78: Land Without Bread

Las Hurdes

ESP 27m  Dir: Luis Bunuel

Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel attempts something more serious and literal with this documentary about poverty in the mountainous Las Hurdes region of Spain. 

We follow cameras as a group travel through the villages an witness the various struggled of the local people, full of illness and struggling to survive in a place with little fertile land. A narration of what's being shown by one of the group run over the top, originally in the form of captions but later as an audio narration. 

I can't quite decide what this is. For some it's a literal documentary and if that's the case then it's a very outdated one. The narrator is overly harsh towards the people, calling them "urchins" that live in a "miserable village" and saying that they are so unhappy they don't sing like most of Spain does. There doesn't appear to be any attempt to seek the actual views of the people being filmed. 

There's also the fact that key moments were staged. A mountain goat falling off a mountain was actually shot. A donkey that tripped and became enveloped with a swarm of bees from the hives it was carrying was actually smothered with honey. A dead baby looks suspiciously like it's sleeping. If this is a literal documentary than it's one which lies to it's audience. 

But what if it's meant to something more than that. The narration's depiction of the human misery is so extreme yet delivered in such a flat way. Could it be then that this is a sort of parody of the documentaries being made by travellers at the time? That then would explain the poor narration and the staging of events. There's perhaps a suggestion that these travellers don't need to go to the Sahara to witness humans struggling in extreme circumstances. 

The trouble with this pseudo-documentary explanation is that this is a real place with real people. By lampooning a type of film, Buenel is being extremely disrespectful to the locals. It's no surprise then when seventy years later documentary-maker Ramon Gieling retracted Buenel's steps to ask locals about the film that he received death threats for fear he was going to "prostitute and falsify history" in the same way. 

It's difficult to like this film but it's fascinating to discuss. It mocks travelogue documentaries of the time but in doing so shows huge disrespect to the people and place it shows.