Online Response #2: Doc Beginnings

The four key elements that form the basis of documentary—indexical documentation (shared with scientific images and the cinema of attractions), poetic experimentation, narrative story-telling, and rhetorical oratory—certainly converge in Land Without Bread.  Perhaps most shocking to the audience is its rhetorical oratory, or the particular perspective/values favored by the speaker.  In this case we have an omniscient voice often narrating in a condescending manner, saying lines such as, “Death breaks the monotony of these wretched lives.” 

As Nichols notes elsewhere in Introduction to Documentary, the rhetorical oratory adopted in Land Without Bread is deliberately subversive, calling attention to its constructedness while also pointing a finger at similar documentaries that combine “elements of a ‘cinema of attractions’ with a narrative story, the poetic orchestration of scenes, and an oratorical voice to affirm [their] distinct perspective,” albeit without the irony of Buñuel (48-50, 136).  Of these four elements there seems to be a certain amount of tension between the cinema of attractions and rhetorical oratory, at least when documentary petitions the audience's pity while also having them gawk at its subjects.  If cinema—and documentary, in particular—is really a pulpit as Grierson claims, its aim is to enact social change.  Too often, though, documentary has “pitched its appeal directly to the viewer and took delight in the sensationalism of the weird, exotic, and bizarre.  It sought to amuse, surprise, titillate and shock rather than deliberate, evaluate, or commemorate” (126).  That the narrator of Land Without Bread comes off so harshly simply reflects the true feelings of the documentarian that places so much emphasis on the sensational, whose goal is not so much to present a new perspective as it is to exploit.

            Some modern documentaries didn’t seem to catch Buñuel’s message; The Devil’s Miner (2005), like Land Without Bread, focuses on a destitute people from Bolivia, living in conditions not unlike the Hurdano.  

Unlike Land Without Bread, we meet a character with an actual name—Basilio Vargas.  Just 14 years old, Basilio already works in the mine that inevitably swallows up all of the men in town.  In order to survive, he worships the devil of the mountain—“The Tio,” as it is called in the trailer.  On the surface, the audience is expected to sympathize with the protagonist; they do to a certain extent, but the emphasis on the exotic—the other—leads to mixed messages.  Land Without Bread exposes this incongruity by presenting an explicit rhetoric that reflects its content.