Araya

 The Araya peninsula is a desert peninsula jutting into the Caribbean Ocean in northeast Venezuela.  The peninsula curves around a great sun-baked lagoon where people have been harvesting salt for 450 years.  Araya is a documentary made in 1959 by a woman named Margot Benaceraff.  Benceraff, a Venezuelan herself, made only one other film but she is revered in her home country and, indeed, apparently, a well-known figure in Latin American cinema.  Benaceraff claimed she made the film Araya with a single collaborator, her cameraman.  This seems unlikely and the presence of several very elaborate moving camera shots in the documentary suggest that she had several people in her crew -- one sequence appears to involve a moving crane shot although Benaceraff claims that she happened to find an abandoned crane at one location and was, somehow, able to use it to make the scene.  (This seems implausible to me.)  Several sequences involve her camera gliding over the waters of the salt-lagoon, sometimes executing intricate maneuvers, and it would seem to me that these shots, probably made from a floating flat-bottomed barge of some sort, must have required the assistance of a half-dozen grips.  These controversies are immaterial to the finished documentary -- it is extremely beautiful and, further, adorned with a stark, highly poetic narrative as well as an elaborate through-composed soundtrack consisting of avant-garde music.  The film is highly accomplished and polished to a high sheen and it is certainly a wonderful feat of something akin to magical realism.

The Araya peninsula is barren and hostile to life.  But people eke out a living on the shore of the sea working incessantly to extract salt from the shallow lagoon.  The men hack the salt off the bed of the lagoon, fill up small barges with the stuff, and, then, drag it ashore.  The salt is then packed in bags, weighed carefully (the woman at the scales has "eyes as dry and glittering" as the salt), and, then, hauled up onto huge prisms of white -- these are the so-called salt pyramids and they seem to be about 60 feet high, great alabaster piles of the stuff heaped in mastaba-shaped bunkers.  Ships come periodically and the salt is scooped from the pyramids, presumably using power equipment, and, then, hauled away.    But the work is ceaseless and no sooner is one salt pyramid loaded onto the ships then another is built. The workers in the village, also called Araya, seem to labor around the clock -- there's no end of salt to be cut and the market for the stuff is seemingly infinite.  About 18 miles from the salt lagoon, there's open sea and a long beach where a fishing village stands.  The fisherman also fish around the clock using huge nets that we see them lovingly mending. The fishermen pull fish from the sea which are, then, hauled fresh down to the salt lagoon.  There the salineros eat the fish  fresh or preserve them in -- you guessed it ! salt.  It's a closed loop.  The salineros can't eat without the fisherman.  The fisherman can't support themselves without being paid for their fish at the salt lagoon.  The film is constructed as documenting the events of a single work day -- it begins at dawn with turbulent thunderclouds gathering over the stark mountains around the lagoon; the day ends long after midnight with the fishers plying the open sea in their boats and the night shift of the salt miners pushing ashore barges piled up with salt.  During the intervening hours, we see a woman making primitive pots (she doesn't have a potter's wheel) and, then, firing the pots from bone-dry brush cut from a little thicket, the peninsula's only source of wood.   A water truck arrives around 11:00 pm and the village's oldest woman supervises the distribution of water to the various households -- some bristly atavistic-looking pigs wallow in the mud near the truck.  A little girl collects coral and sea shells and, then, goes with her grandmother to decorate a grave.  We see carrion birds eating dead fish at the sea shore and huge flocks of prehistoric-looking herons with vast gaping throats.  Some children fly kites and a boy and girl walking on a desolate-looking beach exchange glances if not words.  The women all lug around huge pots which they carry on their heads.  Even when they aren't carrying pots, the women wear little pillow-shaped bags on their heads -- they support the pots on this head gear.  Fish are salted and eaten.  The salt workers take a short siesta in the heat of the day -- apparently, the area is scalding hot.  Everyone lives in neat, but very humble mud huts.  In one unintentionally amusing scene, the women of the households carry some slabs of salt home on their head for personal use -- needless to say, all food prepared here is very liberally seasoned with salt.  The men are paid 50 cents per sack of salt hauled onto the pyramids.  (It looks like hellish work -- everyone has ulcers on their feet and calves where the salt is corroding their skin.)  The landscape is like the moon, totally barren and burnt into submission by the raging sun.  The huge piles of salt have a kind of unearthly grandeur.  The film starts with an account of how the place was founded and protected from pirates by a great fortress -- originally, the salt mining was just  a side enterprise; the real value in the place was pearls for which people could dive in the shallow brine of the lagoon.  The fortress has fallen down now.  At the end of the movie, we see salt-mining done with huge machines -- does modern technology mean the end of this strange primitive economy?

The film continuously sacrifices information for visual splendor.  (For instance, it's clear that ships come almost daily to dredge up the salt in the lagoon-side pyramids -- but we don't see this machine-operation because it would contradict the movie-maker's presentation of the salt-mining as pre-industrial, an ancient kind of work done exclusively by hand.)  The villagers, who are sometimes named, are picturesque ciphers -- they live in a world without agency or culture or, even, much in the way of language.  Indeed, they are presented as ahistorical beings, beasts of burdens, who can scarcely even talk -- the young lovers cast modest looks at each other but don't dare to speak.  Although we see a couple of long shots of a church, we have no idea what they believe or how they worship.  The intensely poetic narration talks about the men repeating over and over again "ancient gestures"-- some of this is very beautiful, particularly a kind of dance that the men perform as they whirl flails down into the crystalline slabs and boulders of salt to crush it into particulate form.  Everything is subordinate to the the majestic and awful beauty of the images of the salt lagoons, the gleaming white pyramids of salt, the turbulent sea where the fishermen ply their trade, the columns of women bearing huge pots and jugs on their heads as they walk through the infernal-looking wasteland.  Ultimately, the movie seems airless, claustrophobic -- the salineros and the fishermen and their women are just picturesque mannequins, people who are wholly devoid of any kind of autonomy or authority over their own lives. I'm sure that Banacerraf was a good Marxist, but the movies that are closest in aesthetic to Ayala are the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl, particularly her studies of the Nuba in Africa.  Benaceraff has succeeding in estheticizing the most dire and brutal poverty.  There's something a bit pernicious about this immaculately beautiful film.