Zama (2017), Lucrecia Martel

Background

• Film adapts Antonio di Benedetto’s novel, Zama (1956)

• Don Diego de Zama is a Magistrate in Spanish colonial administration

• Posted to province in present-day norther Paraguay

• Se at the end of the 1790s (pre-independence)

Key scene: inter-title sequence (prisoner + fish story)

• Prisoner telling story used as extra-diagteic narration. Fish fighting to stay in water despite fact it’s being forced out onto river bank. Contradicting nature, fish belongs in the water

• Fish functioning as symbol of Zama/Spanish colonial project imposed on natural South American environment.

• Allegory of film’s broader narrative → imported European mannerisms: dress, manners, etc. Fixing wigs and dusting shoes unnatural in this rural environment.

Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ (1975)

• ‘Psychoanalytic theory (…) as a political weapon, demonstrating way unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ → revealing patriarchal order (discourse) of society.

• Male gaze → Martel pays attention to how different perspective of the gaze reveals certain social dynamics. Use of sounds and soundscapes to drive our vision and interpretation.

• Could Zama be said to be mobilizing an anti-colonial critique? And an anti-colonial gaze? Martel suggesting whole colonial project was a fantastical pursuit.

Domestic servants in Zama: Malemba and Dona Luciana

• Strategies of compositions → these people rendered invisible or irrelevant. Always visible but never at foreground; e.g. slave with fan, conveying heat, depth of feel, both elements visible, labour that goes into function of this society. Bodies of servants carrying around masters on chairs.

• Lighting: Martel directs our attention to where she wants it to be in frame.

• Same goes for sound, often can identify origin of noise, more than what we can see, don’t have access to it. Film is off-centre both visually and in sound.

Key Scene: fish underwater opening scene

• “Although that world is just as violent as the land above, in a reversal of terms it is the usurping creatures that struggle for life and the environment around them holds the power”

• Music is 1950s guitar pop by indigenous Brazilian group - provides ironic counterpoint to thrashing animals, locating spectator in viewing and listening position of the environment - elemental and sensory - eager to eject fish. (Galt)

• Static contemplative shots of riverbank

• Long takes with minimal action

• Symbolic landscape framing (Zama often placed between river and land)

Overall effect: camera embodies stasis - just like fish metaphor suggests.

Political animals (Galt)

• Offer route into Zama’s worldview - political aesthetic unfolds through organisation of looking relations and arrangement of figures (animal and human) in cinematic space.

• Zama overthrows structure of colonial visuality, enabling spectator to see more than one thing at once, more than one scene within the scene.

• Ecological should not be taken as apolitical, relevant to history, ideology, race, gender, capitalism and society.

Anthropomorphisation

• Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, behaviour to inanimate objects, animals or natural phenomena

Key Scene: llama intrusion

• Zama told he will not be transferred to Lerma.

• “Main characters” not actually most important individuals in the film, should reallocate attention to figures who seem to belong to the environment.

• Directs us to reconsider concepts of narrative focus/ground relations. Native animal trumps white man in this scene and across the film; figure of indigeneity, emergence of native lifeworlds into supposedly serious business of white men. (Galt)

Key Scene: Granddaughter scene/settlers’ story

• Another example of Zama’s lasciviousness/voyeurism (employment of the male gaze).

• Sound comes and goes, like Zama’s attention span?

• Dog whining, undermining what Zama is saying, speaking for the granddaughter, structures of colonial power.

• Can hear diagetic sound from outside the building, reminds us of film’s environment.

• Granddaughter’s resistance to Zama, will kiss dog but not him. Challenging his entitlement.

• Zama’s gaze fixed on her, hard to tell who he is speaking to because he is so distracted, shot-reverse-shot, placed in Zama’s position. Only time he turns his head in scene is to look at the granddaughter as she leaves.

• Puts on wig, hiding dishevelled hair, discrepancy between appearance and authority, insecure.

Granddaughter scene (Galt)

• Her resistance to colonial animalisation figured partly through her association with an animal. Zama sees indigenous woman as less-than-human, something he can easily possess, but film created to violence of this worldview.

• Dog whining - literally complaining through settlers’ story, echoes llama’s disruptive whinnies.

• Classic image of both female subjectivity and modernist cinema? Intersection of patriarchy with colonialism, granddaughter illustrates role of women’s forced sexual labour in production of this story and history.

• Granddaughter meets Zama’s gaze with quiet insubordination, disdainfully refuses to kiss him on way out. Film asks us to recognise her beauty yet see strength from outside patriarchal and colonial gazes that dominated cinema and art history.

• Indigenous men not presented in sexual situations throughout film, women’s sexuality only viewed in relation to colonial sexual violence. Own sexual agency and desires hidden from view, unavailable to representation and gaze of the outsider.

Key Scene: jungle scene / hunt for Vicuña Porto

• Formal arrangements of landscape shots works to decouple colonial fantasy from cultural significance of environment. Beauty of it like spectator taking pleasure in exotic spectacle of foreign environments. (Galt)

• Party swamped by vast environment, dense, obstructed jungle framing

• Handheld/unstable camera movements (compared to earlier rigidity)

• Disorientating spatial continuity

Overall effect: shift in camerawork reflecting Zama’s psychological collapse, environment swamping colonial order.

Key Scene: Zama’s mutilation/aftermath

• Detached, anti-climatic framing: violence is not dramatized but observed

• Muted reaction shots / minimal reaction cues

• Flat composition, even in extreme events

• Matter-of-fact mise-en-scene, avoiding heroic or tragic framing

Overall effect: camera denies catharsis, colonial narratives collapse into absurdity rather than sense of self.

Big-picture camera style (ties all scenes together)

• Decentred composition: Zama not privileged in the frame → undermines colonial perspective

• Sound-image disjunction: off-screen sound dominates → destabilizes spatial certainty

• Long takes + narrative stasis: time feels stretched and uneventful → reinforced theme of waiting

• Intrusive backgrounds: extras, animal, servant constantly interrupt → rejects clean visual hierarchy

• Elliptical structure: time jumps and unclear transitions → creates subjective, drifting temporality.

Overall: camera used to disorient, de-center power, immerse you in stagnation and uncertainty

Theme of “esperanza” vs “espera”

• Play on words

• One of Zama’s final lines mentions not giving “esperanza” to the bandits in search of treasure

• Stuck in Kafkaesque nightmare (paralysed by social situation, degradation and transformative power of alienation; e.g. The Metamorphosis / The Trial)