Resumo

This text examines the use of sound in the cinematography of Lucrecia Martel, one of the most prominent directors of contemporary Argentinean cinema. Through her works La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004), La mujer sin cabeza (2008) and Zama (2017), it explores how Martel employs sound, giving it a central role in both narrative construction and the viewer’s sensory experience. Martel conceives of sound as a tool to challenge the usual visual hegemony of cinema, creating soundscapes that evoke emotions, destabilise the image and question the viewer’s perception. We look at his technique of initiating the creative process from a sound idea, and his use of murmurs, unintelligible dialogue and ambient noise to generate an immersive cinematic experience. It also examines Martel’s metaphor of the cinema as a ‘sound pool’, and how this notion influences his approach to sound design. In the final section, a comparison is made between the use of sound in Martel’s cinematography and that of other filmmakers who have explored it as a primary narrative resource, as exemplified by the works of Jacques Tati in Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Playtime (1967), David Lynch in Eraserhead (1977), Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker (1979), Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Tropical Malady (2004) and Jonathan Glazer in The Zone of Interest (2023).