The New Argentine Women Cinema: The poetics of transgression in Lucrecia Martel’s “The swamp”

Abstract

Lucrecia Martel's cinema constitutes in our view a cinema of transgression par excellence, a cinema that transgresses the rules of academic realism and a classical ‘cinema of action’ (Deleuze) as much as the traditional devices of the body, desire and look. The contribution focuses on the first feature by Lucrecia Martel, The swamp and tries to point out some of its major transgressive procedures. We can carve out at least three basic strategies of transgression: the radical and willful transgression of academic categories of a cinema of action, the subversion of the opposition between subjective and objective look and the subversion of traditional devices of desire and the body. The swamp is the opposite of a cinema of action. Action does not exist. Instead of presenting a linear plot, Martel confronts us with a labyrinthine visual texture in which several paths diverge and never lead us to a center. Martel chooses the fragile and disoriented perspective of a teenager who looks at the world. In this context, The swamp can be read as a celebration of the fall of the patriarchal law.