    Foreword

    Two years after making L’Age d’Or, his second and final film in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel made Las Hurdes, a harrowing, twenty-seven minute documentary about the inhabitants of a dispossessed region of rural Spain.

    Las Hurdes is often seen as the third volet of his surrealist triptych. Fellow former surrealist Pierre Unik co-wrote the script. Eli Lotar, whose documentary photographs of the Parisian abattoirs figured in Georges Bataille’s review Documents, was the cinematographer. Las Hurdes ( Land Without Bread) earned the peculiar distinction of being banned successively by both the Republican government and by Franco’s Fallangists, on account of its unforgiving exposure of the effects of social injustice in Spain. Its Surrealism lies in the incongruity between the imagery and the soundtrack, both the ironic voice-over and the background music. The commentary is freezingly detached – its authoritative, scientific tone confounded by its obvious powerlessness in the face of the conditions that confront it.

    Correspondingly, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is absurdly and intolerably grandiose in the context of visuals focusing on extremes of poverty and disease. Las Hurdes damningly unmasks the complacency and bad faith of mainstream, colonialist, ethnographic filmmaking of the time. Nor was there anything paradoxical about the notion of a surrealist documentary. The scorpions sequence in L’Age d’Or was a forerunner. As Romane Fotiade has commented, documentary could be made to serve the surrealists’ aim to explode realist boundaries from within, by infiltrating an accurate account of events with a sense of the arbitrary, the inexplicable, the absurd: ‘The

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