La Ciénaga
Why we chose this film
La Ciénaga (2001) reminds us of the times when the anticipation and excitement for the holidays ahead turn into endless hours of boredom. Where leisure is converted into a form of punishment.
We begin to experience the movie and its characters as mere observers until the overbearing unease invades our minds and bodies.
The lack of space and intimacy makes us wonder where our own boundaries lie and we realise how important it is to protect our personal space.
With summer approaching we all wonder how our summers will be spent.
Whether we will gather with family and friends or choose to be on our own, we owe it to ourselves to honour the time we are given and spend it meaningfully.
Film Summary
Lucrecia Martel's remarkable debut film, ''La Ciénaga,'' shows how geography and climate also determine human fate. Whether we see it or not, we all live in nature. In “La Cienaga” nature looms over like malevolent giant exhaling fetid vapours.
Set in the high plains of north-western Argentina during the dog days of summer, the movie portrays an ominous semi-tropical environment of greyish mountain peaks shrouded by ragged clouds. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and birds of prey circle the sky. Sudden tropical downpours turn the land around the crumbling estate where much of the film is set into a vermin-infested bog.
Instead of high drama, ''La Ciénaga'' presents a relentless accumulation of small, grinding incidents that portray Argentina's provincial middle class adrift in a self-pitying limbo. We learn about the characters by eavesdropping on their telephone conversations and their desultory bickering.
As ''La Ciénaga'' perspires from the screen, it creates a vision of social malaise that feels paradoxically familiar and new. Anyone who has wilted during the dog days of summer will recognise its mood and identify with the characters' pervasive sense of exasperation.
Cinematic details
Sound
In this approach, sound is never a redundant accompaniment to what is on-screen. Few contemporary filmmakers have explored the possibilities of that element of filmmaking as expressively. Ice cubes tinkling in a glass, chairs being dragged across the floor, thunder, gunshots: sounds give the images a disturbing dimensionality. The director often does not storyboard, but she always plots out her soundscape before shooting: “It is sound that drives me,” she said. “Image is a way of avoiding something that I want to hear but not to see.” What is visible is there to avoid showing something else. Without calling this a horror film, we can say that La Ciénaga uses the genre’s mechanisms that foreshadow the emergence of the monstrous. Something terrible awaits crouched outside the frame, and, at any moment, catastrophe could burst in. (Criterion)
Cinematography
The cinematography in “La Ciénaga”, in combination with an obtrusive use of a natural soundscape, crushes the viewer with an unrelenting sense of drowning and images of decay. The sounds of omnipresent thunderstorms, and the visuals of the wet, thick rainforest, along with the dominating mountainsides, offer little in the way of respite from this the atmospherically rendered space of invaded privacy. As viewers, we feel we are invading the privacy of the family, who themselves have precious little privacy. The shots are claustrophobic and cluttered; there are simply too many people in the frame, too many sweaty bodies, and not enough space to breathe. (Sense of Cinema)
“There are many stories in La Ciénaga, and the film hints at them all without committing itself to any. Rather than an ensemble piece in which narrative threads are interwoven, this is a movie swamped in potential narratives.”
Criterion
