Bunuel had always been a visionary man,his cinema had never stopped trying from "un chien andalou" to "le fantôme de la liberté"."las Hurdes " was a documentary ,but it made the genre explode.And,to think it was seventy years ago!
Near the Portuguese border,there's a part of Spain where a doomed humanity used to live.The beginning of "las hurdes" deals with a feast in a village,last stop before the Hurdes country.
Then Bunuel begins his unthinkable depiction of this subhumanity:morons,maimed persons,monsters with twelve fingers,living in a filth you could not imagine.They drink in the brook/sewer!Springtime which everybody enjoys elsewhere is the worst season for the "Hurdes":all that remains for them to eat is cherries.But they cannot wait that they ripen,so they contract dysentery and they fall like flies.
And ,however,in a world that God seems to have completely forgotten,the children learn at school that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.And chiefly,they must respect the property of others(!). On the wall of the classroom,you can see a picture,showing an eighteen century marchioness!
Irony and surrealism are always here .After these horrors,out of the blue,Bunuel begins a lecture on the anopheles mosquito,complete with anatomical charts.
Banned by the Spanish government in 1933-1935,it took the Popular front(1936)to release what was the first social and political documentary.
