"Don't worry if the movie's too short, I'll just put in a dream" - Luis Bunuel
5/5 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929)
5/5 L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age, 1930)
4/5 Las Hurdes, Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933)
By this point, I've read so much about these three films that I risk plagiarizing other writers if I'm not careful. The three best bits of writing about this period in Bunuel's career come from former Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (his article, "One-Man Armada," available here,) Carlos Fuentes' article from the 70s, "The Discreet Charm of Luis Bunuel" (found in a book of mine, but excerpted here) and from Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh, the English translation of which Rosenbaum (who would know) insists is poor and incomplete, but which I did read and enjoy.
From Bunuel, in translation:
"Un Chien Andalou was born of the encounter between my dreams and Dali's. Later I brought dreams directly into my films, trying as hard as I could to avoid any analysis."
"Like the senoritos [radical students] I knew in Madrid, most surrealists came from good families; as in my case, they were bourgeoisie revolting against the bourgeoisie. But we all felt a certain destructive impulse, a feeling that for me has been even stronger than the creative urge."
From Fuentes, about L'Age D'Or:
"The first break with Dali came on the first day of shooting L'Age d'Or, their second joint venture. They got the money from a Parisian angel called the Comtesse de Noailles, who at the same time was financing Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poete. The Castor-and-Pollux relationship between the two Spaniards seems to have been severely damaged when Dali fell in love with Gala, Paul Eluard's wife, [my note: Gala remained Dali's companion until his death] and Bunuel tried to strangle the lady on a rock at Cadaques because he saw in her a diabolical influence. In any case Dali stayed on the set of L'Age d'Or for exactly one day."
From Rosenbaum:
"Land Without Bread is above all a metaphysical statement, with all the strengths and limitations that implies. It’s also an intricate unpacking of the documentary form rather than a simple adoption of it, and a mockery of touristic observation in general."
In addition to these writings, I also spoke to one of my film professors last fall about my obsession with Bunuel and he suggested seeing all of his early films, because they have "symbols and motifs that are carried from film to film, much like Werner Herzog's early films."
I would go even further to say that these three films (I've been familiar with the first two for a long time, but Land Without Bread was unavailable to me until I went on a downloading spree recently) contain virtually all the seeds of what would come to fruition in Bunuel's numerous later films, from his first Mexican film--1947's Gran Casino--to his final film, 1977's That Obscure Object of Desire. In evidence here are Bunuel's various fascinations and obsessions: with Freud's essay on the Uncanny, including doubles; with deviant sexuality and sexual obsession; with extreme and often inexplicable violence; with satire of the upper and middle classes and the church; with the music of Richard Wagner; with the Marquis de Sade's and the Old Testament's imagery; a clear-eyed, sympathetic look at the struggles and suffering of the poor; and even ecology and etymology, which he studied at the University of Madrid.
It's hard to know what else to say about Un Chien Andalou that hasn't been heard before--a free-associational seventeen minute silent short, definite inspirations from Freud, about a half and half contribution from both Bunuel and Dali (though Bunuel claims he did all the shooting), Chaplain listed it among his favorite films, an inspiration for artists as diverse as Hitchcock and David Bowie, and the famous Bunuel quote that he intended the film as "nothing less than a call to assassination." I read somewhere--it may have been the autobiography--that, despite Bunuel's training as an etymologist, the image of ants crawling out of a hole in a man's hand came from Dali's dreams, and the image of a man slashing open a woman's eyeball came from Bunuel's. This may even be supported diagetically by the fact that Bunuel himself is seen in the film doing the slicing. According to several sources, the film gained Bunuel entry into the Surrealist group in Paris, which included Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, both of whom also made a few excellent short films in the same period.
L'Age d'Or may be the better film and it's much closer to the rest of Bunuel's body of work. It starts with a group of guerillas who are nearly dead tramping up a hill to kill some priests, then moves on to the founding of Rome, and, hence, the founding of Western Civilization by bourgeoisie who arrive in boats. One particular bourgeoisie, the main character--who may be a foil for Bunuel himself--played by Gaston Modot, is seen cavorting in the mud with a pretty young flapper, apparently trying to rape her. The founders come over and arrest him, but he breaks free from them long enough to kick a poodle. He's led away by two detectives, and keeps having sexual thoughts and memories of the girl as he is led past advertising signs for leggings and hair products (Fuentes rightly notes that this might be the earliest on film critique of consumer society.)
After that, Gaston produces a note from the International Goodwill Society that claims he's an ambassador and breaks into an uppercrust party where the girl is staying, while the groundskeeper (perhaps in reference to the story of Abraham and Issac) shoots his son for slapping something out of his hand.
The man flirts with the flapper (played by Lya Lys) by humiliating some of the guests and then they sneak away into a hedged garden, where, after playing some S&M games by biting each others hands, she fellates the toe of a statue of Caesar while a small orchestra plays Wagner. The conductor wanders away from the Orchestra and into their presence, where Lya promptly starts making out with him. Meanwhile, the man has returned to her bedroom and ripped her pillows apart with a plow. After he throws everything he can find out the window, including a burning pine tree, a cow, a priest, and a paper-mache giraffe, the film cuts to Jesus and several other men leaving a De Sade-type orgy in a castle and to a final shot of women's scalps nailed to the cross.
All of this is characteristic of Bunuel, and L'Age d'Or is Bunuel at his wildest and most irreverent. It is an early sound film--some sequences are only accompanied by music, there is little actual dialogue or diegetic sound, and intertitles are still used--but, at an hour's length, it is hardly painful to watch. There is even a bizarre sequence with scorpions attacking each other and killing a rat. 
The film is a riot for modern viewers, who will probably not be as shocked and offended as those who actually rioted in 1930, and I personally enjoy it a lot as both a retrospective commentary on what was considered extremely inappropriate in the 30s and as a startling example of free associational, off-the-cuff filmmaking. Even this early, the power and inventiveness of Bunuel's images is startling, although there are some points where it's obvious he has yet to really master the finer points of filmmaking.
Land Without Bread or Las Hurdes, as it's usually referred to, is a short 27-minute documentary that Bunuel made in a very poor and undeveloped region of Spain. He writes in his autobiography that he felt like he grew up in the Middle Ages, and this film bears some of that sentiment. Compared to his vicious satire of the bourgeoisie and religion in L'Age d'Or, it is almost as shocking how much care and concern he has for the villagers of Las Hurdes, although he strictly resists sentimentality, as always, and looks without a blink at the variety of horrors in the region.
I think Jonathan Rosenbaum's suggestion that this is an "unpacking" of documentary and has a comment to make on tourism is quite insightful. We hear only an offscreen narrator and music--there is no diegetic sound. There are plenty of derisive comments about the relative wealth of the church versus the poverty of the people and one is made to feel more than a little uncomfortable that the camera is here filming this and there is no evidence that help is coming.
There is even an interesting voyeuristic scene, where the filmmakers catch a starved feverish woman sleeping, unbeknownst to her, while telling us just that--a sort of sick joke about third-world tourism, if there ever was one.
Bunuel seems to delight in a couple of burned out monasteries and in filming the barefoot children at school. He's quite aware of the ecology of the place, which is invariably harsh, ultimately damning the people to poverty and disease, and there is a lot of toungue in cheek hinting toward a Marxist solution.
A few years after filming Las Hurdes, Bunuel left Spain for New York as the end of the Spanish Civil War neared. The Spanish Civil War is often thought of by historians as a testing ground for many of the weapons and ideological conflicts of World War II--the Nazi and Italian Fascists supported Franco's military coup and the Soviets, along with many volunteers from the U.S., France and Britain, fought on the side of the Republic. The only difference is that, in Spain, the Fascists won and Franco's regime lasted into the early 1970s.
It's apparent from Bunuel's autobiography that he had sympathies with the Communists in the Civil War, who were, by all accounts, the best organized resistance to Franco, but this wasn't enough to keep him from getting a job at the New York MOMA re-editing Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will as an anti-Nazi documentary to be shown to U.S. Senators. Unfortunately, Dali came to New York with Gala to publish his autobiography, which accused Bunuel of being an atheist (he was) and a communist (only a fellow traveler), and he was forced to resign and move out to Hollywood, where he lived with his wife and two children for several years co-scripting other peoples pictures before finally fleeing to Mexico at the first sight of the Hollywood Blacklist. All in all, it would be fourteen years after Las Hurdes until Bunuel released another film.
