Abstract
This chapter examines the evolution of Argentinian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century and locates Lucrecia Martel among filmmakers who gave it a new direction at the turn of the twenty-first century. The characteristics of New Argentine Cinema, which includes Martel’s cinema, are delineated to show the changes in the cinematic themes and stylistic approaches since the years of the Dirty War—a traumatic period in the country’s recent history. Martel’s oeuvre is sparse, but she has received national and international accolades for every film that she has made. The chapter concentrates on her Salta trilogy, providing justifications for viewing it as a transnational, collective bildungsroman. In addition, the chapter selects the pool for spatial analysis as it is featured prominently in all three films of the trilogy. Viewed through the spatial gynocritic models, the pool emerges as a de-settling element that unravels racial and familial hierarchies in The Swamp; in The Holy Girl, Martel uses it to present a de-canonized view of the home-nation; and in The Headless Woman, the pool becomes a site for de-bordering the perceived safety of the city and the threats from nearby slums.
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Notes
- 1.
The protagonists of Daniel Loedel’s Haedes Argentina (2021) are two young lovers who “disappeared” because of the military junta. Loedel dedicates the novel to his half-sister who was murdered by the dictatorship in 1978.
- 2.
The term NCA gained currency in the 1990s with the release of Historias breves (1995), Rapado (1996), and Mundo grúa (1999). The change in the country’s cinematic trend received international attention in 2001 when Argentine filmmakers marked their presence at Cannes after a thirteen-year hiatus. The festival included films by Lisandro Alonso and Lucrecia Martel. Before 2001, the last Argentinian film that was screened at Cannes had won the best director award for Fernando Solanas in 1988. This film titled Sur was set against the backdrop of the Falkland Islands’ War that had been instigated by the military dictatorship in 1982.
- 3.
Wolfgang Bongers, Interferencias del Archivo: Cortes Estéticos y Políticos en Cine Literatura (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016), 139.
- 4.
In his inaugural address on the occasion of his election as President of Argentina in 2003, Néstor Kirchner pressed the need for staying focused on the future without going into the details of past governmental failures. He said in the speech that “There is no need to do a detailed review of our mistakes.” Under the Kirchner administration, the criminals of the “Dirty War” were brought to justice, and the government adopted a decidedly socialist outlook in its policy framework. However, for the NCA filmmakers, the improvements on the legislative, judicial, and economic fronts under Kirchernism did not make for an easy closure on the past. They did not subscribe to the idea of a monolithic feel-good narrative, instead they continued the exploration of the national trauma.
- 5.
Maria M. Delgado and Cecilia Sosa, “Politics, Memory and Fiction(s) in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: The Kirchnerist Years.” A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 242.
- 6.
Geoffrey Kantaris, “From Postmodernity to Post‐Identity Latin American Film after the Great Divide,” A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 152.
- 7.
The widespread, violent protests against the government’s economic policies in Argentina in 2001 and in Chile in 2019 show that neoliberal frameworks stretch the veneer of prosperity of a few over the misery of many. Though these demonstrations broke out in the national capitals, they speak to the precarity at large of marginal groups in the provinces and rural areas as well.
- 8.
La Ciénaga, directed by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones, 2001).
La Niña Santa, directed by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones, 2004).
- 9.
Lucrecia Martel, “La Mala Memoria,” interview with Mariana Enriques, August 17, 2008, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9-4766-2008-08-17.html.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
La mujer sin cabeza, directed by Lucrecia Martell (Argentina: El Deseo, 2008).
- 12.
Delgado and Sosa, 243.
- 13.
Donald Shaw, The Post-boom in Spanish American Fiction. New York: SUNY Press, 1998, 10.
- 14.
Lucrecia Martel, “Shadow of a Doubt,” interview with Amy Taubin, Filmcomment, July–August 2009, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/shadow-of-a-doubt-lucrecia-martel-interviewed/.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Sandberg, Claudia. “Maximiliano Schonfeld’s Films of the Volga Germans in Entre Ríos: About the Neoliberal Devil in Argentine Cinema.” In Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism? edited by Claudia Sandberg and Carolina Roca (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 244.
- 17.
Martel, “La mala”.
- 18.
Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 3–5.
- 19.
Rina Chandran, “India’s Low-caste Dalits Rally to Demand End to ‘Unclean’ Jobs,” Reuters, August 1, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-protests-caste-idUSKCN10C2RB.
The traditional Indian social structure was comprised of a hierarchical arrangement of four castes wherein the lowest was assigned tasks that were deemed “unclean” such as cleaning sewers and disposal of dead animals. Even in contemporary India, Dalits remain at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy and their struggle for integration into the narrative of development is politically charged.
- 20.
Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty, eds., The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012).
- 21.
Hagen Koo, “The Global Middle Class: How Is It Made, What Does It Represent?” Globalizations, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2016): 443. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1143617.
- 22.
Paul Julian Smith, “Transnational Co-productions and Female Filmmakers: The Cases of Lucrecia Martel and Isabel Coixet,” in Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, edited by Parvati Nair, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 13;
Margaret McVeigh, “Different but the Same: Landscape and the Gothic as Transnational Story Space in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001).” Critical Arts, 31:5 (2017): 144.
- 23.
Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” Transnational Cinemas, 1:1 (2010):10.
- 24.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.
- 25.
Kantaris, 151.
- 26.
Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema (New York: Duke University Press), 2015, 187.
This perfect merchandize might look like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma that reifies the idea of nostalgic belonging in the trope of selfless motherhood. Roma, as a meticulously aesthetic representation of the male gaze, offers a stimulating counterpoint to Martel’s trilogy. Both Roma and the trilogy focalize the racial difference of the female experience, but Martel’s films do not permit an “easy cross-cultural crossover of her explorations of class, race, history,” and gender (White). Cuarón chooses the chingada–madre as a viable binary, and even in the twenty-first century offers motherhood as the ultimate refuge from being the chingada. In Roma, the child protagonist’s Hispanic mother and the indigenous maid seek refuge in motherhood. Rejected by their husband and lover, respectively, the women turn into asexual devoted mothers.
- 27.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007), 52.
- 28.
La niña santa.
- 29.
Juan Pablo Spicer-Escalante, “The ‘Long Tail’ Hypothesis: The Diachronic Counter-Metanarrative of Hispanic Naturalism,” in Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism, edited by J. P. Spicer-Escalante and Lara Anderson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 12.
While the novels of nineteenth century fin-de-siècle writers attest their understanding of “determinism, heredity, and instinct in society, elements that conspired against the idealized nature of the world that the romantic generation had espoused,” the films of twentieth century fin-de-siècle NCA cineastes use the same elements to manifest the falsity of neoliberal claims of widespread betterment.
- 30.
Ana del Sarto, “Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics,” Chasqui. Special issue on Brazilian and Spanish American Literary and Cultural Encounters. 34:1 (2005): 85.
- 31.
Pura Fernández, Eduardo López Bago y el Naturalismo Radical: La Novela y el Mercado Literario en el Siglo XIX (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995), 230.
- 32.
Martel, “La mala.”
- 33.
Deborah Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 56.
- 34.
Ibid., 64.
- 35.
Ibid., 64.
- 36.
Lucrecia Martel, “Mi Límite Es El Pudor, No Lo Que Va A Pensar El Público,” interview with Ernesto Babino, September 17, 2005. http://ernestobabino.blogspot.com/2005/09/entrevista-lucrecia-martel-directora.html.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
La niña santa.
- 39.
Petru Golban, A History of the Bildungsroman (Newcastle upon Tyne. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 10.
- 40.
Olga Bezhanova, Growing Up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain (Illinois: AILCFH, 2014), 11.
- 41.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1986), 77.
- 42.
Ibid., 76.
- 43.
Martin, 34.
- 44.
María Mercédez Vásquez Vásquez, “New Geographies of Class in Mexican and Brazilian Cinemas: Post Tenebras Lux and Que horas ela volta?” In Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism? edited by Claudia Sandberg and Carolina Roca (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 73.
- 45.
Pedro Lange-Churión, “The Salta Trilogy: The Civilised Barbarism in Lucrecia Martel's Films.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 22:4 (2012): 472.
- 46.
Laura Podalsky, “Out of Depth: The Politics of Disaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American Cinema,” in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, edited by Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 109.
- 47.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, [2000] 2006), 3–4.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid., 169.
- 50.
Bakhtin, 231.
- 51.
Ibid., 247.
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Singh, J. (2022). Lucrecia Martel’s Transnational Cinema. In: Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_8
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