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22-530: Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (English: Land Without Bread or Unpromised Land ) is a 1933 French-language Spanish pseudo-documentary ( ethnofiction ) directed by Luis Buñuel and co-produced by Buñuel and Ramón Acin . The narration was written by Buñuel, Rafael Sánchez Ventura  [ es ] , and Pierre Unik , with cinematography by Eli Lotar . The film focuses on the Las Hurdes region of Spain,

44-476: A Surrealist approach to the notion of the anthropological expedition. The result was a travelogue in which the narrator’s extreme (indeed, exaggerated) descriptions of human misery of Las Hurdes contrasts with his flat and uninterested manner. Buñuel claimed: "I was able to film Las Hurdes thanks to Ramón Acín , an anarchist from Huesca ,...who one day at a cafe in Zaragoza told me, 'Luis, if I ever won

66-528: A fake nuclear bombing of England, was seen as so disturbingly realistic that the BBC chose not to broadcast it. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature . Watkins' other such films include Punishment Park (1971) and La Commune (2002). The film Mad Max 2 first frames the story by showing a staged documentary-style sequence of images designed to inform the viewer that what follows

88-536: A mountain goat that subsequently fell from a cliff for another sequence. The premiere took place in December 1932 at Madrid's Palacio de la Prensa . The entire intellectual cream of the Spanish capital was invited to a semi-private show. The screening of the film in its first, still silent version was accompanied by music played from the turntable and the narrator's commentary personally read by Buñuel himself. During

110-464: A real, unscripted story, but is shot and edited to appear like a fiction film. The effect of this fictional aesthetic is precisely to cancel the sense of reality, making the real events appear as if they were staged or constructed. Unlike the related mockumentary , fake-fiction does not focus on satire, and in distinction with docufiction , it does not re-stage fictional versions of real past events. Another filmmaker whose work could be associated with

132-426: Is Welles' first pseudo-documentary. Pseudo-documentary elements were subsequently used in his feature films . For instance, Welles created a pseudo-documentary newsreel which appeared within his 1941 film Citizen Kane , and he began his 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin , with a pseudo-documentary prologue. Peter Watkins has made several films in the pseudo-documentary style. The War Game (1965), which reported on

154-404: Is the aftermath of an apocalyptic global war. Related to, and in exact opposition to pseudo-documentary, is the notion of “fake-fiction”. A fake-fiction film takes the form of a staged, fictional movie, while actually portraying real, unscripted events. The notion of fake-fiction was coined by Pierre Bismuth to describe his 2016 film Where Is Rocky II?, which uses documentary method to tell

176-591: The New York Film Festival . Slant Magazine was launched in 2001. On January 21, 2010, it was relaunched and absorbed the entertainment blog The House Next Door , founded by Matt Zoller Seitz , a former New York Times and New York Press writer, and maintained by Keith Uhlich, former Time Out New York film critic, who was the blog's editor until 2012. Slant ' s reviews, which A. O. Scott of The New York Times has described as "passionate and often prickly", have occasionally been

198-517: The US presidential campaign of 1988 to attack candidate Michael Dukakis showed scripted scenes intended to look like documentary footage of men entering and exiting a prison through a revolving door. Boston-based band the Del Fuegos appeared in a 1984 commercial for Miller beer, with scripted scenes shot in hand-held camera /pseudo-documentary style. The band was criticized for selling out and for

220-667: The Labyrinth of the Turtles is a 2018 Spanish-Dutch animated film based on the graphic novel Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas by Fermín Solís . It covers how Buñuel and his crew filmed at Las Hurdes. Pseudo-documentary Orson Welles gained notoriety with his radio show and hoax War of the Worlds which fooled listeners into thinking the Earth was being invaded by Martians. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum says this

242-763: The Sahara being filmed at the same time. One of Buñuel's points is that there are plenty of terrible subjects for a documentary right in Spain. The film was originally silent , though Buñuel himself narrated when it was first shown. A French narration by actor Abel Jacquin was added in Paris in 1935. Buñuel used extracts of Johannes Brahms ' Symphony No. 4 for the music. Buñuel slaughtered at least two animals to make Las Hurdes . One Hurdano claimed that he arranged for an ailing donkey to be covered with honey so he could film it being stung to death by bees . Similarly, his crew shot

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264-413: The concept of fake-fiction is Gianfranco Rosi . For example, Below Sea Level uses the language of fiction cinema in its rendering of unscripted, documentary material. Of his own work, Rosi said, "I don’t care if I'm making a fiction film or documentary — to me it's a film, it's a narrative thing." The term found footage has sometimes been used to describe pseudo-documentaries where the plot involves

286-552: The discovery of the film's footage. Found footage is originally the name of an entirely different genre, but the magazine Variety , for example, used the term "faux found-footage film" to describe the 2012 film Grave Encounters 2 . The film scholar David Bordwell has criticized this recent use because of the confusion it creates, and instead prefers the term "discovered footage" for the narrative gimmick. Pseudo-documentary forms have appeared in television advertisements and campaign advertising . The "Revolving Door" ad used in

308-415: The distribution of the image throughout the country. The official reason for the censorship record was "defamation of the good name of the Spanish people." It was banned from 1933 to 1936. Writing for Night and Day in 1937, Graham Greene gave the film a neutral review, describing it as "[a]n honest and hideous picture, [...] free from propaganda". Greene claimed that it had a powerful effect and that it

330-452: The falseness of the commercial; founding member Warren Zanes said making the ad was a mistake, that their core audience turned away, and the larger audience gained by the exposure did not maintain interest for long. Peter Greenaway employed pseudo-documentary style in his French television production Death on the Seine in 1988. He used fabricated scenes to reconstruct a historic event that

352-414: The lottery, I would put up the money for you to make a film.' He won a hundred thousand pesetas ...and gave me twenty thousand to make the film. With four thousand I bought a Fiat ; Pierre Unik came, under contract from Vogue to write an article; and Eli Lotar arrived with a camera loaned by Marc Allégret ." The movie is a pseudo-documentary, parodying the exaggerated documentaries of travelers across

374-433: The mountainous area around the town of La Alberca , and the intense poverty of its occupants, who were so backwards and isolated that bread was unknown. A main source of income for them was taking in orphan children, for whom they received a government subsidy. Buñuel, who made the film after reading the ethnographic study Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by Maurice Legendre  [ fr ; es ] , took

396-575: The premiere show there was a schism between the director and Gregorio Marañón , a former assistant to King Alfonso XIII of Spain during his trip to the Las Hurdes region in 1922 and the former director of the Royal Patronage (Spanish Patronato Real ), an organization formed shortly after the trip to improving the situation of the inhabitants of the region. Land Without Bread provoked such an uproar in Spain that conservative forces banned

418-599: The source of debate and discourse online and in the media. Ed Gonzalez's review of Kevin Gage's 2005 film Chaos sparked some controversy when Roger Ebert quoted it in his review of the film for the Chicago Sun-Times ; The New York Press quoted another Slant writer, Keith Uhlich, in a review of the Michael Bay film The Island ; and Gonzalez, who wrote regularly for The Village Voice film section,

440-424: Was "enough to shake anyone's complacency or self-pity". In modern times, critical reception for Land Without Bread has been mostly positive. In 2002 Slant Magazine awarded the film 4 out of 4 stars, writing, " Las Hurdes becomes a frightening call to arms, a fabulous open text that resists simple readings and questions humanity's notion of progress." Jeffrey Ruoff called it a "revolutionary film." Buñuel in

462-533: Was otherwise impossible to shoot, and portrayed it as reality. Reality television has been described as a form of pseudo-documentary. An early and influential example is 1992's The Real World by MTV , a scripted "reality" show bordering on soap opera . Slant Magazine Slant Magazine is an American online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like

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484-488: Was praised by former Voice critic Nathan Lee for his attention to politics and pop culture in a lively and interesting way. KillerStartups.com, a web community that reviews websites for both entrepreneurs and investors, called Slant "one of the most influential online sources of news, comment, opinion and controversy in the world of indie, pop and mainstream entertainment." On January 21, 2010, MovieMaker named Slant Magazine ' s blog, The House Next Door, one of

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