Catalogue of Attributes Exercise: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga

I had this film on my watchlist for a long time, and it was recommended by a distant friend. Lucrecia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker who debuted with La Ciénaga and won 2001 the Alfred Bauer Prize (as part of its Silver Bear series of awards to a film that “opens new perspectives on cinematic art”) at the Berlin Film Festival. Martel was part of an Argentinian New Wave that began in the 2000s. She treats her films away from standard filmmaking modus operandi, as she puts the sound first before thinking about the image. In fact, one of the trademarks of this new wave was related to the way dialogue – “(…) as soundtracks, and many times their sound texture is equally or more important than the meaning of the words.” (Aguilar, 2008).

Lucrecia Martel’s first three films are a trilogy entitled Salta, which relates to the Northern Province the director is from. La Ciénaga (2001) is the opening title, followed by The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008). Her films opened an ongoing debate about Film Sound and the politics of women, class, race and gender.

La Ciénaga is a film about a miasmic family spending their summer vacation in a country near a jungle. It’s a portrait not only of young women but also of the ambiguous middle-class personalities in Argentina.

My First Impression

La Ciénaga, besides being the only way to be introduced to Martel’s cinema – for it being her debut and the beginning of the Salta Trilogy – is also the most challenging way. Watching this film relied on my all attention – one that I was probably not expecting to use. It opened my eyes to new ways of filmmaking, and my brain was trying to go through these virginal ideas without fearing missing out on any information.

It is a challenging film to watch, especially to listen to, considering that Lucrecia only thinks about framing once she gets on set. Sound is at an equal level as cinematography, and it feels like, as an avid film spectator, I have been indoctrinated into image-centric cinema. It feels contra natural. The image is fragmented – very few wide shots – and the sound is so expansive. It feels like it goes and never stops expanding. The sound picture is so complete that it is hard to understand. But subconsciously, I understood everything.

I am a native Spanish speaker, so I didn’t have the need to use English subtitles, but mid-way through the experience, I had to add them because I couldn’t understand a word of what the characters were saying. Not because of their accents but because of the way dialogues were treated. To be clear, this is not a technical issue and is far from a problem. This is an aesthetical decision.

This characteristic is something that goes against what Michel Chion defends as what cinema status quo is concerning sound:

(…) in voice recording what is sought is not so much acoustical fidelity to original timbre, as the guarantee of effortless intelligibility of the words spoken. Thus what we mean by vococentrism is almost always verbocentrism. Sound film is voco- and verbocentric, above all (…).

Chion, Michel – Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen

I could say that 30% of La Cienaga is more voco- than verbocentric.

Also, the acousmatic. What goes off-camera is far from a depiction of reality – it’s emotion itself. What I couldn’t see just made the meaning and the imagery stronger. Often, it happens the opposite when cinematography is the leader and sounds are props.

Posthumous Thinking

After watching the film, I found it hard to catalogue what I had just heard. The nature of the film takes some time to process and sink in. It often happens to me when I watch a movie, and it takes a least one night for me to speak about it. It took me a couple of interviews, articles and reviews to understand what was happening with sound.

As I started looking for more specialised information about the film, I realised the following things:

Many of these scholars are also profoundly researching Film Sound and ways of applying better practices and ideas in films. I read roughly 5 academic essays about La Cienaga, and I particularly enjoyed Jay Beck’s and Liz Greene’s analysis.

Jay Beck – Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2008)

Jay Beck’s article is a well-referenced analysis. It merges many of the scholars mentioned above with interviews and masterclasses Lucretia Martel gave throughout the past 20 years. Interestingly, the article begins with one of Martel’s quotes which is very similar to how Michel Chion begins his book.

The space you see on the screen is an (…) optical illusion (…) called “perspective”.

Voice-over narration from Martel’s “la pileta invertida”, in Francisco Gutiérrez, “Siete notas sobre cine.” DVD/BluRay supplement, “La Ciénaga” Criterion Collection, 2015

This book is about precisley this phenomenon of audiovisual illusion, an illusion located first and foremost in the heart of the most important of relations between sound and image (…)

“Projections of Sound on Image” (2019) in Audio-Vision: Sound on screen. Columbia University Press, p. 5.

However, Martel ends up saying that “sound waves touch the viewer” and that experience can be haptic (“sound is the tactile and three-dimensional component of cinema.”). Martel’s emphasis on sound is profound and exclusive, as it does not relate to scoring music or cinematography. As Beck refers, the Argentinian invites the spectator to become an active listener: preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback to show attentiveness to the message being presented. This listening, however, doesn’t refer to understanding the intelligibility of the voice. In fact, voice, according to Martel and dialogue should be deconstructed – demystifying language and its intelligibility and using voice as a texture. A sound effect. Concerning dialogue, another characteristic of Martel’s style is the overlapping dialogue and speech patterns, which is also a trademark of Argentinian New Cinema.

(The dialogue’s) sound texture is equally or more important than the meaning of the words.

Gonzalo Aguilar in Other Words: New Argentine Film

Jay Beck makes many other reflections on Martel’s use of sound in his article for The Cine Files. One last point he makes is using Aural Objects – “objetos sonoros”. This term (Aural Objects) is used by Christian Metz to describe sounds in films that function as objects onto themselves – the sounds that resist without linkage.

Liz Greene – Swamped in Sound: The Sound Image in Lucretia Martel’s La Ciénaga/The Swamp

In the previous article written by Jay Beck, the same refers to Liz Greene to be one of the experts on Martel’s Sound:

The Interplay among voice, sound effects, and ambiences in the opening sequence has been explored in depth, most notably by Liz Greene (…)

Jay Beck – Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2008)

In Liz Greene’s article, there is another type of analysis. While Jay Beck goes in-depth and catalogues the many aspects of La Cienaga‘s sound, Greene enlarges her perspective onto a more general view of its impact in terms of narrative and message. The sounds in the film go beyond their ontological meaning concerning their parent object.

The researcher mentioned something that astounded me:

We’re not allowed into the head of any of Martel’s characters; instead we are kept at a distance.

In other words, the comprehension of La Ciénaga’s sound world isn’t done by analysing the point of view or the point of audition. Instead, the whole integrity of the soundtrack – is a non-naturalistic sound full of exacerbated, loud hyper-real sound. Greene states that the soundtrack is so powerful that the Sound Image – the image created in the audience’s minds through these aural cues – shades the mise-en-scene. This was explained by Jay Beck when he stated that sound was the carrier of linkage of shots as this was framed very closely.