The booming voice of the narrator, the pentatonic scale-dominated movie score, the Sun, the Wind and the Sea that fill the movie screen…these are examples of the haunting aspects to the black-and-white Araya, an unforgettable journey into a Venezuelan peninsula inhabited by the Araya people and a persistent, uncannily awe-inspiring look at a community unfamiliar to most but worthy of attention, especially since threats to destroy their traditional livelihood are mounting.
At its heart, Araya is a dense documentary, a drone-like meditation on and solemn observation of nature and man with breathtaking images and evocative sounds. The opening credits--waves crashing against the shore, a minimalist score and panning shots of this vast peninsula--evoke something exotic and distant. A thick male voice narrates dramatically, calling out to each individual viewer and pulling him into the heart of the peninsula. Long takes establish an appropriately patient pace, and overhead, sweeping shots magnify the region's natural beauty.
The Araya people are a subsistent community. Their daily life revolves around one main concern--nutrition--and their movements, gestures and the sparse words that are being exchanged all reflect their down-to-earth nature. Men are born to be fishermen or salt-miners, and women help with the salt mines, make pottery, sell fish, and care for their families. The camera eagerly captures their daily routines: repetitive and rhythmically edited mid-shots of men thrashing salt and propping baskets of crystal on their heads and shoulders, climbing up a salt hill to deposit salt and returning to get more salt, call to mind images of farming from Soviet constructivist Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930).
Whereas man's power over nature and the exertion of this power to control production and to provide for a means of life lie at the heart of Soviet cinema, in the case of Araya the human being is both a master of his environment as well as its servant. The narration highlights the predominance of the Sea as the provider for life, the omnipresence of the Sun and the Wind. Man is but a small part of this vast piece of nature. Diligently, the Araya people work with and harvest from nature for their needs but never damage it. No matter its number, the community exudes a sense of humility. Man and nature co-exist in harmony: there are no factories, no iPods, no SUVs to pollute the natural environment.
What are the Araya people really like? What do they do other than work, and what do they think about their lives? In their stoic way, they do not express with words what they think. Instead, the impassioned narrator describes them, uses his imagination, even tries to step into their shoes and to visualise what they may be thinking. His staccato and dramatic delivery is full of vivid emotions, and like a poet he conjures up a very subjective image of the people and the place.
Given this piece of narration, it becomes clear that Araya is more than just a documentary: it is both documentary and narrative cinema. On the one hand, it documents the livelihood of this community by showing how they live and what the landscape is like; on the other, it subjectifies what it sees by having a narrator voice his personal response that may or may not reflect what the Araya people think. His commentary becomes the storyline. As men move about on the salt mine, he ponders what it may be like working so hard in the sun and raises the question, "When will this fatigue ever be over?" Seeing father and son get up before day break every day to prepare their fishing boat, and imagining that this must be a rather monotonous task, he wonders aloud whether these people ever wish to change the way things are in their lives, as if he would do so were he in their place. The commentary not only provides information, it enthralls viewers at the same time with an added layer of subjective poetry that interprets and gives meaning to every single grain of salt, every single bead of sweat.
Given the rich imagery, it is shocking to realise in the movie's finale that this poetry may soon cease to exist. When the machinery arrives--it is never quite clear from where or from whom-- to mechanise part of the salt-mines operation, the incongruity of the tractors with the previously pristine desert landscape is as jarring as the movie's abrupt change of mood punctuated by a now thrill and urgent score. The narrator expresses consternation: will the people's hands stop making their movement, will they stop labouring for the precious salts? What will become of their lives? Like the narrator, a viewer cannot help but feel pessimistic about what the camera sees: machines, like pests on a field, crawling on the same paths on which generation after generation has toiled. By now a viewer feels so moved by the sounds and the images that he even starts to care for a community that previously seems so distant and irrelevant but whose imminent destruction now leaves him feeling dark, disturbed. The movie has not only offered a glimpse into a far-away land but, without the viewer knowing it, enraptured him with its humanism and affected him with its sympathy for the Araya people. A magnificent work full of poetry and passion for life and a valuable lesson on how fragile life actually is in our modern times dominated by progress and technology.
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