Araya

Araya

To be born here is to be born into hell. It must have been so for over 300 years; why else would anyone come? “Araya,” which tells the story of life on the barren Araya Peninsula in Venezuela where Spanish conquistadors discovered salt about 1550, was made in the late 1950s, when a very old way of life had not quite ended. The filmmaker, Margot Benacerraf, believes that the motions of these salt workers became ritualized over generations and that here we see what comes from repeating endlessly an arduous task that will destroy others.

A cake of salt is taken from the floor of a shallow marsh, loaded into flat-bottomed wooden boats, broken up, carted ashore in wheelbarrows and loaded into 120-pound baskets to be balanced on the heads of laborers who trudge up the side of a continuously expanding pyramid to deposit it. At the top a man with a rake shapes each mound into a towering geometrically perfect figure. Now it can be hauled away by truck.

The workers are all muscle and sinew bronzed by the sun and burnt raw by salt. They work under a flaming sky over soil where nothing grows. Food is brought from the sea or corn meal is carted in; they live in small rude shacks; they get their water from a tank truck; some work all day; some work all night.

And just such a phrase as “such is their life” occurs in the narration’s detached seeming detachment hovering above the sweat on the ground. I imagine Miss Benacerraf’s purpose was to make them seem heroic like those mythical figures who exist only “where nothing lives.”

When it gets so hot so often even this becomes incantatory. At first this effect seems strange but then we get used to it: one should look at these people not as individuals but almost as though they were a species evolved to take salt from the sea, build pyramids of it, watch it hauled away and start again.

We are taught something about salt. It was so valuable that the Spanish built their biggest overseas fortress on the peninsula to guard it; many men died in its construction before many others paid with their lives for having worked there. The laborers’ feet and legs were eaten away by ulcers; if they could not work they had no income. These people have been reduced to robots: no wonder the film contains so little dialogue. We do not pity them as we watch because their life is ending but has been one long agony. Yet still we have salt in our shakers and these people lived and died! It would be too sad if they were forgotten.

Represented at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival by its realistic photography and formal language with which it was narrated, this monochromatic doc tied for the critics’ prize with “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” Benacerraf, who was born in Venezuela in 1926 and is still living today, has received many awards. For a time her films were nearly forgotten; now Milestone Films has restored this one to radiant condition and is sending it around the country on an art house tour.

Watch Araya For Free On Gomovies.