Lucrecia Martel

by Gerd Gemünden

Films like Zama and The Headless Woman have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Though often allied with mainstream figures and genre frameworks, Martel works within art cinema, and since her 2001 debut The Swamp she has become one of international film's most acclaimed auteurs.Gerd Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience. Martel's focus on sound, touch, taste, and smell challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. By merging of these and other experimental techniques with heightened realism, she invites audiences into film narratives at once unresolved, truncated, and elliptical. Gemünden aligns Martel's filmmaking methods with the work of other international directors who criticize—and pointedly circumvent—the high-velocity speeds of today's cinematic storytelling. He also explores how Martel's radical political critique forces viewers to rethink entitlement, race, class, and exploitation of indigenous peoples within Argentinian society and beyond.

206 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 30, 2019

Reviews

[David Sterritt]

Lucrecia Martel has emerged as a major filmmaker on the basis of four features, all remarkable in multiple ways, and Gerd Gemünden’s monograph on her – a recent addition to Contemporary Film Directors, the estimable U of Illinois Press series – is an excellent overview, analyzing each feature (and her most noteworthy shorts) in levelheaded, unfussy terms, with commendable attention to the richly understated sociopolitical overtones woven through them, and offering fair-minded appraisals of their aesthetic traits along the way. “Lucrecia Martel” is an important contribution to critical appreciation of an uncommonly brave and challenging filmmaker.

[Catarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boa compilação do que já foi dito e escrito sobre Martel, com alguns insights dignos de nota, como a questão da dramaturgia alternativa no capítulo sobre La Ciénaga. Porém, as análises de filme deixam a desejar: por diversas vezes o autor descreve cenas sem chegar a lugar algum e passa ao assunto seguinte; os parágrafos não tem ligação uns com os outros, é como um amarradão meio solto de ideias esparsas, sem que uma coisa se desenvolva e desemboque em outra. Para quem leu os livros de Deborah Martin e Natalia Barrenha, não tem muita novidade além do capítulo sobre o recente Zama.