La Cienaga: Lucrecia Martel’s Tactile and Aural Cinema

This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on April 10, 2020.

After spending a little under two hours immersed in La Cienaga’s subtropical climate in northwestern Argentina’s city of Salta, I began to embody the tensions and frustrations conveyed in the film. Was the heat getting to me? Or the extreme proximity of multiple bodies after weeks of self-isolation and quarantine? The former was certainly the case for Lucrecia Martel’s characters, but their transferral of emotions to me wasn’t simply that — it was affective in eliciting my tactile and aural senses rather than the visual mode that I’m so used to activating during film screenings.

Martel’s camera has a mind of its own. It’s an unseen character in the film, landing its gaze upon half-hidden characters to leave the viewer curious about what’s happening beyond the frame just as much as the action contained within.

The camera is trusted. It brings viewers right up against the unguarded bodies and sun-kissed skin of characters on screen, but that trust is broken when spectatorial distance is eliminated. Instead, uncomfortably intimate close ups emphasize the sensory experience over the coherence of a traditional narrative.

The narrative, if there is one, is immediately redirected after a tension or potential point of plot progression is introduced. The result of all these subversions of expectations surprisingly brings us a few steps closer to reality as it’s experienced beyond the confines of cinema. But as La Cienaga demonstrates, a film that exists within the very confines that it seeks to break serves to create more disturbance and repression for an audience that’s actually waiting on a moment of revelation and catharsis.