#29: Araya
On occasion, when getting ready to go to work, I've been known to compare my job to working in salt mines. After seeing this 1959 film I no longer do so.
More illuminating than any number of Marxist dependency tracts, this film almost wordlessly shows what dependent development looks like. In a moment of 1960's post-colonial optimism, in the end of the film the salt mining process is being industrialized, with machine power replacing human labor. Looking back, it is difficult to muster the enthusiasm for this process suggested by the cinematography.
Araya puts the lie to the neoconservative/neo-colonial position on the causes and consequences of underdevelopment. Plus it is beautiful, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing.
Having said that, director Margot Benacerraf calls Araya a "scripted documentary". Such characterizations make me nervous. Not that any documentary can, or should, reach some objective truth but comparing her characterization of Araya, the actual place, after revisiting it years later with the observations of others ...
Over 50 years later, it seems Araya is still the end of the road but whether it is the road depicted in the film, well, who knows.
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