The welcome arrival of a pristine print of “Araya,” Venezuelan director Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 tone poem about labor and life cycles, suggests that the Denver Film Society is determined to borrow a verse from John Keats.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…”
Like the sparkling prints of Japanese master Mikio Naruse’s exquisite melodramas (also playing this weekend at the Starz FilmCenter), this expertly restored black-and-white work is a thing of wonder. And Milestone Film & Video, a New York-based company, has been instrumental in making sure it endures.
Araya is an arid peninsula in Venezuela. In a calming tenor, Jose Ignacio Cabrujas narrates this meditation on sea and salineros, or salt miners.
In the 1500s, the Spanish discovered the great salt marsh of Araya. At a time when salt was prized nearly as much as gold, a fortress was built to rebuff pirates. It crumbled — its ruins are still visible — but the salt workers of Araya carried on the Sisyphian tasks: lugging salt up high pyramids, mending fish nets again, collecting shells for the graves of ancestors.
“Araya” unfolds over 24 hours, though Benacerraf makes an elegant case for the eternal rhythms of the work. After all, the laborers’ backbreaking gestures are centuries old. Late in the film, grinding noises foreshadow change.
The film follows three families in the trade. The Pereda family culls the marshes in Manicuare. The Ortizes fish in El Rincon. The Salazars are day harvesters.
There is no dialogue to speak of. Instead, the soundtrack is rich with the lick and lap of waves, the noises of birds and the strains of local music as well as Guy Bernard’s score. Always, there are the narrator’s dulcet musings on history and the sea, the sea, the brutal, giving sea.
In 1959, Benacerraf’s film shared the critics prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Alain Renais’ “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” Still, Benacerraf’s masterwork never gained a theatrical release in the U.S.
Milestone has a remarkable knack for finding gems and burnishing them to a beguiling luster. Like the company’s other vital restorations — Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” and “The Exiles” — “Araya” travels boldly beyond the ethnographic boundaries its subject matter may suggest.
The above bona fides, along with the restoration’s heralded premiere at 2009’s Berlin Film Festival, are perhaps the cheap way of nudging audiences toward this lost, then found gift.
In the darkened theater, the film’s splendor speaks for itself.
Not rated. 1 hour, 22 minutes. Directed by Margot Benacerraf; written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers; photography by Giuseppe Nisoli; Jose Ignacio Cabrujas (Spanish-language version); featuring the Pereda Family (salt marshes), the Ortiz Family (fishermen) and the Salazars (salt harvesters). In Spanish with English subtitles. Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
