A Cinema of the Borderlands: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama

This chapter continues to examine the theme of moral freedom as a marker of ambiguous cinema via analysis of Lucrecia Martel’s film Zama, specifically the study of its protagonist Don Diego de Zama. It extends and develops Beauvoir’s philosophy of ambiguity by working through the varied work of Latina feminist phenomenologists, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, Linda Martín Alcoff and Mariana Ortega. Through a study of key concepts, such as Anzaldúa’s la nepantlera (a different sense of self), and the Coatlicue state (referring to the inability to think or tolerate emotional conflict); Lugones’s notion of ‘world’-travelling and playfulness, and Ortega’s ‘multiplicitious self’, the chapter notes limitations within Beauvoir’s philosophy of ambiguity and identifies how Latina phenomenological thought addresses and articulates diversity in lived experience more effectively. The chapter argues that Zama illustrates how Martel’s filmmaking engenders a consciousness of being in-between, of crossing-over, of spaces and experiences that are hybrid, or as Anzaldúa says: ‘a consciousness of the borderlands,’ demonstrating a clear feminist, intersectional and intermeshed politics of aesthetics.