We continue this SLACextras takeover of Mediatico with a piece by Deborah Martin, which takes as its starting point B Ruby Rich’s ” ‘revisionist history’ of the male-associated New Latin American Cinema” ‘An/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema’ (1997) and the ways Rich’s ideas have emerged and are continuing to emerge in the work of contemporary scholars of Latin American women’s filmmaking and Latin American filmmakers, particularly Lucrecia Martel. Deborah Martin is Professor of Latin American Film and Culture at University College, London. Her most recent book The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema was published in 2019. In 2016 she published The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, a detailed study of the films of the Argentine director, and in 2017, together with Prof Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth University), she published a co-edited volume of essays, Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics

Latin American women’s filmmaking: redefining the political; genealogies; aesthetics

by Deborah Martin

1. ‘An/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema’ (Rich)

Whilst editing our book Latin American Women Filmmakers (Martin and Shaw 2017) Ruby Rich’s field-defining essay ‘An/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema’ (1991) became central in the evolution of our overarching considerations. Rich’s text also came up as a reference point for several of our contributors independently of the editorial process.

Rich writes a ‘revisionist history’ of the male-associated New Latin American Cinema, and constructs an alternative canon of films which, unlike the accepted canon, ‘share a refusal to attribute “otherness” to subjects formerly marked as such, accompanied by a commitment to the narrative inscription of an “other” selfhood, identity and subjectivity’ (280). In this alternative canon she includes Matilde Landeta’s La negra Angustias (1950), Fernando Birri’s Los inundados/Flooded out (1962) and Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera/One Way or Another (1977). Rich identifies a shift, in women’s filmmaking, from a public and overt politics towards the personal and the private, ‘away from the epic toward the chronicle, a record of time in which no spectacular events occur but in which the extraordinary nature of the everyday is allowed to surface. […] a shift from “exteriority” to “interiority” (281).

Some features of this new filmmaking are, according to Rich:

1.  it ‘began to incorporate women’s struggles for identity and autonomy’ (279) as a necessary part of a truly contemporary Latin American cinema;
2. in it, ‘Politics’ equals a shift away from ‘agrarian struggles and mass mobilizations’ towards ‘banality, fantasy and desire’ (281);
3. the films ‘strengthen the case for seeing emotional life as a site of struggle and identity equal to those more traditional sites by which the NLAC was once […] defined’ (286).

Rich talks about ‘a corresponding shift in aesthetic strategies’ (281) but she doesn’t say a huge amount in the essay to elucidate what these aesthetic strategies are. This piece therefore seeks to comment on some of the ways Rich’s ideas have emerged and are continuing to emerge in the work of contemporary scholars of Latin American women’s filmmaking, and I will go on to comment on the interlinked cases of producer Bertha Navarro and of Lucrecia Martel, whose work, and whose effects – especially aesthetic effects – on the women’s filmmaking scene in Argentina I have studied in my own work, proposing some aesthetic tendencies I see as enacting the shifts Rich outlines.

2. Overview of how Rich’s ideas emerge in Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics

Rich’s approach – i.e. the redefinition of canon and what counts as political filmmaking, influenced our approach in Latin American Women Filmmakers. We argued that the landscape of Latin American (political) filmmaking looks very different – even unfamiliar vis-à-vis dominant critical understandings of the field – when we shift our focus to women’s filmmaking, and that this is a critical imperative. Rich was writing in 1991, but her theory of women’s cinema/alternative new Latin American cinema is, I propose here, relevant to today’s filmmaking. The delegates at this conference, at the Latin American women’s filmmaking conference in 2017, and at the forthcoming Madrid event constitute part of the new generation of critics for which her essay calls. 

2.1. The redefinition of the political

As highlighted in Deborah Shaw’s manifesto, how we define the political has consequences for the inclusion or exclusion of women’s cultural production; political filmmaking doesn’t necessarily have to focus on landmark revolutionary processes. Rich’s shift from ‘exteriority’ to ‘interiority’ seems pertinent to many cases. She writes: ‘In today’s NLAC, the old phrase “the personal is political” can almost be heard, murmuring below the surface. Its expression, however, is not a privatizing one at all but very much social, political, public’ (281).

Many films by Latin American women including many of the case studies looked at in our edited volume foreground intimate and private spaces for their dissections and analyses of the political. Sarah Barrow, for example, looks at García Montero’s Las malas intenciones /The Bad Intentions (2011) which she argues ‘renders private citizens as political subjects and centres the political within intimate spaces’ (Barrow 2017, 62).  Las malas intenciones is further notable in that its protagonist is a child, and it uses the intimate, private spaces of childhood and the child’s imagination to reflect on Peru’s civil conflict.

Deborah Shaw’s work has focused on the servant-employer dynamics which are central to films including Lucía Puenzo’s El niño pez/The Fish Child (2009) and Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008), and how they function to ‘reveal the political heart of nations and deep structural inequalities’. As yesterday’s panel on the topic of domestic service in Latin American cinema attests, this is a topic of increasing scholarly interest, perhaps due in part to the release of the high-profile Roma (2018); yet Martel, Lucía Puenzo, Anna Muylaert, Sebastián Silva and others have been producing cinematic meditations on the topic for some time.

A second major site of the political in the work of Latin American women filmmakers is the transgression of gender and sexual norms, echoing Rich’s discussion of the gradual incorporation of ‘women’s struggles for identity and autonomy’ (279) in the work of women filmmakers. Aside from the filmmakers’ own transgressive presence in a male-dominated film world (in particular for those filmmakers working, like Bertha Navarro and Marcela Fernández Violante, 40-50 years ago), often these transgressions are figured through transgressive female characters – we might think of characters Alex in Puenzo’s XXY (2007), Llosa’s Madeinusa, (2006) Bemberg’s heroines – and are precipitated by desire. To return to Rich, she states, echoing Claire Johnston’s 1976 essay ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, that women’s political filmmaking must focus on ‘fantasy, and desire’. In my work on Martel’s films I argue that they demonstrate possibilities of rupture and escape through the cinematic depiction of rebellious young girls’ forbidden desires. Despite the fact that her films depict structures of social and political oppression, desire acts as an uncontrollable force which can overcome these structures. The understanding of desire in Martel’s work – as well as in the other films mentioned, strongly echoes its figuring by Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti Oedipus. They write:

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive: there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. […D]esire is revolutionary in its essence […] (1983, 116, my emphasis).

2.2 Politics and poetics

As mentioned earlier, a way we have sought to build on Rich’s work is to elaborate on the kinds of aesthetic strategies which support or enact the redefinitions of politics which we are seeing here. In Latin American cinema, the aesthetic and the political have been explicitly and purposefully linked since influential texts of the New Latin American Cinema demanded formal enactment of political agendas: an imperfect cinema or an aesthetics of hunger. This raises the question of whether and how new forms and sites of political engagement incorporate the aesthetic and how they innovate aesthetically. A number of contemporary scholars address this relationship, with the focus of discussions ranging from traditional analysis of gaze dynamics and hermeneutic readings of film, to the use of phenomenological film theories. My own discussion of Lucrecia Martel’s work in my contribution to the volume (Martin 2017) foregrounds her aesthetic experimentation and shows how this is taken up in the work of her female contemporaries. I will turn shortly to this discussion of Martel’s effects on the filmmaking scene in Argentina.

3. Martel in context: antecedents, mentors, contemporaries, effects

But before that, I want to take a moment to consider her own cinematic lineage, in terms of a female or feminist genealogy echoing Deborah’s comments earlier about looking beyond the exceptional figure – in this case Martel, who has been highly acclaimed and is well-known – to the context within which they are operating, which we advocate as a model of scholarship because it furthers our understanding of the conditions for women’s filmmaking success. Martel has worked with two of the most significant producer-auteurs in Latin American cinema, Lita Stantic and Bertha Navarro. Stantic is famous for her work on María Luisa Bemberg’s films, and thus associated with a feminist tradition of filmmaking in Argentina. Martel refers to the importance of role models in an interview where she recalls having seen Stantic and Bemberg on TV promoting their latest film, and thus concluding, as a young person, that film was something women did.

Stantic later became associated with major filmmakers of the New Argentine Cinema, producing Martel’s first two films, La ciénaga and La niña santa. She encouraged Martel to attend a Sundance scriptwriting workshop led by Mexican producer Bertha Navarro, who Marvin D’Lugo proposes has been a significant force behind, and creative influence on Latin American filmmaking since the 1970s. As Deborah Shaw has argued, we need more research into the role of Latin American women producers like Stantic and Navarro.

Stantic also was also instrumental in La ciénaga’s winning of funding and eventual realisation. On Stantic’s recommendation, Martel attended Navarro’s talleres, and her work there led to the script for La ciénaga. Elements of Navarro’s methodology are evident in Martel’s work, from her emphasis on the creation of a strong script and on adhering closely to it during shooting, to her films’ attention to the everyday, the intimate and the private, and the way they tease out the relationship between the intimate and the private and wider social power structures.

Cosas insignificantes (Insignificant things, 2008) which is discussed by Marvin D’Lugo in his chapter for our volume (D’Lugo 2017) is a good example of Navarro’s methodology.  This film, produced by Navarro, and directed by a fellow attendee of her talleres, Andrea Martínez Crowther, focuses on the intimate and the private and their relationship with wider social and political issues, as D’Lugo argues. D’Lugo’s main argument centres around Navarro’s career in production as enabling the emergence of a Latin American transnational cinema. Yet he also points out that her transnational workshops ‘helped break down gender barriers’ (D’Lugo, 224) and produced outstanding female filmmakers such as Martel, Spain’s Lola Salvador, and Mexico’s Patricia Riggen and Martínez Crowther.

The very title of Cosas insignificantes recalls Rich’s theory. D’Lugo argues that, of the many films Navarro has produced ‘Cosas insignificantes comes closest to Navarro’s own philosophy of scripting’ in that ‘the film’s attention to mundane objects collected by [its protagonist] Esme recalls Navarro’s 1986 talk at the Havana Film Festival’s symposium on women and audio-visual media […] where she discussed ‘la realidad cotidiana’ (Navarro, cit. D’Lugo, 233),  aligning this, ‘with women’s work, which is generally presented as a series of seemingly inconsequential tasks […] that are nonetheless the cornerstone of society’ (D’Lugo, 233).

This focus on the apparently insignificant, on the everyday, on the eventless, is central to Martel’s filmmaking, and to the forms of politics it pursues. Though I’m mainly talking about her ‘Salta Trilogy’, my comments are also relevant to her more recent Zama (2017). Like La ciénaga, Zama is about waiting, about tedium. Martel’s films are often described as ones in which little happens; in Rich’s words, chronicles rather than epics: ‘a record of time in which no spectacular events occur but in which the extraordinary nature of the everyday is allowed to surface’ (281).  Zama subverts the epic mode with which historical filmmaking is often associated through a number of devices. In one instance this subversion happens where we hear a child’s voice, who whilst being carried aloft in a chair, whispers about the ‘greatness’ of the film’s main character, Don Diego de Zama, as if he were a historical character in a story. The soundtrack, which uses the synthesized musical device of the Shephard tone, and the boy’s deadpan delivery undercuts any epic quality of the language.

In another instance Zama is being bathed by his indigenous servants. We see only his torso and face whilst the servants reach into the frame to rub his body with wet cloths. On the soundtrack we hear a letter from his wife who asks when he will return and how his children are growing, and Zama responds “They are fed up and so am I” . The languid pace of the action, Zama’s words, those of his wife’s letter and the sound of water create a focus on sensuality, tactility, boredom and waiting.

Martel’s previous works – La ciénaga, La niña santa, and La mujer sin cabeza– tend to focus on domestic, private settings, yet they also tease out the relationships between these, and broader sociopolitical structures. In Rich’s terms, they share a ‘commitment to the narrative inscription of [the] “other”’: they focus on the peripheral location of Salta (where the director grew up). These films are peripheral in other senses, too: they explore the lives of women and children, they allude to marginal sexualities and foreclosed realms of experience. They subject the provincial, middle class world they depict to an anthropological and investigatory gaze which illuminates the structures of an oppressive family life, as well as the oppressive class and ethnic relationships within which it is enmeshed. Through a minute attention to private life, the films reveal how neo-colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative structures are repeated to maintain the edifices of a rigidly conservative society, as well as hinting at possibilities for change. Rich writes of Maria Luisa Bemberg: ‘For Bemberg, women are the lynchpin in the ongoing battle between repression and liberation, a battle which she views atomistically as launched inside the family to explode throughout society’ (286-7); the same could be said of Martel’s work, in relation not only to gender, but to forms of oppression based on sexuality, class and ethnicity also.

Like Martel’s, a series of films made in the 2000s by Argentine women filmmakers pursues the political in similar ways, locating it within the family, considering children’s lives and marginal sexualities, transgressions and desire. Albertina Carri, Julia Solomonoff, Celina Murga and Lucía Puenzo, all of whom made their first films in the wake of Martel’s success with La ciénaga, have been influenced by her narrative inscriptions of otherness, as well as by her use of tactile and immersive film languages and experimentation with sound, new aesthetic strategies  which accompany a redefinition of politics. These directors continue Martel’s project of destabilization of the cultural hegemony of the visual, the masculine and the adult, and echo, through their aesthetics and cinematography, the transgressions performed by their characters on a narrative level. Martel’s work can be seen as the inception of a tendency in Argentine women’s filmmaking which pairs unconventional and transgressive portrayals of gender, of sexuality and of childhood with aesthetic choices which are transgressive of hegemonic visual codes, including the slowing of time and the privileging of the tactile, the aquatic and even the abject. So we can speak of a ‘Martel-effect’: Martel as a key agent who constitutes an enabling force behind the success of others (as Navarro, Stantic and Bemberg did for Martel).

Solomonoff’s following of Martel’s lead is evident in her film El último verano de la Boyita/The Last Summer of the BoyitaI (2009) which deals with children and intersexuality. In an interview, Solomonoff commented:

Para mí lo que Lucrecia ha tenido es un efecto muy liberador en mucha gente…. En esa intimidad, en esa observación, en ese momento muerto de la tarde o de la siesta, hay un montón, y creo que ella inauguró una especie de ‘planeta ciénaga’ que le ha dado el pase a mucha gente (in Martin 2012).

‘Planeta ciénaga’ refers to Martel’s first feature and its influence on subsequent filmmakers. I borrow the formulation to further characterise a group of films including Martel’s, Solomonoff’s El último verano de la Boyita, Albertina Carri’s Geminis (2005) and La rabia/Anger (2008), Puenzo’s XXY and El niño pez/The Fish Child (2009) and Celina Murga’s Una semana solos/A Week Alone (2008). In these films, marginal perspectives and the stories of children and adolescents are given prominence. Several of these films also feature an intersectional feminist sensibility similar to that of Martel: in which structures of class and ethnicity are brought to the fore in narratives which foreground sexual dissidence and difference, and in each case the relationship between these intermeshing structures is scrutinised. The tendency of these films to observe intimacy, ‘dead time’, or seemingly eventless scenes of family and domestic life, strongly echoes Rich’s points about the location of the political in women’s filmmaking. Aesthetically, there is a particular emphasis on touch and the tactile, on sound over the visual, and on embodiment, alongside a slowing of time and a slackening of action. There is a preference for the swampy, wet, sticky and dirty, for the aquatic, for swimming pools, and rainstorms, for images of bleeding, of sweat, of dirt, dead animals, blood and innards, as well as sustained and haptic images of skin and hair, echoing, interestingly, some of the points Barbara Zecchi makes in “Envejecimiento y desenfoque: la visualidad ‘presboempática’ en el cine intergeneracional español” that is also in this SLACextras Mediático takeover about the representation of the aging body in the work of women filmmakers.

I asked at the beginning of this piece how filmic aesthetics might perform or express the kinds of redefinition of the political proposed by Rich. Clearly there are many ways in which this might be achieved. These ‘swamp-world’ films create a visuality which speaks to what is excluded, marginalised, abjected. It is transgressive, in Kristeva’s words it is the abject: that which disturbs ‘identity, system, order’ (1982, 4). If (to return to Rich), these films share ‘a commitment to the narrative inscription of an “other” selfhood’, their film language inscribes this otherness aesthetically. In narratives which lack events, our attention turns to the body, to the senses, to what is beneath the surface, as Deleuze suggests in the introduction to Cinema 2: The time-image (1989, 12). These are aesthetics of the private, of the intimate and the personal, of banality, fantasy and desire, the realms in which these films locate the political. Such transgressive aesthetics also overturn the rules of dominant cinema, displacing the hegemony of the visual and Cartesian perspective, undermining identity and order on the viewer-film level, too, as the distinction between the film and the viewer’s body is undermined, and the viewer invited to undergo the film as embodied experience. They invite a merging between the spectator’s body and the sticky, dirty, strange and other body of the film, a ‘becoming-other’. In this sense, too, then, their poetics enact a political imperative to overturn established power structures.

References:

Barrow, Sarah. 2017. ‘Through Female Eyes: Reframing Peru on Screen’. In Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, ed. by Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 48-69.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

D’Lugo, Marvin. 2017. ‘Bertha Navarro and the Re-mapping of Latin American Cinema’. In Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, ed. by Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 217-240.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Johnston, Claire. 1976–85 [1975]. ‘Women’s cinema as counter-cinema’. In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of

California Press, pp. 208–17.

Martin, Deborah. 2012. ‘Interview with Júlia Solomonoff’, 28 April, unpublished.

—. 2017. ‘Planeta ciénaga: Lucrecia Martel and Contemporary Argentine Women’s Filmmaking’. In Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, ed. by Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 241-62.

— and Deborah Shaw (eds). 2017. Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics. London. I.B. Tauris.

Rich, B. Ruby. 1997. ‘An/ other view of the New Latin American Cinema’ in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema, Vol. 1: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 273–97.

Films

Cosas insignificantes. 2008. Dir. Andrea Martínez Crowther.

De cierta manera. 1977. Dir. Sara Gómez.

El niño pez. 2009. Dir. Lucía Puenzo.

El último verano de la Boyita. 2009. Dir. Júlia Solomonoff.

Geminis. 2005. Dir. Albertina Carri.

La ciénaga. 2001. Dir. Lucrecia Martel.

La mujer sin cabeza. 2008. Dir. Lucrecia Martel

La negra Angustias. 1950. Dir. Matilde Landeta

La niña santa. 2004. Dir. Lucrecia Martel.

La rabia. 2008. Dir. Albertina Carri

Las malas intenciones. 2011. Dir. Rosario García-Montero.

Los inundados. 1961. Dir. Fernando Birri.

Madeinusa. 2006. Dir. Claudia Llosa

Roma. 2018. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Una semana solos. 2008. Dir. Celina Murga.

XXY. 2007. Dir. Lucía Puenzo.

Zama. 2017. Dir. Lucrecia Martel.

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