Short Films as Aesthetic Freedom

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the short films in Lucrecia Martel’s cinema recover the possibility (typical of the short films of the historical avant-garde and experimental cinemas) of an image that is not regimented in perceptual, narrative and production terms. Lucrecia Martel’s short films are autotelic productions, emancipated from the commercial and narrative impositions of other film formats, such as feature films and television series. The short film can aspire to, or contains in nuce, a kind of aesthetic radicality that is still possible in the very era of post-radicality. In her short films, there are possibilities that are not in the feature films: female freedom (Dead King); a minority language policy as resistance to the intelligibility of the story and the proposal of a perception that does not depend on the narrative (New Argirópolis); the autotelism of the short film, alien to the demands of authorship, the market and the expectations of the critics (Muta); playful experimentation without purpose and without authorial features (Fish).