Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles

With the Jean-Luc Godard por­trait Redoubtable and Peter Greenaway’s Eisen­stein in Gua­na­ju­a­to still lin­ger­ing in the mem­o­ry, and a Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder biopic on its way, there seems to be grow­ing inter­est in fic­tion fea­tures chron­i­cling the ear­ly years of some of Europe‘s most influ­en­tial film­mak­ers. As an ani­ma­tion, Sal­vador Simó’s Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Tur­tles – about the father of cin­e­mat­ic sur­re­al­ism, Luis Buñuel – imme­di­ate­ly stands out from the pack on form alone. Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of 1929’s sur­re­al short Un Chien Andalou (where he was over­shad­owed by col­lab­o­ra­tor Sal­vador Dalí) and the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing its fol­low-up, L’Age d’Or, Buñuel decid­ed to take a com­par­a­tive left turn by mak­ing a pseu­do-doc­u­men­tary in a remote region of Spain as both his career and the coun­try entered a tur­bu­lent period.

Las Hur­des was the loca­tion of the result­ing 1933 short of the same name – also known as Land With­out Bread – in which Buñuel depicts the intense pover­ty of the area’s occu­pants in a man­ner like a sur­re­al­ist riff on a tra­di­tion­al trav­el­ogue. How he approach­es and manip­u­lates his par­tic­i­pants, from orphans to ani­mals, becomes the main focus of Simó’s movie. Buñuel’s film was fund­ed by his lot­tery-win­ning anar­chist friend, Ramón Acín, and their rela­tion­ship informs the gut punch of the short’s lat­er life after com­ple­tion, once the Span­ish Civ­il War broke out in 1936.

Land With­out Bread blurred fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary, and the most com­pelling ele­ment of Simó’s film is how it merges var­i­ous media. Itself based on a graph­ic nov­el by Fer­mín Solís, the 2D ani­ma­tion sur­pris­es in fea­tur­ing reg­u­lar inserts of live-action footage from the ear­ly Buñuel efforts it doc­u­ments. If this sen­ti­men­tal biopic doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly cap­ture the rad­i­cal bite of its trans­gres­sive sub­ject, it at least hon­ours his for­mal unpredictability.