Las Hurdes

This mockumentary is loved only because it's a..... Luis Buñuel

Just remember that it's fucking with you.

A most puzzling film by Bunuel. It appears at first to be a straight-forward look at an impoverished region of Spain. Gradually Bunuel inserts small absurdities, sometimes for comic effect and sometimes for shock. How much of this is documentary and how much is fiction? If it's not sincere, then what to make of the anti-fascist coda? Overall an interesting experiment, but one that doesn't quite work. I'm also not crazy about the animal cruelty.

Buñuel stitches together his trademark shocking imagery into a peculiar pseudo-documentary with a very obvious political point to be made. Some interesting shots but overly cruel in places.

A great satire on Western Society's attitudes towards older tribal cultures, if a bit too dry. Still gets a few good chuckles anyway.

A strange but captivating short documentary about an impovrished and isolated region of Spain. The narration and images sometimes go too far into the absurd, diminishing the realities in the film, but for the most part it's pretty effective.

# 549

Apart from Bunuel's intention to reveal the hypocrisy of the so called documentaries, I think it is interesting that he found a surreal and even funny aspect in that village; it is so dull, so bare and poor that at the end a life in such a setting becomes something alien to the "ordinary" life standards and hence creates a feeling of absurd. But still it is a very very meagre film, the only reason people grade it so high is Bunuel.

"filmde gösterilen sefalet çaresiz değil. ispanya'nın diğer bölgelerinde dağlılar, köylüler ve işçiler birlik olarak, karşılıklı yardımlaşarak ve devletten haklarını talep ederek yaşam koşullarını yükseltebildiler...tüm dünyadaki antifaşistlerin yardımlarıyla sivil savaş huzur,istihdam ve mutluluk getirecek ve bu filmde gösterilen sefalet içindeki evler sonsuza dek yok olacaktır"

First mockumentary. Sort of.

Luis Buñuel must have had his tongue planted firmly in cheek when we directed this one. On the surface, we are presented with an anthropological documentary but the what the narrator says is often contradicted with what happens before the camera. Keep an eye out for the goat footage, and the suspicious 28-year-old toward the end. [Watched during documentary film class]

"Buñuel Geographic"

586

Claims such as those of Jeffrey Ruoff that this is "ethnographic surrealism" or a comedy seem to me wholly unfounded, if not a form of wilful, almost grotesque blindness. What differentiates this from conventional ethnographic cinema is not the fact that some scenes may have been staged (really, so what?), but rather that the filmmaker makes explicit (and in 1933!) that his aim is not just to document facts but to make a political act, exposing a solvable problem: deep and long-lasting poverty.

A bit on the dull side, although this is the first film I've ever seen that shows a real dead infant. Man, does life for Los Hurdanos suck. By extension, it must have sucked for pretty much all primitive Man for centuries. All the granola fuckheads here in California who treat normal food and tap water like it was plutonium and who only eat "100% organic" ridiculously strict vegan diets should be forced to watch this Ludovico-treatment-style

An odd, at times silly, little "mockumentary" that seems to be part satire, but mostly anti-Franco propaganda, which the "Conclusion" makes clear. The poverty is real, but he fakes some of the evidence in such over-the-top ways, it's impossible to take it seriously (for instance, the "dead infant" is clearly breathing in at least one of the shots). Images of bees seem to have replaced the ants from "Un chien andalou". Still, fascinating in its weird way.

The whole thing was staged, making the endevour preety pointless, it was just anti-Franco propaganda, not really worth much as a film.

Terra sem pão estreava há 90 anos na Espanha (mas a narração francesa da Versátil é a de 1935 e uma chamada ANTIFA). Sabe o burrinho que morreu picado de abelhas? Buñuel o lotou de mel em nome da "arte". Pseudo documentário indeed. Box Versátil O Cinema de Luis Buñuel volume 2.

"Today, Las Hurdes is remembered less for its politicized images than it is for Buñuel parodic manipulation of documentary style." - Ed Gonzalez

Lovely in all its grit, misery and shamelessness. Feels a bit too fragmental and short.

The best way to describe this unique documentary would be Flaherty-gone-surrealist. Las Hurdes has to be seen to be believed, although you probably shouldn't believe much of it as Buñuel took creative liberties here that would be inexcusible in straight-ahead documentaries. The result, however, is as easily convincing as it is fascinating. So, in a way, the film says a lot about our mentality as audience.

604

This is an interesting combination of Bunuel's surrealism with a semi-documentary about a poor region of Spain, though it is apparently a commentary/parody on how documentaries work, as most or all of it is staged. There is also some serious animal cruelty which, while it creates some unique images, is excessive.

#627

How come this reminded me of the dreadful Gymkata pommel horse scene?

Overlooked documentary masterpiece which explores the - sometimes quite arbitrary - conventions that constitute what we perceive as 'reality aesthetics'. Buñuel seems to have foregrounded, already in 1933, the current documentary trend of challenging the epistemological assumptions (almost) automatically embedded in the genre!