Land Without Bread

synopsis

A cinematic essay on human geography – this is how the opening title describes the evocative stream of raw images from the remote region of Las Hurdes in western Spain. A feverish torrent of scenes of desolation and misery is accompanied by a relentless voiceover and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. This consistently unromanticized glimpse into the European wilderness bears witness to people in whose lives Buñuel’s crew finds not a single moment of happiness. As a spectacle of cruelty – albeit partly staged for the camera – it subverts the genre of the ethnographic travelogue while laying bare one of the dark hearts of our own continent.

The film was accompanied by a series of bans, censorship interventions, and re-edits. The opening shot places Las Hurdes on the map of Europe and also highlights other pockets of poverty, including in Czechoslovakia. After its Madrid premiere in 1933, the film was banned in Spain, and in 1938, French censors cut the shot of the European map from it. However, it was not only countries concerned about their image that spoke out, but also those who had been advocating for reform in the region since the 1920s, as well as the people of Las Hurdes themselves. Faced with the threat of international embarrassment, the Spanish government increased its investment in the construction of roads and healthcare facilities in the region.

biography

Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) is the father of cinematic surrealism: fragments of reality come together in unexpected constellations in his films. An Andalusian Dog (1929) opens with a shot of a slit eye (actually a calf’s eyeball), while The Golden Age (1930) features a short excerpt from a documentary about scorpions. Land Without Bread (1933) is Buñuel’s third film and the only one that can be described as a documentary, despite beginning with a scene that is almost surreal: one of headless, twitching rooster carcasses.

film details

director:	Luis Buñuel
producer:	Ramón Acín, Luis Buñuel