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Average Rating:
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Somewhat interesting, if dated - and polemical
This tape includes two very different pieces from Buñuel (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 Buñuel 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 Buñuel 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!. Buñuel 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.
Rating: 
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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.
Rating: 
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Groundbreaking, but no masterpiece
Recently, I purchased and viewed my first Luis Bunuel film, Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned). The film is very good, including some incredibly poignant and unforgettable images. I then decided to purchase and view one of his earlier works, likewise considered a masterpiece of film, Un Chien Andalou/Land Without Bread. This is awful. A mish-mash of mush! Its only redeeming quality is its brevity. Once again, here we have a film that is given much more credit than it deserves, and I'm starting to think that the reason this often happens is that: a) the movies are old and therefore deserve respect for being "groundbreaking" b) they are "enigmatic," which is the critically vogue term for "confusing," which is often the polite term for "stupid," which when inserted into the VCRs of sheltered and myopic film critics can be enigmatically transformed into "intellectual." What's more appalling than this film is the praise that is heaped upon it. So the eyeball scene is groundbreaking. So what? It's not all that! I suppose lifting up the blanket--twice--to view the dead baby was likewise groundbreaking. Try disgraceful. Un Chien Andalou/Land Without Bread is a mongrelization of meaningless movie-making that belongs on some dusty shelf in some vault catalogued for historical reference only. You've been warned.
Okay, perhaps I am being a little harsh, but it's just because I want you to realize that what you are getting in this film is all technique, and, yes, groundbreaking at that. For that reason and that reason alone, I give this project 3 stars. And that's being generous.
Rating: -
'Land Without Bread' might be Bunuel's masterpiece
'Un chien andalou' (1928) is the best-known film on this video and is a fascinating work in its own right, but the real masterpiece here is undoubtedly 'Land Without Bread' ('Las Hurdes'). As great as most of Bunuel's subsequent films would be, this 27-minute 1932 work arguably towers above them all. Calling it a documentary would not do justice to its unrivaled breadth: among other things, this film asks the questions 'what is a documentary?' and 'what is the role of the documentarist?', and this prevents us from using definitive, short-circuiting labels. In fact, no label could conceivably express this film's power. The controversy surrounding this work has three main sources: 1) some of the sequences have apparently been staged by Bunuel; 2) the impersonal narration seems in direct contrast to the pain and tragedy that unfolds on the screen; 3) so is Bunuel's choice of using Brahms's Fourth symphony as background music. For these reasons, cinephiles have been disagreeing for over 70 years about Bunuel's treatment of human and animal misery in this film. For me, his audacious technique creates a space - a window - between the viewer and the plight of the Hurdanos; it is this space that somehow transfigures their misery, rather than merely exploit it (as some have suggested). The film becomes a true initiation for the viewer: it provides a difficult, troubling but potentially life-changing experience. In the end, Bunuel's intentions do not matter as much as the impact his film can have on those who see it; and for this viewer, he has carved a moving, mysterious and ineffable work.
Rating: -
At one time
I find these films interesting for their period statements. At one time Un Chien Andalou was a statement about nothing. It is now, however, an exploration into metaphor that we never could never leave undiscovered. People may think they remain the same but their symbols are reused with new interpretations. This movie is like lost love rediscovered, forgetting the reason for the loss.
Land Without Bread is such a racist, bigoted statement that it boggles the mind. Imagine a time when some human existence could be so distant that it was judged only appropriate for a carny sideshow. This movie is like a right wing view to a kill, totally without sensitivity or compassion.
How we have changed.
