Zama · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the fish. In the opening dialogue someone says the river carries a certain fish its whole life, and the water will not let it settle — it keeps pushing the creature back toward the shore that keeps rejecting it. That fish is Don Diego de Zama. Everything Lucrecia Martel does in the next two hours is a variation on that refusal: a man held at the edge of a place that will neither accept him nor let him leave, waiting for a letter of transfer that the eighteenth century, and Martel, have no intention of delivering.

Deleuze has a name for what happens to a film when its hero can no longer act his way out of a situation. He calls it the crisis of the action-image. In the ordinary cinema of movement, a man perceives a problem and does something that changes it — the sensory-motor circuit hums, situation leads to act leads to new situation. Zama is that circuit with the current cut. Zama perceives everything — the slights, the politicking, Luciana's unavailable flirtation, his own decay — and can convert none of it into effective action. He composes his face into official impassivity and waits. Giménez Cacho's performance is almost entirely reactive, internal, a functionary rehearsing a dignity nobody is watching. This is what Deleuze means by the seer, the voyant: a character reduced to looking and enduring while the world declines to be moved.

Because action drops away, time stops being the measure of movement and starts being felt for itself. The film is built from what Deleuze, borrowing the grammar of Antonioni, called dead time — temps mort, stretches where nothing advances because there is nothing to advance. Martel's debt here runs straight to L'Avventura: the search that never resolves, the dilated waiting, the abandoned narrative promise. Her editing pushes it further. Schverdfinger cuts by ellipsis so severe that years vanish between shots; characters reappear inexplicably, the wait loses its own length. You, like Zama, stop knowing how long this has gone on. That is the point. The film hands you his disorientation as your own.

And it hands it to you spatially too. Deleuze's term for a location that has stopped being a stage for action is the any-space-whatever — space cut into disconnected affective fragments, no longer serving to orient anyone. Martel and cinematographer Rui Poças refuse you the one thing a colonial period film is supposed to give: the establishing shot, the map, the sweep. The river, the fort, the geography of the colony are never laid out. The camera crowds Zama's shoulder while servants, animals, and Indigenous figures cross behind and in front of him with their own autonomy, half-seen, cropped by the frame edge. Important things happen out of focus at the margin while something trivial holds the center. You cannot locate yourself. Neither can he.

Then there is the sound, which is where the film becomes strangest and most modern. Under the naturalistic weave of insects and water, Martel drops in a warm, lounge-ish guitar cue from Los Indios Tabajaras — an anachronism, a sound from the wrong century, easy and romantic over colonial squalor. Deleuze would hear an audiovisual disjunction: image and soundtrack telling two different stories, the ear detached from what the eye is given, so the historical realism of the picture quietly comes unglued. The low tonal drones do the same work from below, producing dread with no source you can point to. The film stops being a reconstruction of 1790 and becomes a psychological, dreamed register — an image that no longer explains itself and instead asks to be read.

What is rotting, in all this, is an order. Zama is a criollo magistrate of the Spanish Crown, a man who believes in rank, transfer, promotion — the entire ledger of imperial standing. Deleuze's crystal-decomposition names exactly this: an ordered, quasi-aristocratic world caught in the act of decaying from the inside. Everything in the outpost is verdant and stagnant at once, green going to rot. And when the film finally grants Zama an action — the third-act expedition to hunt the possibly mythical bandit Vicuña Porto — it is the emptiest kind, the voyage-balade, the trip that transforms nothing. It does not deliver adventure or catharsis. It delivers surreal dismemberment: Zama loses his money, his standing, his hands, and drifts on the river while a child asks whether he wants to live. The irreversible downward slope, the line of slope toward ruin, was the plot all along.

This is the invention worth naming. Martel took the colonial-jungle iconography of Herzog's Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo — Europeans rotting in an indifferent New World — and drained out the operatic delirium, leaving torpor, deferral, non-event. She took the off-center frames and layered off-screen sound she built across the Salta trilogy and scaled them to history. What she proved is that you can make a period epic entirely out of what does not happen, and that the withheld establishing shot is not a limitation but a whole theory of colonialism: a man convinced he is the center of a world that keeps decentering him, waiting on a shore that will not have him. Watch it again for the edges of the frame. That is where the film actually is.