Poetic Latina documentary gets video release a half-century later

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

Filmmakers know that mid-May is the traditional time for the Cannes Film Festival, the gold standard of international film festivals. Back in 1959, the program at Cannes proved to be a landmark one for world cinema, introducing the independent “New Wave” filmmaking approach to cineastes and film critics, featuring such highly acclaimed award-winners as François Truffaut’s “Four Hundred Blows,” Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” Marcel Camus’ Brazilian-made “Black Orpheus,” and Venezuela native Margot Benacerraf’s “Araya.”

While those first three films quickly spread around the world to art cinemas and film societies, the equally-lauded “Araya” vanished almost as quickly, never getting a widespread or continuous distribution like the others. Meanwhile, after taking “Araya” to various other film festivals to acclaim at Locarno, Moscow, Edinburgh and Venice, Benacerraf never made another film. She eventually returned to Venezuela to work with the National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts, and ultimately founded the National Cinematheque of Venezuela in 1966. Some filmmakers look to her as the inspiration for the Latin American “Cinema Novo” movement and the birth of serious Latin American cinema.

All but forgotten, “Araya” didn’t even appear in regular French theatres until 1967 or its home country of Venezuela until 1977. It finally got to a few U.S. cities briefly in 1987, and saw sporadic honors and retrospective showings in the following decade. Then, in 2005, American independent distributor Milestone acquired rights to “Araya,” spent four years restoring the decaying original film and sound elements, and almost exactly 50 years after the film’s Cannes debut was able to premiere the restoration at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. Milestone is releasing “Araya” to DVD next week, on May 17th.

“Araya” is the story of a single day in the lives of a small community of villagers who struggle to survive by either collecting salt from the arid salt marsh of the Araya peninsula, or by fishing off the coast. The film is more than a standard documentary, however. Benacerraf first spent time researching the area’s history and getting to know the inhabitants. Then she carefully scripted a story of three different families going about their daily (or nightly) routines, casting her characters from the villagers rather than using the more time-consuming (and film-consuming) documentary technique of actually following random people and editing footage into a story after the fact.

Working with cinematographer Giuseppe Nisoli, Benacerraf arranged and composed strikingly beautiful and poetic images that simultaneously reveal the location’s harsh realities and its stunning beauty, depicting the villagers’ incredible hardships and their stoic dignity. Paradoxically the film decries the poverty and difficult working conditions of the villagers while it also laments that their unchanged 450-year family and neighbor-based lifestyle is rapidly (in 1959) being made obsolete by industrialization.

Staged or not, and although it drags at times, by making her film when she did instead of a year or two later, what Benacerraf fortuitously wound up with was a vivid anthropological record of humans living off the land in a place that cannot grow anything. It’s also a poetic reminder of just how critically important to human existence, language, and tradition was something we now take for granted as a common table condiment.

Milestone’s DVD has a lovely video transfer of the restored 35mm film in its intended 1.66:1 widescreen format (and we can only hope that a Blu-ray will eventually be forthcoming to show off the beautiful photography to an even greater degree). There is the Spanish soundtrack with optional English subtitles as well as the original French soundtrack Benacerraf prepared for the film’s Cannes premiere.

Bonus items include two audio commentaries, an interesting documentary and interviews with Benacerraf (including her revisiting the Araya location over 40 years later), a trailer, and Benacerraf’s only other film: a haunting half-hour short about eccentric Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón she made in 1951, shortly before he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and just three years before his death. The DVD also includes two computer-accessible PDF files containing a very informative presskit (with both film data and detailed autobiographical background by Benacerraf), and a scrapbook of Benacerraf photos and production notes.

“ARAYA” on DVD –  Movie: A- / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: A