{"id":251035,"date":"2026-04-04T03:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/251035\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T03:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:28:08","slug":"lucrecia-martel-films-at-bampfa-the-urgency-of-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/251035\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucrecia Martel Films at BAMPFA: The Urgency of Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cinephiles said similar things about the then-radical films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais. They also spent hours, if you can imagine, discussing the movies\u2019 meanings and themes. Martel\u2019s films invite equally intense conversations.<\/p>\n

\"olderMar\u00eda Onetto and In\u00e9s Efron in a scene from Lucrecia Martel\u2019s \u2018The Headless Woman,\u2019 2008. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever you manage, through cinema, to cast doubt on the assumed nature of things, you might be approaching something really interesting,\u201d Martel said in a 2019 interview with the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s online journal post: notes on art in a global context<\/a>. \u201cAnd when you have done that once, there\u2019s no way back. Because once you become aware of what makes no sense, never again can reality manage to completely hide its quality of disguise.\u201d<\/p>\n

La ci\u00e9naga (The Swamp) is a fraught, impressionistic portrait of two decaying middle-class families. The Holy Girl<\/a> (2004) explores the twisted entanglement between a doctor attending a conference, a confused-by-religion teenager and her divorced mother. The Headless Woman (2008) follows a well-off woman in the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident. Zama (adapted from Antonio di Benedetto\u2019s 1956 novel) is likewise a portrait of privilege, stasis and desperation, although it more explicitly acknowledges colonial and (by extension) contemporary prejudice and exploitation.<\/p>\n

Because Martel resists convention, plot summaries only convey the surface of her movies. Nor can synopses convey the importance of the outdoors \u2014 the natural world, certainly, but the land as identification, inheritance, history \u2014 as an embedded theme. The recurring presence of Indigenous people in various roles (employees, servants, children on the side of a highway), whether acknowledged by the characters or not, is a reminder to audiences of Argentina\u2019s past and present.<\/p>\n

\"twoA scene from Lucrecia Martel\u2019s \u2018The Holy Girl,\u2019 2004. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)<\/p>\n

Martel\u2019s films are populated with adults so enmeshed in lives of pointless desperation that they lose touch with their children. If they can deny reality to the degree that their kids aren\u2019t a priority, they are surely indifferent to a larger historical and geographic perspective.<\/p>\n

There is an immediacy and energy to Martel\u2019s work that hooks us and commands our attention, and feels completely of the moment. And although her films are rooted in specific Argentine experience and history, their invocations of the intersection of power and gender, and power and class, feel especially relevant now to (North) American audiences.<\/p>\n

I have heard it described as cognitive dissonance. The comfort and complacency that has long existed in a certain strata of American society can\u2019t continue, not in the same way and with the same obliviousness, in a tidal wave of increasing inequality, reduced rights, ICE detention centers, ongoing war, bottomless lies and a collapse of the moral code.<\/p>\n

If we can recognize ourselves in Lucrecia Martel\u2019s characters \u2014 selfish, ridiculous, dumbstruck, unmoored, committed to a failed system \u2014 we might begin to live in the urgency of now.<\/p>\n

\u2018Lucrecia Martel: Un destino com\u00fan<\/a>\u2019 plays April 4\u201319, 2026 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2155 Center St., Berkeley). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cinephiles said similar things about the then-radical films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais. They also spent hours,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-251035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}