Un Chien Andalou / Land Without Bread

March 16, 2008 | By Doug In Dali |

Un Chien Andalou / Land Without Bread
Customer Review: Somewhat interesting, if dated - and polemical
This tape includes two very different pieces from Bu?uel (directed at not too distant time from each other, the late 1920s and the early 1930s). The first is Un Chien Andalou, which is credited as being codirected by Salvador Dali. This surreal short must have been terribly shocking when it was made, but I think that more than 75 years later, a lot of its impact has softened, perhaps because its surreal tricks have appeared in a lot of later movies.

The second piece is flawed too, though at least is more interesting - and I think more polemical, also. It’s a 30 minute documentary about life in one of Spain’s poorest regions. What I find wrong about this movie is that while Bu?uel gleefully shows us the poverty and ignorance of the people living there, he doesn’t have much clues (and doesn’t seem to care much) of how to solve this. Now, 70 years later, Spain is much richer than it was then. And if poverty receded in Spain it was not exactly with the sort of leftism that Bu?uel favored, but with Western European style capitalism. Shockingly, in one scene, the narrator chides that in school, children are taught the value of Pi. Teaching math to poor people, the horror!. Bu?uel shortsightedness is at its most glaring here, not realizing that it is access to the latest knowledge and technology what will help the poor overcome their situation.

All in all, two pieces that have not aged well.

Customer Review: Las Hurdes is absolutely shocking
I just watched Land Without Bread, or Las Hurdes, the only documentary directed by Luis Bunuel. The film is short, only 27 minutes, but it is long enough to portray enough human suffering to disgust. Images include a girl who lies in a road for two days and then dies. No one helps. The local schoolteacher instructs rows upon rows of malnourished children to respect the property of others. The schoolteacher feeds them bread, and makes them eat it immediately to keep their starving parents from taking it from them. They dip it into the only nearby source of water, a trickle running through a ditch where the pigs wallow. Bunuel illustrates with these sorts of images how these people are unbelievably pathetic, yet he clearly goes beyond this when he shows images of the developmentally challenged somehow teetering on the edge of life in a world where even the fittest can rarely overcome. “Morons and dwarves are plentiful…” says the narrator, but in some degree or other, all the people of the community are tragically moronic at every turn. They drink water from the ditch, yet somewhere within a reasonable distance is a river. They try to plant a crop, but the crop is washed away because they plant too near that river. They cook over an open fire indoors, but they don’t make windows for themselves to let smoke out of their homes. They have no food for two months of the year, and yet mothers carry babies around in almost every shot. The viewer is left with the distinct impression that these people can’t survive much longer, and there is certainly no optimism in sight when the film ends. How in the world can these people not plan a little better? The answer, I think, must lie in the intellectually suffocating nature of their hopelessness, the horrendous condition they feel swept away again and again along with every one of even the slightest currents of misfortune. Perhaps they’ve simply quit trying, it would seem.

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