Re:Vision: Araya

Margot Benacerraf’s extraordinary Araya, from the moment of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 (where it shared the FIPRESCI award with Hiroshima mon amour), was immediately heralded as one of the most visually stunning documentaries ever produced. The titular Venezuelan peninsula is known, if at all, for its desolate remoteness and its ample salt marshes. The salineros [salt workers] work there by hand, as they have for centuries. Little has changed since the Spaniards first arrived in the 1500s.

Araya captures nearly five-hundred years of history condensed into a speculative single day (albeit filmed with her cinematographer Giuseppe Nisoli over four weeks, from September to October), with a tripartite structure following the lives of three families in three nearby villages.

In addition to her filmmaking, Margot Benacerraf was the founder of the Cineteca Nacional de Venezuela and, with Gabriel Garcia Márquez, created the Latin Fundavisual to promote Latin American moving image art. On the occasion of Benacerraf’s centenary, we present an opportunity to revisit one of only two films she completed in her lifetime. — Jonathan Marlow

Restored in 2009 from the French internegative by Scott MacQueen and Dennis Doros for Milestone Films in collaboration with Fotokem and Modern Videofilm. Audio restoration for 3-track mag tracks and the Spanish optical track by John Polito at Audio Mechanics.

Araya will screen with the following short:

SURFARARA (Vittoria de Seta, Italy, 1955) 12m, DCP
500 meters below Sicily, sulfur miners pick and drill and hammer in the dark. Vittorio de Seta’s camera captures their descent and their work, then jolts the viewer with shocking cuts to the sun-drenched world above. De Seta shot in a French widescreen process called Cinépanoramic, and rendered his work in strikingly painterly Ferraniacolor. — Kathy Rose O’Regan

Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna The Film Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata in 2019. DCP provided by Cineteca di Bologna. Courtesy of Janus Films.