Zama (Movie)

"Now, in the movie, what happens is we have Don Diego on the right side of the screen. He’s looking to the left of the screen across a wide expanse of river. We don’t see anything: we just see this wide expanse of the river. The left side of the screen is empty. In my new book, The Art of the Filmmaker , I talk about the language of cinema and the language of the screen in particular. The screen is a conduit. It captures the fiction, but it also addresses the audience. It captures the fiction in ways that will address the audience and leave them to think/feel/know/not know in particular ways. Or maybe leave them to decide for themselves. The left-hand side of the screen is generally regarded as the stronger side. This is true of theater (where it’s called stage right, because the perspectives are different) as well. It’s home. So Zama is looking toward home. He’s on the less stable, weaker, right-hand side of the frame, where he’s entrapped by bluffs, there are cliffs behind him. There’s this emptiness where home is and it’s where he wants to get to. So what’s happened here is that the filmmaker hasn’t simply taken an event in the novel and put it on the screen, she has taken the meaning of the event in the novel and communicated it in cinematic language on the screen. And that, I think, tells us a lot about the nature of good adaptation. Di Benedetto also has certain oneiric qualities. Lucrecia Martel captures those brilliantly. In one particular event Don Diego, in order to get out of where he is, is enlisted by a posse going after a notorious bandit. They’ve been captured by indigenous people and we find them in some sort of strange, cavernous subterranean world. We don’t see the background, we just hear this echoey sound. It’s very dreamlike, very nightmarish. Again, she’s conjured on the screen a scene that Benedetto created through his prose. She really entraps Don Diego in frames within the frame. He’s constantly trapped in the composition. The mise en scene really says, ‘Don Diego, I’m giving you no escape whatsoever, you poor thing.’ At the end of the novel, there’s a little bit of hope, when he casts a message to his wife in a bottle and it floats away. That’s after he’s been tortured and injured. But in the film, he’s lost his hands. The leader of the posse turns out to be the bandit he’s been after. Don Diego is dumped in a canoe and a local indigenous boy floats after him to this wonderful music. That’s another thing about film: tonal dissonance. The end of the film uses source music by Los Indios Tabajaras, a Brazilian guitar duo that began recording in the 1940s. The film is set in 1800. And we hear this music. That’s something that film can do wonderfully through sound, through score, and through source music: the clash of time, of sensibility, of mood, of tone. It’s quite beautiful. I didn’t know the book. I went to see the movie and was fascinated by it. I loved it. I had a friend who had the book and I badgered him to let me borrow it. I’ve subsequently bought it. It’s usually the other way around. I haven’t been reading so much lately for one reason or another. There was a time when I was reading 60 or 70 literary novels a year. So I would tend to go that way around, but not always. For my next book, it also worked the other way around."