‘Land Without Bread’: when Luis Buñuel bought a Fiat and made a travel documentary
As a pivotal figure in surrealist filmmaking known for injecting their works with prescient social and political commentary, Luis Buñuel making a travel documentary was never going to adhere to convention. As expected, he instead opted to deconstruct the entire subgenre and poke fun at the norm long before the term ‘mockumentary’ ever existed.
Throughout a career that spanned five decades on-screen, Buñuel always marched to the beat of his own drum, whether he was immersing himself fully in the surreal or broadening his horizons towards satire. Regardless of what terrain he was operating on, there were few – if any – who could do it at his level, which is one of the reasons why Land Without Bread endures as such a fascinating curio.
As far back as 1933, when the film was released, Buñuel displayed what would soon become an ongoing penchant for skewering society at every turn. The 27-minute short zeroes in on the Las Hurdes region of Spain, which suffered from such specific poverty that those who resided in its mountainous surroundings purportedly had no idea what bread was, hence the title.
One of the driving forces behind the local economy was the government subsidies awarded for looking after orphaned children, which only increased the struggles faced by its population when one of the only ways they could earn money was by expanding in number. To juxtapose the seriousness of the situation, Buñuel approached his duties as a straightforward travelogue visually, but with heightened tales of human misery forming the backbone of the narration, which was delivered as monotonously as possible.
A key point he wanted to make is that, at the time, the travel documentary tended to focus its gaze outward to deal with more isolated parts of the world. Meanwhile, Buñuel didn’t have to leave the country of his birth to do the exact same thing, adding morbidly hilarious embellishments to further the notion that filmmakers didn’t have to travel to far-flung locations in order to shine a light on the abject misery of the human experience among its less fortunate.
He claims a local anarchist gave him 20,000 pesetas to help cover the costs of production, and “with 4000, I bought a Fiat” to travel around by road, borrowing a camera from contemporary Marc Allégret to shoot. Unsurprisingly, given its inflammatory content, the authorities banned Land Without Bread on the basis of how it amounted to “defamation of the good name of the Spanish people”. However, the restrictions were ultimately lifted in 1936.
To offer a glimpse of just how ludicrous Buñuel’s approach was, his voiceover intones that “dwarfs and morons are very common in the upper Hurdanos mountains,” and in certain cases “their families employ them as goat herders if they’re not too dangerous.” It was a mischievous and biting approach to the documentary format that was undeniably rooted in a heavy semblance of truth but treated with the same level of avant-garde surrealism as the rest of his work. This is what makes it stand out as a truly unique – if questionably authentic – rumination on the hardships facing the residents of Las Hurdes in the early 1930s.
