Lucrecia Martel

Abstract

Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966) is one of the best-known contemporary Latin American filmmakers. She is an innovative stylist who has gained worldwide recognition for her strange, oneiric, and sensorial feature films, which have won prizes at film festivals around the world. Martel has been seen as part of the wave of aesthetic experimentalism and the shift away from previous forms of filmmaking in Argentina that came to be known in the early 2000s as the “New Argentine Cinema,” and early criticism of her work is often preoccupied with locating it within that trend, which was seen as intrinsically linked with the context of economic crisis in Argentina. Feminist perspectives on Martel’s work were also among the first writings on her, later followed by a number of queer readings of her work. In addition, because of its formal innovations, critics of Martel’s work have also paid sustained attention to aesthetic and cinematographic questions, especially around sound and the extra-visual senses, including touch and the haptic. Martel’s first three features—La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004), and La mujer sin cabeza (2008)—are often referred to as the “Salta Trilogy” and depict the life of the conservative middle classes in the provincial setting of Salta, Northwest Argentina, where Martel grew up. They have been read as critiquing gender, sexual, ethnic, and class power structures, while questions of phenomenology, the body, the senses, and the use of sound have also been to the fore. The more recent Zama (2017) is a departure from the earlier features in a number of respects: it is Martel’s first literary adaptation (of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name), the first of her features not to be set in Salta, and the first to have a male protagonist. Set in the colonial era, it is also Martel’s first historical film. However, it shares certain aesthetic and thematic tendencies with the earlier films. In particular, early readings of Zama indicate that it will be read as an exploration of the colonial underpinnings of the racist, classist society examined in the earlier features. In addition, Martel has made a number of short films. Of these, Rey Muerto (1995) and Nueva Argirópolis (2010) have attracted the most critical attention.