Margot Benacerraf's Araya shared the 1959 Cannes critic's prize with Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour. The world has forgotten the former and remembers the latter. The latter is a love story set against the fresh memories and casualties of the second world; the former is a poem about people who spend every ounce of their existence collecting, carrying, stacking, and weighing salt, the main resource of a peninsula in northern Venezuela. Both films are beautiful. But in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the beauty is all about recovery, regeneration, the return of life-positive activities. In Araya, the function of the beauty is dubious.

The problem with Araya's beauty is a problem that has dogged Marxist theory from day one: What to make of work? Is it a good thing? Should it be shunned? The Hegelian side of the Marxist tradition believes that work is not only good but it defines the condition of the human. The anarchist wing of the Marxist tradition believes that work is bad to the bone. Araya is clearly on the side of Hegel: Work is as natural as salt, as water, as the sea. Even though the narrator of Araya condemns capitalist exploitation (the workers are paid pennies for backbreaking work and survive not on their earnings but from fishing), the film visually worships the dignity of sweat and the greatness of cooperation. The laborers build pyramids of salt as the sun beats on their bare and muscular backs. Sure, the work is hard, repetitive, deprives you of your childhood, and makes you a dumb adult who can only eat fish and sleep in your free time; despite all of this, the work is beautiful.

The film ends with a harsh montage of machines moving earth, breaking rocks, and lifting dirt. What this industrial activity suggests is that machines will eventually replace human labor. Such a suggestion can only transform hard, human labor into something that it is not: a paradise. In the past, workers were happy because they at least had work; in the future, there will be nothing but misery because "only machines make money" (the words of Bob Marley). The beauty of Araya is a mountain of problems. Northwest Film Forum, Fri—Wed, 7, 9 pm.