1933 Spanish documentary
Rating: too short for a rating
Plot: Bunuel looks at an isolated region of Spain and the people there.
"Nothing keeps you awake better than always thinking about death."
I had to wait on the Bunuel movie that I needed to rewatch and watched this instead. I couldn't shake how much it reminds me of the kinds of documentaries Werner Herzog would make 40 years later. The narrated bit about how the crew is there for months or whatever and "never heard a song" sounded especially Herzogian. Bunuel's a trickster, contrasting the matter-of-fact (maybe even bored) narration with these stark images of the suffering people of Las Hurdes and staging sequences with a falling goat and probably a donkey that dies when it's attacked by bees. This should not be shown to animal rights activists although I'm not sure they'd care all that much about a movie that is almost 90 years old. One senses that there's a lot staged or manufactured in this. There's a harrowing moment where the camera examines a little girl's mouth while the narrator informs us that the character dies a few days after the footage was shot. Anybody just taking Bunuel at his word with stuff like that is probably gullible. From what I've read, this is a parody of ethnographic studies or anthropological excursions that Bunuel apparently believed were similarly exaggerated for effect.
A humorous moment is a sequence where Bunuel is showing dwarves and "cretins" who are in charge of looking after goats. The footage keeps shifting to a new figure, and the narrator announces "another cretin" several times. I also liked the matter-of-fact "After two months in this country, we leave" followed by a jarring "FIN." That was so perfect.
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