Films like Zama and The Headless Woman have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Though often allied with mainstream figures and genre frameworks, Martel works within art cinema, and since her 2001 debut The Swamp she has become one of international film's most acclaimed auteurs.Gerd Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience. Martel's focus on sound, touch, taste, and smell challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. By merging of these and other experimental techniques with heightened realism, she invites audiences into film narratives at once unresolved, truncated, and elliptical. Gemünden aligns Martel's filmmaking methods with the work of other international directors who criticize—and pointedly circumvent—the high-velocity speeds of today's cinematic storytelling. He also explores how Martel's radical political critique forces viewers to rethink entitlement, race, class, and exploitation of indigenous peoples within Argentinian society and beyond.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. The book situates Martel's features and unstudied short films in relation to trends in recent national and international filmmaking. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms.

An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Collects critical essays on the influential Argentine director Lucrecia Martel

This book bridges the gap between film theory and filmmakers' thoughts and poetics, and proposes a new way to address and elaborate film theory. It brings together primary sources by filmmakers themselves, drawing on their films, interviews, books, texts, and manifestos. Divided into three parts, the book covers the main aspects of this approach. Part one discusses the concepts of 'author' and 'filmmaker'. Part two evaluates the creative processes of a broad range of filmmakers, including Víctor Gaviria (Colombia), Kleber Mendonça Filho (Brazil), Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda (France), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) Pa. Ranjith (India), Andy Warhol (USA), Maya Deren (Ukraine-USA) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey). The final part examines filmmakers' various techniques, particularly the use of multi-images, after-(dialectical)-images, and the use of sound as a sensorial and narrative tool. This curated selection of writings, with contributors from a range of countries including the USA, UK, India, China, Portugal, Brazil, Belgium and New Zealand, reflects the global perspective of this new approach. The volume also discusses the ways in which filmmakers influence each other, the spectator as seen by filmmakers, and ways to critically address a filmography that takes into account filmmakers other than the director.

This book studies the intimate tensions between affect and emotions as terrains of sociopolitical significance in the cinema of Lucrecia Martel, Albertina Carri, and Lucía Puenzo. Such tensions, Selimović argues, result in “affective moments” that relate to the films’ core arguments. They also signal these filmmakers’ novel insights on complex manifestations of memory, desire, and violence. The chapters explore how the presence of pronounced—but reticent—affect complicates emotional bonding in the everydayness depicted in these films. By bringing out moments of affect in these filmmakers’ diegetic worlds, this book traces the ways in which subtle foci on gender, class, race, and sexuality correlate in these Argentine women’s films.