Slashing the Complacent Eye: Luis Buuel and the Surrealist Documentary

摘要

Land Without Bread [1932] has always been misunderstood. The film incorporates both documentary and Surrealist traditions and has been considered highly problematic as an ethnographic film. Viewers are still perplexed and even outraged by the insensitivity of the portrayal of the residents of Las Hurdes, a remote region in the western interior of Spain where living conditions in the 1930s resembled those in the Third World. In this article I examine the history of the film's creation in the contexts of both documentary/ethnographic film and Surrealism. I argue that the point of the film is to mock both the complacent viewer and filmmakers who construct colonialist documents; and also that ethnographic filmmaking today still has not fully rid itself of an inherent colonialism that has always characterized the genre.