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Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic \u201cAraya,\u201d a visual tone poem chronicling the daily lives of salt workers on an austere peninsula on her country\u2019s coast, shared the critics\u2019 prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Caracas. She was 97.<\/p>\n
Her death was announced<\/a> by the country\u2019s culture minister.<\/p>\n Hailed as a major figure of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf founded Venezuela\u2019s national cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring outstanding merit in the sciences and humanities, by the country\u2019s president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.<\/p>\n But although Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific. She made only two films in her career: \u201cRever\u00f3n\u201d (1952), a 23-minute documentary short about the reclusive later years of the Venezuelan artist Armando Rever\u00f3n<\/a>, and \u201cAraya,\u201d<\/a> her sole feature-length work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/a> and Alejo Carpentier<\/a>, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of workers amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula. \u201cAraya\u201d shared the International Federation of Film Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Alain Resnais\u2019<\/a>s landmark New Wave film, \u201cHiroshima Mon Amour.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2019, the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody called \u201cAraya\u201d a \u201cmajestic documentary portrait\u201d<\/a> of salt producers and their families. \u201cBenacerraf\u2019s grand style,\u201d he wrote, \u201ccaptures the drama of subsistence in the face of nature,\u201d adding that \u201cthe overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces contrasts with the workers\u2019 burdened trudges through them.\u201d<\/p>\n When a restored version<\/a> of the film, which had been little seen for decades, was released on its 50th anniversary in 2009, it was hailed as a lost classic. \u201c\u2018Araya\u2019 is at once a revealing study of a very unique way of life and also a powerful meditation on the inextricable ties between society and place,\u201d the celebrated documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple<\/a> said. The director Steven Soderbergh called it \u201ca gift to cineastes.\u201d<\/p>\n Its languid pace and meditative air were not for everyone. In a 2009 appraisal, the critic Mike Hale of The New York Times praised the film\u2019s \u201cBu\u00f1uelian austerity<\/a>\u201d and \u201cbreathtaking\u201d visuals, but warned viewers, \u201cJust don\u2019t be surprised if the rhythms you feel most strongly are your own circadian ones.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Benacerraf was born on Aug. 14, 1926, in Caracas to Fortunato Benacerraf, an executive at a family trading company, and Sete (Coriat) Benacerraf.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Benacerraf studied philosophy and literature at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas before turning her sights to film. She trained in cinematography at the influential Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris, where the likes of Mr. Resnais, Louis Malle<\/a> and Costa-Gavras also honed their craft.<\/p>\n As an aspiring filmmaker in the Venezuela of the early 1950s, she found her prospects limited, and not just because of gender barriers.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t say that being a woman<\/a> has made my work difficult,\u201d she said in a 2009 interview with the film website Ioncinema. \u201cI suffered the general conditions of a country where it was very difficult to make films. In the Venezuela of those times the filmmaking trade was practically unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n She had never made any sort of film when she set out to document the hermetic lifestyle of Mr. Rever\u00f3n, a celebrated Latin American painter and sculptor, who by then was \u201ca shambling figure<\/a> surrounded by mirrors and bric-a-brac,\u201d The Art Newspaper observed in 2011. \u201cThe scenes of Rever\u00f3n\u2019s life in his primitive dwelling are haunting and disturbing,\u201d the article continued, \u201cgiving no suggestion that this is an artist whose work can regularly fetch six-figure sums at auction today.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cRever\u00f3n\u201d brought attention to Ms. Benacerraf after screenings at film festivals in Cannes, Berlin and elsewhere. The acclaim provided momentum for her next project, which was originally intended to be a triptych of short films about the daily lives of ordinary Venezuelans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While researching possible locations, she was struck by a magazine feature that showed the \u201cbeautiful strangeness\u201d of Araya, Ms. Benacerraf said in a 1992 interview published by The Journal of Film & Video.<\/p>\n Despite the international acclaim it received upon release, \u201cAraya\u201d did not hit theaters in Venezuela for 18 years, because, she later said, distributors initially thought it was \u201ctoo intellectual\u201d for the nation\u2019s filmgoers.<\/p>\n She eventually turned her attention to promoting for film appreciation and filmmaking in her country. She founded the national cinematheque, modeled on the hallowed Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise<\/a> in Paris, in 1966.<\/p>\n Information on her survivors was not immediately available.<\/p>\n While she would never again direct, Ms. Benacerraf remained proud of her signature film into her later years \u2014 not just for its aesthetic beauty, but also for its portrayal of the human condition.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat drew me most to Araya,\u201d she said in the 1992 interview, \u201cwas not its austere, unforgiving beauty but the dignity of its inhabitants.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the middle of that desolate, forbidding place,\u201d she continued, \u201cthey managed to turn the same elements that made their existence so difficult into their very means of survival.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n