I would rank Zama, an Argentine period drama playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, alongside Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle, Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God, Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice as one of the major cinematic events of the decade. The film marks the long-awaited return of writer-director Lucrecia Martel, who hadn’t released a film since The Headless Woman in 2008. Martel’s first three features (which the Film Center will revive later this month) comprise one of the most original bodies of work in 21st century cinema, employing a visual and sonic language all their own to advance an idiosyncratic view of modern life. Based on a 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, Zama stands proudly beside Martel’s other films and takes her core thematic concerns (sex, family, class, nature, inertia) into new territory. The film was worth the wait.
Each of your films has a distinct aesthetic sensibility while feeling like part of a continuous body of work. How do you determine how your films will look and feel? Do you consider this while writing the films, during shooting, or during the editing?
This is related to what I told you before. Let’s imagine a world where just a few films are produced, but it’s necessary to see them several times. That world can exist, it can even be profitable. So why doesn’t this exist? Because of how we organized our system of industrial consumption, around the new, fast and abundant. This world could be otherwise, and I’ve not given up yet.
Zama is your first feature film to be set in the past. How much of your re-creation of the 18th century was determined by research and how much was the product of your imagination?
Poor Zama, he is listening more than watching, but they accuse him of voyeurism. This is one of the first scenes in the book, but not the first one. I like that scene because I see a man who misses conversations, family. I also perceive his desire, and the impossibilities that Zama has with that.
It was my Brazilian producer Vania Catani who put us in touch. They had worked together before. Rui is the ideal man for any difficult quest; he’s always in good mood, always open and willing to try something else. He’s an excellent partner. And well, anyone can see he’s excellent at cinematography as well. We took the decision to avoid candles and fire along the film. We wanted to think about the past without being able to lean and rest on those common places. That was very helpful.
