Feeling the Vibrations of the Past: The Reinvention of Silenced Sounds in Lucrecia Martel's Zama

Abstract

This text analyzes the film Zama (2017) by Lucrecia Martel, highlighting how the director subverts traditional representations of the colonial hero through the characters of Don Diego de Zama, a colonial subject in decay, and Doña Emilia, an indigenous woman who resists, building a critique of colonial power and the process of forced mestizaje. The film is shaped as a counter-history of colonization in which local knowledge and indigenous voices emerge as protagonists, displacing the hegemonic narratives of conquest. The analysis focuses on Martel’s sonic and visual aesthetics, as she decolonizes film narrative through an auditory perception that challenges the primacy of the image. In the film, music and sound effects not only enrich the ambivalence of the colonial spaces represented but also transform the soundscape into a space of resistance, where voices and sounds that usually remain off-screen gain prominence, questioning the narrative structures of power.