Land without bread

The film begins with a brief comment informing that Las Urdes is a land where people are constantly struggling for existence, and the first road connecting the region with the outside world appeared in 1922. This is followed by a short story about the town of La Alberca , not part of Las Urdes. The film shows the traditional competition of La Alberka, during which the young men must rip off their heads at full gallop by a rooster suspended by its legs.

After that, the narrative goes directly to Las Urdes. The performance of Las Urdes Bunuel begins with a story about the valley of Las Batuecas and the ruins of the monastery. Then he changes his tone and, starting from this moment, to the accompaniment of the Fourth Symphony of Brahms, in front of the viewer, one by one, pass the pictures of poverty and despair in which the inhabitants of Las Urdes, suffering from malnutrition and illness, live. Children and pigs drink water from the local river at the same time, and they wash clothes in it. Many children from a local school are orphans from an orphanage in a neighboring city who are being brought up to receive a fee for their maintenance. In another village, many people suffer from goiter due to malnutrition (the frame shows a woman with a characteristic increase in the throat). In a few scenes, Bunuel draws parallels between the everyday deaths of people and animals in Las Urdes ^[1] . In the last scenes of the film, Bunuel shows three idiots (a comment says that they are not uncommon in Las Urdes because of poverty, hunger and incest ), the funeral of a girl whose coffin needs to be carried for several days and rafted down the river to the nearest cemetery, and the poor furnishings of houses locals.

The film ends with two overlapping phrases. The toothless old woman says the first: "Nothing helps to live like the thought of death." The second is Bunuel’s commentary: “After two months in Las Urdes, we left this area.” The comment hints at the fact that Las Urdes also threw the government of the country ^[2] .

The mountainous region of Las Urdes was considered a symbol of the backwardness of Spain by the beginning of the 1930s. The poverty of the local peasants was described by the press, and in 1927, the work of the region was published by the French Spaniard Maurice Legendre. It was Legendre who inspired Bunuel to create the film ^[3] .

In 1932, a group of surrealists , which included Bunuel, broke up due to political differences. Bunuel, Andre Breton , Louis Aragon , future co-author of the script “Las Urdes” Pierre Unique and some other surrealists had leftist views and considered surrealism as a way of transforming society ^[4] . Bunuel hoped to shock the audience with the new film as he managed to do it with the Andalusian Dog and the Golden Age , and in this sense, the director also considered him a surreal work. The filming was funded by Spanish anarchists who were interested in drawing attention to the plight of the Extremaduran peasants. According to Bunuel, the money for the film was given by Ramon Asin , who won them in the lottery. Assistant director Rafael Sanchez Ventura and cameraman Eli Lothar belonged to the left movement ^[5] .

Bunuel first showed “Earth without bread” in December 1933 at a private event in the Madrid Palacio de la Prensa , personally voicing the author’s text. The audience, which included many Madrid intellectuals, met the film rather coolly ^[6] . Soon, the film banned the right-wing government of the Second Republic . The ban was lifted after the Popular Front came to power, but the subsequent outbreak of the Civil War and the victory of Franco made the film in Spain impossible. Already in 1936, English and French soundtracks appeared, but foreign hire was accompanied by censorship restrictions. The full version of the film was first shown in 1965 ^[5] .

Director and critic Adonis Kiru noted that “Earth without bread” is built on the repetition of the same scheme: the author gives the viewer some shocking information, then adds something that covers the seed of hope for the best, but then destroys this hope. Thus, the viewer is under the impression that the inhabitants of Las Urdes exist in a constant struggle for a better life, but cannot escape the vicious cycle of poverty ^[7] .

Siegfried Krakauer believed that starting from this tape, the director moved from "his surreal search to the disclosure of the monstrous essence of reality itself." In his opinion, this film was released at the time when the cinema avant - garde movement came to an end: “this terrible documentary revealed the depths of human disasters, anticipated the near future, which brought untold horrors and suffering to people” ^[8] .

Buenuel has been a consistent critic of religion and the church throughout his life, and “Land Without Bread” was no exception. The film scatters seemingly random allusions to the role of religion in the history of the region: a richly decorated church, the ruins of a Carmelite monastery, an inscription above the entrance to the house. All this should lead the viewer to the idea that the fate of the inhabitants for many years was connected with the church, which now left them ^[9] .

Several scenes in the film were not a documentary chronicle, but a production. So, for a scene with a goat falling from a steep cliff, the goat was shot (smoke from the shot is visible in the frame). In order to depict an attack of bees on a donkey in another episode, the director used a sick animal that was coated with honey. Finally, the infant shown in the film was not dead, but simply sleeping ^{[6] [10]} . Gwynn Edwards believes that production scenes were added primarily for economy and clarity, since the situation of the peasants in Las Urdes as a whole was exactly as it was shown in the film ^[6] .

Bunuel’s film made the region of Las Urdes widely known not only in Spain, but also in the world and largely determined its image. Modern residents of Las Urdes consider the film a kind of “ black legend ” ^[10] .

• Durgnat, R. Luis Bunuel . - University of California Press, 1977 .-- 176 p. - ISBN 9780520034242 .
• Edwards, G. A Companion to Luis Buñuel. - Tamesis Books, 2005 .-- 176 p. - ISBN 185566108X .

• " A Land Without Bread ” on the Internet Movie Database