Classics - The Films of Lucrecia Martel
She's not as widely known in popular culture, but she is one of the best filmmakers working today, and maybe the best representation of what Latin American cinema can be.
What separates literature from other forms of artistic expression? Among other things, it grants its author the ability to build a world with great detail, providing a sense of place, atmosphere, mood and psychology all through paragraphs upon paragraphs of description. With cinema being primely suited to join most artforms through a single audiovisual medium, it seems that literature, from which it takes heavy inspiration, is the hardest to translate to the screen. There isn’t enough time to provide the epic scope that books do, and the qualities that make films shine differ or are more varied, as film needs frames that have the artistic expression akin to fine arts, sounds as deep as music, atmospheres as engrossing as museum installations and the coherence of structure of theater and literary works. So the main question is: how does a filmmaker imbue their work with literary quality, without the words or the space to do so in the same vein as books? The answer could vary among scholars and filmmakers, but I would guess that Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel has an accurate or at least deeply interesting proposition.
Born and raised in Salta, Argentina, Martel always was an intellectual with a middle-class background who seemed keenly aware of the cultural, religious and social issues that occurred in her country. From the clear distinction between social classes and ethnicities within the country to the contradictory presence of religion in her community, she may as well lived through the enigmatic Latin American middle class-experience in ways I identify with to some extent. As one of the leading figures of the New Argentine Cinema movement, she used some of these elements that informed her upbringing to be the thematic center of her oeuvre. Stylistically, she achieved her literary quality not through dialogue or narration, but through complex frame compositions and her manipulation of sound, which achieved such a descriptive quality that gave her films the atmospheric and psychological quality she is known for.
Her debut feature is arguably her most acclaimed: 2001’s La ciénaga, which centers around two related bourgeois families, mainly the women and children, through their decaying lifestyle. While the film has no discernible plot and is as sparse as it is intense, its central theme of middle class decay is clear, through certain scenes and frames indicating characters’ inability to escape their surroundings, and their fate to repeat the actions of their predecessors. The most famous example of Martel’s audiovisual language in this film comes from the pool chairs by the pool, where the adults sit drunk at the beginning of the film. The movement of the chairs has a distinctive sound that feels uncomfortable yet transfixing. At the end, the children, hopeless by the tragic events that happened throughout, repeat the same action of sitting by the pool with nothing to do. This theme of circularity and inescapability is repeated throughout, as characters compare matriarchal figures to their mothers and others first criticize but then repeat the actions of their parents.
The social differentiation is something that immediately comes to mind when viewing La ciénaga. In the decaying house, there is a servant of indigenous descent who also longs to escape the depressing and aggressive environment she finds herself in, where some are crude at her, others ignore her and one young teenager seems inappropriately enamored with her. Constantly, the matriarchal figure Mecha, accuses the housekeeper of stealing, laziness, and being ungrateful. Yet, Martel seems to use these few moments and other microaggressions as background noise to show, subtextually, the irony of white middle class exploiting indigenous communities to do all the work for them. Mecha and her family are lazy and kind of stealing. The only difference is that she was born with the wealth that her housekeeper lacks. As opposed to American films that preach these issues to annoying effect, Martel smartly trusts the audience’s intelligence enough to make her point as subtly as she can, to not protrude her ambiance of bourgeois malaise.
After her debut feature, Martel made The Holy Girl, another film set in Salta about a devoutly religious middle class teen girl who, after being briefly molested by an older man, starts to confuse her faith with her burgeoning sexual desire. This is her most straightforward film from a plot perspective, and while it is my least favorite of hers, it is still a great film, filled with complications and abstractions that lead to no easy answers. Using sound to her favor once again, Martel uses a man playing the theremin -the electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact- to become a sort of leitmotif for both the man’s sexual aggression and teen girl’s sexual awakening.
What is most fascinating about The Holy Girl is that, despite its clear structure, Martel still finds opportunities to focus on a vast set of characters and ensure that all of them are equally defined, from the teen’s mother, Helena, who unknowingly forms a bond with the man who molested her daughter, the staff at the hotel Helena owns which reinforce the racial and social structures present in their society, the religious school girls who confuse devotion with desire, including an older tutor who cries as she sings about Jesus. Every element of the story still contains the visual and sonic textures that define Martel’s style. The third act fails to achieve the ethereal quality that all of her other films manage, but instead, she chooses to find the deep encroaching intensity of a society of people hanging on by a small thread that is about to break. Maybe Martel finds that most of Argentina’s -and Latin America’s- structures are challenged by contradictions of morality and spirituality vs. carnal desire which are impossible to mend. We never know if the characters fully recognize this contraction, and by failing to do so, they will never be free.
Martel’s third film was the one that set her as an internationally regarded auteur, with The Headless Woman. Set again in Salta, this film follows Vero, an upper middle class woman who hits something while driving, and is unsure whether she hit a dog or a little boy of indigenous descent. Here, here use of frames and sounds reach new peaks as Martel uses minimal plot to explore multiple themes at once, but mainly two: another more direct exploration of the white middle class’s complete disregard for the humanity of indigenous communities, and an indictment of La Junta’s actions during the military dictatorship and the many people who disappeared under their rule.
The first idea of bourgeois disregard comes through Vero herself, who after the possible hit and run, loses her mind by acting out and removing herself from any kind of responsibility. She tells her loved ones that she may have committed a crime, fully knowing that everyone around her would help her brush off the issue instead of having her be accountable for her actions. A crime at a medical office says it all, as Martel puts a machine between the camera and Vero’s face, leaving the viewer to only see her body from the neck down. Vero is intentionally reducing her own agency over her situation so that she is less accountable to herself. It is a fascinating showing of communal psychological denial as a measure of self-preservation.
Extending to a more political and historical theme, Martel curates music from the 70s to provide this subtextual element to the viewer’s mind, including the upbeat Soleil soleil which played as Vero hit the dog/child. Martel seems to think that the Junta’s disregard for human life and its disposal is similar to current white upper-middle class society’s disregard for people of different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. It is all clear as Vero, trying to jog her own memory, realizes that the places she visited have no records of her stay. Her surroundings not only aided her in clearing her of any guilty conscience, but went further to forget about the event entirely. All the while, the people of indigenous descent exist solely in the background to serve Vero and her acquaintances. All in all, The Headless Woman is Martel at her best, using style to give as many details as she can while keeping the story as ethereal as it is dense and difficult to understand. It is a true work of art.
Finally, around nine years later, Martel released her fourth and most recent feature film, 2017’s Zama, a departure from her previous original works, as it is a literary adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s acclaimed novel of the same name -which I currently am reading-. Set in a Spanish colony during the late 18th Century, the film follows Don Diego de Zama, a worker of the Spanish crown who longs to return to his home in Lerma. Zama is about many things, it mainly explores the modern man’s sexual, economic and spiritual frustrations and the inability to cope with disappointment, but again Martel is just as interested in exploring postcolonial malaise with equal importance. What served as subtextual elements in her other films here comes to the forefront, as she directly puts the title character in a position of colonial power, disposing of the indigenous people who lived in it first, and who longs to leave the colony he sees as a prison. Isn’t it funny that he is desperate to leave a place his community wants desperately to keep? Martel definitely thinks so.
Her use of sound is better than ever here, with the repetition of creaking wood indicating some sort of sexual frustration and lack of privacy, the swooshing sounds of fish swimming matching Zama’s wish to leave against the tide. Even the indigenous characters emit repeated sounds that feel as if they are objects, because in the mind of the colonialists -and every other of Martel’s characters in her films- they are just that: objects. They first peck at Zama for inappropriately looking at their naked bodies, then they insult his disinterest and finally ask the closing question in a repeated manner: “¿quiéres vivir?”
Ultimately, due to their dense nature, I’m only scratching the surface of what each of her films mean. But on the bright side, this means that her filmography will always benefit from repeat viewing, discussion, writing and scholarship, so our collective knowledge of her work will only grow with time. From what I understand, she will release a new film, a documentary, this year, and while it should make it a bit more intimidating to process, I have no doubt it will likewise contain as many riches as the rest of her work. By having a clear perspective and a strong, unique ability to manipulate cinematic language, Lucrecia Martel is one of the defining voices of cinema in the 21st Century, and possibly the best Latin American filmmaker we have.