Araya
This week we are showing *Araya *(1959) on Thursday, 4/30, at 8pm.
*Here is the link to RSVP. * Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
Araya is a narrative non-fiction film from Venezuelan filmmaker Margot Benacerraf. The Araya Peninsula, jutting out over northern Venezuela, was a site for protracted inter-imperial fighting between the Dutch, Spanish, and English for control over the expansive salt deposits, the strategic military position, the pearls, and the people who labored there. Margot Benacerraf’s gorgeous, black-and-white examination of this place tends towards a mytho-poetic telling of the history of Araya through the daily gestures of its inhabitants and their ambivalent relationships to the sea and salt that surrounds them. Benacerraf plays with time and space, juxtaposing a timeless ancientness of the sea and salt with the timely labors of a day, themselves a present instantiation of procedures now centuries old. If life first emerged from the sea, so did death. Heaps of harsh salt are compared to the Pyramids of Egypt, and the narrator and camera lyrically guide us through the entanglements of beauty and pain, sustenance and exploitation, bounty and scarcity, all clustered around salt as a matter of vibrant material.
Araya is a wonder. Improbably filmed entirely by just two people – Benacerraf and her cameraman, Giuseppi Nisoli— you sway in the ebb and flow of bodies, salt, and sea foam. Araya split the top prize at Cannes in 1959 with recent From Below pick Hiroshima Mon Amour. Music and sound are key elements of the film, too. Guy Bernard’s score for the film includes remixed field recordings, distorted, looped, and run backwards to sonically extend the film’s concern with space and time.
This is intriguingly Benacerraf’s only major work. After Araya, she founded National Cinematheque of Venezuela, which now houses more than 85,000 films, and lived the rest of her life in diligent work archiving and exhibiting the films of Venezuela. She passed away at the age of 97 in 2024 in Caracas.
Repetitively,
Stefan, Charlie, Stark