Terre sans pain

Bunuel had always been a visionary man,his cinema had never stopped trying from "un chien andalou" to "le fantôme de la liberté"."las Hurdes " was a documentary ,but it made the genre explode.And,to think it was seventy years ago!

Near the Portuguese border,there's a part of Spain where a doomed humanity used to live.The beginning of "las hurdes" deals with a feast in a village,last stop before the Hurdes country.

Then Bunuel begins his unthinkable depiction of this subhumanity:morons,maimed persons,monsters with twelve fingers,living in a filth you could not imagine.They drink in the brook/sewer!Springtime which everybody enjoys elsewhere is the worst season for the "Hurdes":all that remains for them to eat is cherries.But they cannot wait that they ripen,so they contract dysentery and they fall like flies.

And ,however,in a world that God seems to have completely forgotten,the children learn at school that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.And chiefly,they must respect the property of others(!). On the wall of the classroom,you can see a picture,showing an eighteen century marchioness!

Irony and surrealism are always here .After these horrors,out of the blue,Bunuel begins a lecture on the anopheles mosquito,complete with anatomical charts.

Banned by the Spanish government in 1933-1935,it took the Popular front(1936)to release what was the first social and political documentary.

Luis Buñuel's approach to film-making was so unusual, and his intentions so hard to decipher, that you can never be quite sure what his movies were meant to convey. So it should probably not be too surprising that even when he makes a documentary it is still hard to tell exactly what he was doing. While this gives every initial appearance of being a straightforward documentary, it is not long before Buñuel's detailed yet surrealistic approach begins to show in subtle ways.

Whatever else may be true, it is an unusual film, and a generally interesting one. It is also unsettling - at times, very much so. It depicts a civilization that, though located in the midst of Spain just before the Franco era, could almost be from pre-historic times. Many of the images and much of the commentary are disturbing and uncomfortable to watch, to say the least. Yet the tone is far from emotional, and in fact it seems to be deliberately withdrawn, even unsympathetic, much of the time.

At the same time, it's easy to see why there are those who suggest that Buñuel was not filming a strictly objective documentary. While there are no outlandish or fantastical images, his distinctive style shows up in less obvious ways, through odd details and sequences. There also seem to be a number of different versions of the narration, which do not always cast events in the same light. So, as so often tends to be the cast with Buñuel, all that you can do is to watch it for yourself and then make your best guess as to what it all means.

I have ancestors from my father side who are originally from Las Hurdes. The highlands were exactly like the documentary film portrays them. The lowlands slightly better off, The documentary helped them because the world focused on them and offered some help. Finally a cementery was built and food imported. Problem is the civil war that followed shortly afterwards. Buñuel was a surrealist film director who tried to shift towards realism after joining the communist party. The civil war against communists and fascists further increased poverty but no films were allowed for decades under the dictatorship 1936-1975

"Las Hurdes" may be the Surrealist documentary par excellence, a tendentious film discourse about poverty shot in Las Hurdes Altas, a human settlement out of a nightmare, among steep precipices, in an almost deserted landscape. Even based on Maurice Legendre's 1927 anthropological text "Las Jurdes: A Study of Human Geography", Buñuel forced into the harsh situations his own obsessions with insects and donkeys that would appall today any society for the protection of animals. Done at a time when Spain was among the nine countries with the highest level of economic development, by contrast this work shows the state of misery of a community marginalized by landowners, forgotten by authorities, and living in the cruelest of conditions. The cynic commentary makes the facts more striking, but the music score by Darius Milhaud is an obtrusive element. Although banned by the authorities, it was re-released with a Spanish narration read by actor Francisco Rabal.

After Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or had caused such earthquakes, Bunuel picked for his next project a documentary on the Hurdanos. These people live in mid-western Spain, near the border of Portugal, under the most horendous conditions possible. They are a primitive, almost neolithic people, who only barely understand the principles of farming and are otherwise so superstitious as to starve themselves rather than eat any animals besides disease-carrying pigs.

Now, it is difficult to know how to take this film. Following Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, I personally expected a comedy, and took it as that when I was watching it. If you read down, you will notice the first person who commented on the film takes it this way. My reasoning went thus: Bunuel saw the Hurdanos in his peculiar surrealist light. Here was a people degraded to the point of utter absurdity. For instance, there is a scene where the farmers are working in a place where adders are plentiful. The adders frequently bite them, but these bites are not fatal. They would eventually heal, but these people don't know that. Instead, they use a kind of ointment to cover the wound, and this treatment actually leads to infection, which eventually mangles or even kills them. In another scene, we are told that the children only know bread from the bits that the local church gives them. They are not allowed to take these bits of bread home because their parents don't trust bread, and will confiscate it and toss it out (this is what I read in an essay about the film; the version I watched had an English voiceover, whose explanation for the parents' actions was to steal the bread for themselves. I believe that the version in the essay is the more correct one).

The surrealist aspects of the scenes I mentioned are there. But, reading that aforementioned essay (and a second), I realize that I was wrong about the humor. Surrealism, you should note, does not = comedy. This is a more serious surrealism. In fact, Bunuel made the documentary as a political statement, showing how the Spanish government treated its people (in fact, he was wrong on this point; Franco idolized the area and had great sympathy for the people, believing them to represent the primitive aspects of Spain; in later decades, he would pour a lot of money into the region). It caused an upset, though not as much as the previous two films. I imagine that people then didn't know how to take it either, since many critics were up in arms over this apparently massive change in Bunuel's style. Nowadays, Las Hurdes seems better than ever before. It is an amazing documentary, and the people represented in it deserve our sympathy. I wonder if their lives have now changed. 9/10.