Lucrecia Martel

This book provides an overview of the films of the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers from Latin America and as a leading female global auteur. It situates Martel’s cinema in the context of a post-dictatorship, neoliberal democracy, as well as within the emergence of a new wave realism (New Argentine Cinema), which profits from and is critical of the privileged role cinema assumes in this new economy. The book argues that Martel’s films challenge the primacy of the visual by emphasizing modes of perception such as hearing, feeling, and smelling to question not only the veracity of what we see but, more fundamentally, the epistemological foundations on which the visual is built. Focusing on her native region of northwestern Argentina, Martel’s Salta trilogy employs a heightened realism, combined with aspects of genre cinema, to articulate a powerful critique of dominant power relations and forms of entitlement. Her radical aesthetics force viewers to rethink privileges of race and class associated with Argentine bourgeois society. Martel’s more recent literary adaptation, Zama, traces the origins of the exploitation of indigenous populations to colonial times and unearths its long-lasting legacies.