Lucrecia Martel’s Nueva Argirópolis: Rivers, Rumours and Resistance

Abstract

This article analyses Lucrecia Martel’s 2010 short film Nueva Argirópolis, which was commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. It explains how the film both inhabits yet contests the discourses of the modern nation state underpinning those celebrations, in particular through its representation of conflict between the state and indigenous groups. Its representation draws on images proposed by an earlier work, Sarmiento’s utopian tract of 1850, Argirópolis, images including the river and the island which in Martel’s film undergo a resignification, which overturns Sarmiento’s understanding of relationships between geography, capital, nation and ethnicity. Political and cultural debates of particular relevance to indigenous communities, such as access to land, as well as the way the indigenous are represented in state discourses, surface obliquely in this short film, which both represents diegetically the circulation and relay of rumours of indigenous resistance, as well as suggesting these formally through a soundtrack suffused with murmurs and barely audible sounds. The unsubtitled words of indigenous actors, as well as the authorities’ attempts at investigation of indigenous political activity through staging encounters of (failed) interpretation, and the subversive mimicry by indigenous activists of hegemonic ideas of national foundation are themselves muted, rumoured suggestions of a resistance which always lies just outside this short film’s visual grasp.

Keywords:

• Nation
• Sarmiento
• indigenous people
• water
• language

Notes

1. The project aimed to create ‘[u]na introspección y una poética acerca del quiénes quisimos ser y del quiénes hemos sido, cruzados con la realidad del qué somos y con la utopía del qué seremos’ (‘an introspective and a poetic look at who we wanted to be and who we have been, mixed with the reality of who we are and who we will be’). This text was included on the website http://www.25miradas.gob.ar (accessed 11 December 2014, no longer available).

2. Spivak is here glossing Ranajit Guha’s discussion of rumour in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, as part of her consideration of the work of the Subaltern Studies group on insurgency. Spivak does take issue with what she reads as the ‘phonocentrism’ of Guha's (1983), and the group’s, conceptualisation of rumour (1988, 212). For Spivak, rumour is in fact akin to Derridean ‘writing’, in its anonymity and plurality, its ‘power […] in the subaltern context […] deriving from its participation in the structure of illegitimate writing rather than the authoritative writing of the law’ (213).

3. Martel has been seen as a crucial player in the ideological and aesthetic break with previous styles of filmmaking in Argentina known as the New Argentine Cinema. She has released three feature films to date, La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), which have been the subject of ample critical attention. Since completing La mujer sin cabeza, Martel has made three short films: Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011), all of which share an interest in aquatic or riverine environments. These short films are aesthetically and thematically rich and exciting, and this article aims to bring one of them to the attention of a wider audience.

4. See Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (2016, 106–7).

5. [A river is not a singular thing] Martel, in Martin, ‘Interview with Lucrecia Martel’ (2011).

6. See Pettinaroli and Mutis (2013) (passim).

7. Other nineteenth century thinkers also dealt with the topic. See, for example, Varela, ‘Sobre la libre navegación de los ríos’ (1980).

8. There have been many discussions of the denigration of the Indian in Sarmiento’s thought. See, for example, Viñas (1983, 263–6).

9. The Desert Campaign was a military expedition of extermination of Indian populations in Patagonia led by the minister of war General Roca, in 1879.

10. The Paraná carries around 160 million tonnes of sediment and the landform, or delta, that results from deposits of this sediment on meeting the River Plate grows by between 50 and 90 metres per year.

11. The privatisation of water in Latin America, and resistance to it, was the subject of another 2010 film, Iciar Bollaín’s También la lluvia (Even the rain) (2010), which deals with the protests of people in Cochabamba, Bolivia, against the sale of the public water company SEMAPA to a transnational consortium controlled by the North American Bechtel.

12. As Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman note, Latin American cultural theorists including Jesús Martín Barbero have seen a liberatory potential in the Internet’s capacity to ‘circumvent traditional routes of power, influence and bureaucracy represented by established states’ (Taylor and Pitman 2007, 12).

13. Fabian argues that there is a ‘persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’. He calls this the ‘denial of coevalness’ (2002, 31), and judges it to be ‘a murky, ultimately political practice’ and a facet of anthropology’s ‘complicity […] with the colonial enterprise’ (35).

14. In Martin (2014).

15. In his work on Colombia’s River Magdalena O’Bryen suggests that rivers precipitate a ‘becoming-minor’, a ‘breaking with identity’, as well as a deterritorialisation of ‘the reified political and social maps around which nations are organised’, because of the way they are characterised by movement rather than fixity, flow rather than structure, pointing to ‘the river as a mise-en-scène for modes of becoming which are multitudinous’ (2013, 229).

16. Many of Latin America’s indigenous languages, even some with relatively large numbers of speakers, are in danger of dying out (Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America 2016).

17. For Berman and Wood, writing on the ethics of translation, ‘If linguistic otherness reminds us of all we cannot comprehend, including our “pre-ontological” ethical responsibility to those whom we do not, and cannot, ever fully know, translation (in the usual sense) can be seen only as a “comprehension,” a taking of power, and a reduction of otherness. […W]e have ethical grounds to be suspicious of the idea of translation, especially as it relates to communities, and their tendency to reduce others to sameness’ (2005, 90).

18. See Britton (1999, 164–5), who glosses Glissant’s discussion of relayed language in these terms.

19. [I can hear voices].

20. On the subject of orality in Martel’s work, see Porta Fouz, who argues that ‘El cine de Martel es el cine de las palabras’ (2008, 18). Martel herself has commented that ‘todo mi antecedente cinematográfico lo debo al lenguaje oral’ [I owe my entire cinematic heritage to oral language’] (cit. in Russell 2008, 3).

21. The director has said: ‘Me parece que estamos mucho más colonizados visualmente; estamos mucho más encaminados a ver determinadas cosas que a escuchar. El oído está todavía muy suelto. Uno escucha mucho más que lo que ve. Las contradicciones en la palabra, en la conversación, en el intercambio oral, para mí son mucho más perceptibles que en la imagen’ [I think that through vision, we are much more colonized; we are much more likely to see specific things than we are to hear them. Hearing is still very loose. We hear much more than we see. Contradictions in language, in conversation and oral exchange are to me much more discernible than they are in the image] (Martel, in Porta Fouz 2008, 22).

22. For further discussion of sound in Martel’s work, see Martin (2016), Russell (2008) and Greene (2012).