A Cinema of Survivances: On Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra tierra

The camera soaring through the air, mimicking the gaze of a bird taking flight or even boarding a satellite orbiting the Earth, in Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023) and Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra tierra (Landmarks, 2025) indicates a shift toward the planetary. Its subject are the diverse modes of destruction and subjugation which, from one hemisphere to the other, have encroached on mountains, jungles, and grasslands, endangering the very continuity of the living. But in both films, what truly matters is finding down there, in the few patches of green that have not yet succumbed to the rigid geometries of agrobusiness, mining, and urbanization, the sites of a “survivance” that takes the form of a constant re-becoming Indigenous (“redevir-índio”), in Déborah Danowski’s and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s intriguing expression.¹ Almost twenty-five years after their debuts La libertad (Freedom) and La Ciénaga, both released in 2001, where they forged, from practically opposite filmic poetics and geographies, an image of the margins of exclusion during Argentina’s previous neoliberal cycle, in their most recent films the two most singular directors of what was then consecrated as “New Argentine Cinema” have turned, in much more explicitly political fashion, to the struggles against ethnocide and exile that traverse Abya Yala and Turtle Island from end to end. Flight and groundedness: in Alonso’s and Martel’s most recent films, this dynamic between space and place, although embodied once more in narrative and generic forms that could not be more different from one another, inscribes a tension between the always local and singular nature of land rights struggles and the planetary dimension that, nevertheless, weaves all these singularities together as the burning issue of our time (literally speaking, in the case of Eureka where the flight of the jabirú stork ties together episodes without any spatial or temporal continuity of their own).

Eureka

Yet both films also lean on, and confront, another, previous filmic image of Indigenous people as archaic and malevolent others, as an obstacle to be removed, by force if necessary, so that the providential advance of History can continue. But whereas Eureka begins with a pastiche of classic Western’s epic of regeneration through violence, only to immediately discard it as TV trash and cut from settler colonialism’s black-and-white mythology to colour and to the survivors’ ordeal in the harsh conditions of the reservation, Landmarks starts off from a different kind of footage, shot in real time, to then extend to longer biographical and historical periods, spanning generations and even centuries. The images from which the film originates are, indeed, the very ones recorded by one of the perpetrators – Sergio Amín, “El Turco,” a rancher and miner from Tucumán in Argentina’s subtropical northwest – of the murder of Javier Chocobar, a leader of the Diaguita community of Chuschagasta, on October 12, 2009 near the hamlet of El Chorro, halfway between the provincial capital and the border with Salta. On that fateful day, the rancher (who was also on the province’s bankroll as an advisor to the division of historical heritage) headed out in the company of Luis Humberto “El Niño” Gómez and Eduardo Valdivieso, two former police officers and members of paramilitary forces, to confront the group of comuneros who regularly monitored and photographed the incursions onto the lands for which they had filed countless legal appeals and injunctions. Heavily armed, Amín and his bodyguards had also brought along a video camera to record the comuneros’ “provocations,” and the encounter between both sides, even before the exchange of words that escalate into shuffles and eventually gunshots that leave Chocobar dead and three other Chuscha peasants seriously wounded, starts out as a clash of images, with Amín’s video lens focusing on community member Delfín Cata, who takes a picture of him with his small analogue camera. The sequence, then, relies on the most basic grammar of film: a shot, a reverse shot – only that, in the video, the latter appears only as a marked absence, the point of view remaining firmly behind Valdivieso, the former agent, who steps forward with a threatening demeanour, demanding explanations, to then pull out his gun and start firing, first into the air and then to kill. It is at that moment, when Amín takes off running and the camera, dangling from his neck, continues recording, that the frame loses focus while the “action,” off screen, continues on the soundtrack (with a voice asking, as if echoing ours, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”).

The “Chocobar case,” as it came to be known in the Argentine media, was thus already cinematic in form long before Lucrecia Martel took an interest in it: it was, in a way, made for the cameras even before things (and the camera) got out of hand, deliberately or not, for Amín and his henchmen. And even, we could think, it had to some degree the cinematic form of a Lucrecia Martel movie where, like the rifle shot in La Ciénaga that may or may not have hit its target, key moments frequently occur off screen or at least outside the camera’s area of ​​focus, to be conveyed in an ominous, uncertain fashion by the soundtrack. Hence, for those of us who followed her work, it was not so much about tying up the loose ends this disconnect between image and sound would frequently leave untied as, rather, about learning to live with multiple parallel moments and developments that, instead of converging into a single narrative thread, rather formed motifs or constellations in the manner of an orchestral score or the weft of a textile on the loom. Landmarks proceeds in similar fashion, although here this interplay of multiple spaces and temporalities also acquires an immediately and profoundly political dimension. On the one hand, there is the teleological time of the judicial process, which Martel’s camera and microphone attend in the rigorous key of an observational documentary – or rather, the two temporalities set in motion by the trial that only begins nine years after Chocobar’s death because, in the series of hearings, testimonies and on-site “re-enactments,” the legal proceedings also return again and again, insistently, to the time and place of the crime the cameras had failed to capture. On the other hand, there is Martel’s film where, conversely, hesitations, pauses, and detours provide a poetic principle, in the sense of staying with the allusions and unspoken understandings that permeate the trial and of following up on them, which invariably leads us out of the courtroom and towards other narratives and temporalities, anchored in family photos, musical rehearsals, and in the times of sowing and harvesting marked by the calendar of religious festivities. That is to say, it leads toward the times of the land and of exile, of uprootedness and return, and of memories that intertwine to form an order, a constellation: a slow re-becoming Indigenous that unfolds collectively and as a result of the struggle for land, in an intertwining of temporalities different from the one that unfolds in the legal process, and toward which Landmarks gradually opens itself up.

Landmarks

A frame in the film’s final part, centred on the communal house at sunset and shot from the distance with the mountains and forest in the background, aptly summarizes this presence on screen of multiple temporalities composing a memory in action. A group of community members are shown watching a projection of images recorded by the film crew, perhaps that very day, of children riding bicycles. This sequence is not part of the film itself, or rather, it only appears there by way of this projection sequence, with the screen partially obscured by the window frames and curtains of the communal house. It features, then, as part of an image of the community recognizing itself and, perhaps, also of how the film has begun to form part of this actively forged and shared memory through which the Chuschagasta community has managed to sustain and defend itself despite continuous harassment and inaction from the justice system and the state. At the same time, the sequence can also be read as an explicit homage, towards the end of the film we have been watching, to a kind of cinematic ancestor of its own: Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years After, 1984), another film that insistently returns to the murder of a peasant leader by henchmen of the landowners and to the denial of justice that, by the time Coutinho finally managed to complete and premiere the film, had lasted already more than twenty years. But as viewers of Coutinho’s landmark documentary will remember (whose title also implied a homage of sorts), Twenty Years After was in itself also a return to, and a folding-back upon, the homonymous project of 1964, aborted by the military coup and the irruption of the armed forces in Galiléia, the peasant village in the interior of Pernambuco turned into a cooperative, with whose inhabitants Coutinho and his crew had proposed to reenact the death of João Pedro Teixeira, his widow Elizabeth and her small children representing themselves, and the peasants of Galiléia playing their companions from Sapé, from where Elizabeth and her family had been forced to escape after the crime.

Both films, therefore, have their origin in a crime and its “reconstruction.” In Landmarks, this is carried out by the justice system itself, which, now equipped with sophisticated digital cameras and even drones hovering above the scene, organizes the protagonists’ return to El Chorro to reenact their own gestures and direct those of the police officers stepping in as extras; a task performed with histrionics by the perpetrators and only timidly by the surviving victims. In Coutinho, on the other hand, the value and meaning of such a return, both in legal-political and in ethical terms, had been harshly called into question. In Twenty Years After, the screening of the reels salvaged from the original shooting for the community members themselves, which in Martel only happens towards the end and with the work already practically concluded, represented the beginning not just of the film but also of the difficult process of reuniting with the protagonists and collaborators from its previous iteration, twenty years later and with many of them (Elizabeth Teixeira among them, in the film’s most memorable sequence) having just returned from dispersal and life in clandestinity which dictatorial repression had forced them into. Their reunion in front of the screen thus represented for Coutinho both a tribute – to the courage of those who had accompanied him in the original project and to what they had achieved then, even under the most adverse conditions – and a critical reflection on his own pretensions of doing justice through cinema, as if the filmic medium could compensate for real-life injustice and, worse still, as if it had not, in a context of intensified state repression, put his own collaborators at risk of being exposed once again as cabras marcados, as landless peasants (“goats”) marked out to die. The reunion at the beginning of Coutinho’s film is, in fact, a gathering of second-degree survivors: survivors of the violence of the landowning class and of the State terror visited on them in response to their attempt of resisting through activism and through cinema. It was this back-and-forth between the different temporal layers of survival and of afterlife, present from the outset in the impressive synthesis-image of the Galiléians watching their own, younger alter egos on screen, from which the film drew its arc of tensions, no less complex than those of the historical plot itself. That is to say, Twenty Years After never abandoned its original commitment to the life and death of João Pedro Teixeira, but these, at the same time, became inextricably bound up with the first film project and its failure, and with the years of clandestinity and separation from loved ones this experience entailed for actors and crew alike.

Twenty Years After

In Twenty Years After, therefore, the form of a film folding back upon itself, as an aesthetic and political response to the historical fracture imposed on the original project and its collaborators by dictatorial terror, ended up questioning the very possibility of a single, definitive truth: Coutinho would strictly refrain from taking sides even when accused on camera by one of Elizabeth’s sons of exploiting the misfortune of others. That is, the film’s focus of interest shifted from the question of truth through re-enactment (thus being able to expose at last the systemic nature of violence) to the difficult process of mourning and of putting back together a shared memory on which a society paralysed by terror could rebuild itself. Landmarks, in effect, maintains a similar mistrust towards the trial’s “documentary” efforts of evidence-gathering (“re-enactments” included), keeping its distance throughout from the legal regime of truth. In other words, the “observational” framing of the series of hearings, interrogations, and closing arguments before the court, cutting from extreme close-ups of the perpetrators giving testimony to hand-held medium-length shots panning across the room to eventually “find” one or another of the different groups (lawyers, police, cleaning staff) huddling or performing their part of the judicial routine, does not merely capture but it rather cuts and reassembles what happens at the trial. It respects the times and conventions of the legal system, which provide the film with a kind of primary narrative scaffolding, but it also urges us (somewhat in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe’s sleuth Auguste Dupin) to look and listen beyond the conventions of the courtroom genre, and thus to realize what is in fact right before our eyes and ears: a stage replete with men and women in suits, attire, hairstyles and mannerisms of an almost exclusively urban kind (if a somewhat anachronistic and provincial one), enacting a “justice” that can only know and refer to its victims through the third person plural. Put differently, beyond the verdict for or against, this “judicial act” can only perpetuate once again the settler-colonial State’s grammars of othering as it inquires into the survival or “extinction” of the collective subject in whose name the claim for the land is pronounced, and into the titles that colonial jurisprudence may or may not have conceded them over a greater or lesser portion of territory.²

Hence, Martel’s departure from the temporalities and narrative forms of historical realism is of a different kind than Coutinho’s. In those interstices where, as it were, the film takes advantage of the lapses between one trial hearing and the next to accompany the villagers back to their homes and their fields and to listen to their stories and songs “in a different context,” Martel abandons documentary observation and returns instead to one of her all-time favourite devices: the separation – or rather, the separate construction – of the visual and sound sequence. Here, however, this separation between sensory registers and ways of meaning-making has different characteristics than, say, those conferred to acousmatic sound in La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) or La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008), where the latter had underwritten the production of a cinematic narrator equivalent to free indirect speech in literature; that is, opening access to the perception and affective life of the character without ceasing to display her or him to us as a body or a face on screen. In Landmarks, by contrast, the soundtrack is frequently given over to the narrating voice of one of the comuneros. At times, this takes the conventional form of an explanatory commentary, as in the stories told by Javier Chocobar’s widow about the photographs of her family, friends and fellow villagers who meanwhile appear on screen, in black-and-white and later faded colour, images spanning more than a century of forced displacements, labour migrations, and returns from the capital city. Together, voice and image here recount the lives of those who struggled to “integrate” into white society or to recover the identity and connection to the land that the State and the dominant sectors had sought to eradicate for decades, if not centuries, be it through legal titles or through the institutions of school, army, church, and the mass media. At other times, however, this mnemonic voice is overlaid to a visual sequence that moves across the mountains and ravines, sometimes aboard a vehicle following a motorcycle or a pickup truck carrying some comuneros, others in the form of a panoramic long shot of the road travelled by a multitude of faithful in procession. And still others, to the melodic intonation of that voice that returns us to ancient times of refuge in the mountains when the first colonizers arrived, the camera itself takes flight aboard a drone, rising to the top of the mountain range and opening our view towards the vastness of forests, rocks, and meadows that lie on the other side, an image that, by tilting downwards almost vertically and not towards the horizon or vanishing point in the distance, opposes to a sensation of the land as mere extension and thus as divisible and appropriable territory, that of the soil as ground and reason of a life in common (at times, Martel also rarefies these views from above through the use of filters that flatten and blur colour contrasts and depth of field, resulting in a loss of visual control and of our sense of distance or proximity to the ground below). That is to say, in these shots, which might at first appear as the most conventional, National Geographic-style exploration of “foreign lands,” Martel and her crew achieve something utterly surprising: a convergence of voice and image, narrative and earthly materiality, in a third space or, perhaps more accurately: in a unity of matter and memory that provides cinematic expression to the conviction that underwrites the community’s claim and that gives the film its title. A land (tierra) that is not so much “ours” as it is “us,” a land that includes its inhabitants insofar as these are part and parcel of it, that is, as Indigenous people. Or as one of the community members puts it after a music rehearsal: “We realized that we hadn’t come from anywhere else, that we had always been here, that we were Indians.”

Landmarks

That’s why even the collision and abrupt downfall of this airborne gaze – a consequence of the drone’s accidental clash with a hawk during shooting – not only takes us back to the camera’s previous “accident” during the run-in between the comuneros and the rancher Amín with his henchmen. More importantly, it also provides Martel with a singularly eloquent figural expression situating Javier Chocobar’s murder within a broader spatiotemporal framework, that of the “ancestral catastrophe,” in Elizabeth Povinelli’s terms, which violently shattered the mode of coexistence in which the land and its inhabitants had complemented one another as an “us” simultaneously unique and multiple: “Ancestral catastrophes are in the past and in the present,” Povinelli writes, “they continue to emerge time and again from the depths of colonialism and racism rather than appearing as the horizon of liberal progress. Ancestral catastrophes bring environmental damage to the soil of the colonial sphere and not to the biosphere.”³ This, I would argue, is precisely the pivot that Landmarks establishes in replacing the satellite images from the beginning of the film with a cinematic expression of this grounded “us” and its colonial-modern unmaking by the settler-colonial state.

This filmic construction is of great formal complexity, as we have begun to understand. As pointed out, the drone shot first appears at the opening of Landmarks from the galactic distance provided by satellite technology: the capsule’s giant, rotating wings providing the foreground of an image that offers us an Earth-landscape of planetary dimensions, reminiscent of the opening shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony playing in the background. Even though, here, that musical backdrop is replaced by Ariel Ramírez’s Misa criolla, this image of the “Blue Marble” nevertheless continues to function, as Timothy Morton has suggested, as the visual archetype equivalent of an “ecomimetic” rhetoric and its effect of conveying an idea of “nature” as objectified and external, “a vivid and solidly real nature, situated ‘out there’ or ‘far away,’” the harmonious creational integrity of which “we” are the culprits of having destroyed.⁴ In other words, this image (and the musical soundtrack that accompanies it) appears first as the bearer of an Anthropocene discourse, that is, as positing a planet in crisis due to the actions of “humans.” A few minutes on, it reappears (now shot from above, taking advantage of the terrain’s unevenness) disclosed in its character as a visual technology, as part of the police operation of “re-enactment of the crime.” Here, then, it is not the image recorded by the drone that we see on screen but the drone within the image: as part of an attempt (by all means futile) to produce “the truth of the story” by way of a comprehensive, omniscient, all-seeing point of view that is beyond appeal, delegated as it is to a machine inside a machine (a remotely operated camera, and thus no longer the prosthetic extension of a physical body). Yet, in its being framed as part of another image shot from a higher point in the terrain, the scopophilic pretensions of this point of view and of the discourse of “objective” truth it underwrites, are deftly called into question just as, later on and by different formal means, Martel’s camera will also challenge the “expert” discourse of the historians and anthropologists summoned by the court. Only then, having first introduced and then deconstructed the audiovisual discourse of an omniscient, “imperial eye” relying on distance and on disembodied, machine vision as guarantors of truth, Martel appropriates the device for her own use. Through a subtle adjustment of perspective and by integrating into the image sequence the voice-over of a (female) community elder reminiscing about the plight of the Chuscha comuneros, she forges a counter-discourse that returns us, as Povinelli puts it, from an exterior, objectified “nature” to the ground as material memory that holds the ancestral catastrophe of conquest and colonization and of the Indigenous survivances that have persisted despite it all.

Landmarks

The accident’s incorporation into the filmic sequence thus acquires a dimension that is nothing short of “mythopoetic”: having been transfigured, in a complex succession of appropriations and resignifications, from a technology of surveillance into the trance-like emanation of an earthly memory, the clash with the unseen bird and subsequent tumbling-down of the image until it completely fades into black turns into a Promethean figure of the ancestral catastrophe itself. But at the same time, this moment of rupture also continues to abide by the rules of a Brechtian “alienation effect,” as it exposes the manufactured nature of this and indeed all filmic images and therefore the limits of their claims to truth and knowledge. As an image of ancestral catastrophe that is, at the same time, a self-conscious reflection on the limitations of visuality in fully apprehending the earth as ground, it is an image that is itself enmeshed with the afterlives – the “survivances” – of telluric community, of the land as an “us” of human and more-than-human existents alike, no less so than the shot of the comuneros attending the screening of footage in the communal house we have discussed above. 

It is through the notion of survivance, taken from one of Jacques Derrida’s final works, that the Anishinaabe critic and writer Gerald Vizenor reflects on “the continuance of stories” triggered by the Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island by way of inscribing a dissident and ghostly line of flight in the language and written discourse of the colonizer. “Native survivance,” writes Vizenor, “is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion […] Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry. Survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry.”⁵ The one entrusted with this intrusion into and inversion of the discourse of dominance, in order to forge from it a “survivant” voice is, for Vizenor, the trickster – a central character and narrative device of Native American storytelling but who also has plenty of relatives within the transhemispheric frame of Abya Yala, including the Fox of Andean foundation narratives (and José María Arguedas´s unfinished last novel), the masked spirit-beings visited upon Selk’nam youths in Tierra del Fuego during the Hain initiation ceremony, or, indeed, the shape- and gender-shifting character of El Coronel in Alonso’s Eureka. What matters is that, on Vizenor’s reading, the trickster metamorphoses into a clandestine and transgressive hermeneuticist. “Trickster hermeneutics” employs narrative techniques of othering, suggests Vizenor, only to exacerbate and amplify them through metamorphic operations that result in a proliferation of “double others” embodying a “post-Indian” presence of Indigenous survivance. “Trickster hermeneutics” is a narrative and analytical vantage point capable of confounding the historical testimony of the perpetrators and restoring presence to what their narratives hold in latency in the form of ghosts, hauntings, discontinuities. What it unleashes is nothing less than an act of political and narrative liberation:

Trickster hermeneutics is the interpretation of simulations in the literature of survivance, the ironies of descent and racialism, transmutation, third gender, and themes of transformation in oral tribal stories and written narratives. […] Trickster stories are the postindian simulations of tribal survivance. [They] are the translation of liberation, and the shimmer of imagination is the liberation of the last trickster stories. Trickster hermeneutics is access to trickster stories…⁶

Survivance, therefore, exceeds the mere fact of staying alive in physical or genealogical terms (which is, instead, how the archivists, historians, and anthropologists called upon by the court as “experts” attempt to frame the issue in Landmarks). For Vizenor, survivance is essentially an enunciative act, a type of performative speech in the Austinian sense. Survivance as an action rather than a condition is to refuse to be outlived by the colonizer. In survivance, as Vizenor explains, “the suffix ance is a quality of action […] Survivance, then, is the action, quality, and sentiments of the verb survive, ‘to remain alive or in existence,’ to outlive, persevere.”⁷ This is also the order, it seems to me, to which belong the acts of testimony the comuneros of Chuschagasta produce in Landmarks, whether before the court or witnessed only by Martel’s camera, freed from the constraints and intimidation of judicial discourse and its insistence on a single, objective truth. Indeed, the film itself aspires to such an act of enunciation that has “a quality of action.” Put differently, Landmarks twists and re-signifies the conventions of the documentary genre in different fashion from what Coutinho had done in Twenty Years After. Without ever claiming to offer us an Indigenous point of view, the film nevertheless forges, through subtle appropriations and transfigurations of the settler-colonial state’s othering gaze, a way of seeing and of listening that comes close to the trickster hermeneutics the comuneros themselves mobilize in their interrogations of the colonial archive and the white settler-colonial justice system. Re-becoming Indigenous means, in cinema, to learn to use its devices in the fashion Lucrecia Martel does: through a slow and patient work of disrupting and of weaving back together the continuity of image and sound such that, from these fissures and recombinations, a strange and beautiful sense of situated permanence can emerge, of survivance in and with the land that becomes us.

Endnotes