chapter 2

Speeds, Generations and Utopias:

On The Swamp
Ana Amado

T ime has a stellar role as a succession, as the chronological order or duration

of a story, but it can also sediment into a density or thickness different from
the targeted vector model. A one-way direction which the temporal convention
takes from the human biographical story, nestled between birth and death, and
by which time, in cooperation with space and point of view, is subjected to a
normalisation and a standardisation of stories and images which are eminently
desirable for captive viewers. This is particularly true in film, where space and
point of view are literal concepts and require the mediation of movement and,
particularly, of staging to ensure the fluidity of a malleable syntax, the illusion of
seamless continuity. It is based on this summation of dependences, this indirect
representation of temporality, on which Gilles Deleuze reflects as a matter of
‘emancipation’, of liberation of the image from time, and its indirect represen-
tation inasmuch as it depends on movement, space and staging to conquer a
direct temporal representation. This, of course, does not entail doing away with
movement, which is central to cinema, but transforming it into an abnormal
movement, an ‘aberrant’ movement, as Deleuze describes it based on its effect
of jamming fluidity, of transforming the link between present and past into a
conflictive relation, of alluding to the real not as a mirror but as something full
of tension and mystery.
This ‘aberrant’ movement, translated by different alteration ranges, whether
it be in spatial layouts, in the dissipation of narrative centres, due to unexpected
connections or unpredictable directions, causes the idea of time to emerge
directly, unshackled from all syntactic dependencies, and that independence
turns it into a problem which is related not only to film, but also to philoso-
phy. Deleuze’s ‘time-image’ is a conceptual distillation in which both fields
flow together, film and philosophy, and which the author expands in multiple

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possibilities and variations.1 In a similar register, Georges Didi-Huberman’s

‘symptom-image’ extends the above notion, stressing the dysfunctional or
paradoxical traits of images when they enable untargeted or discordant move-
ments, to the point of turning time into a process, rather than a regulator of the
story.2 The ‘symptom’ is that which becomes evident when the normal course of
representation is assaulted by ‘counter-times’ capable of changing the chrono-
logical story. It should be mentioned, however, that this does not refer to a mere
alteration of the linear succession of events. Narrating several characters and
actions simultaneously by means of cross-cutting is now a commonplace and
no less arbitrary operation, well on its way to becoming a new convention: in
place of the debased narrative device of the flashback, there is an interrupted
present. These ‘counter-times’ refer instead to a temporal regime of images
more complex and impure than one attained merely through a simple artifice
of staging procedures. Such complexity and impurity can be seen in a film like
The Swamp/La ciénaga (2001), for instance, with a world which is still or fac-
ing extinction, segregated by a series of spatial and temporal collisions, among
which stands out, in principle, the unprecedented equation between bodies
and temporality.
Deleuze places the body in the series of the time-image not only because
it offers a glimpse, he says, of people’s inner self − a statement inevitably
illustrated by Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema − but for the synthesis of past
experiences which can be established therein. His definitions portray the body
as a surface of sorts on which the signs of a lived life are inscribed, a potential
document which reveals the link between the past and the present, a virtual
coexistence of times in gestures and telling everyday attitudes, almost instinc-
tive, and a ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the body.
Among Argentine films, The Swamp may be the one that enables us to per-
ceive an exceptional sense of temporality, expressed precisely through attitudes
and body postures, through the ritualised repetition of the most mundane and
trivial actions; that is, through the direct theatricalisation of bodies, whose posi-
tions would appear themselves to determine the plot, which is subjected to the
slow cadence of stillness and repetition, but also to other rhythms and speeds.
It could be said that The Swamp entails a double speed, to the degree that each
generation of protagonists (i.e. adults, and children and teenagers) gives its
gestures and movements a different speed. Indeed, this effect of multiple dura-
tions, of heterogeneous times born from the combination of physical presence,
spatial movements and positions, stands in stark contrast to contemporary
policies of image, with their redundant exaltation of marginal or juvenile bodies
with reckless, violent, inconsequential or hysterical gestures, with their doses
of objection or conflict, but almost always as vehicles for ‘reality’ or sociology.
The Swamp, instead, is among those movies which fully trust the power of
bodies and gestures not as an anecdotal tether, but in their ability to shape

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the shot (and to do that from impossible axes, as we shall see), or even to go
through the shot and expose themselves as a ‘symptom’. If the in-vogue phe-
nomenological Vulgate favours the body as the channel for experience, as the
synthesis of an authenticity which is plausible in cinema, resorting to move-
ment, to actions and sensations, those premises assume in Lucrecia Martel
their best meaning, to the degree that the presence of the body affects the
narrative, more than the mere visual. Rather than furnishing an iconic vision,
bodies in The Swamp carry the very logic of representation, they instil into
the tale their enigmatic, deviant side, and they disorient the units of film gram-
mar which typically take any physical performance and its materiality for an
indicator of realism.
A digression is warranted here to rescue female filmmakers’ insistence on
showing body attitudes as a sign of women’s states of mind. In their movies −
perhaps not only in theirs, but they represent the majority in this trend − women
are shown as revealing a subjectivity in crisis, in the search for their own individ-
uality, their own temporality, together with specific ways of reacting against an
era, with attitudes which almost inevitably manifest themselves in private, in the
intimate exchange of encounters, which is not restricted to the domestic sphere.
As the Latin American heiresses of Agnès Varda or Chantal Akerman − and
also of Antonioni, it could be said − female characters are nomads traversing
not only places but ages, situations, in films such as those by Mexican director
María Novaro; Sandra Gugliotta, who set her urban migratory version in A
Lucky Day/Un día de suerte (2002); Paula Hernández, in Inheritance/Herencia
(2001), even though it did so as latency; Celina Murga, in Ana and the Others/
Ana y los otros (2003); Albertina Carri, in The Blonds/Los rubios (2003); and this
list, surely incomplete, should not leave out Eduardo Milewicz’s Life According
to Muriel/La vida según Muriel (1997), which pioneered geographic displace-
ment fuelled by existential crisis.
At the opposite pole of transhumance, The Swamp is sedentary, with char-
acters reduced to a cloistered life and the repetition of domestic routines, in a
fictional world outlined along strict coordinates. If, in narrative terms, family
sagas show a tendency towards a horizontality laid out by the chain of actions
and emotions, in this case, that progression of successive links is replaced by
an entropic movement, a type of inward, imploding movement. With a ‘story’
that is imprecise or barely glimpsed in the transience of movements, of lateral
actions, of the informative resource of a gesture or a posture, narration can only
stem from those traits which are material, physical, but also psychic, which make
up the miniature world of family societies. Martel adopts the meticulous lens
of the anthropologist focused on all details, as if taking them from her memory
to show them as symptoms together with the rhythm of sleep, latencies and
crises. No hierarchy comes through among important or minuscule events, as
if accepting the Benjaminian idea that the story (actually, history) is ultimately
segregated by the slightest manifestations of existence.

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This dramatic minimalism resorts for its construction to basic time and
place data. There is a chronological time: the story takes place during the sum-
mer, during the days of carnival, a permanent off-camera reality in which that
time of masks and liberation of the bodies takes place, available to a social class
which is not that of the protagonists’ families: the poor. And, if the carnival
dance is updated in images, the goal is not to show the confluence or harmonic
coexistence which recent Argentine filmmaking constantly imagines for festive
spaces, but the radical (and, this case, literal) clash, from which the upper-class
boy emerges wounded, among characters from both sides of the social border.
Martel focuses on the social matter which she seeks to describe, the middle
class (including its codes of exclusion), and if she approaches subordinate
bodies from the perspective and the desire of her teenage protagonist, she
leaves them at the margins, alone with their rituals and smells. The field of the
visible defines places: domestic interiors and nature, which vie to be the stages
of that fabric of viscosity and survival made of the gestures and attitudes of
men and women, of children and teenagers who circle the latency of a catas-
trophe to whose signs they appear impervious.
The stillness, the inertia, the acute perception of an annulled time which
these elements convey have, then, no other outlet than physical attraction, and
therefore converge in the concept of precipitation: something appears to drag
everything and everyone down. In The Swamp, the precipitation, the downfall,
unfurls fictionally, inasmuch as all narrative procedures attempt to tie them-
selves to the law of gravity. And it also becomes an allegory of fiction, which
flows out from the title of the film to the image of the mire which hopelessly
sucks in humans and animals.

Figure 2.1 The Swamp. © Lita Stantic Producciones

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‘We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of
gravity unless there is supernatural intervention’, wrote Simone Weil (a Ger-
man philosopher and mystic who converted to Catholicism and is admired by
Lucrecia Martel, according to an interview) in Gravity and Grace. Weil deploys
in this book the multiple relationships between time and space, linking them
to the high and the low, which from her perspective relate to heaven and earth.
Analysing from this spatial and physical standpoint the interpersonal relation-
ships and family conflicts in King Lear, for instance, Weil does not hesitate to
label them a tragedy of gravity. In this line, Martel assumes in The Swamp that
the transmission of unease (or of any other movement towards doom or salva-
tion) has physical gravity as its inevitable law. And also that the rules of ther-
modynamics are functional as a means to translate the world − the world seen
from the model of family relations, in this case as a human mechanism doomed
to move down, rather than up. ‘If we think we gain this deliverance by means of
our own energy, we will be like a cow pulling at a hobble and thus falling onto
its knees’,3 says Simone Weil in one of her radiant images, in which she blends
the immaterial with the laws of physics.
In this equation of lightness − a lightness which, like Weil, Martel appears
to associate with the light or grace of hope, faith in the miracle or mere belief −
and heaviness, with its collapsing movement, The Swamp favours the latter
with the pulley of bodies. The prominence granted to gestures, movements,
body attitudes and the rhythm of their position in the shot, which turns the
most trivial of positions into choreography, finally, with the symbolic power of
a story that unfolds between two downfalls (that of a mother toppled by alcohol
and that of a child who dies). From one downfall to the next, adults and chil-
dren collapse onto the ground, or into puddles, or into deck chairs, beds and
foul pools, or onto piercing objects which tear their flesh or maim them, as if
the impossibility of being upright or always lying down was their true realisa-
tion or a revelation of sorts.
The horizontal nature of the shot’s format is matched by a horizontal image
field. By choosing this horizontal or tilted axis for the postures of bodies,
Martel manages to pivot them outside of the vertical, dominant and sublimat-
ing condition (after all, the phallus, as a virtual object and imaginary basis for
all representation, is designated in an erect position) and references them from
sub-human fixations, near animal-like positions: a somewhat similar operation
to the body regulations of Samuel Beckett, who challenges the privileges of
verticality with characters who are always sitting or just lying down, a direct
expression of tiredness. With her choice of a horizontal, tilted perspective,
Martel attempts a pedagogy of perception of a world which has crumbled, or
exploded, and can only be glimpsed in disconnected fragments: a perception
which, in turn, places bodies and their positions not as an aesthetic liturgy, but
as social and political testimonies of the present. Unlike the bodies from the

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Latin American films of the seventies, with vertical bodies which defy the law
of gravity (though the exception of Glauber Rocha’s cinema should be pointed
out, with characters who frequently have their trances and public and private
conflicts down on the ground), Martel’s do not convey utopias, but pure defeat.
This one possible interpretation of the relation between the body and the series
of time I pointed out at the beginning, through the condensation it offers of
before and after, that is, what remains in it from past experiences and what
would appear to herald what is to come. The Swamp shows both directions, the
traces of the past and the perception of the future in all attitudes of neglect and
fatigue. And we can also see the order of time when they reveal the individual
and the social they are made of and when they let time shine through in the
space between two arrangements of bodies, in the interstice between them. I
believe these reasons explain why bodies in The Swamp fail to be snared by the
new mannerisms, among which the line of movement, the journey, the urban
drifts, the pointless transits, to name but a few examples, would be the most
noticeable. Rather, they stand out by the singular nature of their horizontality.
The time-image can be born from this paradoxical relation, in which
stillness is segregated by bodies and attitudes, while space is absent. All the
characters of the various generations depicted in The Swamp are, one way or
another, attentive to a premonition, to the despair of waiting, to a beyond which

Figure 2.2 The Swamp. © Lita Stantic Producciones

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can be geographic (travelling or not to Bolivia to buy school supplies) or heav-

enly (the apparitions of the Virgin seen by a young neighbour). If every event
is related to an alien place, which works as the vessel for a vain expectation or
something as shocking as a miracle or a belief, the problem is defined based on
an outside point. The image centre is also a response to that other place which
is ultimately the location for the point of view of an external observation, that
of the narration, which only occasionally matches the internal view of Momi,
a teenage character who, in the game of imperceptible oppositions between
sleep and wakefulness, is the only one who identifies the details of a ‘problem’,
or sees ‘too much’, even though she will ultimately accept her failure as a seer
when attempting to see the material traces of a miracle.
However, there are differences both subtle and significant which affect the
cog-like repetition of elements and alter the passive organisation of those com-
ponents: variations translated by the genealogical times which coexist in the
present of the hills of Salta, which are expressed through two speeds or rhythms.
On the one hand, we have the world of adults, ruled by alcohol’s unsteady move-
ment. They do not stumble, but conquer a posture, that of alcoholics, which is
associated with the cloister which heralds paralysis, as the route that takes the
mother from room to room and ultimately to the circuit of her bed. Children
and teenagers, on the other hand, take movement back. They play pretend and
replicate the world of adults, they create their own world inside the larger world
with the same elements, but with a different rhythm. Even though they adopt
different combinations, lying in the mother’s bed, alone or hugging in twos
and threes, they offer a different view of what happens on the ground or when
lying down, they abruptly interrupt the lethargy of movement with an unex-
pected sense of speed and violence in the awkward movements of their races and
chases. Temporality, held still and subjected to the law of gravity, is interrupted
or ‘crossed’ by these ephemeral explosions in which time is expressed as speed,
linked solely to the rhythms of childhood.
Opposed to adults as a block of numbed perceptions (they would appear
incapable of noticing falls, wounds on themselves and others, or even the rain
against their skin), the bodies of children are astonishing at communicating,
crossing as a loud and promiscuous entity the exterior spaces (the woods, the
garden, the town streets, when they run from the water balloons: the appari-
tions of children energise the internal movement of shots), or disturbing the
domestic stillness with unbridled gestures and shrill voices. In any event, in
The Swamp, their vulnerable bodies are the only source of the unexpected and
the disarray of the present.
‘A playing child invents the conditions of his knowledge and history’, claims
Walter Benjamin.4 There is a state of experience in their relation to the world
and things, situated between the tactile and olfactory power of children −
which becomes a way to survive − different from the numb existence of adults.

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Where the latter establish a radical divide with their environment (with chil-
dren, family, friends and objects), children re-establish a relation to the world,
to the outdoors, with peers, with the other. Theirs is a different type of spatial
perception, which incorporates the idea of trajectory, a concept held by Paul
Virilio as the ideal way of recovering the physical, psychic and cultural space
lost to technological globalisation.5 The trajectivity put forward by Virilio as the
unavoidable foundation for the relationship between subject and object is, in
The Swamp, an idea insinuated − partially, perhaps as the single utopia − only
in the generation of children and teenagers, but as an energy without direc-
tion, inherently uncontrollable and ultimately taken over by inertia. Between
the two types of trajectories (downwards, subject to the law of gravity with the
annulment of time, or in the horizontal nature of the sudden movement of chil-
dren as a recovery of speed and space within the objective temporal coordinates
required by the existence of the world and others), characters in The Swamp
remain, however, trapped between the promise of life and a terrifying threat
to this plenitude. Thus, the clash between the speed of children’s movements
and the sluggishness of matter is won by the latter. Matter lumps together, like
the fermented pool water, and obstructs itself in a pure accumulation of debris.
And in that accumulation of materialities (in the matter of bodies and ruined
things, in the games of children, in language habits, in decadent behaviours),
something emerges which is like the prehistory of a culture, as if every person
was, in his or her way, the trace or the remnant of that past.
The past (which in The Swamp is, based on the above, a psychological indi-
cator, rather than a dramatic one) resorts to language as well to be evoked and
passed by the adults to the new generations. ‘Children are political prisoners’,
said Deleuze, less optimistically than Benjamin as regards inheritances. Children,
in this case, are prisoners of the aberrant version of transmission, an unfathom-
able magma of information about bonds and betrayals of others or of one’s own
vocation, as a complement of a domestic system in which adult language is but
a redundancy of contradicting orders or mandates, while children employ it in
stories of horror, loss and despair.
Until we reach the death of a child. Actually, the film as a whole advances
based on the premonition of that death, even though the children themselves
are the ones who make that death evident when toying with that enigma. They
are the only ones who can portray corpses in a game, the only ones who ‘play
dead’, who refuse to breathe, who attempt those paradoxical poetics of survival
or simply an imaginary disintegration which assumes death as if it was real:
they are always hovering near the risk of standing in the way of a bullet, of
getting lost, of drowning in the stagnant water of a pool (these plot foreshad-
owing devices are what make that death plausible, turning its almost arbitrary
cruelty into a dramatic ‘necessity’). Until a child effectively dies, an aspect
which this fiction portrays as unavoidable in the troubled novel of the family.

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The boy dies in silence, without language. There are no images or sound for
his death: only a temporal gap in the flow of everyday repetitions, a fracture
which remains off-screen (Martel’s chaining of shots works through an opera-
tion of subtraction: the interval between the action in a shot and the next makes
any reaction impossible, or that reaction rebounds further into the plot, as in
the short feature Dead King/Rey Muerto, 1995), and abruptly interrupts that
repetition, perhaps to begin a new one, but set in the general decline of all
belief and certainty.
Pessimism and the cancellation of the idea of future is a recurring topic in
contemporary Argentine cinema − and in global cinema, it could be said −
produced, like The Swamp, during the turning point between centuries or to
open a new one. However, I have tried so far to highlight Martel’s narrative
choices, who even taking the family as a vantage point to analyse society, eludes
the trap of psychologism and moral crisis so frequent in that trend, and pro-
poses instead an approach which can be construed as an anthropological docu-
ment: ages and generations, customs and attitudes of men, women, children,
revealing heterogeneous modalities of time and of its rhythms (present, past
and future, detention, repetition, speeds) as the formal key of a poetics and
cipher of the private reproduction of collective trauma, with its indefinable
dose of comedy and tragedy.
Translated by Juan Ignacio García Fahler

notes

* This text was originally published in Spanish (‘Velocidades, generaciones y utopías: A

propósito de La ciénaga, de Lucrecia Martel’) in Yoel, G. (ed.) (2004), Pensar el cine 2, Buenos
Aires: Manantial, pp. 187–97.
1. Deleuze, G. (1987), La imagen-tiempo: Estudios sobre cine 2, Barcelona: Paidós.
2. Didi-Huberman, G. (2000), Devant le temps, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
3. Weil, S. (1994), La gravedad y la gracia, Madrid: Trotta, p. 55.
4. Benjamin, W. (1987), Dirección única, Madrid: Alfaguara, p. 56.
5. Virilio, P. (1997), La velocidad de liberación, Buenos Aires: Manantial, p. 159.

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