At the 55th New York Film Festival, the great Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel brought her latest unique venture, “Zama.” The film is a peculiar oddity, a tackling of Spanish history with deliberate inaccuracies. It’s an adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic novel but with layers of splattered fiction woven into its story. “Zama” is Martel’s first period film and, even more intriguingly, her first film with a male protagonist. That would be Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the 17th Century, who is settled in Asunción, and badly wants to be transferred to Buenos Aires.
Although “Zama” will surely be one of the highlights of the festival, the talk that the 50-year-old Argentinian auteur gave in New York immediately turned to her long-rumored science-fiction film which never got off the ground. “Yes, I was working on a science fiction film in 2009 and on through 2010 based on the iconic Argentine comic ‘El Eternauta..’ Suffice to say, it didn’t happen, and so I went straight to ‘Zama.’ For me, the beginning of ‘Zama’ was the end of ‘El Eternauta,’ ” she shared.
In case you’re wondering, the story in “El Eternauta” would’ve kicked off after a gigantic snowfall on Argentina and then follows a small group of survivors battling alien invaders and their army of giant insects. Oh, what could’ve been….
She went into seclusion and delved into the world of what would be her next feature film. “I actually escaped on a boat and read ‘Zama.’ ” However the failed comic sci-fi adaptation was still looming in her head. “I was reflecting on this comic, which was set to take place in the strange future of the 1950s, it also made me reflect on the past. When you’re working on a historical document it really constrains you to mostly just think about the past whereas science-fiction makes you think about everything, there are no constraints on it.”
READ MORE: Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama’ Is Difficult, Beautiful & Cruel [Venice Review]
Martel had a standstill with how she should tackle the novel— should she be faithful to the source material or imprint her own unique revisionist vision on it? “The novel is set in the seventeenth century, but it was written in the 1950s and I’m here producing this film in the 2000s, so it does beg to ask the question: What time is it actually set? So in that sense, narrated time is also occurring in the present, it has to make sense today.”
This all led Martel to rethink how she could tackle “Zama,” and to find a way to feel comfortable about falsifying history. Maybe this could, in fact, still be her “sci-fi” movie and yet still take place in the historical constraints of the past. “When I decided to do Zama I decided to tackle it with the same freedom I would have had with the sci-fi movie.” When asked to elaborate a bit on what might have been rumbling in her head at the time, in terms of making a 17th Century historical document with a dose of fiction, Martel says her reasonings were that, “for historical reasons, the story was written and told by white men so I didn’t mind falsifying it a bit, I would even say I took decisions that would contradict Latin American history, like representing the Catholic Church. For example, there was supposed to be a lot of furniture that had crosses on them but I decided to deliberately eliminate that.”
However, don’t expect Martel to stray too far away from the core themes of the novel. “It’s also about existential conflicts and that makes it not too far off from the novel, which is about the Catholic idea of waiting. This Catholic idea that the meaning of life comes at the end and that all the suffering we undergo acquires some kind of reason when it’s here. I wouldn’t say [the character of] Zama is an antichrist but he does push around that model.”
The frustrating nine-year wait between films for Martel enthusiasts has been a test of patience, but what we finally receive in “Zama” is a return to what made her such a central filmmaker in world cinema. There’s the exquisite, and original way she uses sound and image, but even more importantly, the harkening back to themes that are so dear to her such as that of the social and racial prejudice of the upper-class bourgeoisie. “The first thing to destroy another person is to not see them, the occidental propaganda, for example in which see Islamic violence, by which we judge other content in the ways they treat other people, negating other people through our vision of them, to justify violence, that’s all in ‘Zama,’ ” she said.
She sees traces of us all over her film, a world still filled with bigotry and hate, which almost seems to be in total denial about it. “To negate another person you have to draw them in a very general way, it’s like representing Indigenous people or slaves and represent[ing] them in this very simple way. Especially when the protagonist is a white man, we decided to leave a trace, or a gesture if you will, of the rejection of the submission.” She also saw something that irked her in American cinema. “In the American movies of the 1950s you can see black men performing tasks in ultimately submissive ways, I think you can only bring about this representation when the person creating the oppression is creating it.”
Just like she did in her previous films “The Headless Woman” and “The Holy Girl,” “Zama” is very much about the experience of the body, and Martel wants to show how the body manifests itself, but particularly when confronted with violence. “The reason why I make films, and the reason why people want to express themselves, is because we’re all alone in our bodies, we are alone on this island known as our body and we try to invent or find ways to leave that island, we do all these things to transcend the existential solitude that we feel. It would be difficult to imagine any human drama which does not have as its first point of contact the human body,” she explained.
“Zama” will be distributed in cinemas by Strand Releasing.
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