Land Without Bread

Duration: 30

Genre: Educational

Creator: Luis Bunuel

Format: 16mm

Color: B&W

Sound: sound

Description: The Spanish master Luis Bunuel is best known as a director who inhabits his own dark world of surrealist fancy and poker-faced melodrama, an artist who makes David Lynch look like a well-scrubbed schoolboy. In other words, Bunuel is not a candidate for traditional documentary filmmaking; yet he made one, in 1932, called Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread). After the failure of the surrealist masterpieces Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'or, both conceived with Salvador Dali, Bunuel was without funds for another picture -- until an anarchist friend won the lottery and pledged the winnings toward financing a film. This 27-minute film is the result of Bunuel's visit to Las Hurdes, a miserably poor section of Spain, where the director's typically pitiless gaze takes in the starving, the inbred, the sick. It is a catalog of horrors, offered in Bunuel's uninflected style (including a just-the-facts narrator), which makes the degradation seem all the more intense. The least sentimental of artists, Bunuel offers no solutions, no condemnations, no pep talks -- just the information that this is how things are, and that no remedy exists to make sense of it., Bunuel's controversial documentary about the poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and disease of Las Hurdes, an isolated area of northeastern Spain. The director uses unconventional methods to arouse the viewer's horror and outrage. A condescendingly academic narrator is accompanied by the majestic strains of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony.

Complete Record: The Spanish master Luis Bunuel is best known as a director who inhabits his own dark world of surrealist fancy and poker-faced melodrama, an artist who makes David Lynch look like a well-scrubbed schoolboy. In other words, Bunuel is not a candidate for traditional documentary filmmaking; yet he made one, in 1932, called Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread). After the failure of the surrealist masterpieces Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'or, both conceived with Salvador Dali, Bunuel was without funds for another picture -- until an anarchist friend won the lottery and pledged the winnings toward financing a film. This 27-minute film is the result of Bunuel's visit to Las Hurdes, a miserably poor section of Spain, where the director's typically pitiless gaze takes in the starving, the inbred, the sick. It is a catalog of horrors, offered in Bunuel's uninflected style (including a just-the-facts narrator), which makes the degradation seem all the more intense. The least sentimental of artists, Bunuel offers no solutions, no condemnations, no pep talks -- just the information that this is how things are, and that no remedy exists to make sense of it., Bunuel's controversial documentary about the poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and disease of Las Hurdes, an isolated area of northeastern Spain. The director uses unconventional methods to arouse the viewer's horror and outrage. A condescendingly academic narrator is accompanied by the majestic strains of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. NOTE: Two (or more) records have been merged together to create this data.