133: Las Hurdes (a.k.a. Land without Bread)

André Bazin, a founding father of the French film theories that lead to the new wave, referred to Luis Buñuel’s work as “the cinema of cruelty.”  Watching a Buñuel film you can just feel it.  He was cruel to religion, the middle class, and idealists.  He was cruel toward his actors, and some said he disregarded them entirely.  Most of all, he was cruel to his audience.  He expected them to reciprocate in kind, and is said to have carried rocks in his pocket to the premier of his Un Chien Andalou (1929) to ward off attackers.  Of course it sounds somewhat reasonable to anticipate defending yourself if you’re going to force your audience to watch an eyeball being sliced in half.

This is the second Buñuel I’ve reviewed for this project.  The first was The Young One (1960; #162).  That is a harsh film, one that does not shy away from cruelty, but it’s perhaps the nicest of the Buñuel pieces I’ve seen.  It’s a good film as well, but I don’t think it would make a very good introduction to the father of Spanish Surrealist movement.  I think that more so than with most directors, Buñuel’s pictures should be seen in chronological order.  It may be the only way to interpret the development of his cruel anthology.  After making Un Chien Andalou and his first feature L’Age d’Or (1930), both of which were considered masterpieces, he waited three years to direct the documentary short Las Hurdes (1933) about a remote area of his native Spain that has somehow gone almost untouched by civilization.

Of the nine films of Buñuel’s in the 1001 catalogue I suspect that Las Hurdes is the least seen and I’m almost certain that it’s the least well known.  That he chose to make a small and difficult documentary after making his name in features isn’t surprising from Buñuel.  I’ve come to believe that the best thing to expect with him (other than the aforementioned cruelty) is the unexpected.  The 1001 text calls the film “extraordinarily powerful yet wholly unsentimental,” but I don’t know if that is what makes this film captivating.  I think it’s simply that Buñuel made it at all.  Documentaries about the horrible conditions of individuals’ lives have always existed*.  Typically however they are enforced by an empathy or sympathy for those lives that they display, and I’m not sure if Buñuel ever had either of those emotions.  There’s evidence of perhaps a bit in The Young One, but not much.

This lack of emotion informs the “unsentimental” comment yes, but I think it speaks to even greater depths of Buñuel’s intentions.  I don’t think he means to engender audience sympathy or to come across as distant.  Here he is cruel not because his camera chooses to be, but because the world that it films is.  The images speak for themselves.  We see children drinking from a dirty stream that runs through their village.  They dip bread into the water to soften it.  Until recently, no one in the area had even seen such food, hence the film’s subtitle.  The terrain is mountainous and travel between villages is dangerous.  Feet are cracked and calloused as shoes are as uncommon as fresh meat.  A young girl sleeps dying in the street, untouched for three days until after she breathes her last breath. 

These images are disturbing, but never haunting, because Buñuel does not regard them as such.  They are simply life in Las Hurdes, only about 50 miles from Salamanca.  Life here isn’t cruel because Buñuel wants it to be, but is it cruel to display it so simply?  I’m not sure.  I’m also not quite certain that the religious hypocrisy that many read into the film is Buñuel’s primary intent.  Juxtapositions of starvation and degradation against images of the elaborate churches of the region might play into the iconoclastic nature of other Buñuel works, but here I think he shows them simply because they are both present.  It’s almost as if he’s daring his audience to read into the editing something that might not be there.  Or is it?  Again, I’m not sure.

In the film’s most famous sequence a donkey, forced to carry two beehives to market for the sale of honey, is stung to death by a swam of the creatures after one of the hives breaks open.  It’s widely acknowledged that this scene was staged, and that Buñuel had the animal smeared with honey to induce the attack.  This is perhaps his greatest act of cruelty, but he was never above using animals to make his points.  In another shocking moment, a mountain goat falls from a high ledge to its death.  This is said to have been perpetrated by Buñuel as well.  Why? All in the name of his film I suppose.

Las Hurdes isn’t a movie for everyone.  I’m not entirely sure who it’s for, but it is an interesting chapter in the book of Buñuel.  I don’t think I like his films any more or any less after seeing this entry in the catalogue, but I can say that I’m somewhat looking forward to his remaining films on the list.

Language: French (English dubbed V.O. version available as well)

Runtime: 27 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off

*See Titicut Follies (1967) and The House is Black (1963; #196)