The cinema of Lucrecia Martel


Book Description

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.




Lucrecia Martel


Book Description

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


Book Description

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.




Zama


Book Description

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.




Refocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel


Book Description

Collects critical essays on the influential Argentine director Lucrecia Martel




On Women's Films


Book Description

On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand's Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden's Wanda; Valie Export's Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women's films to embrace, shape and question the world.




Intersectional Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism


Book Description

Intersectional Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism: Voices from the Margins explores the limitations of the transnationalist approach to feminism and questions the neoliberal emphasis on individual freedom and consumer choice as the central goals of feminist activism. The contributions to the volume discuss such varied topics as fiction by Edwidge Dandicat, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, and Diamela Eltit; visual art of Laura Aguilar and Maruja Mallo; films directed by Lucrecia Martel; a TV series based on a novel by María Dueñas; the art-activism of Ani Ganzala and Zinha Franco; and the philosophical thought of Gloria Anzaldúa. All chapters proceed from the belief in the continued usefulness of intersectionality as a valuable category of critical analysis that is particularly necessary at the time when the effects of neoliberal globalization are undermining many familiar categories of critical inquiry.




Cinema Today


Book Description

In Cinema Today, Elena Oumano has ingeniously crafted a conversation from her personal and individual interviews with a distinguished group of international cinema legends. She follows a lively symposium-in-print format, with the filmmakers' words and thoughts grouped together under various key cinema topics. Collectively these artists reflect on and explore issues and concerns of modern filmmaking, from the practical to the aesthetic, including the process, cinematic rhythm and structure, and the many aspects of the media: business, the viewer, and cinema's place in society.




The Film Archipelago


Book Description

How do the islands and archipelagos of the New World figure in Latin American cinema? Comprising 15 essays and a critical introduction, The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema addresses this question by examining a series of intersections between insular spaces and filmmaking in Latin America. The volume brings together international scholars and filmmakers to consider a diverse corpus of films about islands, films that take place on islands, films produced in islands, and films that problematise islands. The book explores a diverse range of films that extend from the Chilean documentaries of Patricio Guzmán to work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, and films by Argentine directors Gustavo Fontán and Lucrecia Martel. Chapters focus on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Mexican Islas Marías, and the Panamanian Caribbean; on ecocritical, environmental and film historical aspects of Brazilian and Argentine river islands; and on Cuban, Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Puerto Rican contexts. The Film Archipelago argues that the islands and archipelagos of Latin American cinema constitute a critically interesting, analytically complex, and historically suggestive angle to explore issues of marginality and peripherality, remoteness and isolation, and fragility and dependency. As a whole, the collection demonstrates to what extent the combined insular and archipelagic lens can re-frame and re-figure both longstanding and recent discussions on the spaces of Latin American cinema.




The Female Gaze


Book Description

Alicia Malone’s take on Influential Women in Film! “Once again Alicia Malone champions women filmmakers, opening the floodgates to a great new wave of female voices and creative vision.”―Maria Giese, filmmaker and activist #1 Bestseller in Movies & Video Guides & Reviews With the success of the Wonder Woman movies and the results following the outcry of the #MeToo movement, now is the time to highlight the female influences in film history previously left unheard! The voices of powerful women in old Hollywood—told. You may have heard the term “male gaze,” coined in the 1970s, about how art and entertainment have been influenced by the male’s perspective. What about the opposite? Women have been making movies since the very beginning of cinema. In The Female Gaze, Alicia Malone explores the ideas, thoughts, and views we learn from women from behind the scenes. What does the world look like through the “female gaze”? Learn about women who changed the world. Discover brilliantly talented and accomplished women directors, both world renowned and obscure, who have shaped the film industry in ways rarely fully acknowledged. Find mini-essays written by women like Alicia Malone and other diverse female film critics. Featuring past and present films, this behind the scenes guidebook is perfect for the Hollywood history fan in your life. Inside, observe: • How female directors’ voices shaped films and the film industry • The advancements and accomplishments of influential women in history and film • The lives of these women and the struggles they faced throughout Hollywood history If you liked Women in Art or Camera Man, you’ll adore the powerful women in history found in Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze.