Land Without Bread

The film focuses on the Las Hurdes region of Spain, the mountainous area around the town of La Alberca, and the intense poverty of its occupants, who were so backwards and isolated that bread was unknown. A main source of income for them was taking in orphan children, for whom they received a government subsidy. Buñuel, who made the film after reading the ethnographic study Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by {{ill|Maurice Legendre|fr|Maurice Legendre (historien)|es}}, took a Surrealist approach to the notion of the anthropological expedition. The result was a travelogue in which the narrator’s extreme (indeed, exaggerated) descriptions of human misery of Las Hurdes contrasts with his flat and uninterested manner.{{citation needed|date=December 2018}}

• Abel Jacquin (voice)
• Alexandre O'Neill (voice, dubbed version)

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Buñuel claimed:

"I was able to film Las Hurdes thanks to Ramón Acín, an anarchist from Huesca,...who one day at a cafe in Zaragoza told me, 'Luis, if I ever won the lottery, I would put up the money for you to make a film.' He won a hundred thousand pesetas...and gave me twenty thousand to make the film. With four thousand I bought a Fiat; Pierre Unik came, under contract from Vogue to write an article; and Eli Lotar arrived with a camera loaned by Marc Allégret."Jose De La Colina, Tomas Perez Turrent.Objects of Desire - Conversations with Luis Buñuel. Trans. Paul Lenti. Marsilio Publishers, 1992. {{ISBN|0-941419-68-1}}.

The movie is a pseudo-documentary, parodying the exaggerated documentaries of travelers across the Sahara being filmed at the same time.Ruoff, Jeffrey. [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jruoff/Articles/EthnographicSurrealist.htm An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread.] Visual Anthropology Review 14, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), pp. 45-57. One of Buñuel's points is that there are plenty of terrible subjects for a documentary right in Spain.{{citation needed|date=December 2018}}

The film was originally silent, though Buñuel himself narrated when it was first shown.Luis Buñuel. My Last Breath. Trans. Abigail Israel. Fontana, 1987. {{ISBN|9780006540885}}. A French narration by actor Abel Jacquin was added in Paris in 1935.{{citation needed|date=December 2018}} Buñuel used extracts of Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 4 for the music.{{cite journal|last=Rubinstein|first=E.|title=Visit to a Familiar Planet: Buñuel among the Hurdanos|journal=Journal of Cinema and Media Studies|publisher=University of Texas Press|volume=22|issue=4|date=Summer 1983|pages=3-17|doi=10.2307/1224951|jstor=1224951}}

Buñuel slaughtered at least two animals to make Las Hurdes. One Hurdano claimed that he arranged for an ailing donkey to be covered with honey so he could film it being stung to death by bees. Similarly, his crew shot a mountain goat that subsequently fell from a cliff for another sequence.{{cite news|last=McNab|first=Geoffrey|title=Bunuel and the land that never was|newspaper=The Guardian|location=London|date=8 September 2000|url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/sep/09/books.guardianreview|accessdate=30 October 2011}}

The premiere took place in December 1932 at Madrid's Palacio de la Prensa.{{cite book|title=Estudios sobre Las Hurdes de Buñuel: Evidencia fílmica, estética y recepción|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DlZmAwAAQBAJ|author=Javier Herrera|publisher=Editorial Renacimiento|date=22 April 2014|lang=es|isbn=9788484729518}} The entire intellectual cream of the Spanish capital was invited to a semi-private show. The screening of the film in its first, still silent version was accompanied by music played from the turntable and the narrator's commentary personally read by Buñuel himself. During the premiere show there was a schism between the director and Gregorio Marañón, a former assistant to King Alfonso XIII of Spain during his trip to the Las Hurdes region in 1922 and the former director of the Royal Patronage (Spanish Patronato Real), an organization formed shortly after the trip to improving the situation of the inhabitants of the region.{{cite book|title=El paraíso maldito|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JiRSQ6HnVhQC|author=Iker Jiménez Elizari|author-link=Iker Jiménez|publisher=EDAF|date=6 April 2006|lang=es|isbn=9788441417724}}

Land Without Bread provoked such an uproar in Spain that conservative forces banned the distribution of the image throughout the country.{{cite journal|title=An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luisbuñuel's land Without Bread|author=Jeffrey Ruoff|journal=Visual Anthropology Review|volume=14|issue=1|pages=45–57|date=1 March 1998|issn=1548-7458|doi=10.1525/var.1998.14.1.45}}{{cite web|title=Bunuel and the land that never was|url=http://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/sep/09/books.guardianreview|author=Geoffrey McNab|agency=the Guardian|date=9 September 2000|accessdate=20 June 2016}} The official reason for the censorship record was "defamation of the good name of the Spanish people." It was banned from 1933 to 1936.

Writing for Night and Day in 1937, Graham Greene gave the film a neutral review, describing it as "[a]n honest and hideous picture, [...] free from propaganda". Greene claimed that it had a powerful effect and that it was "enough to shake anyone's complacency or self-pity".{{cite magazine|last=Greene|first=Graham|author-link=Graham Greene|date=18 November 1937|title=Land Without Bread/Personality Parade|magazine=Night and Day}} (reprinted in: {{cite book|editor-last=Taylor|editor-first=John Russell|editor-link=John Russell Taylor|year=1980|title=The Pleasure Dome|publisher=Oxford University Press|page=179|isbn=0192812866}})

In modern times, critical reception for Land Without Bread has been mostly positive. In 2002 Slant Magazine awarded the film 4 out of 4 stars, writing, "Las Hurdes becomes a frightening call to arms, a fabulous open text that resists simple readings and questions humanity's notion of progress."{{cite magazine|last=Gonzalez|first=Ed|title=Land Without Bread|url=https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/land-without-bread|magazine=Slant Magazine}} Jeffrey Ruoff called it a "revolutionary film."

Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is a 2018 Spanish-Dutch animated film based on the graphic novel Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas by Fermín Solís. It covers how Buñuel and his crew filmed at Las Hurdes.

{{Reflist}}

• {{IMDb title|id=0023037}}
• {{Rotten tomatoes|land_without_bread|Las Hurdes}}
• {{TCMDb title|490560|Las Hurdes}}

{{Luis Buñuel}}

{{Darius Milhaud}}

Category:1933 short documentary films

Category:1933 films

Category:Filmed deaths of animals

Category:Films directed by Luis Buñuel

Category:Films scored by Darius Milhaud

Category:1930s French-language films

Category:Las Hurdes

Category:Media bias controversies

Category:Animal cruelty incidents in film

Category:Films about social realism

Category:Spanish black-and-white films

Category:Spanish short documentary films

Category:Spanish silent films

Category:Films set in Extremadura

Category:Films about poverty