nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.  

la niña santa (w&d lucrecia martel, w. juan pablo domenech)

Last year Lucrecia Martel came to Montevideo and screened a short she had made during the pandemic. It was a twenty minute short about her life in the north of Argentina. Afterwards, her partner, a singer, did a set. There were questions and answers, many of them about Woody Allen, whose season in Cinemateca was ongoing. It was a slightly dispiriting affair, none of which felt like it had all that much to do with her four feature films, all of which I have seen at one point or another. So I returned to Niña Santa, a film I haven’t watched since it came out, nearly twenty years ago, uncertain of what to expect. Would it live up to the memories, or would it prove as underwhelming as the night in the Zitarossa?

Thankfully, it was the former. Martel has only made four films and they are all small masterpieces. La Niña Santa is a waspish, delicate, pitch perfect film. Martel has talked a lot about the importance of sound. The film opens with girls singing. A recurring motif is the playing of a theremin, the setting for the initial contact physical contact between Amalia and the doctor. Martel explores the balance of power between Amalia and the doctor, pursuing a contentious line which suggests, perhaps, that the weaker party is in part complicit in events. It’s a film which has some affinity with Harrower’s Blackbird, not to mention Lolita, dramatic works which are prepared to go beyond the obvious tropes of blame in their investigation of teenage sexuality and the way adults manipulate or find themselves beholden to this.

There isn’t time or inclination on the part of the reviewer to go into the ethical dimensions of the film, buy him a drink and it can be discussed to the small hours. On an aesthetic level., however there is time to note Martel’s flawless composition and almost too perfect shot selection. Every shot is beautifully set up. The location is a hotel, with the film only occasionally venturing out into the street. Yet Martel makes this hotel into a small town. Secondary characters are allowed to steal the scene, (the maid with the spray and the bad timing offers the kind of comic touch which belies the film’s seemingly serious nature), and the action of the hotel is always humming in the background. The director succeeds in giving the impression that the whole wide world is contained within the hotel’s walls. Lastly, it’s worth noting the sublime pacing of the film, as it seems to pick up pace and accelerate, acquiring more and more dramatic tension as it heads towards its baleful climax.

Let’s hope Martel hasn’t gone to ground altogether in Northern Argentina, and that her fifth feature film is in the pipeline and coming soon. 

zama (w&d lucrecia martel)

The first two acts of Zama are dominated, in classic Martel fashion, by what we don’t see. The film, in spite of its lustrous period setting, tends towards the closed frame. Rarely have the details of costume seemed so important. The extravagant pattern of a jacket. The sunken bodice of a a dress. Zama has a craggy face, whose lines say more than the words he speaks. The narrative, like this world, is opaque. Zama hopes for a letter to the king, giving him license to go home. But the path to the letter is paved with obstacles. He’s trapped in a Kafkaesque new world. Sickness stalks the land. The indians live in a parallel universe. Everyone is strange: a melting pot of Indians, Africans and Europeans that never coalesces. The other is around every corner. The things we don’t see or half-see are more telling that what we do see. A gunshot; an affair; a rumour. The things that matter occur beyond the range of the camera’s eye.

In the last act, this closed perspective changes. The third act opens with a wide shot, a band of men making their way through a sodden, palm-struck field. The canvas is bigger. The world has come to Zama. Something which, for the protagonist, is not good news. The rhythm of the film changes. Things start to happen. Terrible things. A Latino variant on the heart of darkness. Martel lets the light in. What it shows is fragmentary, violent, terrifying. The next three hundred years of a continent laid out in miniature. The bewitching penultimate shot of a mutilated Zama being paddled in a boat through water lilies emphasises the confusion, the violent intervention, the accidental, incomprehensible beauty.