Las Hurdes: tierra sin pan (1933)

 Las Hurdes: tierra sin pan (1933)

Upon L'Age d'Or (1930) controversially being received with riots and other negative reactions, Buñuel found doors being closed to him. His investors were threatened with excommunication from the Pope, so it was difficult for him to fund his next project. An acquaintance proposed the project which was an expose of an impoverished and geographically isolated group of communities known collectively as Las Hurdes.

I believe I first heard of this movie in college and, (it may be a false memory,) but I recall the area being described as so poor and ignorant that when bread was brought from outside it was discarded, as the denizens had no idea it was sustenance. This may have been the first time I ever heard of one of Buñuel’s works.

Buñuel and his team spent a couple of months there and the resulting work is a short but (still powerful) film, even when today other documentaries, newsreels or ads soliciting donations show human beings living under worse conditions than what we see here. Yes, we see documentary footage, but we also see obvious directorial interference and reenactments which added to the film’s impact but are clearly Buñuelian contributions.

Amidst the poverty we see Hurdano suffering from goiters, dwarfism, “cretinism” (as it’s described in the Spanish narration,) malaria (which allows Buñuel to include a mini-doc about mosquitoes,) etc. but Buñuel cannot resist adding staged scenes in closeup of a wedding day custom of tearing a chicken’s head off while riding a horse; scenes of goats falling down cliffs or, most controversially, of a donkey bee-stung to death.

A child lies sick on the street for a couple of days till she dies.

It’s clear inbreeding is a problem, but the documentary (version I most recently watched) fails to mention this fact.

Buñuel ironically points out images of wealth at a school of barefoot children, where they are taught to ‘respect the property of others,’ and that the only luxury in evidence is inside the local Catholic temple.

Reading a bit on historic life in Baja California recently some similarities came to my mind. The Baja peninsula offered even worse living conditions for the Native Americans than that which existed in Las Hurdes, but they were able to adapt by creating a nomadic lifestyle.
The Californian Natives also subsisted on hunting and gathering rather than on sedentary, agriculture-based subsistence. Obviously, the harsh conditions gave these folks some traditions and mores which were and still are ‘unacceptable’ to Western civilization today, (abortion, orgies, suicide, warfare among local groups,) and it seems to me that Hurdano might have benefited from such adaptations. Instead, they lived in miserable stone homes and unhealthy living conditions.
Rather than wasting all the useless effort we see spent on their agriculture, it might have benefited them more to travel and subside on lizards, mice, nuts, and berries as the Californio Indians did.
When the Spanish missionaries changed the local life and economy of the natives all that resulted was their near total extermination.

Had Buñuel made a documentary about Baja California natives and their destruction by Catholic/Western conversion, he would have ended up with much the same cinematic result.

The film was banned from 1933 to 1936.