“Land without bread”

Tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread) was filmed in the highlands of Las Hurdes in the spring of 1933, perhaps the most decisive year of the Second Spanish Republic. Buñuel’s third film, coming after Un Chien andalou (1929) and L’ge d’orr (1930), was also the first to be made entirely in his own countryand the first in which the director confronted images of reality. The cinema was beginning to use sound and to produce newsreels that soon became propaganda. For independent film directors the documentary was then a new creative path for perception and communication. As a director coming from the avant-garde and provided with very scanty resources, Buñuel here faced a story opposed to exoticism and focused on immediate reality, the grim harshness of a society in which the ancestors of the rural Spain of the time could be recognised. A film about social destitution, the political consensus and the limits of collective transformation, and also about the role of the viewer, who is not granted the possibility of compassion. In order to make Tierra sin pan, Buñuel gathered together an interdisciplinary team that combined the most significant cultural and political attitudes of the time and the media that expressed them: the cinema, plastic arts with poor materials, photography, journalism, poetry, pedagogy, ethnography and anthropology. From Aragon came the sculptor, teacher and anarchist leader Ramón Acín (1888-1936), who produced the film, and the university lecturer and museum specialist Rafael Sánchez Ventura (1897-1984), who was also involved with the anarchists. From Paris came the poet, journalist and screenplay writer Pierre Unik (1900-1945), the youngest member of the initial Surrealist group and by then a member of the French Communist Party, and Eli Lotar (1905-1969), photographer, cameraman and documentary film-maker connected with the Surrealists in Paris and with the photographic avant-garde in Europe. This film, which concludes the trilogy of films made by Buñuel before the Civil War, was censored during the “Two Black Years” of the Republic governed by the right, and the sound dubbing and première took place after the war had begun, in Paris at the end of 1936 and in Belgium, Holland and Great Britain in 1937. That version was also censored. The complete copy was not restored, in the French version and under Buñuel’s supervision, until 1964. The Republican coda added to the film in 1936 then disappeared, having never formed part of this documentary which in 1933 was planned as an appeal to go beyond the limitations of the reformers’ good intentions. With time, Tierra sin pan has become one of the central films of Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and the film that completed the formation of his Surrealist vision. It is also a work of reference for contemporary cinema, particularly for documentaries and film essays about reality, including works made for television, because of its radical exploration of the use of sound and of how to tell what the strict realism of the camera cannot explain. A legendary tale, a cruel story of the Europe of the thirties.