Lucrecia Martel (born December 14, 1966) is an Argentine film director, screenwriter, and producer whose feature films have frequented Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and many other international film festivals. Film scholar Paul Julian Smith wrote in 2015 that she is "arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur in Spanish-language art cinema outside Latin America" and that her "transnational auteurism and demanding features have earned her a hard-won reputation in the world art cinema festival circuit". Similarly, film scholar Haden Guest has called her "one of the most prodigiously talented filmmakers in contemporary world cinema", and film scholar David Oubiña has called her body of work a "rare perfection". In April 2018, Vogue referred to her as "one of the greatest directors in the world right now".
Her 2001 debut feature film, La Ciénaga (The Swamp), about an indulgent bourgeois extended family spending the summertime in a decrepit vacation home in provincial Salta, Argentina, was internationally highly acclaimed upon release and introduced a new and vital voice to Argentine cinema. David Oubiña called it "one of the highest achievements" of the New Argentine Cinema, a wave of contemporary filmmaking that began in the mid-1990s in reaction to decades of political and economic crises in the country. The film, Oubiña wrote, is "a rare expression of an extremely troubled moment in the nation's recent history. It is a masterpiece of singular maturity".
Martel's succeeding three feature films received further international acclaim: the adolescent drama The Holy Girl (La niña santa) (2004), the psychological thriller The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008), and the period drama Zama (2017).
Early life The second of seven children, Martel was born and raised in Salta. Her father Ferdi owned and operated a paint shop, while her mother Bochi dedicated herself to the family. Her parents met in university (where Ferdi studied science and Bochi studied philosophy) and got married at 24 years old. Eventually they left their careers and settled in Salta.
In primary school, Martel's uncle helped her develop interests in mythology, Greek, and Latin languages. In fifth grade, she set her sights on gaining admission to the elite, "ultra-Catholic" secondary school Bachillerato Humanista Moderno, because it was the only school in Salta that offered classes in ancient languages. Her parents opposed the school because of its elitist tradition which they felt reinforced class differences, but, because of the school's prominent alumni and Martel's intellectual curiosity, they did not stop her from her pursuit. Eventually, Martel passed the demanding entrance exam and enrolled in the school in the sixth grade. Since she came from a "solidly middle class" family, as she stated in a revealing 2008 interview with BOMB Magazine, Martel felt like an outsider at the school. Her peers, she said, attended the school because their families expected them to, while she only attended it so she could study Greek and Latin. In a 2018 interview with Gatopardo magazine, her mother said that at the school Martel was a "radical and challenging" honor roll student who excelled in science.
In her home, Martel says "there was a very deep devotion to storytelling." Her father, mother, and maternal grandmother Nicolasa were "very good storytellers" and would tell her and her six siblings "lots of stories" to keep them quiet in bed while the adults took their afternoon siesta. She was especially fascinated by the way her grandmother used different sounds, tones, and carefully selected pauses to establish "atmosphere" in her scary, fantastical stories. "As a child," Martel says, "and even today, I have always been captivated by the form not only of stories and storytelling, but also of conversation and the way people pause and leave space for someone to intervene. All the ways that, especially when you're a child, you're charmed and steered just by words alone." She says that her fascination with this "world of conversation" in oral storytelling is what fueled her passion for cinematic storytelling and the emphasis on sound in her films.
Martel first used a video camera when she was "15 or 16" years old, she says, after her father bought one to store memories of their large family. "A very big investment for us," she says of the camera, nobody in the family used it but her. "I began recording conversations and everyday things: family stuff," she says. "My family got used to it because I was always filming...There are two or three years in our family life where I don't appear at all in videos or photos, because I was always behind the camera. It was the discovery of something that fascinated me, but it didn't seem to me then that my future could be related to that."
When she was 17 years old, she accompanied her father to Buenos Aires and attended a cinema projection of Camila (1984), a film written and directed by María Luisa Bemberg and produced by Lita Stantic about a real and tragic love story between a priest and a young lady of Buenos Aires high society. Impressed with the film's women creators and mainstream success, Martel says that as a result of the viewing she "thought the cinema was a woman's job", a "confusion", as she describes it, that "stayed with [her]" for years.
Education
Upon graduating from secondary school, Martel intended to study physics at the Balseiro Institute, but she "started to have doubts" and instead enrolled in an art history course at the National University of Salta, as well as in chemical engineering and zoology courses in Tucumán, a nearby province. "Suffer[ing] uncertainty" and trying to decide "what to study or do with [her] life", she farmed pigs that year, too—breeding, raising, and selling them—and even considered making it her future livelihood. However, poor sales of just two pigs per month proved it would not be a feasible career option for her.
At the end of that school year, Martel traveled to Buenos Aires to study advertising at the Catholic University. The program combined creativity and technique, so she and her family thought it could work for her. Although Martel says she lost her Catholic faith at 15 years old, at the university she volunteered with Catholic Action and spoke against abortion. Feeling uncomfortable, she decided to distance herself from the faith and leave the school to pursue the new communication sciences degree program at the University of Buenos Aires. She describes the program as "a typical post-transition-to-democracy program made to train journalists and media analysts. Of course, it was an area of Argentine culture that had been hit especially hard by the years of dictatorship. There were very interesting professors who were returning from exile at the time, people with more left-leaning ways of thinking. It was a good moment for the program because no one quite knew exactly what this career entailed." She completed all of the degree requirements, she says, but "didn't do any of the paperwork toward receiving the [actual] degree". However, she believes that her time at the school "helped [her] out a lot".
Not wanting to neglect her interests in the technical and the creative, while at the University of Buenos Aires she enrolled in a nighttime animation course at the Film Art Institute of Avellaneda (IDAC) located about 5.5 miles away, which Martel describes was a significant commute at the time. "Something of the scientific spirit in me remained," she says regarding her decision to enroll in the school, "and I liked how animation was very technical, precise, and controlled". At the school, she started to meet people who were studying film and began to produce short films.
While at IDAC, she decided to take the admission exam for Argentina's only state-sponsored film school at the time—the National School of Film Experimentation and Production (ENERC). Since over 1,000 people signed up for the exam and only 30 vacancies existed at the school, applicants were required to take a "huge qualifying course", which Martel says she spent months preparing for. After she "finally got in", the school closed due to lack of funds. "When school was supposed to start," she says, "the economic crisis was already so severe that there weren't any professors or materials. We didn't have classes. The only real possibility was to study autodidactically, to watch films and analyze them. I watched Pink Floyd: The Wall 23 times, analyzing the montage. We would watch a film many times to learn how it was edited. I was learning in many different ways—participating in short films that friends were making, helping with production or photography, anything just to keep learning." Martel has maintained in interviews that she was self-taught.Telegraph. Film review of La Ciénaga, October 2001.
Career
Early career
While attending IDAC, Martel directed the animated short films El 56 ("The 56") in 1988 and Piso 24 ("24th Floor") in 1989.
As a film student at ENERC, Martel directed No te la llevarás, maldito ("You Won't Get Her, Bastard", 1989), a short film about a jealous boy who fantasizes about killing his mother's boyfriend. Film scholar Deborah Martin wrote that in the film, "there is an exploration of the subversive power of children that would become a crucial feature of [Martel's] later work, as a little boy's murderous Oedipal feelings towards his mother's lover are fully unleashed in a fantasy he lives out through his drawings."
Another short film Martel directed as a student is La otra ("The Other", 1990), a documentary about a man who talks about the joys and sorrows of his life as a transvestite as he dresses up as a woman to sing tangos at a nightclub.
Next, Martel directed Besos rojos ("Red Kisses", 1991), a short film based on a real-life police case between three lovers caught in a love triangle.
Martel says that "just when [she] was starting to think that [a career in] film was impossible, that it was time for [her] to get a (real) job," she entered a public script competition organized by the Argentine National Film Board (INCAA), the grand prize for which was the budget to produce a short film. Martel won the contest and, as a result, was able to produce her breakout film Rey muerto ("Dead King", 1995), a violent western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto in provincial Salta. It went on to win Best Short Film at the 1995 Havana Film Festival.
Rey muerto was exhibited in Argentina as part of a larger omnibus film called Historias breves ("Short Stories", 1995). Martel explains that this compilation film was "unprecedented in the country" and came about after all the directors of the other winning short films in the script contest banded together and visited the INCAA headquarters in Buenos Aires repeatedly to ask the contest organizers to premiere all the short films as a string of films in a theater. Martel says that she and her fellow filmmakers "sat for hours until [the contest organizers] would meet with us. We argued that it was a waste of state funding if they didn't exhibit the finished films." As a result, the films were exhibited on the dedicated screens of the national public circuit run by INCAA. Martel says that the premiere of Historias breves was "very successful" and drew 10,000 viewers. "It also inspired people," she says, "to study filmmaking and to start making shorts. It was a really important phenomenon in spiritual terms. Curiously, many of the directors who began their careers at the time—'95 or '96—are still making films today. That event inaugurated the activity of a lot of directors, and also a lot of young people's interest in film." Film scholar Haden Guest says it helped inaugurate the New Argentine Cinema and "is really where the [movement] began".