Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain/ France/Netherlands/Mexico/ Portugal/USA) — Masters cinema-scope.com /cinema-scope-online/zama-lucrecia-martelargentinabrazilspainfrancenetherlandsmexicoportugalusa-masters/ Blake Williams
By Blake Williams Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) “[Cinemas of the senses] generate worlds of mutating sounds and images that often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, and where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main point of reference. One way or another, the cinema of sensation is always drawn towards the formless: where background and foreground merge and the subjective body appears to melt into matter.”—Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation Writing in 2007 on sense and the aesthetics of transgression in the so-called New French Extremity, Martine Beugnet laid out how a cinema of sensation—that is, one that privileges filmic texture, affect, and embodiment over and above narrative—could speak to a nation’s specific questions of identity and difference. “Film is, by definition, the medium of being as change,” she says, borrowing liberally from Deleuze and his notion of “becoming.” In early 2000s work by “extremists” like Philippe Grandrieux, Bertrand Bonello, Claire Denis, and Olivier Assayas, the expectation that a movie should be grounded in a “story” was abandoned, and they turned instead to the unconscious, to the interiority of dream places and non-spaces, and it was there where cinema was able to engage with more archetypal dimensions. By creating a cinematic experience that connects us to pre-objective experiences—those that operate before our desires and drives become encoded and organized by language—these filmmakers effectively enable the viewer to have first-hand, impulsive encounters with “originary worlds”: formless spaces where bodies exhibit traits both human and animal, placed in a seemingly permanent process of mutation. In this space, questions of difference become matters of fact, and the notion of the “individual” becomes essentially nonexistent. Containing multitudes, everything is an Other—even to itself. As generative as her discussion was for this collection of French directors, Beugnet’s thesis, which participates in broader and deeper philosophical investigations into tactility and perception, has also been productively applied to other filmmakers and movements. This is especially true for national cinemas in South America and southeast Asia (namely, Argentina and Thailand), where many artists actively grapple with the casual sense of chaos, displacement, and Otherness that lingers in everyday culture, where images of life cannot be unmarked by spectres of colonization, racism, and barbarism. But there is a significant difference. The images and sensations evoked in the work of these nations’ leading art-cinema auteurs most frequently suggest abstractions 1/5