Argentine director to attend Berkeley retrospective
Argentine director Lucrecia Martel is one of today’s most boundary-breaking directors — consistently daring in form and feeling.
Born in 1966 in Salta, Argentina, Martel has been at the forefront of Latin American cinema since the early 1990s. She was part of a generation of Argentine film students who took up the camera as a way of engaging with their politically chaotic times. In the ’90s, Argentina was in a state of perpetual tumult — racked with poverty, at the mercy of a corrupt government, caught between brutal dictatorships and bourgeois neoliberalism. Film schools lacked any sturdy means of financial support — but this didn’t deter Martel, who says she was self-taught. Guided by her own impulses, she read voraciously, watched lots of movies, and began to develop her circular storytelling style which dealt (in oblique and subtle ways) with Argentina’s history.
Inspired by the macabre fairy tales her grandmother told her when she was young, she wrote a screenplay for a film about a middle-class family and its hazy, lurching demise. The film would be set in Salta, her hometown. (Her
next two films — the autobiographical “Holy Girl” (2004) and the Michelangelo Antonioni-like psycho thriller “Headless Woman” (2008) would also be set in Salta.) It would be called “La Ciénaga,” and would be workshopped at the Sundance Institute, where it was given a prize for best screenplay. With the funds from the prize, Martel finished the film in 2001 to acclaim. Not only had she made a seminal work of the New Argentine Cinema, she also had proclaimed herself as a vital new auteur. She has the power to reveal the terror of the ordinary to unsuspecting viewers: disgusting family secrets, the feeling that the past is a lie, an inability to trust your own senses.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will help the Bay Area get reacquainted with Martel’s work with “The Anxiety of Identity,” a retrospective devoted to her feature films. Martel will appear in person Sunday, April 22, to discuss her two most recent films: “The Headless Woman” (2008) and “Zama” (2017), her first movie in a decade.
“Zama” is based on Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novella of the same name, a masterwork of Argentine literary modernism. (Writers Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño were ardent fans.) Set during the last decade of the 18th century, “Zama” follows Don Diego de Zama, a minor official of the Spanish Empire who waits endlessly in Paraguay for his promotion and transfer to Buenos Aires. In 1790, he falls in love with several white Spanish women, to no avail; in 1794, he sires a bastard child by a lower-class Spanish woman (in the film, she is indigenous); and in 1799, he embarks on a quest into the jungle to locate an infamous criminal. With each chapter, Zama’s sense of self, inflated by his meager connection to the king of Spain, withers. By the film’s end, resembling Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre the Wrath of God,” he is so delirious he doesn’t know who he is or why he is even alive.
The novella is written in a swirling, rambling style — one that Martel captures perfectly. She doesn’t just transpose the story and themes of the book to moving-image form; she also sharpens the novella’s haze. She removes di Benedetto’s neat three-year structure, so that events and characters melt into one another. We’re even more in Zama’s cruel, vacuous, rotten headspace.
“No one can organize emotions along a linear timeline,” Martel says in Spanish during an interview. “Things happen simultaneously and without order.” In this way, Martel’s ruin-filled film thinks in a more authentically historic way than most period dramas, which order events within a traditional (and rigid) linearity.
Martel also more frankly acknowledges the presence of indigenous and black people in the Americas. In a scene between Zama and one of his Spanish loves, they chatter in utterly banal tones while a black slave cools them down with a wooden fan. What’s brilliant is that we begin to notice them less and notice the slave more. Even though he is not in the shot, we can always hear the monotonous creaks of his fan. Through just sound, Martel subtly focuses us on the people that have been left out of historical accounts of 1790s Argentina.
Martel’s experiments with sound are also important. She successfully finds an alternative model from the modern cinematic grammar of D.W. Griffith in “Birth of a Nation” (1915). But Griffith’s revolutionary and racist techniques treated blacks as either backdrops or grotesques, never entirely human. Griffith hoped viewers would forget the presence of the slaves, keeping their focus on the “true” heroes: in Griffith’s story, the North and South whites fighting the Civil War.
Griffith’s logical grammar has guided generations of filmmakers, from John Ford to Steven Spielberg to Christopher Nolan. Martel disrupts that centuries-old logic, offering an alternative model for cinema through various means. She uses no establishing shots. Characters walk in and out of the frame without the camera guiding us on who to clue in (a hark back to the pre-“Birth of a Nation” days of organized clutter). Martel’s thick, busy soundscape in “Zama” immerses the viewer in a swamp — of late 19th century colonialism, of time, of the mind. The first sound is a cicada’s piercing shrill, which violently cuts out mid-chirp. The film’s hot-crummy loopiness, as in Martel’s debut “La Ciénaga” (Spanish for “The Swamp”), is rendered entirely from the sounds Zama hears. Like the great auteurs Jacques Tati, David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky, Martel holds up sound as a crucial element — perhaps the crucial element — of the cinematic universe.
“Sound is the vibrant space in which the spectator immerses herself,” she says. “And that immersion allows one to see something else, a beyond, past the luminescent surface of the screen. To define sonic space is to define the way in which images are read.”
Martel works with a dangerous palette: ennui, slowness, a sickly-green horror found in the stasis of Argentina’s decadent rich and bourgeois. It’s dangerous because her art demands active viewers. Martel approaches the world with a militant hatred of familiarity and aesthetic stasis. She finds that most cinema today works within safe parameters of treacly cliché.
“Today, the cinema, with its ideas of white bourgeois supremacy, stumbles hastily to its own annihilation,” Martel says, pulling no punches. “For there is nothing less interesting than a cinema which celebrates the same dubious values — meager happiness — as if this were humanity’s greatest achievement.”
Martel is well aware of the challenges that face her work.
“It’s difficult to make circular films which aren’t beholden to today’s hegemonic narrative system,” she explains. “See the Academy Awards if you want to know what those movies look like. I hope that someday, someone bored of turning points and plot points will dust off another cinema. Maybe then, many of us will have another chance. We won’t witness such a distant day — but what does that matter?”