Land Without Bread

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Las Hurdes
Directed byLuis Buñuel
Written byLuis Buñuel
Rafael Sánchez Ventura
Pierre Unik
Produced byRamón Acín
Luis Buñuel
StarringAbel Jacquin
Alexandre O'Neill
CinematographyEli Lotar
Edited byLuis Buñuel
Music byDarius Milhaud
Johannes Brahms
Release dates
December 1933 (Spain)
ca. 1937 (France)
Running time
27 mins
CountrySpain
LanguagesFrench
Spanish

Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (English: Land Without Bread or Unpromised Land) is a 1933 French-language Spanish

Ramón Acin. The narration was written by Buñuel, Rafael Sánchez Ventura [es], and Pierre Unik, with cinematography by Eli Lotar
.

Synopsis

The film focuses on the

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
]

Cast

Production

Buñuel claimed: "I was able to film Las Hurdes thanks to Ramon Acin, 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."[1]

The movie is a pseudo-documentary, parodying the exaggerated documentaries of travelers across the Sahara being filmed at the same time.[2] One of Buñuel's points is that there are plenty of terrible subjects for a documentary right in Spain.[citation needed]

The film was originally silent, though Buñuel himself narrated when it was first shown.[3] A French narration by actor Abel Jacquin was added in Paris in 1935.[citation needed] Buñuel used extracts of Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 4 for the music.[citation needed]

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.[4]

Premiere and censorship

The premiere took place in December 1932 at Madrid's

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.[6]

Land Without Bread provoked such an uproar in Spain that conservative forces banned the distribution of the image throughout the country.[7][5][8] The official reason for the censorship record was "defamation of the good name of the Spanish people."[6] It was banned[4] from 1933 to 1936.

Reception

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".[9]

In modern times, critical reception for Land Without Bread has been mostly positive. Ed Gonzalez from Slant Magazine, for example, 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."[10] Jeffrey Ruoff called it a "revolutionary film."[2]

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.

References

  1. ISBN 0-941419-68-1
    .
  2. ^ a b Ruoff, Jeffrey. An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread. Visual Anthropology Review 14, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), 45-57
  3. ISBN 9780006540885
    .
  4. ^ a b McNab, Geoffrey (8 September 2000). "Bunuel and the land that never was". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 30 October 2011.
  5. ^
    ISBN 9788484729518
    . Retrieved 20 June 2016.
  6. ^
    ISBN 9788441417724
    . Retrieved 20 June 2016.
  7. ISSN 1548-7458
    .
  8. ^ Geoffrey McNab (9 September 2000). "Bunuel and the land that never was". the Guardian. Retrieved 20 June 2016.
  9. ISBN 0192812866
    .)
  10. ^ Gonzalez, Ed. "Land Without Bread". Slant Magazine.com. Ed Gonzalez. Retrieved 6 December 2018.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Land_Without_Bread&oldid=1195462322"