Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic “Araya,” a visible tone poem chronicling the day by day lives of salt employees on an austere peninsula on her nation’s coast, shared the critics’ prize on the 1959 Cannes Movie Competition, died on Wednesday in Caracas. She was 97.
Her dying was introduced by the nation’s tradition minister.
Hailed as a significant determine of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf based Venezuela’s nationwide cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring excellent benefit within the sciences and humanities, by the nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
However though Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific. She made solely two movies in her profession: “Reverón” (1952), a 23-minute documentary brief in regards to the reclusive later years of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, and “Araya,” her sole feature-length work.
Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of employees amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula. “Araya” shared the Worldwide Federation of Movie Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Alain Resnais’s landmark New Wave movie, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”
In 2019, the New Yorker movie critic Richard Brody known as “Araya” a “majestic documentary portrait” of salt producers and their households. “Benacerraf’s grand model,” he wrote, “captures the drama of subsistence within the face of nature,” including that “the overwhelming fantastic thing about the wide-open areas contrasts with the employees’ burdened trudges by them.”
When a restored model of the movie, which had been little seen for many years, was launched on its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, it was hailed as a misplaced traditional. “‘Araya’ is without delay a revealing research of a really distinctive lifestyle and in addition a robust meditation on the inextricable ties between society and place,” the celebrated documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple stated. The director Steven Soderbergh known as it “a present to cineastes.”
Its languid tempo and meditative air weren’t for everybody. In a 2009 appraisal, the critic Mike Hale of The New York Instances praised the movie’s “Buñuelian austerity” and “breathtaking” visuals, however warned viewers, “Simply don’t be shocked if the rhythms you are feeling most strongly are your individual circadian ones.”
Ms. Benacerraf was born on Aug. 14, 1926, in Caracas to Fortunato Benacerraf, an government at a household buying and selling firm, and Sete (Coriat) Benacerraf.
Ms. Benacerraf studied philosophy and literature on the Central College of Venezuela in Caracas earlier than turning her sights to movie. She skilled in cinematography on the influential Institute for Superior Cinematographic Research in Paris, the place the likes of Mr. Resnais, Louis Malle and Costa-Gavras additionally honed their craft.
As an aspiring filmmaker within the Venezuela of the early Fifties, she discovered her prospects restricted, and never simply due to gender boundaries.
“I can’t say that being a lady has made my work troublesome,” she stated in a 2009 interview with the movie web site Ioncinema. “I suffered the overall situations of a rustic the place it was very troublesome to make movies. Within the Venezuela of these instances the filmmaking commerce was virtually unknown.”
She had by no means made any kind of movie when she got down to doc the airtight life-style of Mr. Reverón, a celebrated Latin American painter and sculptor, who by then was “a shambling determine surrounded by mirrors and bric-a-brac,” The Artwork Newspaper noticed in 2011. “The scenes of Reverón’s life in his primitive dwelling are haunting and disturbing,” the article continued, “giving no suggestion that that is an artist whose work can usually fetch six-figure sums at public sale in the present day.”
“Reverón” introduced consideration to Ms. Benacerraf after screenings at movie festivals in Cannes, Berlin and elsewhere. The acclaim offered momentum for her subsequent venture, which was initially supposed to be a triptych of brief movies in regards to the day by day lives of extraordinary Venezuelans.
Whereas researching doable areas, she was struck by {a magazine} function that confirmed the “lovely strangeness” of Araya, Ms. Benacerraf stated in a 1992 interview printed by The Journal of Movie & Video.
Regardless of the worldwide acclaim it obtained upon launch, “Araya” didn’t hit theaters in Venezuela for 18 years, as a result of, she later stated, distributors initially thought it was “too mental” for the nation’s filmgoers.
She ultimately turned her consideration to selling for movie appreciation and filmmaking in her nation. She based the nationwide cinematheque, modeled on the hallowed Cinémathèque Française in Paris, in 1966.
Info on her survivors was not instantly out there.
Whereas she would by no means once more direct, Ms. Benacerraf remained happy with her signature movie into her later years — not only for its aesthetic magnificence, but additionally for its portrayal of the human situation.
“What drew me most to Araya,” she stated within the 1992 interview, “was not its austere, unforgiving magnificence however the dignity of its inhabitants.”
“In the course of that desolate, forbidding place,” she continued, “they managed to show the identical components that made their existence so troublesome into their very technique of survival.”
