Araya Across Time and Space: Competing Canons of National (Venezuelan) and International Film History

Abstract

ARAYA ACROSS ??? AND SPACE: COMPETING CANONS OF NAHONAL (VENEZUELAN) AND INTERNAHONAL FILM HISTORY ______________JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL_____________ Latin American & Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz Araya, a 90-minute scripted documentary filmed in 1957, depicts a twenty-four hour cycle in the subsistence rituals of three communities of salt gatherers and fishermen on Venezuela's remote and barren northeastern coast. The unusual reception trajectory of this self-consciously poetical social documentary has been marked by bursts of rekindled interest at ten-year intervals. Honored with two important prizes at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival , commercially released in France in 1967, premiered in Venezuela in 1977, featured selection of the ambitious Latin American Visions retrospective organized in Philadelphia in 1987, it generated enthusiastic critical response at the 1995 Chicago Latino Festival and was honored with tributes in Venezuela and Colombia in 1997. Despite this remarkable resiüence,Araya's historical place in the formative history of both Venezuelan national cinema and the New Latin American Cinema movement is stiU contested. Over the decades, European and North American critics have not hesitated to celebrate the film as universal masterpiece, authentic national product, and exemplar or precursor of regional cinema's highest capabilities. Upon its long-deferred Venezuelan release, a number of commentaries in the press likewise heralded Araya's preeminent position in national and in Latin American cinema: "the crowning achievement of national cinema" (Matías Carrasco, El Universal May 17); "national cinema's most important film" (Alfonso Molina, El Nacional, May 18); "a cinematic work of authentic national expression with universal projection" (RAS, El Nacional, June 1); "precursor of aU Latin American cinema" (Penzo, Momento, May 23). For these writers, Araya's earüer European success, its "universal" appeal and "world-wide" acclaim , confirmed and enhanced its national import. In marked contrast, a pair of Venezuelan film speciaUsts writing in various film publications over a twenty year period disputedaraya's status as a foundational film and as a national and Latin American product. For these©1998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 208_________________________________________JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL writers, formed within a Marxist, anti-imperialist tradition, European exhibition was not a vaUd point of entry into national and continental production histories. The very precariousness of these stiU-emerging geneologies dictated that aU taint of dependency be rejected. Its European post-production and the nearly twenty years that elapsed between its filming and its reception in its country of origin made Araya tangential to the evolution of national and continental cinema. As we shaU see, the readings of the film elaborated by these critics emphasized an understanding of history effectively circumscribed by its own historical moment. Araya was made by Margot Benacerraf. Born in Caracas in 1927 to Sephardic immigrants from North Africa who accumulated great wealth in their adoptive land, the young Margot was educated in literature and art history under the tutelage of a number of illustrious refugees from the Spanish Civil War. She subsequently studied drama in New York and filmmaking in Paris, editing her first film, Reverán (1953), as weU as Araya (1959) in the latter city, where her extended residence put her in close contact with many of the foremost international artists of the period including Pablo Picasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roberto Rosselini, and Luis Buñuel. It is not unusual for Latin American filmmakers, including the more militantly engaged ones, to come from families of means, to develop close ties with leading international artists, and to seek European co-production funds or facilities. Judging from the examples of Margot Benacerraf and Argentina's María Luisa Bemberg, however, the "original sin" of class privilege seems to be less pardonable in a woman filmmaker. I can only speculate on the role of class and gender in Benacerrafs marginalization by film critics and historians identified with the militant left, whüe acknowledging that there may be other contributing factors imperceptible from my current vantage point. Any attempt to understand Araya's anomalous inclusion-exclusion status —its inclusion in a transnational canon and persistent exclusion from national and continental film histories— must therefore be centrally located in the film itself. What insights into processes of...