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Virtual Exhibit Hall
The Sounds and Images of Colonial Indignity: About Lucrecia Martel's "Zama"
Mon, May 27, 10:45am to 12:15pm, TBASession Submission Type: Panel
Abstract
Much anticipated by audiences and critics, Zama, Lucrecia Martel’s last feature to date, premiered in August 2017 at the Venice Film Festival. While formally and politically consistent with her previous work, Zama clearly marks a new direction: it is her most expensive production to date; her first literary adaptation; her first period piece; the first to be shot digitally and using a 16:9 ratio; the first to be set outside her native Salta; the first featuring a male protagonist; and the first without a swimming pool. It’s a leap forward that does not so much capture a world through a heightened realism, which marked the Salta trilogy, but thoroughly re-invent it. Contrasting this new film with her previous oeuvre, this panel focuses on Martel’s process of adaptation; on her use of camera and storytelling, which de facto disrupts and de-narrativizes the films’ foregrounded formation; and the deconstruction of the colonial gaze through cinematography, mise-en-scène, and soundscape.
Embracing LASA’s themes of “justice” and “inclusion”, we want to demonstrate that, through cinematographic procedures, Zama shows the structural violence of colonialism in Latin America. Antonio Di Benedetto’s novel focused on Don Diego de Zama and his environment of European aspirations, which mostly ignored the people and the Indians enslaved by the colony. Martel, on the other hand, includes people of African decent and indigenous populations, mainly women, in almost every scene. In Zama, every sound and image tells the same sickening story, the story of the indignity of existence in colonial America.