11 - Martel Variations

Summary

To Natalia Brizuela

IMPERFECT CINEMA

Lucrecia Martel's cinema is an act of thinking, and I do not mean that cinema is for Martel an act of thinking, because I do not know if she considers or would admit that. Even if she does believe so, albeit intermittently, how deliberate and evident a filmmaker finds what he or she does is irrelevant; what is arguably more fascinating is the fact that Martel's cinema is, or becomes in and through its very realisation, an act of thinking.

I also want to stress that I do not say that cinema is for Martel an act of thought, because I want to focus on the action, and particularly on the progression, on the drift, on the time which becomes active in the succession. Cinema as an act of thinking ‐ which in its case manifests itself as a narrative or as poetics ‐ which entails, ultimately or primarily, thinking of cinema as writing and of writing as essay-writing. Thus, the essay-like dimension of Martel's cinema manifests itself as materiality and as duration, rather than as a subject, as the deployment of a continuum. Or, perhaps, of an aspect, in the grammatical sense of the word: not making reference to the concrete time in which things happen or happened (that would not be the aspect, but the tense), but to the actions’ internal duration. It does not point out the moment when something happens, but the process of happening. Martel states:

I don't care at all about telling stories, but I am interested in perceiving a process. When you watch a movie, you don't sit for two hours in front of a story: you sit before a complex process in which another person tries to reveal his or her perception of an outside.

Thus, aspect does not reveal when something happens, will happen or happened, but how complete that action is, will be or was. And, if there are perfective actions, in the sense that they are finished, concluded (regardless of whether that conclusion takes place in the past or in the future), Martel's cinema installs itself (and I choose that verb as long as it is not construed as stillness, but as a way of dwelling, mobile, changing and fluctuating) in imperfective actions: the unfinished ones, the durative ones.