Why Is This Absurd Picture Here? Ethnology/Equivocation/Bunuel

Abstract

Near the middle of Luis Bufiuel's film Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread (1933), we witness one in a string of atrocities that make up Hurdano daily life.1 After learning that the Hurdano diet consists almost entirely of potatoes, which are all eaten by May orJune, and unripe cherries, which cause deadly dysentery, we spy a pair of wild goats scaling a precipice. As if to underscore the extremity of the Hurdanos' existence, the narrator tells us that goat meat is eaten only when an unlucky creature slips on a loose stone and plummets to its death-an unlikely event that, nevertheless, promptly occurs. This has become one of the film's most notorious scenes, for spectators invariably notice a telltale puff of smoke from the right edge of the frame indicating that the goat has, in reality, been shot. A tiny shift in the camera's position would have obscured the smoke, but as if deliberately to draw attention to the staged nature of this scene, Bufiuel further theatricalizes it by giving us a reverse angle shot of the goat falling down the hill. Because the camera is not visible in the previous shot, the spectator's only possible