Review

"From the marriage of sea and sun, salt was born ..." Lovingly restored, in some sequences frame by frame, the starkly beautiful 1959 Venezuelan documentary Araya follows the people of an inhospitable Carribbean peninsula, where for centuries they've worked the prized salt marsh, fished, made pots by hand, and ... that's about it. Margot Benacerraf's portrait of their labors is wordless but for a somber narrator, the film sometimes uninflected to the point of tedium. Yet that level rhythm is also the source of its hypnotic power, as Benacerraf (very much alive at 83) evokes a grinding existence in a land where nothing grows, where great pyramids of salt give the landscaper an otherworldly cast. — David Edelstein