Martel Variations

Focusing on some early and short productions by Lucrecia Martel, the article will analyze the essayistic dimension of his cinema: cinema as an act of thinking, which is, in her case, to think of cinema as writing. The documentary as a writing (or perhaps a score, but always –above all– a notation) that articulates image and sound as a fully verbivocovisual composition. The essayistic dimension, as a slow mode of scrutiny of an idea, materializes in certain critical objects, as happens in research essays: fish, water, dogs, children, Silvina Ocampo, a pond, a pool, Encarnación Ezcurra or some texts (Zama, Argirópolis). The documentary is thought not as a record of the real, but as a notation of a process of elaboration of the real. There is, endeed, a syntax in her cinema which involves or realises (i.e., crystallises) her prosody. That syntax defines the (dis)order in which the moods of the situations, rather than the facts, become chained. Martel’s cinema, therefore, as a writing, as a musical notation of variations.