A Poetics of the Senses

Film images affect primarily the spectator’s senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually. —Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film Lucrecia Martel’s most recent feature, Zama, opens to the titular hero striking a pose of grandeur, wearing a tricornered hat and bearing a sword, while standing proudly before an immense river. We soon learn that the waters behind him bear the sole promise for his future, namely a ship delivering the longed-for transferal from this backwater of the Spanish colony to the town where his wife and children live. As it turns out, this vessel never arrives, but through several ironic twists of fate, at the end of the film his boat finally does come in: badly injured and clinging on to dear life, the hero finds himself in a dugout canoe, slowly moving deeper into the wilderness and farther away from his planned destination, and history itself—an image of hope, not despair, as Martel has insisted....