For Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, cinema is less a medium for storytelling than a tool for cognitive restructuring. In a world defined by uncertainty — where social safety nets like healthcare and education are often precarious — Martel argues that the primary function of film should be to challenge and reshape how we perceive our environment. "We cannot put off rethinking our ways of thinking, our habits, and our ideas," she recently observed, framing her work as a necessary disruption of the status quo.

This weekend, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) launches Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común, a retrospective held in conjunction with her residency at UC Berkeley. The program begins with a 35 mm screening of her 2001 debut, La Ciénaga (The Swamp). Set in Salta, Martel's own hometown in northern Argentina, the film serves as a discursive portrait of a bourgeois family during a sweltering summer. It is a work that famously eschews a central narrative in favor of an atmosphere of "elastic tension," where the threat of disaster is always present but never quite realized.

A cinema built on sensory disorientation

Martel's aesthetic is defined by a refusal to prioritize specific events over others, creating a non-hierarchical visual field that forces the viewer to navigate the frame without a guide. This lack of emphasis mirrors the disorientation of real life, demanding a more active, apprehensive form of looking. By dismantling the traditional hierarchies of the image, Martel suggests that we might begin to dismantle the rigid structures of our own social and political realities.

The technique is not merely visual. Across her filmography — from La Ciénaga through The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008), and Zama (2017) — Martel has consistently used sound design as a primary narrative instrument, often more decisive than dialogue or plot. Off-screen sounds bleed into scenes without explanation. Ambient noise competes with speech. The viewer is placed inside an acoustic environment that resists easy parsing, much as the characters themselves resist easy moral categorization. The effect is a kind of perceptual democracy: no single element of the film tells the audience where to look or what to feel.

This approach places Martel in a distinct lineage within Latin American cinema. Where filmmakers of the New Latin American Cinema movement in the 1960s and 1970s often sought to politicize audiences through direct address and didactic structure, Martel's politics operate at the level of perception itself. The argument is structural rather than rhetorical: if a viewer can be trained to see a frame without hierarchy, perhaps that viewer can begin to question the hierarchies that organize daily life outside the theater.

The significance of a university residency

That this retrospective is anchored to a university residency rather than a conventional festival circuit is worth noting. Academic settings offer a different kind of engagement — slower, more discursive, less constrained by the promotional rhythms of distribution. For a filmmaker whose work demands sustained attention and resists the logic of the highlight reel, the format is well matched. Berkeley's BAMPFA has a long history of programming that bridges film scholarship and exhibition, and a residency allows for the kind of extended dialogue — lectures, seminars, conversations with students — that a single screening cannot provide.

The timing carries its own resonance. Martel's films have always been preoccupied with social decay observed at close range: families that cannot sustain their own myths, provincial elites whose authority rests on little more than inertia. These themes tend to gain traction in periods of institutional uncertainty, when audiences are primed to notice the gap between the stories a society tells about itself and the material conditions underneath. The retrospective does not arrive in a vacuum.

What makes Martel's body of work endure is not a single formal innovation but a sustained commitment to a proposition: that the way a film organizes attention is itself a political act. Whether that proposition finds new purchase in an academic setting — whether it can move from the screening room into broader conversations about how images shape public life — is a question the residency is designed to test rather than answer.

With reporting from Criterion Daily.

Source · Criterion Daily