12 - ‘They smother you’

Summary

We owe the highest praise to Zama (2017) from the Iberian Peninsula to Serafín Fanjul, an incredible member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. In the 26 January 2018 Opinion section − a significant detail − of the ABC newspaper, he wrote:

They smother you: the movie starts with Don Diego slapping a native woman after playing the Peeping Tom, followed by a different native ruthlessly bound and harassed by officials […], and dismal brothels, an evil and negligent governor, slaves, the hunting of natives, domestic and personal filth galore, only to finish with a minor arc of the hunter becoming the prey, which not even some shots of beautiful landscapes manage to improve.

In Fanjul's oceanic and also fluvial ignorance, we recognise the most naive aspect of what we may call the Spanish foul mood, almost an obsession with dispelling the Black Legend. Serafín Fanjul accepts that he has not read Antonio Di Benedetto, whom he describes as the author of the ‘base novel’, or Lucrecia Martel (to whom he clearly ascribes no ‘reading skills’, to borrow the pedagogical term). That is why he ignores that, as the director herself has pointed out repeatedly, she drew her inspiration from Félix de Azara and his 1801 Descripción e historia del Paraguay y del Río de la Plata, and that, when fleshing out Zama, she would think of Azara rather than of Di Benedetto's character. As Martel has said in an interview:

Actually, that world is the Chaco Gualamba. With the exception of the Amazon, the Chaco is curiously the region which the colonisers took the longest to massacre and penetrate. Take Félix de Azara, who is the character I focused on to create Zama. He said in the late 1700s that he was alarmed at how clumsily the Chaco trees were being cut down. In 200 years, he said, the region would be completely devoid of trees. That place, which was ultimately destroyed by Creole skill [a note to Fanjul: Martel refers to the voraciousness which did away with the Chaco woods during the era of our republics], is the location I wanted for my film.