I admit I haven’t seen any of her films, but this excellent write-up has convinced me I should. Good work, sir. I’ll post back here once I’ve seen some of these.
The Headless Woman is the only film I have seen of hers so far and it’s currently one of my favorites. I plan on seeing her other films sometime soon. Thank you for this wonderful write up Javier!
Josh and Will, thanks a lot..
Sorry for the delay..
Her films are rich and dense.. I’m so glad to write about a latin american filmmaker!
I’ve read only the first part but I will come back to this for sure. I just received my copy of The Holy Girl and can’t wait to see it tonight.
Thank you very much Javier. I haven’t seen anything by Lucrecia Martel yet but I’m looking forward to…
Thanks Grey Daisies
Haven’t seen The Headless Woman yet but I really liked La Cienaga and La Nina Santa. You nicely write about the ambiguity between characters and relationships that mark her films. She also creates amazing atmospheres.
La Nina Santa is pure cinema.
So I’ve seen La Nina Santa finally and I’ve liked it very much. Considering the image for the movie higher in the article: am I the only one to whom it echoes Courbet’s L’Origine du monde? I wouldn’t call it quotation, but some kind of transposition.
I saw La Cienaga, liked it a lot, although it was frustrating to watch… The Holy Girl was good as well.
Fantastic write-up on Martel!
I am a recent fan. Her films are absolutely incredible. Her point-of-view is so refreshing and unique. The soundscape and use of off-screen space in La Cienega. The silence in La mujer sin cabeza. The tension in La nina santa. So so good.
Interview coming tomorrow.
Awesome news! I haven’t seen any of Martel’s films but this project is too good to die!
That’d be great! I hope she can tell us something about her latest film.
Cinema 21 Presents Lucrecia Martel
MUBI and Garage would like to thank Jose Sarmiento-Hinojosa for continuing to bring some of the finest directors to Cinema 21.
Interesting interview. I connect to a lot of what she says and thinks. I love her.
javier quintero
Lucrecia Martel: Discontinuous coordinates
By Javier Quintero
“Our culture is riddled with holes and ruts, in cinema above all, where continuity has never been respected. The new enthusiasm for film in the 1990s was distinct from other periods in Argentine history. In truth, the different chapters in Argentine film history have been separated by very violent periods of dictatorship or economic crises; this impedes the possibility of continuity, which can be so nourishing for a country.” —Lucrecia Martel (1)
Lucrecia Martel’s films occupy an important place in the movement so-called second “New Argentine Cinema” (First one was in the 1960’s with Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Fernando “Pino” Solanas, Fernando Ayala). In the mid-90s, along with filmmakers such as Martin Reijtman, Esteban Sapir, Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro and Pablo Trapero among others, a rupture in filmmaking began to take place against the previous generation. Both in the aesthetic and the modes of production, various ideas were rethought, gradually reaching an insertion in the industrial field. Also accompanying the idea of film movement, the new auteurs began to stimulate other areas such as the critical and theoretical discussion on film circuits. In terms of funding, both the private and the public began to support film production through grant funds and investments. This model came into use later in other South American countries (Of course, there have also been generated working models with ultra low budgets).
Lucrecia Martel doesn’t consider it a movement in itself, but rather a shared experience (2).
Martel’s films are composed of several simultaneous actions distributed from defined groups where you can appreciate different behaviors in their daily lives.
Although they might resemble the Cinéma Vérité in some moments where it seems that actions are not designed to twist dramatically, the fact is that each of the gestures, markings and dialogues are carefully scripted and calculated.
Her films focus on the observation of relationships and family moments in which, the established order has been altered in a way barely noticeable and difficult to diagnose.
In The swamp, the accident suffered by Mecha, will serve as a ground for the encounter between two families in the middle of a hot (but not sunny) summer with constant sound of thunder.
In The Holy Girl, Amalia, a 13 years old teen, while watching a musical performance played on the thereminvox (an instrument played without being physically touched) is touched on her buttocks by Dr. Jano, event that changes the course of her life when she realizes that it is a divine sign.
In The Headless woman, Veronica has run over something on the road without stopping to examine what it is. This promotes a series of changes in her personality. The nature of the situation suggests us that she has changed. However we never knew how was really Verónica before.
The swamp (La ciénaga, 2001)
In this film Martel examines the family of Mecha, a drunken woman in crisis and who has had a domestic accident and therefore, must rest. Mecha is visited by her cousin Tali, who is accompanied by her husband and children. Both families spend the summer on the countryhouse, and their only hobbies are lying to rest in the beds of the rooms, or sit to relax beside the pool of putrid water.
In this countryhouse we can also observe the relationship between employers and servants, the latter dubbed in a racist way as “los collas”. The prejudices of the rundown middle class on the “collas" are quite offensive and demeaning. This is one example of the logic of the film, which works from the contrast of opposites and the excesses of the comparative view based on the bias.
In The Swamp, Lucrecia works with a camera quite close to the characters. Not dominate the long shots, but she uses a lot of depth of field to show various simultaneous actions, thus making possible the relationships in crowded familiar places.
There’s no such information as Who are they? What do they want? Where are they? – Those questions are here to be solved, just not by the beginning in the film, as usual on narration of classical canon.
Similarly, the spatial coordinates are not carefully detailed. On the contrary, are lightly sketched, so that the viewer is witness to processes and can rebuild what has not seen to happen in front of the camera. However, the viewer knows that it has happened.
It is the spectator who makes inferences and deductions on what is happening. The Information is going to be there, but not in the moment that the audience is used to.
Similarly, dialogue lines do not anticipate actions but reinforce the view about the world being built: they characterize ways of thinking and systems to assume life.
Sometimes there are difficulties in communication between family members, as each speaks simultaneously about its own interests from the role they have adopted and which seems impossible to question. They are characters that do not stop to think and are constantly at risk of repeating life based on the cycle model lives that their parents have lived.
Martel has a great sensitivity to direct her actors and actresses, specially children. She doesn’t look for compassion, mercy, excessive tenderness, or exploitation when dealing with child actors. For her, each character has a lot of dignity.
“When I’m filming, I have to desire the actors. I need to feel that desire to know who the characters are, and that’s why I don’t want to think through or conceptualize their entire lives in my scripts. I need to be driven by a curiosity to know more when I’m casting an actor, to be drawn to a mystery that I can perceive within them. When I film a person without desiring them, it comes out badly. When the actors in my movies do well, it’s not because I’ve told them something and they’ve followed my orders, but because they have been doing something, and I’ve wanted to watch them. If there’s no mystery, you get bored on the set. And that’s the worst thing that can happen to a director. It’s the death of the film, for sure.” —Lucrecia Martel (1)
The holy girl (La niña santa, 2004)
A medical conference takes place in Helena’s hotel, where she lives with her daughter Amalia. The girl attends a Catholic girls’ group to discuss each one’s vocation. Amalia feels divine inspiration through the approach that Dr. Jano has towards her. She begins to look for him insistently. Jano, despite being married and having two daughters, also begins to come closer to Helena.
At what point do these things happen? – Lucrecia Martel’s characters break up the time space continuum because, as viewers, we are witnesses of everything they do and there is always room for what we have not witnessed the scene. Through small signs and gestures, mysterious feelings are born.
“Another thing about Martel’s characters is that they seem to have a life outside of the film; they begin before the film begins and they continue after the film ends.” —Jeffrey M. Anderson (3)
Thus, since the shooting himself, in her three films, scenes and even the majority of shots begin “in medias res” from actions that are taking place without waiting for the viewer to establish coordinates so events can begin to take place. It is our job to weave the events so they acquire a meaning.
Martel weaves several narrative threads between the various characters. For one side is Helena and Amalia in their approaches to Dr. Jano. On the other hand there is the hotel staff in constant motion because of the medical convention. Other scenarios are built from the group of Catholic girls, where they think about the divine call and its mystery.
The hotel as a space is represented fragmentarily, in a labyrinth way and not as a continuos building. Lucrecia applies also a risky frame composition, cutting characters’ heads and putting them “off the center”, specially the main ones, Amalia and Dr. Jano.
“It’s important for Martel to use her setting as part of the story, part of the whole. As a rule, she never shoots establishing shots or transition shots, which would physically separate a space from its moment in the film.” —Jeffrey M. Anderson (3)
Martel is focused on the looks and tensions between characters. The Holy Girl is a film on the body as matter in constant invitation to explore. At the moment to think and feel that the indiscreet physical approach of Dr. Jano in a crowd corresponds to the call of God, Amalia has a mystical experience.
The headless woman (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008)
While driving in her car at an indigenous settlement road, Verónica has hit something. She’s convinced that she has killed somebody. People in her family and her own social class say she has not killed anyone, but a dog.
A strange feeling, perhaps quite different from guilt, takes hold of Veronica during most of the film, while traveling and wandering from side to side, stunned, abstracted, sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded by her family, barely realizing that the rest of world exists. As if she were all of the time isolated from the safety of her car or from a glass wall that protects her from outside.
“The film can be read as a political parable, alluding not only to the denials of the past, but to the bourgeoisie’s present denial of its sheltered privilege. But these issues are never raised explicitly. Martel is in the first place interested in making us feel what it’s like to inhabit her characters’ sealed world – a series of fishtank spaces such as the dining room where Veronica’s family finally gathers behind glass doors.” —Jonathan Romney (4)
In Martel’s films, the relationships between the characters are not entirely clear. While one can assume that the characters share a degree of kinship, they act like very close lovers. The latter suggests a kind of incestuous promiscuity very subtly suggested in her films. In The Swamp, José and Vero are brothers but they share games and dynamics as lovers in conquest. In The Holy Girl, Helen and her brother share the same bed and have attitudes like marriage. Just as happens in The Headless Woman, with the strange triangle between the main character Veronica, her cousin and her husband.
“You can take an establishing shot of relationships, but I never take those shots because it’s very important to me that the spectator sees that things in the world are not as reason dictates. No one is a father simply because they have a son; they are a father because they care for a son. If you read the most orthodox American script guidebooks, by the tenth minute you’re supposed to know who all the characters are with clarity. They always give the example of Pretty Woman: by the tenth minute, I know that she’s a prostitute, and that he’s a rich man…”— Lucrecia Martel (1)
The Headless woman is Martel’s film where less dialogue and less characters can be found. Just because you get into trouble when trying to describe or define in words the state that crosses Vero, this ineffable experience reflects the great kinematic ability in Martel to configure a world of gestures, signals and signs. It had to be this way because somehow she has entered the realm of the invisible in constant conflict with the visible. The presence of undefined and blurred images brings to mind what is there but refuses to go away, and more than that, to be labeled, to be named, both in its appearance and in its disappearance.
The three films share in addition to accidents, distorting spontaneous apparitions that blur and question the concept of reality. Or rather, they question our usual mechanisms to approach reality.
In The Swamp there’s a constantly evolving news media about an apparition of the Carmen Virgin in a water tank roof. In The Holy Girl, there is the call of God and the manifestation of the divine vocation. In The Headless Woman there is the constant appearance of ghosts or presences which is “better not to talk” or “forget about”.
Again, the coordinates are fuzzy and discontinuous. They look for an active viewer who can participate in the film and begin to knit together the separate pieces of the puzzle that Martel offers.
“The film reveals a blurred moment of a woman’s life, and shows how things become more secure by making certain things disappear. Like my other films, The Headless Woman doesn’t end in the moment that the lights go up, it ends one or two days later. That’s why I don’t like to do [post-screening] Q&As.” …”— Lucrecia Martel (2)
Filmography (5)
El 56 (1988) (short/animation)
Piso 24 (1989) (short/animation)
Besos rojos (1991) (short)
D.N.I. (1995) ( TV Series)
Rey muerto (1995) aka Dead King
La Ciénaga (2001) aka The Swamp
La niña santa (2004), aka The Holy Girl
La mujer sin cabeza (2008), aka The Headless Woman
Endnotes and references:
1. Lucrecia Martel, An interview by Haden Guest
2. When Worlds Collide: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel, director of The Headless Woman
3. The nature of water: Interview with Lucrecia Martel on The Holy Girl
4. Review on The headless woman
5. Lucrecia Martel in IMDB
OUBIÑA, David. Estudio crítico sobre La ciénaga. Buenos Aires: Picnic Editorial, 2007.
GÓMEZ, Lía. Nuevas razones de la imagen. Un estudio sobre Lucrecia Martel y el cine argentino contemporáneo. Facultad de Periodismo y Comunicación Social UNLP.
Dread Desert, Part II: a conversation with Lucrecia Martel