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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel

Edited by Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje and Paul Merchant

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£100.00

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About this book

Collects critical essays on the influential Argentine director Lucrecia Martel
  • Includes essays by prominent scholars from Latin America, the United States and Europe, and a new interview with Martel
  • Offers conceptually rich and politically engaged readings of Martel’s films
  • Covers all of Martel’s work, including short films and projects beyond cinema

Lucrecia Martel has made only four feature films to date, but has nonetheless become one of the world’s most admired directors. Her work is extraordinarily sensitive to the limits of sensory perception, the limits imposed by gender roles, and the limits of empathy and affect across social divisions.

This edited collection broadens the critical conversation around Martel’s work by integrating analyses of her features with the less frequently studied short films and her other artistic projects. This volume’s fresh, holistic approach to Martel’s career includes contributions from scholars in Latin America, Europe and the United States, and ends with a new interview with Martel herself.

Reviews

This book offers a very wide and thorough approach to Martel’s cinema and her other visual productions. The introduction and final interview provide very interesting and thorough information to any reader who wants to dive into Martel’s films [...] many of the chapters will surely become leading references in the study of her cinema.

A superb volume, full of new insights and innovative approaches. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Lucrecia Martel’s fascinating work.

Bringing together a select group of critics from Argentina as well as from Anglophone academia, this volume sheds new light on aspects and nuances that have gone unnoticed in the work of Lucrecia Martel, Latin America’s defining filmmaker of the last twenty years.

Table of contents

Metamorphosis and Persistence: An Introduction - Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje and Paul R. Merchant

  1. Speeds, Generations, and Utopias (Concerning Lucrecia Martel’s The Swamp) - Ana Amado
  2. Sounding Class, Race and Gender in Lucrecia Martel’s The Swamp - Dianna C. Niebylski
  3. Being Unable to See and Being Invisible: Unrecognizable, Inaudible Voices in Fish, New Argirópolis, and Muta - Ana Forcinito
  4. Muta: Monstrosity and Mutation - Mariana Souto and Mônica Campo
  5. Short Films as Aesthetic Freedom - Emilio Bernini
  6. Masculinity, Desire and Performance in The Holy Girl - Gonzalo Aguilar
  7. Other Areas: The Bio-Communal and Feminine Utopia of Cornucopia - Alejandra Laera
  8. Realities Made to Order. On The Headless Woman - Malena Verardi
  9. Fevers, Frights, and Psychophysical Disconnections: Invisible Threats in the Soundtracks of Zama and The Headless Woman - Damyler Cunha
  10. Martel Variations - Adriana Amante
  11. ‘They Smother You’ - Nora Catelli
  12. ‘A Kind of Bliss, a Closing Eyelid, a Tiny Fainting Spell’: Zama and the Lapse Into Colour - Deborah Martin
  13. Phenomenology of Spirits: Off-Screen Horror in Lucrecia Martel’s Films - David Oubiña
  14. The Conquest of the Uncomfortable. An Interview with Lucrecia Martel - Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje and Paul R. Merchant

About the contributors

Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha

Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha is an independent film researcher and programmer specialising in Latin American cinema. She is the author of Espaços em conflito. Ensaios sobre a cidade no cinema argentino contemporâneo (2019) and A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Resíduos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina (2014. Translation into Spanish: 2020).

Julia Kratje

Julia Kratje is a researcher at Argentina's National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the author of Al margen del tiempo. Deseos, ritmos y atmósferas en el cine argentino (2019) and editor of El asombro y la audacia. El cine de María Luisa Bemberg (2020), among others.

Paul Merchant

Paul R. Merchant is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (2022) and the co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020).

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