Tribute to Lucrecia Martel

The “Tribute to” programme of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival will for the first time honor a filmmaker from Latin America, and – at the same time – a woman director. Programmer Howard Feinstein has decidedly opted for this twin novelty, by zeroing in on the work of Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who burst onto the global cinema scene with her debut feature La Ciénaga/The Swamp (2001), and continued to reverberate with her other two features, La Niña santa/The Holy Girl (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008). She has been acknowledged as one of the leading figures of the “New Argentine Cinema.”

Martel’s work is firmly anchored in her own personal life in Argentina in the last few decades. Born in 1966, into a middle-class family in the northern Argentinean province, she has witnessed tectonic shifts and breaks in contemporary history of the nation: first the fall of the brutal Pinochet regime and the unearthing of its horrendous heritage, and then the economic decline and the subsequent social anomie that peaked in the 1990s. Although all of Martel’s films are located in the milieu of the province town La Ciénaga, that backwater (la ciénaga literally means “the marsh”) is anything but the specificity of Argentina. That locale might be inspired by and shaped on Martel’s hometown Salta, yet in her films it becomes a universally recognizable locale of the social malaise caused by contemporary political and economic conflicts.

The universality of Martel’s work is additionally underlined by her penchant for both family life captured in its debilitating quotidian, and the class antagonism that persists unresolved and often unacknowledged even today, when the notion of “class struggle” seems an outdated Marxist shibboleth. La Ciénaga is a tragicomic story of two families from opposite ends of the middle class spectrum: the decaying upper-middle-class family hosts their poor small-town relatives. These dysfunctional families are embodied in their respective matriarchs who can control neither their wild children nor their chaotic familial setting. The social decay is set in an environment where the humid atmosphere and torrential downpours erase the border between a luxurious mansion and the surrounding swamp.

Volatile familial relations, class antagonism, and the crumbling world of a bygone era characterize La Niña santa as well; here, however, Martel accentuates the ambiguous sexual maturation and religious vocation of her titular heroine, the nymphet on a mission to “save” the man who abused her. Again, the decrepit mise-en-scene offers itself as the index of the social quagmire, and the principal female protagonist aims to defy the inertia of everyday life and the disintegrating traditional mores.

La mujer sin cabeza is Martel’s exercise in mystery: anything but a standard thriller, the film follows a mature, blase upper-class blonde who develops the idea that she killed a dog or a child in a hit-and-run car accident. Her guilt about this uncertain crime shapes the way she perceives her relations with others, and Martel once again emphasizes the privileges of the upper-class which remain unchallenged even after its economic demise.    

Not interested in linear storytelling, Martel organizes her films as multilayered and polyphonic structures, where anything – a character, a sound, a visual motif – can come into focus at one moment only to get lost in the next one. The spectator is not expected to follow a specific narrative thread toward a specific climax, but to actively probe through manifold, unstable layers of image and sound. This sort of strategic complexity  enables  Martel to defy those critics that see her work as too pessimistic: she argues that her films do not depict only social stupor, but also the possibility of change. This focus on alteration resulting from willful, conscious action, makes Martel one of the today’s most piercing political filmmakers.

Nebojša Jovanović

LUCRECIA MARTEL FILMOGRAPHY

Director
Nueva Argirópolis (short) (2010)
The Headless Woman (2008)
The Holy Girl (2004)
The Swamp (2001)
Las dependencias (TV documentary) (1999)
Magazine for Fai (TV series) (1996)
Dead King (short) (1995)
D.N.I. (TV series documentary) (1995)
Besos rojos (short) (1991)
Piso 24 (short) (1989)
El 56 (short) (1988)

Writer
Nueva Argirópolis (short) 2010
The Headless Woman 2008
The Holy Girl 2004
The Swamp 2001
Dead King (short) (writer) 1995

Producer
The Headless Woman 2008
D.N.I. (TV series documentary) (producer) 1995

AWARDS

THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008)

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science of Argentina
Best Film
Best Director
Best Original Screenplay

Lima Latin American Film Festival
Critics Award

Premios ACE
Best Director

Rio de Janerio International Film Festival
FIPRESCI Prize

THE HOLLY GIRL (2004)

Clarin Entarteinment Awards
Best Director - Film

THE SWAMP (2001)

Argentenean Film Critics Association Awards
Silver Condor for Best First Film

Berlin International Film Festival
Alfred Bauer Award

Havana Film Festival
Best Director
Grand Coral – First Prize

Sundance Film Festival
NHK Award

Toulouse Latin America Film Festival
French Critics’ Discovery Award
Grand Prix

Uruguay International Film Festival
First Work Award – Special Mention