Chapter II - Land without Bread

Summary

Land without Bread (1932) is a twenty-two-minute film by Luis Buñuel whose ostensible subject is the Hurdanos, an impoverished people cut off from the rest of Spain by a range of high mountains. It is often referred to as the only documentary by the great Spanish filmmaker. However, all of Buñuel's films have a documentary aspect – his early surrealist classics Un Chien andalou and L'Age d'or and his late ironic comedies (Tristana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, for example) no less than the grimly naturalistic Los Olvidados. And, as we shall see, the documentary status of Land without Bread is itself a complex issue.

Land without Bread portrays the Hurdanos' way of life as a struggle for survival in a natural environment as inhospitable as the “Barren Lands” of Nanook of the North. “Nowhere does man need to wage a more desperate fight against the hostile forces of nature,” one of Buñuel's opening titles reads. In Nanook of the North, nature may be harsh and unforgiving, but it is not hostile. Nature is sublime, as is the way of life, for all its rigors, of those who live as close to nature as Nanook and his family. In Land without Bread, by contrast, nature is a horror, at once cause and expression of the horror that is the Hurdanos' existence. But society, too, is implicated in this horror.