77. Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread) (1933)

Directed By Luis Bunuel

Synopsis

Feel Good Documentary of the year, like March of the Penguins only with dead babies, a Goat falling to its death off a cliff and a Donkey being killed by bees and eaten by a wolf. Fun for all the family.

Review

In this laugh a second rom-com romp Bunuel shows us the region of Las Hurdes in rural Spain... following the crazy antics of it's inhabitants ina Benny Hillesque pace actually using Yackety Sax for a soundtrack.

Well... not really. Buñuel brings surrealism to documentary film making like he had done at the beggining of L'Age D'Or with the little scorpion documentary. Again the images are focusing on death, the death of animals and human being that live in conditions little different from the animals themselves. If you expect this to be a realistic portrayal you would be profoundly wrong, however.

Buñuel's anti-clericalism is more than obvious throughout the film, as is his political agenda, this is not to say that he isn't portraying a kind of "reality" just that it is a caricaturised reality seen through the lenses of anarchical surrealism. Life in Las Hurdes was tough but Bunuel makes it almost like a caricature of anthropological documentary, the disinterested voice over seems to not give a shit about the terrible suffering being witnessed making it all the more poignant. No one seems to give a shit. You can't get this from anywhere, I got it in a french DVD of Los Olvidados which has Las Hurdes as an extra, try to get it from eBay.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Although it is often described as a documentary, Land Without Bread is actually an early parody -- some would say a Surrealist parody -- of documentary filmmaking. The film focuses on the Las Hurdes region of Spain, the mountainous area around the town La Alberca, and the intense poverty of its occupants. Buñuel, who made the film after reading an ethnographic study (Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927)) by Maurice Legendre, took a Surrealist approach to the notion of the anthropological expedition. The result was a travelogue in which a disinterested narrator provides unverifiable, gratuitous, and wildly exaggerated descriptions of the human misery of Las Hurdes.

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