Catherine Russell/ Surrealist Ethnography

For my final paper, I spent a lot of time looking at Las Hurdes and studying it. Catherine Russel's article on the film depicts it as a surrealist Ethnography. The film plays on our attraction to watching the Hurdanos suffer, rather than try to inform us about it, or make any changes to their situation. It does not try to build them as characters or even give us much information about them. Some of the information given by the narrator doesn't even match what we see on the screen. Bunuel's film feels like a mash-up of a bunch of different genres, especially the travelogue (which was the focus of my paper.) Some interesting references to the travelogue are the quick ordering of shots reminiscent of slide shows, which were the main visual format for lecture travelogues. Another reference is the blunt, condescending tone of the narrator. The narrator helps build discontinuity between sound and image, and the lack of sympathy in the descriptions borders on cruelty. This lack of sympathy both distorts our perception of the people in the film, and satirizes the travelogue lectures of the early 20th century.