“Lucrecia Martel’s Auteur Politics and Zama’s Sonic Universe.”

Teaching Women Filmmakers.

While linking her persona to an unwritten and complex politics of auteurism, Lucrecia Martel places herself as a global auteur. By recurring to some of the traits of the 'global auteur' as described by Thomas Elsaesser (2016), I will show the ways in which the Argentine filmmaker negotiates an active even in contradictory position within cinema. Here, auteurism works as an inter-relational practice embroiled and created in the production process as well as the dissemination and consumption of movies. Concurrently, by addressing Martel's most recent feature Zama (2017) and its nuanced reworking of the colonial period-piece genre, my essay will center on sound and the creation of affect, the phantasmagorical, haunting memories of the protagonist, and the Derridean animot as an implicit alternative to being. The film's framing and cinematography characterized by shallow focus will aid in this while also emphasizing the film event as an affective process able to engage affect and touch spectators. I contend that Martel's film Zama inquires into the social construction of experience to relay and ethico-aesthetic and political stance. More specifically, framing and sound in Zama undermine narrative conventions to engage affective networks and cognitive strategies that challenge normative ways of knowing.

Open Screens