03 · 06 · 26

“I want cinema to remain independent of power”: Interview with Lucrecia Martel

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

Lucrecia Martel is undoubtedly one of the great contemporary filmmakers. As you will notice in our conversation, her way of speaking reveals the authentic mark of intelligence: a theoretical mind that knows it cannot know everything and that questions more than it judges. Martel often clarifies the concepts I offer her, but she also corrects herself in search of a truth that prevents her, in her films and in conversation, from reaching definitive conclusions.

This is where the ambiguity in The Headless Woman (2008) comes from: did a bourgeois woman run over a child, a dog, or nothing at all? Is the protagonist's guilt actually a social conscience erupting in the form of madness? It is difficult to describe the plots of The Holy Girl (2004) or The Swamp (2001) as anything more than images that capture the speech and imagery of the Argentine petty bourgeoisie, where Martel grew up. It is in the things her characters say, in the ways they refer to people from social strata considered inferior, that we understand the director's ideas, but never from a moralizing perspective.

The day before this interview, I had the honor of moderating a meeting between Martel and the members of the IIII Film Development Lab for Filmmakers of Indigenous and African Descent in Mexico, and I ended up being a happy spectator of a debate on identities, as Martel does not consider herself a spokesperson for her gender, sexual orientation, class, or ethnic group. Her stance is not reactionary: she knows that as a lesbian woman, her cinema will lean toward a certain perspective, but it cannot encompass all lesbian individualities. And that is precisely why she refuses to describe her latest film, Nuestra tierra (Our Land, 2025), as indigenous cinema.

Lucrecia Martel's first feature-length documentary observes the events following the murder of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Diaguita people in Tucumán, Argentina. While trying to peacefully defend his community from dispossession for mining purposes, a group of ex-police officers hired by landowner Darío Luis Amín opened fire, killing him and wounding two other men from the community. Martel cannot place herself in the indigenous perspective; this would also be a dispossession, so she captures, from her perspective, the ruling class and exposes it without having to intervene as a narrator: the images contain enough to tell us who they are. The montage, of course, obeys a perspective, a militancy; Martel does not deny this, but for her, the image is enough to show the facts, for that is the vocation of cinema.

Below you can read the complete conversation, edited for better understanding.

FICM: I would like to start with an idea you outlined yesterday in the discussion at the Indigenous and Afro-descendant Filmmakers Laboratory. You said very emphatically, and I found it very interesting, that Nuestra tierra is not an indigenous film.

Lucrecia Martel: Because I think that label should only be used when the authorship belongs to the communities or to someone who belongs to a community. And that's not the case here. And also because what the film narrates, what it constructs, or tries to unravel, is actually the hoax of white Latin American culture. Let's call it white, for lack of a better term, but it is the dominant Latin American culture. What are the lies used to dispossess communities of their territory, to mitigate the possibility of justice? That's what it is. Since we did a film workshop, there are many images in the film that were made by young people from the community, but if they did not participate in the editing process, we cannot say that it is an indigenous film.

FICM: I am struck by something in the style of the film that corresponds to the rest of your filmography: there is no authorial intrusion. That is, it is not like Werner Herzog's cinema of narrating, participating, appearing on screen.

LM: Which I love!

FICM: But you seek, I think, to disappear a little, not from the frame.

LM: No, I don't know if I disappear, because I think it's obvious that the editing is not invisible in the film, that the soundtrack is added and obviously elaborate. Or at least, perhaps, I don't want to appear with my voice or with a voice-over or with text, but the presence of the director in a film is undeniable, always, in every decision, in every detail, in the narrative order.

FICM: Something I really like about the film is that there are these moments when certain characters are humanized through photographs. I found it interesting to use the archive to bring them to life. How did you come up with this?

LM: There are things that you have no way of telling, or where perhaps photography is the best way to share a life experience with the viewer. And since, luckily, we were fortunate that several people in the community told us about each photo... the photo is no longer just that image, but rather the person's evocation of it and a lot of other things, so that the voice pierces the image and transforms it into something else. Or not into something else, but into something much more than that image. And in addition, we add to that the sound space where the person is, which tells more about the science fiction sound space—because it doesn't exist—of the photograph where we use a lot of materials that were on the phone cards that the community members shared with us. And some others that we produced. So all of these things together make the photograph... and the fact that you don't see the frame of the photograph, that is, you don't see the photograph as an object on paper, but rather it encompasses the entire cinematic space, so to speak, of the screen. And all of these things denature the photograph and transform it into something else. That is the desire that we have found to work. 

FICM: And in contrast, I also find it interesting to see that these characters, let's say, from the white, petty bourgeois Argentine order, are constructed on the basis of certain statements. I remember very well the scene in which a lawyer says that your film is a circus. I found it interesting that she conceived Lucrecia Martel's documentary as a spectacle.

LM: But those people don't know who I am, and it doesn't matter if they do. What I think is that what that lawyer had was perhaps fear. It was a kind of reality show or something like that, and she was afraid, I don't know, or maybe she was bothered by us being there, but she didn't insist on it much afterwards. They didn't oppose it, I think. The judge was very forceful. It was an oral and public trial.

FICM: But within the production, I also find it interesting to see, for example, the prejudices of these characters. In fact, I think one of the most serious things they do is when they try to somehow take away the identity of the indigenous people by saying that they cannot be understood as such because they do not use their language.

LM: I think that if that embarrasses us, it's because we are like those people. Because our urban Latin American culture is in a position of power or control of public administration, in whose hands lies the power of our countries. And I think that embarrasses you, feeling so similar to those people. I don't mean that those people aren't exceptionally shameful, but that we are similar to them in a very everyday way. That's what I think.

FICM: Do you think cinema can embody a form of power in that sense? That it can help combat this type of discourse?

LM: I wish... I don't know how this would work, how it would be possible, but I wish that cinema did not participate in power, because unfortunately, in the power structure we know, when power appears, the desire to impose oneself on others appears. And I hope that cinema serves to converse, to exchange ideas, and not to impose itself or to assert one truth above all else. Hopefully not, I wouldn't want that to happen with the film.

FICM: And what would you like to see happen? What reaction would you like to provoke?

LM: I think conversation, and that. And yes, hopefully the film will allow us to see certain things we see in one way in another way momentarily, even if only for a second. To have a little spark of insight that things could be different.

FICM: Now, making films, especially making certain decisions, involves a way of freeing oneself from that power. There is a hegemony of the cinematic. We are told that, narratively, formally, there is a correct way, an appropriate film. And I think about this because you have these drone images that I find very interesting, including one where a bird crashes into it, and towards the end you have these very free movements. Do you feel that style can at least propose a liberation?

LM: You know? I wouldn't be able to identify or separate style from content, form from substance. I think those are ways of talking or of being able to identify things, but they're not how I work, at least. For me, the organization of sound and image... I can't separate it into style and content, but rather you see a trial, you film a trial, and in what you filmed and what happened in front of the camera, and in what you did behind the camera, there is a structure. Possibly full of prejudices, possibly full of historical errors, but there is a structure and you dive into that structure to find that or something else. For me, the structure comes from immersing myself in the material with Jero (Jerónimo Pérez Rioja), who edited the film, and Miguel Schverdfinger, who was there at the beginning and who organized a lot of material and started that process. Later, as he was in Mexico, it was difficult to continue working together. And so Jero continued and immersed himself in the film with me. And that's it: you immerse yourself in material that is images, that is sounds, and there you begin to find a structure. It's not that you come with a structure and say I want this material to respond to this structure. I think this film would be totally different if we had followed that path.

FICM: Would you say, then, that cinema is more a product of a certain spontaneity, that it is something that is found rather than planned?

LM: Spontaneity? No, because it takes a long time and you make an enormous effort. It's not something you find quickly, it doesn't just appear by chance. You search, search, search, try, try, try, try, try until suddenly you say, “Something's happening here.” That's how it is. It's the same effort that the viewer makes when watching the film. What do you offer the viewer? An immersion in sounds, and the sounds generate a situation of perception of the image. So, let's say, when I make films (and it's the same in documentaries and fiction), I think: what soundscape will the viewer be immersed in and how will that condition the reading of the image? And thinking about that, it's not that this way is better than the other, but it's the way I've worked with so far. And then that frees you from a lot of prejudices or formulas that cinema has. It puts you in a more uncomfortable place, it forces you to think more, it forces you to try more. But you can also get slightly different results. So...

FICM: This brings us to a certain idea of ambiguity, doesn't it? Because it's something Pasolini said: that cinema differs from written language because there is a certain precision there. But cinema, by moving, by working with images in the viewer, is a more mysterious language.

LM: I think that image and sound have that possibility, but I also think you can bend image and sound and convert or flatten them and transform them into something that defines what is true and what is not true. And I prefer, as you called it, the realm of ambiguity, where it's not so easy to assert something. Because if everything is asserting and asserting and asserting, it's very difficult to learn anything about the world, so you have to stop asserting in order for something to be revealed.

FICM: Do you think a film fails if it gives the viewer certainties?

LM: It bores them, and the viewer is healthy enough to forget it. There are a lot of films that keep the viewer in front of the screen. But the viewer gets up from their seat and forgets because deep down they want to take care of their body and their health, and they forget because it's useless information. I think it's very difficult for a film, as a whole, to be a revelation. It's small moments, seconds, and they work differently for each viewer. So what is the job of the director and the entire team working on a film? It's to see if, by working on the image and the sound, we can achieve small moments of altered perception about something, about a subject, about a way of seeing things, about a way of listening. That's right, but I haven't seen a movie that's spectacular throughout: sparks, sparks! I don't know how many hours I've spent making movies in my life, and there must be seconds where I achieve that possibility. And on top of that, I'm not even sure which seconds those are, because it differs depending on the viewers. So...

FICM: And well, to finish up, precisely with this idea of ambiguity, I find the image you open Nuestra tierra with very interesting, of the entire planet seen from space by a satellite, which in some way refers to the title.

LM: What I wanted was to remember that ephemeral thing that is being lost in the universe. That we are a speck in the universe. And then there's this crazy presence of technology watching us from outside, which is obviously replicated with drones and all that. But that's because I think that sometimes this problem is about land ownership, it's about the usurpation or extraction of other people's space. We thought that starting this way would make it easier to understand that it's not a problem of indigenous communities; it's a problem that goes beyond indigenous communities. I always say this because I think it's important. The fact that young people don't have access to their own homes is not separate from the problem of land usurpation from communities; they are not separate things. Or that people live crammed together in the city. These are things that have quite similar roots, if not the same ones. So: that, to put it bluntly, to start from afar, you see? It was a slight possibility that that thought, that feeling, would arise. It is not something specific to communities.