La mirada enfangada. Acerca de La ciénaga de Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel’s film La ciénaga (2001), shot with hand-held camera and in direct sound, builds a sense of suspense within a banal everyday life family situation. The film is an ex- ploration of familiar situations and apparently well-known spaces that turn out to be anomalies and reveal another reality. Martel seems to explore what Georges Perec called the infra-ordinaire, thus presenting the ins and outs of daily life, the repetition and the absurdity of certain family dy- namics. La ciénaga is literally a ‘swamp’, a city in Argentina, and a pool, muddy and covered with leaves. The title allegorically summarizes the corrupt environment in which human beings with an inhuman behaviour fight for their survival.