2) Land Without Bread
Luis Bunuel was never really one to follow the rules. Throughout his colorful, bizarre career, the Frenchman made it his mission to defy the laws of filmmaking, with the likes of L’Age d’or and Un Chien Andalou deliberately eschewing cinematic convention in favor of surrealist, lurid images and themes. His third film – Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread – was predictably headache-inducing in its strange execution, and created further problems in the way it masqueraded as an authentic documentary.
Bunuel took his crew into the poverty-stricken mountain region of Las Hurdes in Spain in the early 1930s, and claimed that he simply filmed what he saw there. The result is supposedly Land Without Bread. Of course, anyone half-familiar with Bunuel took this surrealist documentary’s claim of authenticity with a strong pinch of salt, and as the years rolled by, close analysis revealed that Bunuel and his crew had deliberately manipulated the footage to create the desired effect for the film; breaking several taboos and laws regarding treatment of animals along the way.
In aiming to shock and appall, Bunuel’s team created a deathly atmosphere by brutally slaughtering several wild animals for Land Without Bread. In the many years since the film’s release, many rumors have floated around, but it does appear that the crew painted a donkey in honey and allowed it to be stung to death by bees, along with chopping the head off of a rooster, and deliberately murdering a mountain goat by pushing it off the edge of a cliff. Yet, the movie’s biggest sin – according to 1933 Spanish government – was that it painted the country in a negative light. Land Without Bread was promptly banned upon release, and continues to be strongly debated to this day.
