Zama and the Politics of Contamination: from Di Benedetto’s Novel to Martel’s Film

This article examines Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and her transposition from Antonio Di Benedetto’s book (1956) of the same name. I argue that Martel’s film is able to “de-visualise” the mobility and visuality of Di Benedetto’s text by pushing his elusive images towards higher levels of cinematic abstraction. More broadly, I claim that the film Zama is exemplary of what Martel calls “contamination” – that is, a term the ancient Romans employed to incorporate and transform previous Greek materials into their own cultural texts, which stands here as the filmmaker’s method in rearranging the novel. In this way, the process of de-visualisation which I borrow from Jacques Rancière’s work will be played out in relation to Martel’s politics of script adaptation and her re-imagination of the literary Zama.