Argentina — Blog — Emma Unscripted

February: La Ciénaga (2001), dir. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina

As it always does, the 28-day February came and went in a flash. And because of that, my schedule got condensed and more crowded, and so I was unable to watch La Ciénaga until the last week of the month. I’ve taken the extra week to write my essay on it because I wanted to make sure I did a good job researching and understanding the film and its context.

My relationship with foreign film began less than a year ago, in July 2020. I was taking a film class through UPenn’s summer program, “World Cinema: 1945-Present.” The first film we were assigned to watch was the Italian neorealism classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), dir. Vittorio De Sica. I had never seen it, much less heard of it, or Vittorio De Sica, or Italian neorealism. So, as an American teenager who had up until that point had only seen American films, I was underwhelmed and confused by Bicycle Thieves. “Nothing happened.” “What was the point of that?” were the questions that kept swirling in my mind. And then my class discussed it, analyzing scenes and talking about what neorealism was and why the movement is so significant in the history of cinema. Bicycle Thieves is not my favorite movie, and I have not watched it in full since, but after looking at it as a historical document, both in its importance as a political and artistic expression, I have tremendous reverence for it.

I felt a similar way after diving into Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 debut, La Ciénaga. Although only a 101 minute film, Martel does not rush even for a moment. Everything is at the pace of a slow summer day, when the sun glares in your eyes and the cool of the wind breezes over. La Ciénaga is more of an atmospheric film than a story; it is a film more concerned with how people react, interact, and confront their innermost desires and fears as opposed to where they came from and where they are going.

To try to describe the plot of La Ciénaga would be a disservice to the film; there is no way to satisfyingly sum up the events that transpire or the moments in between the events in one sentence. I think the Criterion Collection’s words on the film are the best at capturing why I felt it was an important film to include in this project: “Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.” And that is essentially what the film tackles; it “stars” actresses Graciela Borges and Mercedes Morán, but it is truly an ensemble with no performances that overpower the others.

Similar to how I felt after viewing American filmmaker Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), one thing was clear to me: Lucrecia Martel had a clear voice and vision, and had portrayed women on screen in a way I had never seen before. And while I knew a lot about Sofia Coppola before seeing The Virgin Suicides, I knew virtually nothing about Lucrecia Martel, and so I set out to change that.

I watched a fifty minute interview that Martel gave to Film at Lincoln Center in 2018 about La Ciénaga as well as reading some profiles on her. In Film at Lincoln Center’s guest profile of Martel, they wrote: Martel studied film in Buenos Aires during one of the country’s worst economic crises, and eventually lent her worldview and sense of place to intimate, elliptical dramas that broke from the aesthetic and ideological tendencies of the prevailing national film scene.” Viewing La Ciénaga through the lens of a woman who lived in a broken economy and had a disillusioned view of the bourgeoisie makes the cynical nature of the film less “empty” as one may feel viewing it and more profound and knowing.

Then I read more about why she made La Ciénaga as her debut and the impact it had. Not only is the film a staple of the New Argentine Cinema (which the Criterion Collection described as “escaping the theatrical aura of previous cinema”), but it is also shown in many film classes and is adored by film academics. Film critic and journalist Kleber Mendonça Filho described his adoration for the film by saying “I remember the impact Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature had on film students, critics, and fellow filmmaker...I love everything about this film: the obliqueness of it, the fresh and bold take on sexuality, the use of sound, the faces and bodies.” There are countless anecdotes about people’s experiences with the film similar to Filho’s, and they all strike upon the same themes of the film’s subversion of narrative and audience expectations of what a film can be, which is quite powerful.

What struck me during my research Martel’s revelation to an interviewer that La Ciénaga was intended to subvert film conventions and make audiences experience something new and partly distressing. In an interview with The Telegraph around the release of the film, Martel stated that to her, La Ciénaga is “not a realistic film. It's something strange, a little weird. It's the kind of film where you can't tell what's going to happen, and I wanted the audience to be very uncomfortable from the beginning." It is not revolutionary for a filmmaker to want to bring out feelings of discomfort and tension in their audiences; however, to do so with such a sparse film is what makes the film stand out. In American film, Alfred Hitchcock makes his audiences uncomfortable with relentless suspense, and David Fincher does so with his cool-toned frames and unpredictable characters like Amy Dunne in Gone Girl or Tyler Durden in Fight Club; Martel does not have a “gimmick” or a “thing” that she uses. Instead, the through line of the film is discomfort and dissatisfaction; scenes are often cut short, storylines are unresolved, characters appear in their grossest, most unkempt forms, and exterior sounds are what control the movie, not a thundering score or a carefully curated soundtrack.

I do not know if I will ever revisit La Ciénaga, or at least visit it anytime soon. And yet, I recommend that everyone watch it at least once. I cannot say it was a life changing viewing experience, nor did it move me in any profound way. But it was something I had never seen before, made by a woman who, on her first film, knew how she saw the world, and was not afraid to show that to the world. It is a movie that easily could have been dismissed or forgotten, but it is Martel’s dedication to her vision and disregard for making the film easy or pleasant for her audience that I feel has made the film remain relevant in its now 20-year life.

La Ciénaga is available for streaming on HBO Max and is also a part of the Criterion Collection.

Sources:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/?xml=/arts/2001/10/04/bfsf4.xml

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3449-lucrecia-martel-and-the-new-argentine-cinema

https://www.criterion.com/films/28113-la-ci-naga

https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/372-kleber-mendon-a-filho-s-top-10