Lucrecia Martel, whose films include “La Ciénaga,” “The Holy Girl” and “The Headless Woman,” has been celebrated as guest of honor at the 54th edition of international documentary film festival Visions du Réel, where organizers had to switch to a larger venue to accommodate the large, enthusiastic audience attending her masterclass.
During the three-hour event on Tuesday, the acclaimed Argentinian filmmaker and leading figure of the New Argentine Cinema delved into her body of work and spoke about her upcoming hybrid project, “Chocobar,” her first foray into feature-length non-fiction.
“I am learning as I’m doing, that’s why it’s taking so long,” she quipped, with characteristic self-deprecation. “I am currently on version four of the edit,” she explained of her doc, which focuses on the real-life murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar. The film explores the subject of land ownership and indigenous struggles in Latin America, asking what has changed over the past five centuries.
“In this doc there are historical archives from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries because the more something is documented, the more it is adjusted to the rules of fiction,” she said.
“In former colonies, where what was written was completely controlled by the colonialists, the documents correspond to the fantasies of the colonialists. Colonialism did not end, the continuity of the colony is intact in terms of property – when you talk about eviction from territory, the indigenous people’s situation got worse when the country was decolonized.”
In 2020, the project won a Pardo prize in the Locarno Festival’s The Films After Tomorrow section, an award to help filmmakers whose productions were halted by COVID-19 (see interview with PvNew here).
Casting a look back at her first encounter with a camera, Martel explained that it all started when her father bought a video camera in the 1980s, which she used to make movies, in particular Westerns, with her siblings.
“My brothers were the cowboys, and I was very severe as a director, I would punish them: they didn’t understand that if they were shot and died, they couldn’t just get up again. I tried to get them to understand the rigors of the art, it was a violent experience,” she said with a smile, drawing laughter from the crowd.
It was during these first films that Martel, who is well-known for her sensitivity to the use of sound in her films, became aware of the importance of the soundscape, even when filming what she described as “boring scenes of my brothers doing their homework in the kitchen.”
“I realized that what’s interesting is what happens when the camera is not looking. When you think about sound, a scene you want to shoot, it’s more about thinking where the spectator will be when watching it: What will they hear and see? So, you need different angles with different depths – like whispering or the deep voice of a man, for example – otherwise it’s a ghost film with ghost sounds. When you think about it that way, you get different layers.”
Martel explained how the art of storytelling runs through her family, starting at a young age when her grandmother used to tell the children scary stories to keep them quiet during the afternoon siesta.
“She had this technique to keep us quiet. That’s how I learned about plagiarism because she would tell us stories written by famous Argentinian authors, but as if they had happened right next door,” she said, citing the example of a famous tale about a parasite that grows inside a pillow and sucks on the woman sleeping on it. “This happened to my grandma’s neighbor,” she went on, to the audience’s amusement.
Addressing the international audience in the Swiss town of Nyon, which has been home to Visions du Réel since 1969, Martel had a word of advice for aspiring filmmakers.
“Many of you are directors, scriptwriters – each of you has a different view of the world and many people are interested in seeing how you see the world, but if you just obey the canon of auteur cinema – the rules of cinema – none of that will be useful to you if you don’t elaborate on it. You need to look around yourself, you need to invent cinema, make it up, do something that’s not been done or created yet,” she said, adding: “It’s strange to be in a time when we are all consuming the same audiovisual narratives from the same platforms. To submit oneself to these universal rules on a planet so full of different people, places, languages, foods, is crazy: there can’t possibly be just one narrational system for a planet like this.”
A retrospective of Martel’s work was shown during the festival, where the filmmaker received an honorary award from the hands of French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who was BAFTA nominated for “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”
Visions du Réel runs until April 30.
