Feminine Adolescence and Transgressive Materiality in the Films of Lucrecia Martel

Abstract

This chapter considers girlhood in the films of acclaimed Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, arguing for its central importance to their political and aesthetic project. It explores the local proliferation of girl-images which followed in the wake of Martel’s influential début La Ciénaga/The Swamp (2001), and indicates some of their global resonances. Whilst Martel has come to be seen as a crucial player in the experimental-ism and aesthetic break with previous Argentine filmmaking that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s came to be known by the label “New Argentine Cinema,” it is also vital to delineate the correspondences that exist between her work and that of other recent Argentine women filmmakers frequently excluded from this canon. As Jens Andermann suggests: “[I]t makes sense today to look beyond the uncertain boundaries of an ‘independent’ generational project, which has been in many ways a critical fiction […]. [W]hat this critical narrative missed was the wider, more contradictory and multi-layered landscape of film-making in Argentina.”¹ I argue that Martel’s work has also played a crucial role in the development of a new feminist and queer cinema in Argentina, made by women filmmakers and focused in particular around young characters and girl-figures.

If the New Argentine Cinema has been characterized as arising from and responding aesthetically and thematically to profound political and economic upheaval, the increased liberalization of the law in relation to gender and sexuality since the “progressive turn” in Argentine politics has, in turn, been accompanied by a striking set of cinematic challenges to gender and