The cinema of Lucrecia Martel 9781784997489

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SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN FILMMAKERS Series editors: Núria Triana Toribio Andy Willis

Bringing together traditional hermeneutic approaches with an understanding of film as material object, this book shows how Martel’s cinema can be understood as an experiment with perception, and how the films break away from the sedimented thinking of dominant cinematic forms, thereby challenging the viewer’s perceptual capacities. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Latin American, women’s and queer cinemas.

Deborah Martin is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College London Cover image– Maria Alché in La niña santa (The Holy Girl), 2004. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones

ISBN 978-0-7190-9034-9

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Martin

Through discussions of the interventions made by Martel’s films in matters of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and Argentine history and politics, the book makes a case for her cinema as deeply political, showing how its creation of uncertainty and doubt allows for glimpses of alternative realities. In this reading, the films can be seen as sites of radical optimism and potentiality, offering new kinds of cinematic pleasure, and as parodic and camp in their treatment of cinematic codes, especially those relating to femininity. This is linked to a broader queer sensibility, which informs the films’ politics and aesthetics.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel is a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical features have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. Examining these films alongside lesser-known shorts, the book situates Martel’s work in relation to trends in recent Argentine filmmaking, as well as international art and horror cinema.

Deborah Martin SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN FILMMAKERS

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers Series editors: Núria Triana Toribio, University of Kent Andy Willis, University of Salford

Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers offers a focus on new film­­ makers; reclaims previously neglected filmmakers; and considers established figures from new and different perspectives. Each volume places its subject in a variety of critical and production contexts. The series sees filmmakers as more than just auteurs, thus offering an insight into the work and contexts of producers, writers, actors, production companies and studios. The studies in this series take into account the recent changes in Spanish and Latin American film studies, such as the new emphasis on popular cinema, and the ­influence of cultural studies in the analysis of films and of the film cultures produced within the Spanish-speaking industries.

Already published The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis Daniel Calparsoro  Ann Davies Alejandro Amenábar  Barry Jordan The cinema of Iciar Bollaín  Isabel Santaolalla Julio Medem  Rob Stone Emilio Fernandez: pictures in the margins  Dolores Tierney

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel Deborah Martin

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Deborah Martin 2016 The right of Deborah Martin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 9034 9 hardback First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appro­ priate.

Typeset in Scala with Dax display by Koinonia, Manchester

For Anna

Contents



List of figures Acknowledgements



Introduction

page viii x 1

1 La ciénaga: distanciation and embodiment

30

2 La niña santa: horror, ambivalence, femininity

54

3 La mujer sin cabeza: haunting and community

80

4 Liquid worlds and aquatic life: the short films (2010–11)

106



Conclusion: cinematic pleasures

122



Filmography Bibliography Index

130 134 144

List of figures

1 Graciela Borges (Mecha) and Martín Adjemián (Gregorio) in La ciénaga. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones. page 36 2 Sebastián Montagna (Luchi) in La ciénaga. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones.

47

3 María Alché (Amalia) in La niña santa. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones.

58

4 María Alché (Amalia) in La niña santa. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones.

61

5 María Alché (Amalia) and Carlos Belloso (Jano) in La niña santa. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Lita Stantic Producciones.

66

6 Andrea Verdún (Cuca), María Onetto (Vero), Inés Efrón (Candita) and Claudia Cantero (Josefina) in La mujer sin cabeza. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Aquafilms.

89

7 María Onetto (Vero) and Ramón Yapura (the gardener) in La mujer sin cabeza. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Aquafilms.

90

8 María Onetto (Vero) and Inés Efrón (Candita) in La mujer sin cabeza. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel and Aquafilms. 98

List of figures

ix

9 A rural maestra and children in Nueva Argirópolis. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel.

109

10 An image from Pescados. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel.

114

11 A model in Muta. Reproduced by kind permission of Lucrecia Martel.

118

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Chapter 2 has appeared in Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (http://www.tandfonline.com). Sections of Chapter 3 have appeared as part of an article in Hispanic Research Journal (http://www.maneyonline.com/loi/hrj). This book has benefited from the support of a wide network of colleagues in the UK. I am grateful to Jordana Blejmar, Constanza Ceresa, David Clarke, Jo Evans, Katie Grant, Claire Lindsay, Montserrat Lunati, Rory O’Bryen, Ryan Prout, James Scorer, Deborah Shaw, Cecilia Sosa, Nuria Triana Toribio, Peter Wagstaff and Steve Wharton for advice, ideas and practical help at various stages of its inception and prepara­ tion. I also wish to thank students of my cinema courses at Univer­ sity College London for their responses to Martel’s films, which have informed my own. In Argentina, I am grateful to the staff of the INCAA Library, especially Adrián Muoyo and Octavio Morelli, for their kindness, dedication, ideas and contacts, to Sebastián Pérez and Patricia Barbieri of Lita Stantic Producciones and Roberto Severa of Aquafilms, and of course to Lucrecia Martel for the generosity with which she has given her time for interviews and discussion. I also wish to thank the staff of Manchester University Press for their assis­ tance in the process.

Introduction

Since the release of her debut feature, La ciénaga (The Swamp), in 2001, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has gained worldwide recog­ nition for her richly allusive, elliptical and sensorial filmmaking. Acclaimed at home and abroad by critics and art-film audiences, she has been called ‘one of the most promising of world auteurs’ (Smith 2012, 70); ‘one of the most talented filmmakers in the world’ (Bradshaw 2008); and a ‘mini-Chekhov of the tropics’ (Kezich cit. in Falicov 2007, 126). Her three feature films, which also include La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008) have won numerous awards of the Argentinian Film Critics Association (ACCA), as well as prestigious prizes at film festi­ vals around the world, and are consistently rated amongst the top ten of recent Latin American films. In 2009, all three features appeared in a Cinema Tropical poll which asked New York critics to name the ten best Latin American films of the decade, with La ciénaga taking the number one spot. Martel has been seen as a prominent figure in the experimentalism and aesthetic break with previous Argen­ tine filmmaking that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, came to be known as ‘New Argentine Cinema’, yet with only three feature films, her critical acclaim and international appeal looks set to outstrip that of any of her New Argentine contemporaries. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel examines her place within that body of work, or tendency in Argentine filmmaking, yet also explores correspondences between her work and other national and global filmmaking trends. It brings together some of the important critical approaches to Martel’s work – including feminist and queer approaches, political readings and phenomenology – and suggests new ways of understanding her films, in particular through their use of the child’s perspective, and

2

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

address to the senses and perception, which it argues serves to renew cinematic language and thought.1 Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966) grew up in Salta province, north-west Argentina, in a conservative middle-class family, and it is this milieu which is depicted in her first three features, which draw on memories of growing up in Salta, and keen – almost anthropological – observa­ tions of life there.2 Martel began filming her family aged fifteen when her father purchased a video camera. She would place the camera in a static position to record family members as they moved in and out of the frame, developing a sense of off-screen space which would define her future work. At twenty she went to Buenos Aires to study a Social Communication programme and animation at night classes, briefly studying at Avellaneda Experimental and at the Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica, but not completing a degree (Jubis 2010, 17). She made some short films in the late 1980s and worked in television throughout the 1990s, but her filmmaking career began in earnest when she participated in the 1995 portmanteau project Historias breves, with her short film Rey Muerto, a ‘feminist western’ about domestic violence.3 Historias breves was one of a number of initiatives intended to support young, first-time filmmakers in Argentina in the mid-1990s, following the passing of the Cinema Law in 1994,4 and led to the formation of a writing group with other talented young filmmakers including Daniel Burman and Bruno Stagnaro. In 1996, Martel began work on the screenplay of La ciénaga, which went on to win the Sundance Prize for Best Screenplay, sponsored by Japanese broadcasting organisation NHK, in 1999. The award brought with it $10,000, and enabled the film to find further backing through a mixture of Argentine and international funding sources.5 Martel’s second and third films, La niña santa and La mujer sin cabeza, also both international co-productions, followed later in the same decade. Since completing La mujer sin cabeza, Martel has directed the short films Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados, for the 2010 Notodofilmfest, and Muta (2011), a parodic publicity short for fashion house Miu Miu. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel considers these unstudied short films within the broader context of Martel’s filmmaking.6 Together with the Cinema Law, an expansion of film school places led to a boom in filmmaking and sharp increase in debut features in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Several new, first-time directors – including Martín Rejtman, Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro,

Introduction

3

and Pablo Trapero, and shortly afterwards, Lucrecia Martel – were deemed by critics and journalists to have initiated an ideological and aesthetic break with ‘veteran’ Argentine directors such as Fernando Solanas and Eliseo Subiela and with the reigning tendency to deal in cinematic metaphors for the 1976–82 dictatorship. Instead – in the 1990s context of neo-liberalism and economic crisis in Argentina – these new directors turned to the private and the personal, rather than the national or the obviously political, to the intimate rather than the epic. Their gaze was typically minimalist, opaque, and focused on the social or geographical margins. Moving away, also, from the depictions of the porteño middle class which had characterised most post-dictatorship Argentine filmmaking, these new directors turned instead to the urban or rural poor, or in the case of Martel, to the provinces and rural settings held in the grip of a conservative, patri­ archal bourgeoisie, and the sharp class division between this elite of European descent and the mestizo or indigenous poor. Salta was cinematically unchartered territory – a world away from the culture of Buenos Aires which still dominated the Argentine film scene.7 But the worlds Martel depicted were also peripheral in senses other than the geographical: they explored the lives of women, children and adolescents, they alluded to marginal sexualities, and foreclosed realms of experience. The history of the New Argentine Cinema has been extensively documented, its trends and tendencies comprehensively analysed, and these writings include excellent discussions of the place of Martel’s work within it – indeed, this is the critical category within which Martel’s work has most frequently been considered.8 This book considers ways in which, as Dominique Russell suggests, Martel’s films are both ‘representative and exceptional within the New Argen tine Cinema’ (2008, 2). However, as Jens Andermann proposes: ‘[I]t makes sense today to look beyond the uncertain boundaries of an “independent” generational project, which has been in many ways a critical fiction […]. [W]hat this critical narrative missed was the wider, more contradictory and multilayered landscape of filmmaking in Argentina’ (2012, xii–xiii). As such this book also traces the resonances of Martel’s work beyond the New Argentine Cinema, arguing that it has played a crucial role in the development of a more established feminist and queer cinema in Argentina.9 New Argentine Cinema has been characterised as arising from and responding aesthetically and thematically to profound political and economic upheaval, in

4

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

particular the economic recession of the 1990s, culminating in the economic crash of 2001.10 However, the increased liberalisation of the law in relation to gender and sexuality since the ‘progressive turn’ in Argentine politics has in its turn been accompanied by a striking set of cinematic challenges to gender and sexual ideologies.11 Martel’s films draw on the legacy of María Luisa Bemberg (1922–95), whose work initiated such challenges for Argentine film in the 1970s, and Martel’s oblique approach to marginal sexualities has in turn paved the way for a series of related films in Argentine cinema, which share a transgressive attitude to regimes of gender and sexuality, as well as concerns and representational modes with other currents of global queer cinema. Martel’s work is also profoundly influenced by genre film, especially horror, and the three Salta films undertake a radical subversion of the conservative imperatives of that genre.12 Martel and her New Argentine contemporaries have been positioned by criticism and industry as auteur-figures, and often as media­ tors between commercial and artistic interests. As D’Lugo (2003) discusses, in the era of international co-productions auteurism has been an important way of establishing the identity of Latin American cinemas in the world market. The film auteur was a concept origi­ nally proposed in the 1950s by contributors to Cahiers du cinéma and it understood the director as possessing a unique, personal vision and a distinctive cinematic style which made his films instantly recognis­ able as his work. Because of the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the idea of the film-author has always been somewhat problematic, and it has further come under attack in the context of post-structur­ alist critiques of authorship as the expression of a unified subjectivity and as function of an individualist, capitalist society.13 In the 1960s, there was a reconceptualisation of film authorship in Latin America by the directors associated with the militant New Latin American Cinema; a shift of emphasis in understandings of auteurism from the individual to the collective, from the Cahiers model – an elite club of virtuosos and a strong emphasis on style over content – to the polit­ icised auteur as voice of the people and agent of change.14 As a result, the Latin American auteur has come to be associated with the act of taking a stand, even whilst, since the renewal of cinema that has occurred in the region since the mid-1990s, the politics of the new auteurist offerings are co-opted for commercial ends. Notwithstanding the conceptual and political problems of auteurist discourses, there remain compelling reasons to study the work of a

Introduction

5

director like Martel within such a framework. Martel writes her own scripts and, despite the collaborative nature of filmmaking, exercises a good deal of control over decisions about aspects such as mise-enscène, lighting and camera placement, as members of her crew have suggested (Jubis 2010, 12; Colace 2001, 26).15 She has also stated in interviews the autobiographical nature of her work which draws on diaries and childhood memories (Wood 2006, 168). More impor­ tantly, though, the consideration of a figure like Martel destabilises the Eurocentric and masculinist underpinnings of the auteurist project, allowing for those traditionally excluded from the canon to be originators of meaning. As many feminist and minority critics have noted, the post-structuralist decentring of the subject and of author­ ship is all very well for those groups (straight, white, European males) for whom subjectivity is a given, but for groups which have tradi­ tionally been denied a voice, the post-structuralist project comes at the wrong time, and does not seem especially liberatory. Assuming a subject position and telling one’s own story continue to be important political activities for groups historically excluded from those activi­ ties, and whilst critical discourse must retain its understanding of the author-function as constructed category, it can also act as a vehicle through which the author’s lived, material existence (as a woman or a member of a minority) and identity (however strategic) may enter the public realm. Martel’s feature films to date can be understood in part as expressions of or meditations on feminine identity, especially as it is constructed and plays out in a specific local and ideological setting; in addition, they include enigmatic expressions of lesbian sexuality, often inexplicit or just off-screen, expressions which are part of a broader, multiple and heterogeneous field of desire in these films which this book understands as queer. Such expressions can be read as a kind of subcultural code providing the pleasure of recognition and identification to queer audiences, ‘a pleasure of particular polit­ ical importance to minority or marginalised people’ (Dyer 1991, 188); it is in this sense, too, then, that the ‘authorial signature’ acquires a political relevance. Martel has worked with two of the most significant ‘producer-au­ teurs’ in Latin American cinema, Lita Stantic and Bertha Navarro. Stantic, who Martel met whilst working in television on the children’s programme Magazine for fai, worked with Martel on both La ciénaga and La niña santa. Famous for her work on María Luisa Bemberg’s films and thus associated with a feminist tradition of filmmaking in

6

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Argentina, Stantic became associated with the New Argentine Cinema through her work on some of its most canonical films, including Mundo Grúa (Crane World, Trapero 1999) and Bolivia (Caetano 2001), as well as Martel’s first two features. Stantic encouraged Martel to attend one of the Sundance scriptwriting workshops led by Mexican producer Navarro, who Marvin D’Lugo proposes has been a significant force behind, and creative influence on Latin American filmmaking since the 1970s (D’Lugo forthcoming); Stantic also advised Martel to send the script of La ciénaga to the Sundance Institute and was thus instrumental in that project’s winning of funding and eventual reali­ sation. She suggested the actress Mercedes Morán for the role of Tali in La ciénaga and Morán also went on to take a leading role in La niña santa. Elements of Bertha Navarro’s methodology are evident in Martel’s work, from her emphasis on the creation of a strong script and on adhering closely to it during shooting, to her films’ attention to the everyday, the intimate and the private, and the way they tease out the relationship of these to wider social power structures.16 After the success of La ciénaga, which won numerous awards including the Alfred Bauer Prize of the Berlin International Film Festival, and was seen by 130,874 spectators in Argentina,17 Martel won a Cinéfondation grant which enabled her to attend a residence programme in Paris where she wrote the script for La niña santa. Both La niña santa and La mujer sin cabeza were produced by El Deseo, the production company of brothers Agustín and Pedro Almodóvar. As Shaw notes, ‘La niña santa is the result […] of a complex configuration of private and public finance, and is an example of auteurist Latin America cinema made possible thanks to the support of European organisations and companies’ (2013, 167).18 Both La niña santa and La mujer sin cabeza premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and received ACCA nominations and awards.19 In addition to the thematic and aesthetic resonances between their work – the films’ queer politics are an obvious point of comparison – Martel and Almodóvar actively endorse one another’s work and have even campaigned together on LGBT rights in Argentina.20 As Paul Julian Smith argues, ‘El Deseo is aware that sponsorship of young auteurs like Martel, whose films may well lose money for them, remains a way of adding to the prestige and symbolic capital of Almodóvar himself’ (2012, 71). D’Lugo discusses the idea of a house style common to El Deseo productions and sees Martel’s later films, and especially La mujer sin cabeza, as sharing the company’s ‘transhispanic’ aesthetics and aspirations (D’Lugo

Introduction

7

2013). By the time of La mujer sin cabeza a clear aesthetic connection to Almodóvar’s own work was created through paratextual features such as the striking publicity image for that film, which was designed by Juan Gatti, the graphic designer for the publicity of Almodóvar’s own films (Kairuz 2008, 53). In part through this connection with Almodóvar and El Deseo, Martel’s films have achieved a signifi­ cant global impact, with Martel becoming perhaps the best-known of contemporary Argentine filmmakers, and serving on the juries of international festivals including Berlin, Cannes, Sundance and Venice. Her increasing lionisation has been augmented by the many public appearances, interviews and discussions of her films through which her authorial persona has been created; in television appear­ ances she glosses and intellectualises the difficult aspects of her films, and has latterly adopted a ‘trademark’ use of 1950s-style cat eye glasses which she now always wears in publicity shots. Their quirky, elongated shape is wittily referenced in her parodic short film Muta and dialogues with the more general meditation on constructions of visual or ‘film star’ femininity (including, then, her own authorship and its performance) which I show to be a part of her filmmaking. Martel’s work has been more widely distributed internationally than is usual in the case of Latin American cinema,21 and its global reach – in addition to the high-profile associations already mentioned – can be attributed to its privileging of themes and styles currently popular in global arts cinema such as the subversive take on child sexuality (which echoes Almodóvar’s own La mala educación [Bad Education, 2004] and which has become an established theme of European arts cinema),22 as well as to its dialogue with the classical auteur cinema of, for example, Antonioni and Hitchcock, and its subtle echoing or re-working of genre film including conventions of the horror, the thriller and the melodrama.23 24 In terms of their style, Martel’s films can also be seen as part of a tendency in contemporary art cinema towards an aesthetic of sensation, a cinema which privileges the tactile and the sensorial over the visual. This sensorial approach in contemporary ‘festival films’ often takes place – as in Martel – within the context of a slowing of cinematic time. Tiago de Luca proposes this as a tendency of contemporary world cinema, which he sees as ‘defined above all by a sensory mode of address’ (2012, 187), and as ‘foreground[ing] reality primarily as a perceptual, sensible and experi­ ential phenomenon’ (2012, 192). Indeed, both Paul Julian Smith and Marvin D’Lugo see the feature films’ transnational funding arrange­

8

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

ments and distribution deals as generating a transnationalisation of style, with Martel’s films featuring aesthetics similar to those of other transnational auteurs favoured on the international festival circuit.25 Despite these global resonances, Martel’s features retain an intensely local flavour, attesting to the tastes of international art-house and festival audiences for local and ‘authentic’ slices of Latin American life, and suggesting the production of Latin Americanness for foreign consumption as a feature of the contemporary deterritorialisation of cultural production. Whilst the films avoid concrete references to specific places,26 Martel’s home province of Salta provides a semi-im­ aginary geography which played an important part in Martel’s creative process when working on the first three features, and which creates intertextual resonances between the films. Subsequent to La mujer sin cabeza, Martel has started to film in different regions of the country with a particular focus on riverine landscapes and the provinces of Chaco, Corrientes and Formosa, which provide the settings for the short films Nueva Argirópolis and Muta, and for the more recent Zama project. The riverine location as a setting for increasing ontological fluidity and the deterritorialisation of identities will be discussed in Chapter 4, which deals with the 2010–11 short films. In the three features, as well as the early short Rey Muerto, the fictional town of La Ciénaga functions as an anchor for an imaginary salteño space, in relation to which Martel has commented that she located each of these films (in Panozzo 2008, 14). La niña santa in a sense grows out of La ciénaga, because, as Martel has put it: ‘La niña santa es un cuento, un cuento de esa gente que vive en La Ciénaga. No es algo que les pasó a unos personajes sino algo que cuenta la gente de por ahí. Le falta un grado más de realidad’ (‘La niña santa is a tale, a tale told by the people that live in La Ciénaga. It’s not something that happened to some characters, but rather a story which is told by people in the area. It’s at another remove from reality’, in Oubiña 2009, 78). In turn, Martel thinks of some of La mujer sin cabeza’s characters as adult versions of the girls in La niña santa, and names them accordingly.27 In this way, she creates a semi-consistent world, linking her first three feature films in space and time.28 These films share a minute attention to the vicissitudes of everyday life in Salta: its particular religious practices,29 its class, ethnic and sexual relations, the particularities of local speech. For Porta Fouz, it is their attention to how local ways of speaking construct a provincial world-view that marks Martel’s feature films out as salteñas (from Salta province): she calls attention to their ‘palabras de

Introduction

9

provincia’ (‘provincial words’) which ‘describen una vida (provinciana) de familia opresiva, […] de mirar a la ciudad como algo lejanísimo […]’ (‘describe an oppressive, provincial family life […] which sees the city as something very far away’, 2008, 21), and which distinguish the characters’ speech from a neutral, porteño Spanish. This emphasis on naturalistic and non-standard speech has been seen as a defining feature of New Argentine filmmaking, shared by directors such as Rejtman, Caetano and Stagnaro, and Trapero, despite the fact that they were depicting different social milieux.30 The emphasis on local speech in Martel’s work constructs a local way of seeing; as Porta Fouz puts it ‘La provincia de Martel es la provincia quieta, sin horizontes, de la que es difícil salir’ (‘Martel’s provinces are a place which lacks movement or horizons, and which it is difficult to leave’, 21). Martel has stated on several occasions that she made the three features to be watched in Salta, where ‘repeating the lives of others is a goal’ (in Guest 2009).31 These films display a strong political commitment to the depiction, analysis and often the defamiliarisa­ tion of the local culture. Through a minute attention to private life, to intra-familial relationships as well as to the relationships between the white middle-class protagonists and their dark-skinned, workingclass servants and neighbours, the films attempt to reveal how neoco­ lonial, patriarchal and heteronormative structures are perpetuated, with particular emphasis on the tendency to repeat, and possibilities for change. In the features this means that a scrutiny of family life as the field within which these power relations and repetitions play out is central; in the later short Nueva Argirópolis, the focus is instead on the construction of (racial and social) otherness by the state, through the depiction of the police handling of indigenous internal migration and activism. These films all share what has generally been under­ stood to be a defining feature of New Argentine filmmaking; that is, the avoidance of obvious didacticism, or of overt political meanings as well as of any tendency to the politically programmatic.32 The cinema of Lucrecia Martel contends, though, that Martel’s films are, neverthe­ less, highly political, and that their politics can be found not only in their attempts to reveal reality, and to defamiliarise it – especially in relation to how the power structures of a rigidly conservative society are maintained – but also, and perhaps most importantly, in their pervasive creation of uncertainty and doubt, their play with percep­ tion, which in turn suggests a contingent and mutable reality, and allows for the glimpsing of alternative possibilities.

10

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Martel’s films work to undermine the ideological mechanisms of the cinema and to reveal those of the worlds they portray. They use well-worn art-house techniques to disrupt spectator identification and produce distanciation, to fracture notions of empirical truth and the accompanying sujet supposé savoir, favouring ambiguity, a disjunc­ ture between sound and image, temporal and spatial dislocation over classical editing styles, and an immanence of meaning requiring active spectatorial involvement. Characters and the relationships between them are not established in a conventional way, and often remain indistinct or unclear; minor characters especially may be diffi­ cult to distinguish from one another. Pans of the camera are rare; they would allow too much certainty about the way spaces relate to one another. Elliptical narrative structures, weak or missing causal links, major events which happen off-screen, and shots which either withhold information or include too much information – often in the form of many minor acts happening at once – all contribute to the creation of uncertainty and disorientate the spectator. Immer­ sive, heightened and often haptic and acousmatic sound is impor­ tant in Martel’s ‘aurally conceived’ cinema (Russell 2008, 1) and contributes to this spectatorial estrangement and immanence of meaning, working against the tendency of dominant cinema to use sound simply to support and explain the visual image. In Martel’s work, sound tends to have thematic and narrative importance, often fulfilling functions traditionally performed by the visual, and the strange, off-screen yet diegetic sounds which permeate the films continually suggest further layers to reality, something beyond the frame, beyond the visible or tangible. Aguilar has suggested that a defining feature of the New Argentine Cinema is the sense in which the films ‘trabajan con la indeterminación y abren el juego de la inter­ pretación’ (‘work with indeterminacy and open up the play of inter­ pretation’, Aguilar 2006, 24), and this is a crucial element of Martel’s films; where they differ from those of Trapero, Caetano, Rejtman et al. is the sense in which this indeterminacy, the constant menace or possibility of the off-screen, the repressed or the noumenal, gener­ ates a pervasive sense of the uncanny often subtly redolent of horror. As this book contends, the uncanny, a feeling of ‘uncertainty […] regarding who one is and what is being experienced […of a] commin­ gling of the familiar and unfamiliar’ (Royle 2003, 2), and the subject of an influential essay by Freud (1953a [1919]), constitutes a major mode of Martel’s filmmaking.

Introduction

11

Martel’s method and process combine intricate planning with an understanding of cinema as an investigative tool which will reveal something about reality. She makes detailed plans of both soundtrack and the use of focus prior to shooting. Having the soundtrack worked out in advance indicates the importance of sound artistically in her work, but she has also spoken about it as a way of saving money, since adopting this method means that fewer takes are required, and that a lot of the information is communicated through sound rather than the visual (in Guillen 2009). She has commented: ‘yo me doy cuenta que del rodaje espero una revelación, que cuando filmo un plano espero no solamente poder hacer la película […] sino, profundamente espero entender algo del mundo […] entonces es muy contradictorio: llevar acabo tu plan, pero que algo te sea revelado’ (‘I have realised that in shooting I expect a revelation, that when I film a shot I’m not just hoping to make a film […] but rather I am deeply hoping to understand something about the world […] so it’s very contradictory: carrying out your plan, yet hoping something is revealed’, in Martin 2011). The use of cinema as an investigative tool has been under­ stood as a crucial element of the new Argentine cinema, shared with other directors such as Lisandro Alonso and Juan Villegas (Aguilar 2006, 25), a tendency ultimately drawing on approaches such as that of Dziga Vertov who understood the camera as enabling a ‘commu­ nist decoding of reality’ (1984, xxx), a means of revealing ‘that which is invisible to the naked eye’ (85). However, as Oubiña (2009, 10) notes, Martel’s tight scripting and meticulous planning differentiate her work from that of a filmmaker like Alonso, which borders on documentary. It is also distinguished from naturalist or neo-realist Argentine productions of the same period by its heightened, oneiric atmosphere and expressionist style. A crucial strategy in the films’ investigative and revelatory work involves the use of dialogue and especially the conjunctions and – often ironic – juxtapositions of dialogue with the visual image. As noted above, Martel’s is an oral cinema, a ‘cine de las palabras […], de la conversación’ (‘cinema of words […], of conversation’, Porta Fouz 2008, 18), whose characters are frequently engaged in telling stories, often of the fantastical or horrific. Dialogue is not approached in a conventional sense but instead consists of rambling chatter and open-ended conversations, creating a soundtrack of ambient speech. Voices which predominate are those of the provincial middle classes, and especially of their adult members, and within that field it is

12

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

the judgemental and critical voice of the mother which often takes precedence, creating a ‘mundo viscoso de aburguesadas palabrasmadre’ (‘viscous world of bourgeois mother-words’, 20), a prime vehicle for the films’ investigation of the naturalisation of ideology and marginalisation, the production of social subjection and inter­ pellating of subjects through insults and labels of social class, race and sexuality.33 The discursive circling of certain topics – especially race and class in La ciénaga (and to a lesser extent La niña santa) and homosexuality in La mujer sin cabeza – is often brought to a moment of analytical clarity or revelation through the conjunction of these labels and insults with the visual image. This is the case when La ciénaga’s Joaquín bad-mouths the indigenous for ‘fucking dogs’, attempting to designate them as ‘other’ and sexually deviant, whilst petting his dog’s backside, a conjunction which highlights the many other projections of desires and failings by the film’s white characters onto the indigenous underclass.34 Through the conjunction of words and the visual image, the films seek ‘una articulación que permite ver las cosas en toda su naturalidad aunque con una nitidez que no sería posible al natural’ (‘to articulate in a way which appears at once entirely natural and yet which allows for a clarity which would not be possible naturally’, Oubiña 2009, 12). Moments of analytical lucidity such as this are combined in Martel’s films with defamiliarisation, and a surreal or oneiric quality. In fact, the films’ politics rely as much on the creation of strangeness, ambiguity and otherworldliness as they do on investigation and analysis. Chapters 1 and 3 show how La ciénaga and La mujer sin cabeza defamiliarise class privilege through their visual styling; Chapter 4 demonstrates how Muta renders strange the codes and constructs of what we might call ‘hypervisual femininity’. More broadly, all Martel’s films in some way work to call into question our perception, making us uncertain about what we see or hear. In this way they undermine the conven­ tional languages of narrative cinema, which tend towards the suture of the spectator, and towards explanation and clarity. Martel’s films are also strongly diegetically preoccupied with situations of perceptual uncertainty and crisis, as well as with the creation of new objects of perception. Echoing Shklovsky (2004 [1917], 17), Martel’s feature films in particular suggest that our perception is educated and habitual, and that this education is a function of ideology. The idea is given narrative form in the films through images of perceptual deprivation of (mainly though not exclusively) adult characters, themselves associated with

Introduction

13

dominant subjectivities and oppressive attitudes. Perceptual impedi­ ment is evoked aesthetically by distorted soundscapes, and evocations of limited vision, signalling the ways the white, bourgeois and patri­ archally-conditioned subjectivities the films critique and expose are blind or deaf to other, dominated realms of experience. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze argues that through the use of clichéd, sensory-motor images in cinema: We do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs, and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés (1989, 19–20).

For Deleuze, whilst cinema has the potential to rupture perceptual regimes and to create thought, its industrial and economic positioning means it rarely does (Deleuze 2005 [1986], xx). Instead, it has devel­ oped a regularity which inclines it towards perceptual inertia so that (like Martel’s older characters) it ‘restricts its own potentialities’ (Flaxman 2000, 19). Martel’s films counter this cinematic tendency to restrict perceptual possibilities by working to engender perceptual flux and fluidity in characters and spectator, engaging with cinema as an experiment with perception, staging diegetic experiments with and crises of perception, which are in turn generative of doubts about social reality or the status quo. This concern with perceptual crisis or flux, with the borders of perception, explains the frequent return in Martel’s work to images of falling asleep and waking, dozing, illness and immersion (in water, usually swimming pools).35 In these ‘border states’, or in the passage between sleeping and waking, between being under water and emerging into air, the films find ample possibili­ ties for the imaging of ideological immersion or submission, and for the rupturing of that submission, as well as for the engendering of uncanny sensations of ‘psychical uncertainty’, or the idea that reality might not be quite what it seems – a feeling which is (in many cases) experienced by both character and viewer.36 The seeking out of or otherwise experiencing states of perceptual flux and liminality may suggest both threat and anxiety, but also possibility; it allows for the glimpsing of other realities, for an encounter with ‘the horizon of ideology […] the border of the obvious, the natural and the selfevident’ (Nichols 1981, 3). The extent to which the films are optimistic or pessimistic about possibilities for change has been a focus for

14

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

debate on Martel. For Wolf, La ciénaga and La niña santa are about cyclical immutable universes, which he contrasts with his view that ‘en La mujer sin cabeza se abre una potencial […] transformación’ (‘in La mujer sin cabeza, the space is opened up for a potential transforma­ tion’, 2008, 44). Whilst the potential for transformation in La mujer sin cabeza may be more apparent in that film because of the fact that it is organised around a central protagonist and clearer indications of what that change might be, in fact this potential is strongly present in all the films, which balance their cyclical, repetitive universes with moments of ideological rupture and possibility. As The cinema of Lucrecia Martel will show, it is primarily, in the feature films, their representation of crises, shifts and renewals of perception, and their production of such renewals in the spectator via their aesthetic organ­ isation, as well as their figuring of desire, that constitute the major sites of transformation and optimism in these works. The understanding of desire in Martel’s work strongly recalls that of Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Oedipus. They write: If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive: there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without demol­ ishing entire social sectors. […D]esire is revolutionary in its essence […] and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised (1983, 116, my emphasis).

For Deleuze and Guattari, desire can be coded by or made to mimic society, yet it is also a decentring, fragmenting and dynamic force, always seeking ‘more objects, connections and relations than any socius can allow, pursuing “nomadic and polyvocal” rather than “segregative and biunivocal” flows’ (Best and Kellner 1991, 86). Whilst Martel’s films clearly show how ‘the first order of business for a society is to tame and repress desire, to “territorialise” it within closed structures’ (86), and demonstrate the ways in which desire is coded and functions to uphold social systems of domination and privilege, desire is also consistently figured as revolutionary in these films, as pervading and inhabiting the institutions (primarily the middle-class family, but also religion and, in La niña santa, medicine) which attempt its control. Asked to comment on the hints of incest in her three feature films, Martel has remarked that ‘desire cannot be governed, it is above the law, beyond limitations’ (Guest 2009, 8).

Introduction

15

It is the films’ queer sensibility (and I use ‘queer’ in this book in a broad sense, to designate the films’ non-judgemental assumption of a heterogeneous and plural field of desire, as well as in a narrower one) which constitutes desire as a revolutionary essence, as a crucial means by which the films gesture to the rupturing of the status quo, of the ‘closed worlds’ they depict. In the features, desire is insistently figured as a force of change or would-be change, and it is often the young, and particularly the young female characters of Martel’s features who embody both the radical potential of desire and the idea of perceptual experimentation and openness. Compelling arguments have been made for understanding Martel’s work as ‘feminist’ or as ‘queer’ filmmaking, because of this focus on the intimate lives and subversive desires of girls and women, and the domestic, often stifling settings in which the films play out.37 Martel’s early shorts suggest an engagement with both feminism and queer politics; her documentary Historias de vida: Encarnación Ezcurra (1998) focuses on the historical role and political importance of the wife of the nineteenth-century caudillo and dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and how her reputation as a weapon-carrying ‘marimacha’38 was crucial to her consolidation of Federalist power in Buenos Aires whilst her husband was leading military campaigns in the provinces, as well as highlighting how labels of sexual deviance were used by Federalists to symbolically ‘other’ Unitarians.39 A later documentary, La otra (1990), is a portrait of drag queens in Buenos Aires, in particular the Transformistas, a group whose act further destabilised gender binaries by including a semi-reconversion to masculinity on stage, the removal of bra-padding and wigs becoming part of the performance. In Rey Muerto, which has a more straightforward narrative than any of Martel’s later work, a woman kills her violent husband, and she and her children escape domestic violence. Unlike Martel’s later films, this early short deals much more definitively in feminist options for escape, in the possibility for radical change, which in the features and later shorts is considerably more tempered.40 In its use of music and drumming, as well as in its more limited interpretative possibilities, Rey Muerto recalls canonical New Latin American Cinema classic La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces). Like the films of that movement, Rey muerto has a clear political message: fighting back is necessary for political liberation. For Aguilar, a defining feature of the New Argentine Cinema is the insufficiency and disintegration of the family order and patri­

16

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

archal authority, the ‘pasaje de una imaginación masculina a una imaginación femenina’ (‘shift from a masculine imagination […] to a feminine imagination’, 2006, 46). Martel’s films depict feminine worlds in which women and girls loom large and male characters are less prominent (even if they may silently control matters from the background). Mothers, especially, ‘pululan y se multiplican’ (‘abound and multiply’) in Martel (47),41 though they are presented in a highly ambivalent way; from the aggressive alcoholic Mecha (Graciela Borges) of La ciénaga, to the harshly judgemental, critical and moral­ ising mothers that recur in La niña santa and in La mujer sin cabeza. Men are often sidelined, and are frequently feminised (Russell 2008, 17). Martel’s camera pokes fun, gently, at the vain, and this includes Gregorio’s (Martín Adjemián) obsession with hair-care in La ciénaga, and Marcos’ (César Bordón) suggestion that his new swimming trunks are ‘medio chiconas’ (‘on the small side’) in La mujer sin cabeza, as well as the image-obsessed parody of the femme fatale that is Helena in La niña santa. Men also become objects of desire, as the voyeuristic punishment and fetishistic idealisation which has marked the treatment of women in cinema undergoes a subtle gender inver­ sion, with the beaten and bruised body of José (Juan Cruz Bordeu) being undressed somewhat sadistically by his sister in La ciénaga and Amalia (María Alché) spying on the sleeping mirror-framed form of Jano (Carlos Belloso) in La niña santa. Critics highlighting feminist readings of Martel’s work have tended to focus on the earlier two feature films, and to draw attention to the privileging of a transgres­ sive feminine gaze in these (Forcinito 2006; Jagoe and Cant 2007, 179), and to the contradictions of patriarchal ideology demonstrated in particular in La niña santa (see Rangil 2007, 220). For Stites Mor, who notes that Martel is reluctant to align herself with a feminist political programme (2007, 149), Martel’s work is nevertheless part of a feminist film culture which constitutes one of only two significant public sites of feminist discourse in Argentina (the other is the work of human rights organisations), a space she posits was opened up by María Luisa Bemberg. There are, indeed, moments of homage to Bemberg in the work of Martel: the most striking being the pivotal moment of La niña santa – a moment which suggests ideological rupture, an escape from or transformation of gendered and sexual ideologies – which plays out to ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ from Bizet’s Carmen. This is an aural reference to the bodily liberation of Charlotte (Alejandra Podestá) in Bemberg’s De eso no se habla (We

Introduction

17

Don’t Want to Talk About it, 1993), in a scene where she dances before the mirror to the same music.42 An increasing number of critics are also now discussing the queer politics and aesthetics of Martel’s work, and indicating where it departs from orthodox feminism. Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla (2013), B. Ruby Rich (2013) and Deborah Shaw (2013) all draw attention to the non-judgemental nature of the gaze in Martel’s films, especially in relation to sexuality and desire. For Shaw, who discusses La niña santa, it is the film’s refusal to judge the story or the characters’ actions or desires from an orthodox feminist standpoint which designates the text as ‘queer’, as well as its emphasis on ‘multiple sites of desire that escape scientific and social regulation’ (2013, 171).43 The lesbian subject matter – girls’ desires for other girls, or for women – is presented largely unremarkably: it is just another aspect of the field of heterogeneous and multifarious desires presented in each film, the ambiguity of these desires just part of the generalised ambiguity of sexuality, narrative and motivation. For Galt, this ambiguity forms part of a ‘queer refusal to signify’ (2013, 62) which she identifies in contemporary world cinema.44 It is certainly a very different approach to sexual dissidence to that proposed by the ‘coming-out story’ which would conventionally feature a strong gay character, as well as tending towards narrative closure; instead, as Rich puts it, Martel’s work is ‘assumptive’ rather than ‘declarative’ on the subject of homosexual desire (2013, 181), her promiscuous narratives resisting closure and always tending towards the multiple and uncontainable. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel develops further queer approaches to Martel’s work, discussing her frequent return to images of dirt and contamination as a subversive appropriation of the discursive abjection of the queer, and proposing a parodic, kitsch or camp excess in her citing of cinematic versions of femininity. Pleasure, performance and parody are crucial elements of Martel’s filmmaking: there is a self-conscious, playful meditation on the visual pleasure of the female image running through her features, from La ciénaga’s irreverent use of Graciela Borges – the great diva of Argentine cinema who is forced to lament her deteriorating physique throughout the film (‘como a mí me gustan los escotes’ (‘you know how I love to show off my cleavage’))45 – to La niña santa’s Helena, a parody of the ‘to-be-looked-at’ woman (Mulvey, 1989), and finally to Vero (María Onetto), the Hitchcockian heroine of La mujer sin cabeza, whose visual presence is coded as cinematic excess. In all these cases, as well as in

18

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

the short Muta, the films flirt with paradigms of visual femininity, whilst simultaneously defamiliarising the visual or cinematic signifier ‘Woman’ in a number of ways: through the acting style of Borges,46 through Helena’s excessive self-consciousness of her status as visual object, and through the excessive use of the close-up in filming Vero. Partaking in the norm of cinematic femininity, yet destabilising this norm, these films demonstrate an increasingly kitsch or camp excess in their treatment of the female image, drawing attention to its constructedness, whilst, in the features, contrasting these women of the older generation, trapped in their excessive visibility, with adoles­ cent girls who seem to resist being looked at, either through a lack of conventional beauty or femininity, or through being pushed to the edges of the frame. Whilst more associated with the position of bearer of the gaze than their adult counterparts, these girls also move away from involvement in gaze dynamics through an increasing involve­ ment in extra-visual epistemologies of touch, sound and smell. In addition to their parodic citation of cinematic femininities, the features draw, at times subversively, on a range of genres and trends in cinema, from European art-house codes to classical Hollywood, and especially the genres of melodrama and horror, also at times citing these in a destabilising way. Russell argues that, in melodrama, ‘Martel is playing with the themes of arguably the dominant mode in Latin American cinema [which is] still central culturally through hugely popular soap operas’ (2008, 4). Like melodrama, Martel’s feature films centre on ‘the bourgeoisie, the domestic and the maternal’ (2008, 4), and each of them recalls Thomas Elsaesser’s analysis of melodrama’s characteristics: the depiction of a ‘stifling social milieu’, which characters are powerless to influence or deter­ mine (1987, 55). La ciénaga in particular, with its alcoholic Mecha and thwarted Tali, recalls the genre’s masochism and frustration, the inner, non-cathartic violence emanating from characters ‘turn[ed] against themselves’ (56). Yet, as Russell argues, ‘usually melodrama is constructed from the spectacle of emotion’ (2008, 4), whereas in Martel’s films the structures of melodrama are subverted: as emotion and conflict are downplayed, the ‘big moments’ take place off screen (4), and, importantly, extra-diegetic music is not used.47 Despite narrative gestures to notions of guilt, innocence and responsibility, moral polarities are rejected, as the films refuse to pass judgement on characters. Instead they analyse and explore the functioning of this stifling milieu as well as how its workings reflect and reproduce wider

Introduction

19

societal structures of power and oppression, reclaiming the domestic as a site of (micro)political analysis. Martel’s interest in genre cinema extends into the realms of horror and science fiction. Her three features can be characterised as subtly Gothic in mode, with La mujer sin cabeza employing some conventions of the thriller, and more recent projects such as Nueva Argirópolis and Muta drawing in an understated way on science fiction.48 The cinema of Lucrecia Martel pays particular attention to the place of horror in the director’s work, arguing that its use of horror conventions is a playfully subversive one, which functions to challenge the genre’s constructions of otherness. The feature films, each of which has a title worthy of a B-movie, are thematically concerned with the supernat­ ural, the divine and the unknown, their characters subtly redolent of zombies, monsters or ghosts, their soundtracks punctuated by shrill telephones, and weird acousmatic sounds. The language of horror on which Martel calls is often intimately linked to her films’ defamil­ iarising aesthetics, generative of uncanny effects and doubts about reality. Motifs from horror which are commonly used conservatively to demarcate social or sexual otherness are often repeated transgres­ sively in Martel’s work in ways which overturn the genre’s conserva­ tive imperatives, from La ciénaga’s queer embracing of the abject of monstrous (adolescent) femininity to La niña santa’s uncanny protag­ onist Amalia who challenges horror’s disciplining of the female gaze, and La mujer sin cabeza’s use of ghosts to evoke social exclusion and the film’s conversion of the dominant social group into the primary source of fear. This dialogue with horror has taken place in the context of a surge in production of Argentine horror films. Between 2000 and 2010 almost 100 horror films were produced in the country (Rodríguez 2014, 90). As Rodríguez discusses, it is very difficult for actual horror films to access INCAA funding in Argentina, as the Institute tends to favour realist cinema with more obviously ‘national’ or ‘political’ themes, which has led to horror developing, generally, in polarisation from the New Argentine neo-realist-influenced cinema (though Martel’s work could be seen as bridging the two), and being largely produced for export (151).49 There is a particular image which repeats itself across the three features: a child’s hands are pressing up against a screen, touching its far side. In La ciénaga this is Luchi (Sebastián Montagna), on the inside of a car (see figure 2), an image which finds a very strong echo in La mujer sin cabeza’s opening minutes. In La niña santa, the screen

20

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

is a less transparent one, and is perhaps the most redolent of horror, but all these images bear traces of horror’s fascination with touch and the visceral, with the threat posed by the image to the bodily integ­ rity of the viewer.50 We are reminded of the 1970s horror of Dario Argento, whose Suspiria also draws attention to the skin, to contact, by pressing the human face up against the far side of a window pane. Deleuze proposes that images of the hand may elicit a tactile gaze (1989, 12), arguing that the tactile can constitute a pure sensory image as long as the hand gives up its motor functions and ‘contents itself with pure touching’ (1989, 12).51 The little hands in Martel’s features invite an uncanny closeness, pushing us up against the image just as the children push up against these diegetic screens. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel shows how these films destabilise the traditional relationship between viewing subject and viewed object, eliciting a sensual and mimetic relationship between film and viewer, often evoking the sense of touch and using sound in ways which augment the corporeal, tactile relationship that cinema can have with the viewer. Younger characters’ experiments with sensation and percep­ tion, Luchi’s peering through a set-square in La ciénaga, or Amalia’s pressing on her eyes in La niña santa, operate as a mise-en-scène of the films’ own propensity to rupture the ideologically-indebted perceptual regimes which, according to Deleuze, dominate cinematic form. Martel has said that, in the three feature films, she has thought of the camera as a child of ten or eleven, valuing the child’s gaze for its curiosity and lack of judgement, its ability to perceive more, to perceive what adults have learned not to (in Martin 2011). The camera is not attached to the viewpoint of any of the children we see, though, as Martel’s filmmaking avoids subjective shots. Rather, the camera is positioned as another (unseen, child) character, and as such is only placed in positions that character could realistically occupy.52 For Deleuze, the time-image, which he saw as undoing the ideolog­ ical functioning of cinema and allowing for thought, was especially associated with the child’s gaze, since the child – due to its physical limitations – has a reduced capacity to act, and a greater capacity for seeing and hearing than the adult (Deleuze 1989, 3). It is also in the time-image that there is a shift of emphasis away from the visual and action, and towards the senses and the body. As this book will show, the films’ own experiments with the senses and perception can be understood as conveying a childish sensorium and mode of appre­ hending the world, rather than simply a child’s ‘gaze’.

Introduction

21

Indeed, the gaze and the visual are often displaced or decentred in Martel’s filmmaking, not only by the tactile but most importantly by sound, which may itself have tactile qualities.53 Commenting on this aspect of her work, the director has said: ‘En el cine, lo más táctil que uno tiene para transmitir, lo más íntimo, es el sonido. El sonido se mete en uno, es muy corporal. Y para ser fiel a esa perspectiva infantil, trabajé con la idea de que el sonido pudiera contar más que la imagen, incluso más que las palabras’ (‘In cinema, the most tactile thing one can use to transmit, the most intimate tool, is sound. Sound penetrates you, it is very corporeal. And, in order to be true to the child’s perspective, I worked with the idea that sound could tell more than the image, and even more than words’, in Monteagudo 2002, 74). As Chion writes, in contrast to the visual field, ‘[the] aural field is much less limited or confined, its contours uncertain and changing’ (1994, 33). Sound poses a challenge in Martel’s work to the hegemony of the visual, and is continually used to suggest layers to reality beyond the visible, to open up the field of interpre­ tative possibility.54 If, as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘to see is to have at a distance’ (1964, 166), these films’ appeals to extra-visual epistemol­ ogies – through sound, through touch, and even smell – resonate in the body, bringing viewer and film closer, undermining cinematic and visual regimes which uphold mind–body separation and which are associated with a Cartesian, a Western, a patriarchal and an adult way of seeing. Merleau-Ponty suggested that Western art, rooted in Cartesian thought, has worked through perspective to construct the viewing subject as rational and adult, and as a disembodied intellect. By contrast the cinematic experiments with touch and sound which characterise Martel’s work are a means to convey, through alternative sensory and perceptual experiences, the ‘aberrant forms of life and consciousness’, which Merleau-Ponty attributed, amongst others to ‘children and madmen’ (2004, 56). In this attention to the tactile, the senses, and their evocation of other forms of life and consciousness, especially childhood, but also the sexually non-normative, Martel’s work has had a significant influ­ ence on filmmaking in Argentina. Filmmaker Julia Solomonoff has linked this in particular to La ciénaga. In interview, she commented: ‘Para mi lo que Lucrecia [Martel] ha tenido es un efecto muy liber­ ador en mucha gente […E]n esa intimidad, en esa observación, en ese momento muerto de la tarde o de la siesta, hay un montón, y creo que ella inauguró una especie de ‘planeta ciénaga’ que le ha dado el pase

22

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

a mucha gente’ (‘For me, Lucrecia Martel has had a very liberating effect on [filmmaking] people. In that intimacy, in that observation, that dead moment of the afternoon or the siesta, there’s so much, and I think she has inaugurated a kind of ‘swamp world’, which has opened up the way for many people’, in Martin, 2012). The themes and aesthetics of Martel’s films have paved the way for a new wave of Argentine women filmmakers including Solomonoff (El último verano de la boyita/The Last Summer of La Boyita, 2009) and Alber­ tina Carri (La rabia/Anger, 2008) making films about children and marginal sexualities, and using tactile and immersive film languages and experimentation with sound to destabilise the cultural hegemony of the visual, the masculine and the adult.55 All Martel’s films work to open us up to such repressed or aberrant forms of consciousness. They operate on the border of the known and the unknown, always gesturing to that which is just beyond our grasp, at the edges of the visible and of the thinkable. This is why the uncanny is such a prominent mode for Martel: the uncanny is an experience of doubt, of uncertainty, and Martel’s films operate to communicate an essential lack of certainty, with all the anxiety and possibility that this entails. As such, despite their depiction of closed orders, of claustrophobia, repetition and oppression, these are films replete with exhilarating possibility and potentiality. They exhibit a pervasive openness of frame and of meaning, an openness echoed by their representation of desire which proliferates promiscu­ ously, eluding fixity. There is also a strong emphasis on the opening of perception; an idea which is diegetically staged, and which also results in cinematic experiments inviting a renewal of spectatorial perception. As we shall see, this openness and experimentation gives a radical political valence to Martel’s work. Notes 1 Martel’s work has attracted a good deal of academic attention. Although there is no monograph to date on her work in English or Spanish, Viviana Rangil’s El cine argentino de hoy: entre el arte y la política (2007) devotes a section of essays to La ciénaga and La niña santa, whilst David Oubiña has written an excellent extended study of La ciénaga (2009). Marcelo Panozzo’s La propia voz: el cine sonoro de Lucrecia Martel (2008) is a useful collection of short articles and reviews (though with twelve male contrib­ utors to one female, somewhat imbalanced). Two noteworthy theses have also been published: Oscar Jubis’s The Films of Lucrecia Martel: The

Introduction

2

3

4

5

6

23

Salta Trilogy (2010) and Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha’s A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Residuos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina (2013). Martel has commented in interview that the scripts of, in particular, La ciénaga and La niña santa are based on her own experiences and recol­ lections of adolescence and family life in Salta. See, for example, Wood (2006, 168). Prior to Rey Muerto, Martel made the short films El 56 (1988), Piso 24 (1989) and Besos rojos (1991). In the student short No te la llevarás, maldito (1989), there is an exploration of the subversive power of children that would become a crucial feature of the later work, as a little boy’s murderous Oedipal feelings towards his mother’s lover are fully unleashed in a fantasy he lives out though his drawings. Between 1996 and 1999 Martel worked on the children’s television show Magazine for fai. She also made two documentaries for television: Encarnación Ezcurra (1998) about the wife of Argentine caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, and Las dependencias (1999), a reconstruction of the life of the celebrated Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo which draws on the testimonies of servants and friends. Page remarks on the affinities between Ocampo’s short stories and Martel’s own fiction filmmaking, which both ‘focus on the subterranean power struggles of parents, children and servants’ (2009, 186). This law responded to the complaints of young filmmakers who had previously had to compete with established filmmakers to gain access to state funding. For detailed discussion of the national film funding situation in 1990s Argentina and the conditions which led to a group of talented young directors coming on the scene, see Battle (2002) and Falicov (2007, 115–50). The project received finance from the Argentine production company Cuatro Cabezas, as well as the support of Ibermedia, Fonds Sud and the Argentine Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA). Since completing La mujer sin cabeza, Martel has worked on several further feature projects. The first was a science fiction film to be entitled Gente and the second an adaptation of Argentine Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s science fiction comic strip El eternauta, which Martel was adapting as a meditation on power and social class in Buenos Aires. In both cases these projects were shelved, after significant work had been undertaken on them, due to artistic differences with the producer. At the time of writing, Martel is working on an adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s novel Zama (1956), which is set in the late eighteenth century and narrates the story of Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish colonial functionary sent to Asunción for a short period but who ends up waiting there interminably, and who is consumed by the long wait to the point of self-destruction. These unfin­ ished projects suggest a shift into more overt engagement with genre filmmaking, and an interest in adaptation which imply a break with the previous ‘Salta’ films.

24

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

7 Producer Lita Stantic was impressed by the unconventionality of Martel’s first feature. She is quoted as saying that ‘nobody has ever dealt with this region, this ambiance, or exhibited such purity of style’ (in Rich 2001). 8 Aguilar’s Otros mundos: un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino (2006) provides the most comprehensive analysis of the New Argentine Cinema’s political and aesthetic tendencies, and includes excellent and extended analyses of La ciénaga and La niña santa. Andermann’s New Argentine Cinema (2012) probes the category more critically, and treats it in a more open manner; it also includes illuminating analyses of Martel’s three features. 9 These developments have an important precedent in the work of María Luisa Bemberg. Viviana Rangil’s Otro punto de vista: mujer y cine en Argentina (2005) positions Martel’s work within feminist currents of filmmaking in Argentina (90) but pre-dates La mujer sin cabeza and other more recent films such as those by Lucía Puenzo, Julia Solomonoff and Albertina Carri, which share feminist and queer subject matter, as well as aesthetic strategies with Martel’s work. 10 As Andermann notes, the New Argentine directors have been character­ ised as sharing a ‘preoccupation with the national present at a time of crisis, often encountered through neo-realist chronicles of the social and geographical margins’ (2012, xii). 11 In 2010, Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalise same-sex marriage, and in 2012 passed a comprehensive transgender rights bill, allowing transgender people to change their gender on public documents without undergoing surgery and without medical or legal permission. 12 As she notes: ‘When I was a girl, what I mostly saw on television were Westerns – Rey Muerto is, in a way, a Western – and horror movies. These were the genres that I paid the most attention to. They also formed part of the general “climate” of my area of the country, with its deep affection for horror stories, for stories full of apparitions and fantastical situations’ (in Guest 2009). 13 See Roland Barthes’ ‘The death of the author’ (1977) and Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an author?’ (1984). 14 See D’Lugo (2003, 109–10). 15 As Oubiña notes, however, the production model of Martel’s films has differed significantly from that of other films identified with the New Argentine Cinema, such as Trapero’s Mundo Grúa, Stagnaro and Caeta­ no’s Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes, 1997) and Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad (Freedom, 2001), which were produced by their directors (2009, 9). 16 For example, Cosas insignificantes (Insignificant Things, Andrea Martínez Crowther, 2008), produced by Navarro, focuses on the intimate and the private and their relationship with wider social and political issues, as

Introduction

17

18 19

20

21

22 23

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D’Lugo suggested at a talk entitled ‘Bertha Navarro and the re-mapping of Latin American cinema’ given at the ‘Latin American women filmmakers on the global stage’ Symposium, University of Portsmouth, 10 May 2013. Cosas insignificantes also features a diegetic kaleidoscope, and thus a selfreflexive focus on altering the conditions of (visual) perception, which this book will contend is crucial to Martel’s feature films. In chapter 1, I discuss La ciénaga’s use of similar images (42). The film won the Grand Prix at the Festival Cinelatino de Toulouse, the most significant festival for Latin American cinema in Europe, and three ACCA (Asociación de Cronistas Cinematográficos de Argentina) awards. For a fuller discussion of the writing and financing of La niña santa, including the Paris Résidence programme, see Shaw (2013, 167). La niña santa was warmly received on the international festival circuit and purchased by HBO. For more on the critical reception of La mujer sin cabeza, see chapter 3 (80, 102  n.2). Martel notes that Almodóvar was a ‘director emblemático’ for her genera­ tion (Jagoe and Cant 2007, 173), whilst Almodóvar contributed a lauda­ tory text on Martel’s work to the (Gijón Film Festival compiled) collection La propia voz: el cine sonoro de Lucrecia Martel (Almodóvar 2008). Martel and Almodóvar also publicly united in support of the same-sex marriage bill in Argentina which was passed in 2010, with Martel’s publishing in the local publication Salta 21 a letter written by Almodóvar in support of legalising gay marriage. Jubis writes that ‘La niña santa enjoyed commercial runs in Turkey and Israel, countries where audiences normally have access to Spanishlanguage films only when screened as part of film festivals’ (2010, 14). All the features were released commercially in the US. Examples include Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink, Berliner, 1997) and Tomboy (Sciamma, 2011). Shaw argues that ‘Martel’s success in the international arena depends on her use of an intellectual and self-conscious global language of art cinema that attracts cinephiles and has made Martel a critical success and a favourite of art-house audiences’ (2013, 174). Martel’s work is frequently compared to the cinema of Antonioni for its use of temps-morts and attention to the body. It often recalls the corpo­ real evocation of ‘tiredness and waiting, even despair’ which for Deleuze are the hallmarks of Antonioni’s work (Deleuze 1989, 182). La mujer sin cabeza, in particular, recalls Antonioni’s use of focus to suggest the psychological state of female leads such as Monica Vitti in Red Desert. Oubiña suggests further associations of Martel’s work with that of María Luisa Bemberg, Luis Buñuel, Leonardo Favio, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Leopoldo Torre Nilson and Luchino Visconti (2009, 13). Although remarking that Martel’s style makes her aesthetic more distinc­ tive than most, Smith suggests that ‘festival films’ are threatening to

26

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30 31

32

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The cinema of Lucrecia Martel become formulaic, and share cinematographic elements with Martel’s work (2012, 72). Martel notes that when filming these features she would eliminate any place names or other geographical identifiers in order to avoid suggesting a documentary element to her work (in Panozzo 2008, 14). She has said ‘en La mujer sin cabeza de una manera muy sui generis, muy libre, era como el futuro de Jose y Amalia, como si esas amigas ya grandes, hubieran ido por ese camino’ (‘La mujer sin cabeza, in a very loose way, was like the future of Jose and Amalia, as if those two friends were now grown up, and their lives had developed in that way’, Martin 2011). Thus, La niña santa’s Jose (Julieta Zylberberg) shares a name with La mujer sin cabeza’s Josefina (Claudia Cantero). Martel’s depiction of hot, oppressive summers and family life playing out in a racially divided society has often been compared to the fictional universe of William Faulkner. Like Faulkner, Martel also creates a semiconsistent geographical world which has linked several of her works. Rangil, for example, considers the films’ engagement with local religious practices as evidence for an understanding of them as intensely local (‘muy salteñas’, 2007, 210). On ‘El lenguaje como tema’ in the New Argentine Cinema, see Wolf (2002, 35–6). Elsewhere, Martel has drawn attention to the specifically local aspects of her filmmaking which are unlikely to be understood by foreign audiences. See Smith (2012, 71) and Taubin (2009). On the status of ‘the political’ in New Argentine Cinema, see Aguilar (2006 133–42). Commentators have questioned the political status of these films because they tend to lack ‘la idea de agrupaciones activas, movilización permanente y demanda de cambio social’ (‘the idea of active groupings, permanent mobilization and a demand for social change’, 137), which is to say that they differ from the militant model of cinema established by filmmakers associated with the New Latin American Cinema in the 1960s. Critics have often turned to the aesthetics of Martel’s films to argue for ways in which these disrupt the viewing experi­ ence, or demystify ideology. Gundermann, for example, in relation to La ciénaga discusses how the film uses distanciation to interrupt ‘the conventional (and commercial) suture of the spectator’ (2005, 242), whilst Quirós discusses the temporal structuring and the editing of La mujer sin cabeza as ‘un instrumento para desvelar las relaciones de poder inscritas dentro de lo cotidiano’ (‘an instrument for revealing the power relations inscribed within the everyday’, 2010, 251). A similar investigation of the power of words to perpetuate oppression and marginalisation is undertaken in Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia (2001). Gonzalo Aguilar considers this aspect of Bolivia, drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of excitable speech (2006, 172–4).

Introduction

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34 Referring to his dog, he says ‘estos kollas de mierda se la deben de haber cogido’ (‘those shitty kollas must have fucked her’). 35 Martel has said: ‘La palabra “inmersión” no lo asocio solamente con el agua, porque en verdad uno está inmerso en el aire, no estamos tan ­conscientes de que estamos inmersos en el aire que es muy parecido al agua fisicamente, en su comportamiento. […L]a idea de inmersión es algo muy específico del estado humano […] una idea epistemológica desde la que hay que partir es que estamos inmersos […] cualquier intento de transformación implica salir de esa inmersión…’ (‘I don’t only associate the word ‘immersion’ with water, because the fact is we are immersed in air, though we are not as conscious of being immersed in air, which is very like water physically, in its behaviour. Immersion is very specific to being human […] epistemologically, we should start from the idea that we are immersed […] any attempt at transformation implies coming out of that immersion’, in Martin 2011). 36 Ernst Jentsch in his essay ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’ (1906) signals light sleep as one of a number of psychic states, also including illness, which cause the subject to experience a psychic uncertainty giving rise to uncanniness. 37 Scholars producing feminist readings or debating the place of feminism in Martel’s work include Forcinito (2006), Gutiérrez-Albilla (2013), Stites Mor (2007) and Russell (2008), whilst recently Galt (2013), Grant (2012), Shaw (2013) and Rich (2013) have evaluated her work from a queer stand­ point. 38 Slang for masculine woman. 39 After Argentine Independence, there was a civil war between Unitarians and Federalists about how the country should be organised and admin­ istered, with Unitarians favouring a centralised power base in Buenos Aires, and Federalists a federation of self-governing states. Martel’s documentary Historias de vida includes discussion of a Federalist rhyme of the period which labels the Unitarians ‘maricones hermafroditas’. Martel’s later films would also be interested in the use of language to subject, in particular through insult (see 12). 40 Forcinito suggests that this is a fundamental difference between the feminist politics of Martel’s feature films (she discusses La ciénaga and La niña santa) and those of Bemberg. For Forcinito, Bemberg’s films always explore feminist options of rupture and escape, whereas Martel’s are more focused on analysing the lives of women and girls as they exist within confinement and domestic enclosure, though as I will argue, hints of and gestures towards rupture and escape are an integral part of her vision (2006, 115). 41 Aguilar is referring to La ciénaga specifically. 42 Thanks to Deborah Shaw for this observation. In De eso no se habla, the dwarf Charlotte is closeted by her mother because of her bodily

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48 49

50 51

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The cinema of Lucrecia Martel ­ ifference. The scene in which she dances before the mirror signals d sexual awakening, celebration and liberation of her body, and a resistance to its strict regulation. Gutiérrez-Albilla, discussing La ciénaga, concurs with the idea that Martel’s work goes beyond orthodox feminism, and he also cites the film’s lack of judgement. For Gutiérrez-Albilla, Martel is ‘more interested in providing us with a kind of experimental écriture that may undermine the law of the symbolic order than in attacking power directly’ (222). Galt suggests that this refusal can be found also in Diego Lerman’s Tan de repente (Suddenly, 2002), and in the films of Todd Haynes and Apichat­ pong Weerasethakul. Borges, who once quipped ‘I am Argentine cinema’ (Gundermann 2005, 258) is an iconic diva who has starred in over fifty films. B. Ruby Rich points out that ‘just as Almodóvar has centered many of his films on divas, so too has Martel recruited some of Argentina’s most dazzling divas to anchor her casts of unknowns and non-professionals’ (2013, 180). Gundermann argues that ‘Martel takes the stereotypical acting style of an actress/diva like Borges, which constitutes an important part of what defines Argentine cinema since the beginning of the 1950s, and disman­ tles it systematically, leaving it behind like an empty shell’ (2005, 259). As Elsaesser notes, ‘[i]n its dictionary sense, melodrama is a dramatic narrative in which musical accompaniment marks the emotional effects’ (1987, 50). The unfinished projects Gente and El eternauta both deal with alien invasion. Martel’s work is held up in Argentine film schools as an example of cinema to be emulated, including by those interesting in making horror, and as such has had a significant influence on the work of this new gener­ ation of Argentine horror directors (Elián, cit. in Rodríguez, 148). The sequences from La ciénaga and La niña santa are discussed in detail on 47–8 and 61, respectively. Deleuze’s argument here is somewhat different to those of recent theorists of touch in film, such as Laura Marks. For Marks a focus on the hands themselves suggests identification, whereas her focus on haptic images suggests rather that the eyes can function as organs of touch (2002, 8). Martel’s cinema elicits a tactile gaze through both means. For Martel, this means that ‘whether you like it or not, you always have the feeling as a spectator that you are part of the action. And that’s the same reason that I don’t use establishing shots or transition shots. I find that they are very anonymous devices. I like to think that the camera is actually somebody who is physically there, like a creature, and it’s somebody who is very curious, with no moral judgement. Somebody who is not scandalised by what they see’ (in Taubin, 2009)

Introduction

29

53 For detailed analysis of sound in Martel’s work, see Greene (2012), Losada (2010) and Russell (2008). 54 Martel has also commented that ‘Me parece que estamos mucho más colonizados visualmente; estamos mucho más encaminados a ver deter­ minadas cosas que a escuchar. El oído está todavía muy suelto. Uno escucha mucho más que lo que ve. Las contradicciones en la palabra, en la conversación, en el intercambio oral, para mí son mucho más percep­ tibles que en la imagen’ (‘I think we are much more colonised visually; we are pushed much more to see specific things than we are to hear them. The contradictions in speech, in conversation and oral interchange, are in my opinion much more perceptible than they are in the image’, in Porta Fouz, 22). 55 Other recent Argentine films, including XXY (Puenzo, 2007) and Una semana solos (A Week Alone, Murga, 2007), also echo the themes of children’s lives and child sexuality we find in Martel.

1

La ciénaga: distanciation and embodiment

Febrero en el noroeste argentino. Sol que parte la tierra y lluvias tropicales. En el monte algunas tierras se anegan. Esas ciénagas son trampas mortales para los animales de huella profunda. En cambio, son hervideros de alimañas felices. (February in north-west Argentina. Sun that cracks the earth and tropical rainstorms. In the forest some areas turn to bog. These swamps are death traps for larger creatures; and yet they are alive, teeming happily with insects and vermin.) (Lucrecia Martel, ‘Sinopsis’)1

The opening minutes of La ciénaga have received the most detailed analysis of all Martel’s work.2 With remarkable dexterity and speed they create an intense, disturbing atmosphere of enervation and stagnation, of uncertainty and threat. Heightened sounds of chirping insect life are accompanied by far off, then nearer, rolls of thunder. Distant mountains are shrouded in cloud, whilst in the foreground red peppers sit out in the weak sun of a humid afternoon, where the middle-aged, upper middle-class Mecha (Graciela Borges) and her friends and family while away the hours on the declining northwestern estate of La Mandrágora, lying by the stagnant swimming pool or indoors on their beds. The credits appear, intercut with the film’s opening images, the wavering appearance and disappear­ ance of their Gothic lettering suggesting something being stifled, or attempting to emerge from the swamp only to be sucked back under; they echo the wavering of the shadows of lace curtains we now see on the wall of teenage daughter Momi’s (Sofia Bertoletto) room, and the shakiness of Mecha’s hand and gait as she attempts to pour herself more wine, drunkenly losing some over the side of the glass. Bodies, skin and touch are central to these opening images, both the wrinkled and puckered skin of the adults in their bathing suits, and

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31

the intimate contact of Momi as she spoons Isabel (Andrea López) the family’s indigenous maid, gently rubbing the sleeping Isabel’s clothing against the sensitive skin of her own upper lip. As she does so, she repeats a passionate prayer: Señor, gracias por darme a Isabel, gracias por darme a Isabel (‘Lord, thank you for giving me Isabel, thank you for giving me Isabel’). Like much of the speech and sound in the film, the communicative and dramatic function of these words recedes in comparison to their musicality and materiality. They also announce important themes of Martel’s oeuvre: the conjunction of religion and eroticism, the subversion of the sacred by the everyday, the body and desire, such as will be more comprehensively explored in La niña santa, as well as a more generalised preoccupation with the otherworldly: with the divine, the supernatural and the unknown. The soundscape of the opening sequence is both startling and immersive, both defamiliar­ ising and corporeal, and immediately gives a sense of both strange­ ness and anxiety, through heightened atmospheric sound, and the bizarre, unpleasant and initially unidentified sound of metal loungers being dragged across the patio. This particular sound is used in place of traditional transition or establishing shots to create a spatial link between the outside of the house and its interior, as it is still audible when we first cut to the bedroom. Sound also takes the place of mise-enscène, dialogue and suture: ‘aural shortcut[s]’ such as the sound of ice rattling and clinking in the wine glasses are used to immerse us in ‘a practice and lifestyle’ (Greene 2012, 59).3 The use of many-layered sound which is difficult for the spectator to attribute to a source or to prioritise, Laura Marks terms ‘haptic’ (2000, 182–3).4 Sound in La ciénaga is strange yet corporeal, much like the zombified, fragmented bodies which lounge around the pool in this opening sequence. These friends of Mecha, who barely react when, six minutes into the film, she drunkenly falls over on the patio, are filmed from odd angles, and framed to avoid any humanising focus on their faces. La ciénaga thus anticipates the more extreme defamiliarisation of the human body we find in Martel’s 2011 short Muta, in which fashion models’ resem­ blance of monsters or stick insects is emphasised, and their faces completely hidden. In La ciénaga, these techniques have the effect of freeing the world they portray from its ‘stamp of familiarity’ (Brecht 1964 [1949], 192), and conversely of emphasising its monstrous aspects, rendering strange or even fearful the naturalised elements of that social world.

32

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Atmosphere is privileged over event in La ciénaga, and very often little seems to be happening at all. When, in 1999, the screenplay was awarded the Sundance Institute/NHK Award, the jury recommended that the script be re-written, following a more traditional structure around one or two protagonists (Oubiña 2009, 26), but Martel chose instead to retain the diffuse nature of the script, which refuses to settle on particular characters, perspectives or events, and which privileges allusion and narrative multiplicity over resolution. Character relation­ ships are not clearly established, there is no clear protagonist, and it can be hard to distinguish between the crowd of child characters played by non-professionals selected from around 2,400 auditions (Rich 2001). La ciénaga’s long takes, use of deep focus, naturalistic dialogue and non-professional actors (alongside well-known ones such as Borges and Mercedes Morán) align it with neo-realist tenden­ cies. Like certain neo-realist films, it also employs a series of Brech­ tian techniques to weaken emotional identification and provoke active spectatorship, denying the spectator a fixed viewing position, and favouring instead the creation of a series of tableaux and vignettes which are revealing of the social milieu and its ideological compo­ nents.5 The ‘look’ of the film also eschews many of the tendencies of more conventional cinematic forms, as cinematographer Hugo Colace suggests when he remarks that, in working on La ciénaga, ‘Me impuse como disciplina interna el “no”. No, a ningún exceso fotográfico; no, a buscar la fotogenia o el glamour de los actores; no, a regodearme en lo paisajístico, ni siquiera mostrarlo hospitalario. Con los cielos oscuros, debía sentirse el calor, la humedad, el abandono’ (I disci­ plined myself internally to say ‘no’. No, to any photographic excesses; no, to seeking the photogenic or glamorous side of the actors; no, to revelling in the beauty of the landscape, which shouldn’t even appear hospitable. Alongside the dark skies, there needed to be a feeling of heat, humidity and abandonment, 2001, 26). The film’s loose collection of events and tableaux centres on the families of Mecha and Tali (Mercedes Morán) in and around the northwestern town of La Ciénaga. Mecha’s family lives on the decaying pepper-producing country estate of La Mandrágora whilst Tali’s lives in a more modest house in town. The film opens with Mecha’s fall, after which repeated visits are made by Tali (and her children) to the estate, to visit the convalescing Mecha, and to escape from her own claustrophobic home environment. Mecha’s son, José (played by Juan Cruz Bordeu, Borges’ son), who lives in Buenos Aires with his father’s

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former lover, Mercedes (Silvia Bayle), also returns to La Mandrágora after his mother’s fall. Characters seem to be drawn back again and again to the estate, and once there, as if in a swamp, they seem power­ less to move, overcome by lethargy and inertia. Multiple narrative directions are hinted at, rather than being fully developed: Momi’s intense feelings for Isabel, perhaps the underlying cause of Mecha’s racist antipathy towards the servant girl, and Isabel’s eventual depar­ ture from the estate, seemingly due to pregnancy; the unresolved sexual tension between José and his sister Vero (Leonora Balcarce); the latter’s jealousy and hatred of Mercedes who threatens to come to the estate for a break from her job in Buenos Aires operating the family’s pepper business; Tali and Mecha’s plan to travel to Bolivia to buy cheap school supplies for their children, repeatedly thwarted by Tali’s husband and never realised; Mecha’s psychosomatic illness, her alcoholism, and the breakdown of her marriage to husband Gregorio (Martín Adjemián); and in the background the TV story on which everyone is hooked, a sighting of the Virgin Mary on top of a water tank endlessly covered by the local media. To a greater extent than Martel’s later features, La ciénaga is a rhizome text that flows in many directions, suggesting a state of ‘becoming’ or in-betweenness through a refusal to settle on any one story, character or event. The film is structured through echoes and repetitions, and through the circling, dodging and postponement of events.6 It prefigures throughout the final, tragic event: the death of Luchi (Sebastián Montagna), Tali’s youngest son, who falls off a ladder, in a closing echo of Mecha’s accident. Martel has suggested that this structure recalls oral narration, and is reminiscent of how a tragic event might be relayed by a speaker who would hint throughout at the final outcome in order perhaps to soften the blow, by way of small incidents which endanger Luchi or foreshadow his death throughout the film: he cuts himself, tries to stop breathing, and plays dead.7 However, many of the film’s 102 minutes have less to do with tradi­ tional narrative or representational drives than with creating corpo­ real or sensory vignettes: a trip to the local dam to swim and catch fish with machetes; Gregorio’s repeated brushing and blow-drying of his hair; a water-fight in town; Momi’s dip in the dirty pool and careful application of sun cream to her skin; the experiments of Luchi and Momi with sensory perception, especially vision; the experiments of Tali’s daughters with their voices as they sing into a whirring fan. The sticky, swampy world of the film emphasises dirt, bodily fluids,

34

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

odours and the abject. It privileges texture: rumpled sheets, peeling walls, the feeling of shampooing long hair. Images of hands, skin and touch abound. Through texture, smell and touch the film invites an embodied form of spectatorship. Distanciation and defamiliarisation – and the intellectual, politicising effects they are associated with – are accompanied in La ciénaga, then, by a shift in the locus of knowledge from the intellect to the body, from the hermeneutic to the erotic, which will also be strongly in evidence in La niña santa.8 La ciénaga’s poetics are those of uncertainty and ambiguity. Editing and sound do not serve to explain or clarify matters but rather to further extend the realms of possibility. As Colace notes, the film was largely shot with a hand-held camera, and much of it portrayed family situa­ tions, in which, ‘la cámara debía comportarse como si un integrante anónimo de esa familia estuviese observando la situación. No debía sentirse una “puesta”, aunque ésta existía y siempre era muy precisa’ (‘the camera had to behave as if an anonymous member of that family were observing the situation. It shouldn’t feel at all ‘staged’, although it was, and always very precisely’, Colace 2001, 26).9 However, rather like a child, the anonymous family member/camera is curious, but does not occupy a position of mastery or control: it doesn’t under­ stand or see everything, either happening upon situations in medias res, or staying too long after an action is complete (Oubiña 2009, 28), whilst action and conversations often take place off-screen, such that the frame doesn’t manage to contain what, in traditional cinema, it would be expected to (18). In particular, the dénouements of poten­ tially dramatic or dangerous situations are not shown: when Momi plunges into the pool, we do not see her surfacing; when Luchi is in the line of fire, we do not see him move away but instead cut to a shot of the mountains, and hear a gunshot. The film doesn’t acknowledge these dangerous situations by resolving them satisfactorily; we only learn that Momi and Luchi have escaped danger when we seem them crop up in an incidental fashion in later shots or scenes.10 The film also omits the usual means of constructing coherent spaces, meaning that the viewer is often disorientated in space. There are no estab­ lishing shots, for example of either La Mandrágora or of Tali’s house, and there are no transition shots to establish the spatial relationship between the finca and either the mountains where the children play and hunt, or the town of La Ciénaga. When Tali and José travel to the finca, there are no shots to suggest the duration of the journey. This treatment of space privileges stagnation and stasis over movement or

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35

transition. As Oubiña writes: ‘La metáfora del título, entonces, resulta clara, porque eso es precisamente una ciénaga: se advierte su exist­ encia cuando ya es tarde y uno ha empezado a hundirse en el barro’ (‘The metaphor of the title, then, is clear, because that is exactly how a swamp is: you only realise its existence when it’s too late and you’ve started to sink into the mud’, 2009, 21). Neither is the geography of the house itself established for the viewer: its interior is labyrinthine, and we get to know certain spaces, but we do not get a sense of how they fit together. The film provides the spectator with limited visual means of under­ standing either its narrative or its spaces, then, whilst in a variety of ways drawing our attention to seeing and not seeing, to vision and blindness: our own view is occluded by framing and editing, whilst the characters, like us, see partially or inadequately: Mecha wears dark glasses and everyone watches TV but no one sees the Virgin reappear. In relation to the Virgin, Tali’s comment that ‘cada uno ve lo que puede’ suggests limited and contingent sight, the idea that what one sees is conditioned by one’s own subjectivity or abilities. In the final scene, Momi returns from a pilgrimage to see the Virgin, but tells her sister ‘no vi nada’ (‘I didn’t see anything’), the final line of dialogue in the film suggesting her shift away from the heightened perceptual capac­ ities with which she has been associated throughout, and towards the perceptual impediment and blindness associated with her mother, and with the adults in general (see figure 1). This filmic and narrative attention to the processes of seeing self-reflexively provokes spectator distanciation by foregrounding the processes of spectatorship, thus undermining the cinema’s illusionistic power.11 La ciénaga’s focus on the lives of two families in Salta, the autobi­ ographical resonances in the film’s intimate portrayal of adolescent girlhood, do not rule out political or national readings.12 In particular, its emphasis on the corporeal and the affective has been read as an encoding of the country’s recent history, its wounded and fragmented bodies as carrying the imprint of state terrorism (Gutiérrez-Albilla 2013, 221; Martins 2007, 207), as ‘speaking’ that which cannot be spoken in the country’s past (Oubiña 2009, 61). Podalsky suggests that the film allows viewers to experience ‘the affective legacies of the dictatorship’ (2011, 111). Critics have read the historical blindness of the Argentine middle classes in the foregrounding of blindness discussed (Martins 2007, 210), the ‘superficial and unequal prosperity derived from the years of financial speculation and privatisation’ of the Menem

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1  Adult blindness: here evoked by Mecha and Gregorio’s sunglasses.

years in the film’s focus on ‘holidays that are unable to provide any rest’ (Pérez Melgosa 2004, 163), and a divided nation in its focus on a dysfunctional family (Varas and Dash 2007, 198–9). The sense of decay and decline of the middle-class family, with its once-grand but now crumbling finca and failing pepper business, have inevitably suggested to many critics the economic fortunes of Argentina in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and in particular of the regional economies which, as Maristella Svampa has discussed, were no longer guaranteed a place in the national economy under the new neo-liberal model (2005, 43). Without wishing to invalidate a historical or allegorical approach, in addressing the film’s politics this chapter will take its cue from the film’s own detailed, almost anthro­ pological investigation of the micropolitical, its close attention to the functioning and the intersection of neocolonial and patriarchal ideol­ ogies, proposing that the film reveals how power operates through desire, belief and inclination, and how subjects are produced within the fields of desire and everyday life, and within the context of the provincial middle-class family as micropower.

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Through its close attention to speech and insult, the film inves­ tigates how the white elite symbolically ‘others’ the indigenous and mestizo servants and neighbours with whom it lives in close proximity. As Wolf notes, La ciénaga is the only film of the early group denom­ inated New Argentine films which seeks to depict class itself (2004, 180) and especially the relations between classes.13 Its investigative gaze in particular reveals how the white characters project their own desires and failings onto their ethnic and social others: Mecha contin­ ually bemoans the fact that her servants, whom she calls estas indias14 will not answer the telephone, something which she herself seems incapable of doing, whilst her son, Joaquín (Diego Baenas) – whose blindness in one eye and overt racism echo his mother’s own use of sunglasses and her attitudes – condemns the kollas for suppos­ edly having sexual relations with animals whilst petting his dog’s backside, and tosses aside the river fish he has caught, claiming that they are only fit for kollas (he later consumes them unknowingly with gusto).15 The film is also attentive to the workings of gendered and sexual oppression, most clearly through the domestic confinement of Mecha and Tali, and especially through the thwarting of their plan to travel to Bolivia – a possible escape from domestic tedium – by Tali’s husband. More subtle is the inclusion of misogynist pop songs, such as ‘Mala mujer’ (‘Bad Woman’), which, proclaiming that ‘hay muchas malas y las buenas son igual’ (‘there are a lot of bad [women] and the good ones are the same’), jars ironically as the diegetic music for the carnival scene in which Isabel attempts to negotiate a crowd of drunken men, to good-naturedly put off the attentions of the boss’s son (José), and then, dismayed, to prevent her boyfriend, Perro (Fabio Villafane), from attacking him, whilst the pop song croons about women as the root of evil and misery. If the film attends to how categories such as indio/kolla and mujer are constructed and symbolically othered, whilst undermining these representations, it is especially acute in its analysis of how racial and sexual ideologies overlap and interact with one another. Joaquín’s racism against the kollas, as mentioned, is expressed through fanta­ sies about their supposed sexual deviance (bestiality) which, it is suggested, are also projections of his own desires,16 whilst Momi’s romantic or sexual feelings for Isabel are mingled with a sense of entitlement and possession which the other members of her family share towards the maid (this is expressed in José’s sense that he is entitled to harass Isabel at the party, but also in Mecha’s outraged

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response when, at the end, Isabel announces she is leaving her employ). Isabel becomes a pivotal character in the film; largely silent herself, she is an object of desire for Momi and José, the primary target of Mecha’s racist abuse and accusations, and the excuse for or cause of the explosion of class tension in the violence between José and Perro: she is the subject of others’ speech and the motivation for their actions. The fact that Mecha accuses Isabel of stealing, as well as her conjoining of Isabel with Momi through the insult she levels at both of them – chinita de porquería (filthy girl) – suggests that her hatred of Isabel – expressed in racist and classist terms – is a conse­ quence of Momi’s unrequited passion for the maid, a displacement of unacknowledged homophobia.17 In La ciénaga, as in the later La mujer sin cabeza, working-class or indigenous characters are often viewed through a screen, such as a window or door frame, and in La ciénaga, also on television, through the coverage of the sighting of the Virgin. For Aguilar, this is the film’s way of ethically representing the oppressed or ‘popular’ classes: rather than trying to represent them directly, or suggesting that the film’s representation of them is unmediated, Martelian ethics make visible the position of the oppressed, by presenting them as occluded, silenced or marginalised through their positioning at the edges of, or on the far side of, the frame (2006, 153–4).18 Rather than trying to speak from the position of these characters, La ciénaga makes manifest how their reality is mediated by the middle classes. Isabel and Perro, the most important working-class characters, are largely silent, more spoken about than speaking; the film does not attempt to appropriate their perspective or speak from their position. Momi gazes at Isabel through a window, as she is picked up and dropped off at the edge of the estate by Perro. The TV broadcasts feature middleclass journalists interviewing working-class pilgrims and visionaries (with whom their accents contrast strongly), but the manipulation and manufacture of their reality by the news media is strongly in evidence; news reportage, putatively ‘documentary’ footage, appears more manipulated than the main body of the cinematic text. The contrast between the film’s own language and that of the television sequences it includes serves as a further critique: the intrusive camer­ awork of the TV sequences, the use of zoom and the crew’s insistent attempts to penetrate the visionary’s home all contrast with the film’s own use of the camera, which hangs back, for example, at the moment of Luchi’s death, retaining an ethical distance.19

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The presence of the televisual in the film also allows for an explo­ ration of spectacle, consumption and desire. The film was made at the tail end of Argentina’s neo-liberal 1990s, after around a decade of media-fuelled consumer culture, and the country’s economic liberalisation. These years were particularly associated with media spectacle, and the frequent news updates in La ciénaga about the continued non-reappearance of the Virgin suggest ‘a diversionary entertainment’ (Wisniewski, 2010), just as the TV culture of the 1990s functioned as a distraction from the context of economic recession and of massive privatisation.20 The televised miracle references the common Latin American phenomenon of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, such as those which occurred throughout the 1990s to a salteña housewife, María Livia Galliano.21 The film is critical of the language and form of television, in its eliciting of desire both for the religious experience and the commodity, through the news broadcasts and their punctuation by publicity breaks, such as the darkly humorous one for a mini-fridge which has Mecha – ever in need of ice cubes to replenish her wine glass – enthralled. The news broadcasts insistently manufacture desire for another sighting of the Virgin through their continued presence at the scene, and through their attempt to talk to the exhausted visionary. As Andermann points out, the reappearance of the Virgin is always postponed until after the next commercial break, bringing the temporality of belief into line with that of the commodity (2012, 163); it also means that desire is momentarily diverted from the spectacle of the Virgin’s non-appearance and replaced by a more easily fulfilled desire, such as that for a mini-fridge. Ultimately, the fridge – which, when it arrives and is installed further confines Mecha to her bed, meaning she no longer needs to roam the house in search of ice – takes the place of the TV set in Mecha’s bedroom, suggesting ‘the dissolution of TV into life, of life into TV’ (Baudrillard 1983, 55). The frequent returns to the TV screen are part of the broader struc­ ture of repetition and cyclicality in La ciénaga. As Tali declares early on in the film, ‘las historias se repiten’, and several of the film’s scenes are reenactments of or variations upon previous ones: Luchi’s fall, Tali’s visits to La Mandrágora, Momi’s dragging of a sun-lounger across the patio in the closing scene as the adults did in the opening one. The characters’ lives and actions are marked by uncanny repetitions: Mecha’s ending up confined to her bed as her mother had before her, José’s relationship with his father’s former mistress, Joaquín’s echoing of his mother’s racist speech. In turn these images of repeti­

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tion occur against the backdrop of a pervasive atmosphere of inertia, as the film is populated by immobile bodies prostrate, fatigued, depressed or simply bored. For Freud (1953b) the compulsion to repeat, alongside a primary masochism or primitive urge to return to an originary state is a feature of the death drive, evoked in the film in particular by Mecha’s seemingly inevitable retreat to her bed, and by its mirror-image in the forest, the cow mired neck-deep in a swamp which we see on two occasions. For Gutiérrez-Albilla, a ‘loss of verti­ cality’ pervades the film, and suggests a move away from the human and towards the animal, ‘a fall from […] civilised bourgeois society to a state of primal abandon’ (2013, 217). Reinforcing this lethargy and inertia, states of postponement, waiting and suspension are also crucial registers of the film: just as the characters perpetually wait for the Virgin to appear on television, the camera itself – and conse­ quently the spectator – seems frequently to be waiting for something to happen. Both the trip to Bolivia and Joaquín’s eye surgery are oft-discussed yet eternally postponed actions, the former a potential escape from life in La Ciénaga, the latter a potential improvement to it, neither of which is ever realised. Through this emphasis on repeti­ tion, cyclicality and suspension, the humans’ movement towards animal states, and through its setting, the film recalls the originary world which Deleuze identifies in naturalist film, and which is an expression of the death instinct. The swimsuits adorning the strange headless forms of La ciénaga’s opening scene are leopard-print, or zebra-striped; they suggest that, as Deleuze puts it, ‘the characters are like animals […]’ (2005 [1986], 128). For Deleuze, the setting of such films is likely to be, as in La ciénaga a ‘marsh […or] a virgin forest’, and, as here, such films are ‘composed of unformed matter, sketches or fragments’. He continues: ‘[the originary world] is the set which unites everything, not in an organisation, but making all the parts converge in an immense rubbish dump or swamp, and all the impulses in a great death-impulse’ (2005 [1986], 128). The naturalist film is dominated by ‘precipitating repetition, eternal return’ (Deleuze 2005 [1986], 131) yet also manifests ‘the desire to change milieu, to seek a new milieu to explore, to dislocate’ (133). Each of Martel’s features stages a tension between repetition and difference, between stasis and change, and each time it is the younger generation through whom this tension is staged: in a sense each film is about the propensity of this generation to either repeat or differ from the behaviour and attitudes of their elders. Potential for radical

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change in La ciénaga is especially associated with Momi, the only character who seems to perceive the realities of her social milieu, the only one who confronts her mother with the reality of her alcoholism and mental state, and the repetition and stasis it threatens, as she voices what others ignore: ‘Yo ya sé como va a terminar todo esto. Vos no vas a salir más del cuarto como la abuela’ (‘I know how all this is going to end. You’ll end up staying in your room all the time like our grandmother’). For Podalsky, Momi’s diving into the dirty swimming pool is a crucial image: it signifies this penetration and cognisance of the ‘dirty realities ignored by others’ (2011, 109). Momi’s homoerotic, cross-class gaze upon Isabel – whom she repeatedly watches from her bedroom window as Isabel leaves and returns to the estate, signifies a desire for change – figures change through desire – the desire to break out of her family’s stagnant, incestuous and repetitive patterns. In the sense that Momi’s desire imagines social change, the transcending of the closed and incestuous order of her family, there is a utopian sensi­ bility attached to the young girl’s desire, which can also be found in the later features. Desire in La ciénaga is especially associated with the younger generation, but in general it flows endlessly and incestuously in all directions. It is evoked by the continual touching of bodies, the erotically-charged play-fighting and looks between José and Vero, and the shot which suggests that José is kissing his mother rather than just reaching over her in bed. In desire, the tension between repetition and change is manifest: incestuous desires suggest a closed world turned in on itself; yet the explosive and multiplicitous nature of desire in the film also functions to undermine cultural codes of family, heterosexuality, class, race and species.22 The pull of the outside, of the unknown, which is present in Momi’s desire for Isabel is also present in the attraction that José holds for the other characters when he returns to the estate from Buenos Aires, in the fascination with the Virgin’s reappearance, the escape to Bolivia, and in the mythical perro-rata (dog-rat) that obsesses Luchi. The ‘African rat’ is the subject of a story told by Vero to the other children about a pet dog, which turns out to be a particularly vicious type of cat-eating rat, and which recalls the stories of Horacio Quiroga, which also use animals to fantastic or macabre effect.23 The perro-rata – as external yet menacing force threatening to encroach on Luchi’s world – recalls in name and function Isabel’s boyfriend, Perro, a young, male and potentially violent presence largely external to the middleclass world portrayed yet constantly hovering on its edges, as he picks

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The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

up his girlfriend at the boundary of the estate.24 As such, the perrorata can be read as a displacement of the middle classes’ fear of the working class, and also stands for the vaguer sense of threat which pervades the film as a whole, announced by the rolls of thunder with which it commences, and continued through the many accidents and near-accidents which threaten characters physically. Luchi’s mind becomes dominated by the mythical animal, and it is his obsession with the neighbour’s (real) dog barking on the other side of the patio’s high wall, and his conviction that the sound is made by a perro-rata that drives Luchi to scale the ladder and fall to his death. Although a fiction, the story takes on a life and a power of its own, and ends up producing the film’s tragic dénouement. Luchi’s obsession with the perro-rata, his attempts to see over the patio wall, are also associated with the desire to go beyond the closed world of La ciénaga. In other ways, too, we see Luchi experimenting with the conditions of his exist­ ence and perception: holding his breath, playing dead, experimenting with his vision by peering through a set-square much as Amalia in La niña santa will try to alter her vision by pressing her fingers on her eyes. The children in these films perceive more than their adult counterparts, who generally manifest some perceptual impediment. Through child characters open to other perceptual possibilities and other realities, the films question the status quo, as well as dominant, visually-predicated cinematic regimes, as I will explore below. The desire and vitality of the young in La ciénaga function, then, to counter the dominant atmosphere of repetition, immobility and entropy, constituting a ‘fuerza vital en medio de la inercia y la parálisis’ (‘vital force in the midst of inertia and paralysis’, Monteagudo 2002, 71). Their impromptu dancing in Mecha’s bedroom, and the sudden changes in pace where young bodies run and jump over and around static older ones, interrupt the lethargy of La Mandrágora.25 Domestic stagnation is disrupted by moments of euphoria and violence, the tension of postponement mitigated by moments of intensity and release. As Ana Amado proposes, ‘La temporalidad, detenida y sometida a la ley de gravedad, es interrumpida o “atravesada” por estas fugaces explosiones en las que el tiempo se expresa como velocidad, ligada exclusivamente a los ritmos de la infancia’ (‘Tempo­ rality, which is slowed and subjected to the law of gravity, is inter­ rupted or “shot through” with these fleeting explosions in which time is expressed as speed, and which are linked exclusively to the rhythms of childhood’, 2006, 53). Despite the reigning inertia of the adults in

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depression or prostration, the bodies of the young provide explosive moments of speed, running and jumping over beds, dancing and playing. The film’s action plays out on the body: it proliferates with accidents and injuries, with scars, blood and bruises, fragmented and fractured bodies, corporeal pain, loss and fatigue; yet it revels in the tactile, and is suffused with desire and eroticism at the level of gaze and touch. As Martel herself points out, ‘swamps are dangerous for some animals, but they are also full of life’ (in Guest, 2009). The mandrágora (mandrake) is a plant with sedative but also aphrodisiac properties, the image neatly capturing the relationship in the film (and especially at the finca) between states of slumber and desire, the sensuality of bodies lazing together. As Deleuze suggests, it is in the time-image that the senses and the body emerge. The film’s slowness, its frequent lack of action and event, its emphasis on suspension and postponement, recall his theory of a cinema which presents us with direct time-images, in which ‘the situation is not extended directly into action, it is no longer senso­ ry-motor, as in realism, but primarily optical and of sound, invested by the senses’ (1989, 4). In her book Cinema and Sensation Martine Beugnet argues that the shift from action-image to time-image also allows for the emergence of the abject which we so often find in horror. For Beugnet the ‘gratuitous or surplus nature of the vision’ in the time-image, ‘engages us […] with the irrational and the unacceptable’ (2007, 40). The abject – that which we repress in order to become subjects – is privileged in La ciénaga, a film replete with bodily fluids, dirt, decay and sticky residues, and which suggests a tactile and embodied relationship to these.26 Characters sniff the underarms of their clothing, evoking the smell of sweat, and lounge around on grubby-looking mattresses amidst peeling paintwork; Momi picks shards of glass from Mecha’s bleeding chest after her fall and Jose’s face is encrusted with blood the day after his fight. The distancing tendency discussed – the odd angles from which the body is filmed, its fragmentation in the image, the avoidance of techniques which might elicit identification – is countered in La ciénaga by a simultaneous sensorial closeness to the human body, and to its abject materiality. In a film in which mothers loom large, this abject corporeality of course brings to mind Kristeva’s abject mother and the creation of a maternal universe. Yet the film’s grubbiness and materiality is especially associated with the adolescent girl, Momi. She is taunted with the nickname ‘Momi sucia’ (‘dirty Momi’) by her brother whilst

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her mother, Mecha, calls her ‘chinita de porquería’, and ‘inmunda’ (filthy). After her dip in her family’s putrid swimming pool (she is the only character to swim in it), Momi, who always seems to be wearing the same gingham swimsuit, is scolded by Isabel for not washing for days. In other words, Momi is aligned with the transgressive materiality the film privileges, and thus with the disruption to the symbolic order posed by the abject. In Kristeva’s theory the abject is associated with that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambig­ uous, the composite’ (1982, 4). In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed proposes that conventional horror, structured according to the anxieties of the dominant (masculine) culture, ‘stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of […] “the abject”’ (1990, 70), and that this opera­ tion is part of the process by which the abject is culturally repressed in order to uphold the symbolic order. In La ciénaga, the abject is not jettisoned but rather recuperated: the film subverts conventional horror’s (misogynist) uses of abjection, instead, like Momi, embracing the ‘abject’ as part of the everyday, and it does so by privileging tactile and olfactory images which elicit embodied spectatorship – such as that of Momi rubbing sun cream into the skin she has been accused of not washing – thus functioning to diminish boundaries between spectator and film, self and other, rather than (as conventional horror does) redrawing them.27 Momi’s ‘abjection’ by her family can be read as a result of the threat posed by her desire for Isabel to the social boundaries which maintain race and class segregation, and compulsory heterosexuality. Whilst her homosexual desire is never mentioned by her family, their words consign her to the same realm of abject bodies inhabited by the film’s indigenous and poor, who as we have seen are subject to constant racist abuse which labels them as perverted, thieves and dirty. Judith Butler argues that abjection can be used ‘to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex/sexuality, and/ or color’ which consolidates identities based on the exclusion and domination of others. ‘In effect’, she posits ‘this is the mode by which others become shit’ (1990, 182). La ciénaga’s, and Momi’s, embracing of ‘shit’ – of dirt, bodily fluids and decay – thus also constitutes a queer resistance, a subversive re-citation of the dominant ideology which produces the jouissance associated with the transgression of taboo. It is this kind of subversive appropriation of the discourses of repudiation which Butler argues can function as a basis for queer

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opposition (1993, 223–42). The film’s (and Momi’s) embracing of the abject also implies, then, a resistance to the broader functioning of the mechanisms of abjection proposed by Butler – namely the racist – and is particularly important in a film which examines how racial, social and sexual others are constructed in overlapping ways, through images of abject corporeality: Joaquín’s fantasies of the kollas’ besti­ ality or consumption of unclean food; Mecha’s vision of Momi and Isabel as tainted, as chinitas de porquería. If the film uses images of the rubbing, sniffing and touching of the body to instigate a relation of shared embodiment with the spectator, it also does so through the sensory experiments of the younger characters, which operate as a mise-en-scène of the film’s own propensity to rupture the ideologically-indebted perceptual regimes which, according to Deleuze, dominate cinematic form. For Flaxman, following Deleuze, ‘Sensations possess the capacity to derange the everyday, to short-circuit the mechanism of common sense, and thus to catalyse a different kind of thinking; indeed, sensations are encoun­ tered at a threshold we might call the “thinkable”. […T]hinking for Deleuze begins with a “disorder of the senses”’ (2000, 12). Common visual regimes are altered by Luchi (peering through a set-square) and Momi (a rain-drenched window); both images suggest the possibility of being able to see the world differently. Early in the film, Tali’s two little daughters sing into a fan, experimenting with the effect it has on their voices: ‘Doctor Jano, cirujano/Hoy tenemos que operar/ En la sala de emergencia/A una chica de su edad/Ella tiene veintiún años/Y usted tiene un año más’ (Dr Jano, surgeon/Today we have to operate/ In the emergency room/On a girl of your age/She is twenty-one years old/And you are a year older’)28 The whirring blades of the fan act as a gate, which as it opens and closes allows some sound waves through but not others. The familiar human voice is made strange in the process, and the sequence gains a further uncanny resonance through its intertextual relationship with La niña santa, in which, as we will see in the next chapter, the words to this song take on a new life as the basis for its plot, which revolves around the sexual misdeeds of Doctor Jano (Carlos Belloso) and his advances to the teenage Amalia (María Alché). The fan-singing sequence will then be eerily evoked in the later work, like déjà vu.29 The sequence produces both defamiliarisation and bodily close­ ness. Initially, as we watch Tali on the patio we hear the acousmatic and unidentified sound of the fan. The dislocation of sound and

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image, and the unfamiliar distortion of the familiar human voice create uncertainty: what are we hearing? We then cut to the girls and the fan, but initially the image is not easily recognisable either, the camera being too close to the object (the fan), with the girls’ faces almost entirely obscured behind it: what are we seeing? This close-up on the fan’s whirring blades is also an instance of hapticity, inviting the kind of tactile gaze which, for Marks: ‘tends to move over the surface of its object […] not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to “gaze”’ (2000, 162). Likewise, the sound in this sequence produces a corporeal resonance for the spectator. As in certain films discussed by Beugnet: ‘sound plays an essential role in the construc­ tion of a haptic space. […P]recise and hyper-detailed or inchoate, the audio close-up pulls the viewer in and envelops him or her with a sensuous or uncanny sense of intimacy’ (2007, 91). The whirring fan in this sequence makes the girls’ voices vibrate strangely, and allows for the feeling of the unfamiliar vibrations in the familiar territory of one’s own body, evoking the feeling of air falling unevenly onto the skin. As discussed in the Introduction (21), Martel sees sound as a way of penetrating the body of the viewer. The fan-singing sequence is seen by Oubiña as one of the film’s many instances of tragedy foretold (2009, 29), because of the proximity of the rotating blades to the girls’ faces. And, I would add, to ours, because this feeling of threat is augmented by the viscerality, the haptic nature of the image and sound here, at a point in the film which wavers uncannily between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between vision, hearing and touch, between distanciation and embodiment. Sensorial experimentation and the openness to alternative versions of reality are in particular associated with Luchi, a character who can be read as modelling the mimetic, intersubjective relationship between film and spectator which the film is proposing.30 In his essay ‘On the mimetic faculty’, Walter Benjamin argued that our behaviour is conditioned by ‘a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else’ (1978, 333), adding that ‘children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behaviour, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being a windmill or a train’ (333). For Benjamin and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School, humans ‘give up this rich mimetic world when they become adults’ (Potolsky 2006, 141). In stark contrast to the older boys who point a gun at it (thus

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reinforcing a subject/object divide) Luchi imitates the cow stuck in the swamp by getting closer to it, in doing so submerging himself in the mud and thus coming to resemble it. As the many-toothed perro-rata progressively takes over Luchi’s imagination, the child informs Tali ‘me están saliendo muchos dientes’ (‘I’m growing lots of teeth’), rather like those plants and animals which defend themselves by imitating the features of more dangerous species. This impressionability, the ‘wonderingly open side of childlike cognition’ (Connell 1998, 74) with which Luchi responds to the story of the perro-rata is rendered visually in the film by images of Luchi pressing up against the inside of a car window, the skin on his hands becoming moulded by the contact with the transparent surface as he tries to ascertain the safety of getting out of the car against the possibility of perros-rata marauding below (see figure 2). The impressionability of skin here echoes the process of psychic mimesis taking place.31 The mimetic faculty of Luchi, his pressing up against, yielding to, or taking the shape of the world suggests an openness to possibility and a non-dominating relation to otherness. As Potolsky writes: ‘rather than setting the world at a

2  Children’s heightened perception: Luchi’s tactile, impressionable openness to reality.

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distance, mimesis brings it closer, [… and] forges a bridge between self and other’ (2006, 145). The mimetic tendency has also been associ­ ated with the death drive,32 and, given that it renders Luchi vulner­ able and leads to his death – the ultimate symbolic yielding to the perro-rata – it could be interpreted as yet another manifestation of that impulse in the film, yet the wondering openness of Luchi’s relation to otherness, his reliance on the physical and the mimetic, on touch and hearing, also strongly suggest a counter to the dominant relationships towards otherness which we see elsewhere in the film, and which are epitomised by Mecha. In this sense, Luchi’s death suggests not only the ‘cancelación de la idea de futuro’ (Amado 2006, 55)33 but also the denial of the wonderingly open relationship to the world and to the other which he exhibits. The little hands which press up against the inside of the car window refuse to stay within the world of the film and instead suggest the possibility of traversing the screen and touching us, appealing to our own embodied memories of touch, and in this way ‘subverting notions of “onscreen” and “offscreen” as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions’ (Sobchack 2004, 67). Through this image, the film dieget­ ically stages its desire to instigate a relation of shared embodiment. Tactile, physical and mimetic forms of knowledge were understood by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School as having been suppressed by Western reason; these perspectives have recently been taken up by theorists of the senses in cinema such as Laura Marks, who proposes that images of touch, or which invite a tactile and embodied response in the spectator, instigate a fundamentally mimetic relationship, a relationship to the image which functions as a corrective to dominant – symbolic – modes of visuality in late capitalism (2000, 138–53). For Marks cinema is an apt medium for producing mimetic knowl­ edge, and as this chapter has proposed, La ciénaga is something of a model in this respect, offering a mutual co-creation of viewer and film, self and other. For Marks such embodied spectatorship consists in ‘being drawn into a rapport with the other where I lose the sense of my own boundaries’ (2002, 1); it constructs a spectatorial subjec­ tivity ‘constantly transformed by its encounters with the world’ (xix). This interpenetration of self and other is also suggested not just by La ciénaga’s tactile images but also by its insistence on the sense of smell, if, following Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘[o]f all the senses, that of smell – which is attracted without objectifying – bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the “other”. When we see we

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remain what we are; but when we smell, we are overtaken by other­ ness’ (1972, 184). These thinkers also link the sense of smell to the urge to return to a horizontal or an animal state, and thus perhaps to of a form of abject materiality, when they write that ‘[t]he multifarious nuances of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower forms of existence, for direct unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud’ (184). The film’s privileging of the moments of being overtaken by otherness – the return to an origi­ nary state, the mimetic film language which dissolves distinctions between self and other – also constitutes, then, a kind of embracing or recuperating of the death drive, a drive to (pleasurable) submersion which runs counter to Western capitalist and consumerist modes of viewing and being. With her first feature film, then, Martel effects an important challenge to the aesthetic codes which have defined intellectual and resistive cinema. La ciénaga is a highly reflexive film which uses many techniques to distance the audience, defamiliarising social reality in order to create a questioning, critical spectator, and using minute investigations of social realities, hierarchies and speech in order to reveal to the spectator aspects of the ideological. Yet instead of implying a disembodied intellect, or Cartesian viewing subjec­ tivity – which might readily separate mind and body, subject and object, self and film – La ciénaga’s aesthetics function to create an embodied viewing experience which privileges a kind of intersub­ jectivity, a cross-contamination, a transgressive material relationship between the viewer’s body and the sticky, swampy body of the film. The film thus combines traditional tactics of political cinema with a bodily and sensorial aesthetics, bringing it into line with the current interest in the body, the senses, the skin and touch in filmmaking and theory, understood by Elsaesser as crucial to what he terms the ‘new realism’ (2009, 7) of contemporary world cinema. This is one impor­ tant difference between Martel’s first film and its contemporaries on the Argentine scene which were on the whole less interested in the non-optical senses.34 Whilst on a diegetic level the film is pessimistic – for all their openness to other realms of experience and forms of knowledge, both Momi’s and Luchi’s experimental, undomesticated perceptual capacities are in different ways denied by the close of the film, by its diegetic ending – if we read the film, in the words of Barbara Kennedy ‘not as a text with meaning but as a body that performs’ (2000, 5),35 the film’s radical optimism – the possibilities it

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stages of the renewal of perception and the creation of thought, can be more fully comprehended. To draw on Kennedy’s (Deleuzian) vocab­ ulary, the film can be understood as a machine or assemblage for this renewal and creation. Through the children’s diegetic experiments, and the filmic experiments which accompany them, the film counters the stagnation of the body and the domestication of perception which it portrays. As such these filmic and childish experiments function as ‘lines of flight’36 from the sedimented perceptual regimes constructed and perpetuated by dominant cinematic forms, by a reliance on the visual economy and conventional visual languages. In addition, if the film engages in a defamiliarisation, a rendering strange of the status quo – another traditional mechanism of critique – then it also works, through its sensorial aesthetics, to re-familiarise, to bring into bodily proximity, that which is abjected and excluded by the social order. In this way, the film’s exploration of constructions of otherness through images of dirt, deviance and contamination is complemented by the non-dominating, non-exclusive relationship to otherness that it produces through its own spectator-construction. Notes 1 From the synopsis of La ciénaga. Available at www.wandavision.com/site/ sinopsis/la_cienaga (Accessed 4 October 2014). 2 See, for example, Greene (2012), Gundermann (2005, 247–52) and Wisniewski (2010). 3 Greene (2012) provides a very detailed analysis of the film’s sound design, concentrating in particular on the sound images of the opening sequence and how sound performs functions commonly held by the visual in conventional filmmaking. 4 Marks writes that: ‘as vision can be optical or haptic, so too hearing can perceive the environment in a more or less instrumental way. […] One might call “haptic hearing” that usually brief moment when all sounds present themselves to us as undifferentiated, before we make the choice of which sounds are most important to attend to’ (2000, 183). 5 Colin MacCabe argues that Rossellini’s work, for example, is Brechtian in its treatment of narrative and character (1974, 19–20). 6 For Oubiña, ‘El filme avanza dando rodeos, esquivando algo innom­ brable que no se deja ver pero que amenaza con hacerse presente’ (‘the film advances by means of detours and diversions, dodging something unnameable which is hidden yet constantly threatens to manifest itself’, 2009, 18). 7 Martel has said: ‘When I saw La ciénaga finished, I realised that the

La ciénaga

8

9

10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17

18

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overall structure of the movie was very similar to the way my mother would have told the story of a child’s death, trying to find a lot of small situations to foretell that death that was going to occur’ (Guest, 2009). Following Jennifer Barker, I use ‘erotic’ in the loosest sense, not neces­ sarily as relating to adult sexuality but to refer to tactile, pleasurable, sensory relations (2009, 34–47). As Barker notes the tactile is also closely associated with disgust (47–56); La ciénaga hovers around this border between pleasure and disgust. Eisenstaedt notes that the camera used was an AATON 35-5. This allowed for shooting without a big technical team and for hand-held work, even during the sequences where the camera follows the children as they run through the forest. It also enabled cameraman Hugo Colace and his assistants to keep a low profile on set when necessary (2000, 26). As Oubiña writes, ‘el filme no se hace cargo del efecto de peligro en el que nos obligó a reparar’ (‘the film does not deal with the effects of the danger it obliges us to see’, 2009, 29). I am indebted to Oubiña for his very detailed analysis of La ciénaga’s editing and style (28–9). See Stam 2000, 151–3. Paola Arboleda Ríos proposes that in La ciénaga and La niña santa there is a ‘shift from a national-allegorical to a subjective-autobiographical paradigm’ (2011, 48), and discusses the way that ‘Martel’s creative proposal is pervasively enhanced by personal experience, memories, diaries, and desire’ (68). Martel herself has said that ‘all of [her] films are more or less memories’ (in Wisniewski 2009). Other films by Martel’s contemporaries may depict social classes (often the poor, as in Caetano and Stagnaro’s Pizza, birra, faso, but also the middle classes, as in the work of Martín Rejtman) but they do not feature La ciénaga’s scrutiny of relations between the middle classes and their working class, indigenous or mestizo counterparts. Pejorative and racist expression meaning ‘these Indians’. A hispanicised spelling and pronunciation of ‘Qulla’, an indigenous people living in Salta and Jujuy provinces. This echoes the theme of Martel’s short Historias de vida. See Introduc­ tion, 15. Forcinito makes a similar point, arguing that the mother–daughter conflict produced by Momi’s desire for Isabel is shown visually, yet hidden behind Mecha’s racism, linking this to the film’s general pre­occupation with what is seen and what is obscured (2006, 129). This is another sense in which, as I suggested earlier (26 n.28), Martel’s work can be compared to that of William Faulkner. For Celia Britton (glossing Edouard Glissant) in Faulkner, ‘the black characters are only ever represented from the outside’, which can be understood as ‘evidence of the author’s honesty in recognizing the limits of his own under­ standing’ (1999, 21).

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19 Andermann discusses the contrast between the language of the TV footage and that of the film itself in more detail (2012, 162–3). 20 As Gundermann shows, the languages of advertising, spectacle and desire that the film plays with, for example the citing of the Argentine star system through the use of Borges, or the film’s repeated use of the colour red which he sees as a reference to an advertising aesthetic, are ultimately disrupted by the film’s distancing mechanisms, a process which he argues ‘[interrupts] the flow of desire in late capitalism’ (2005, 260). 21 See ‘María Livia, la mujer que dice ver a la Virgen’. Available at: www. lanacion.com.ar/924137-maria-livia-la-mujer-que-dice-ver-a-la-virgen (Accessed 4 October 2014). 22 For Martel ‘the desire among family members [is] closely linked to the gap between classes and to the social tendency to want a social class closed, like a caste, while the gap between classes gets bigger’ (in Wisniewski 2009). 23 For example the flesh-eating ants of ‘La miel silvestre’, and the pillowdwelling parasite of ‘El almohadón de plumas’, both in the collection Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (1917). Martel has commented that she was told Quiroga’s stories by her maternal grandmother as if they were real events that had happened to people she knew (Guest 2009). La ciénaga shares other details with Quiroga’s stories, including the children running wild, the foreshadowing of a child’s death, and the extreme weather conditions of the Argentine interior. 24 Aguilar suggests this comparison between the character of Perro and the perro-rata (2006, 53). 25 For Oubiña, ‘[t]odo el filme se juega a una dialéctica entre el reposo y el movimiento: el sosiego de lo que vemos y el flujo imperceptible de lo que se alborota por debajo’ (‘the whole film plays on the dialectic of rest and movement: the calm of what we are seeing and the imperceptible flow of what is bubbling under the surface’, 2009, 30). 26 For Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, wounds, blood, pus and sweat are what we ‘permanently thrust aside in order to live’. They bring us to the border of our condition as subjects (1982, 3). 27 Elsewhere I have discussed the association of the abject with Momi as an expression of feminine puberty, and ‘the uncomfortable materiality of a changing body’ (Martin 2016, 67). 28 A playground rhyme which refers to the protagonist of the 1970s TV series Medical Centre, Dr Ganon. Thanks to Núria Triana Toribio, who alerted me to the origin of the rhyme. In La ciénaga, the girls sing ‘Dr Jano, cirujano…’ (Martel, in Panozzo 2008, 15). 29 As noted in the Introduction, Martel has suggested that she thinks of La niña santa as a tale told by the characters of La ciénaga (8). 30 Thanks to Jo Evans for this observation, after a reading of an early version of this chapter.

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31 Luchi also ‘plays dead’, another tactic adopted by some species to defend themselves until the danger of a predator has passed. 32 Discussing the work of Roger Callois, Potolsky writes: ‘Callois […] regards mimesis as a perennial instinct of all life forms […]. [H]e seeks to explain the strange fact that many insect species have evolved to mimic their surroundings. Although most studies of this phenomenon see mimicry as an offensive or defensive adaptation […], Callois approaches it as part of a more primal relationship between the organism and its surround­ ings. As he notes, some examples of mimicry lack obvious advantages for survival. […] In [some] cases mimesis is even suicidal […]. Callois sees this as evidence of a “universal mimetic drive”’ (Potolsky 2006, 142). 33 Amado sees this negation of the future as ‘un tópico recurrente en el cine argentino actual’ (‘a recurrent theme of contemporary Argentine cinema’, 2006, 55). 34 Although the time-image privileging ‘slow cinema’ of Lisandro Alonso, for example La libertad (2001), and certain sequences of Caetano’s Bolivia do emphasise the extra-visual senses, in general films associated with New Argentine Cinema do not stage sensory experiments as part of the diegesis in the same way as Martel’s first two features. In later films by Albertina Carri (La rabia, 2008) and Julia Solomonoff (El último verano de la boyita, 2009), we see the influence of Martel’s experimentations with sound and touch. 35 Noting that much film theory (and especially feminist film theory, which is her topic of investigation) has been dominated by ‘debates about repre­ sentation, signification, semiotics and structuralism’, Kennedy, in her book Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, proposes to ‘provide a neo-aesthetics of the film experience as an “event”: an aesthetics of force and sensation, where “subjectivities” are no longer purely contained in the image, or in the spectatorial psychic spaces, but through a melding of matter, the material of film, force and sensation as movement, the “in-between” of those spaces. Rather than film being perceived as purely representational, with images seen and perceived through a purely specular economy, film is here explored as a mind/body/machine meld, as experience, as sensation, as a perception-consciousness formation’ (2000, 5). 36 The Deleuze-Guattarian ‘line of flight’ ‘is a path of mutation precipitated through the actualisation of connections among bodies that were previ­ ously only implicit (or “virtual”) that releases new powers in the capacities of those bodies to act and respond’ (Lorraine 2005, 145).

2

La niña santa: horror, ambivalence, femininity

No creo que alguien pueda confundirse algo feo con algo lindo, algo que te llena de felicidad con algo horripilante, ¿no? (I don’t think anyone could confuse something ugly with something beautiful, something joyful with something horrifying, could they?) Inés, La niña santa L’amour est un oiseau rebelle Que nul ne peut apprivoiser […] L’amour est enfant de bohème Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi. [Love is a rebellious bird That no one can tame […] Love is a gypsy child It has never, ever known the law] ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy)1

Good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, saintliness and desire: these are the dichotomies upon which La niña santa meditates, the social and cultural categories which it seeks to blur. These are the questions which obsess its young female characters, and especially its teenage protagonist Amalia (María Alche), as she attempts to recon­ cile her Catholic teachings with sexual desire. In La niña santa, it is in particular the ideological conditions established by Catholicism – and their close relationship with constructions of femininity – which are subject to the scrutiny of Martel’s investigative gaze. From its very first sequence, the film presents us with the confusion and intermin­ gling of sexuality and holiness, elements which supposedly remain distinct, antithetical within the ideology of Catholicism and especially within its version of femininity. The film begins with the singing, by Inés (Mía Maestro), the girls’ spiritual leader, of a devotional poem in

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La niña santa

which religious faith is expressed through the language of erotic, even masochistic submission: Vuestra soy Vuestra soy, para vos nací Que mandáis señor de mí? […] Soberana majestad Eterna sabiduría […] Mirad, mirad, la suma vileza Que hoy os canta así […] (Thine I am, I was born for Thee; What is Thy command for me? […] Majesty most sovereign, Wisdom without end […] Look on the vileness and sin That today sings thus to Thee).2

The singer of these words, furthermore – the beautiful Inés – is the first character to be presented to us as ambivalent: she preaches religious devotion and holiness, but her pupils tell a different story: Inés is in a sexual relationship with an older man, who, the girls report, makes her tremble as if with epilepsy when they kiss. Inés’s own faint smile as she hurriedly leaves one of the classes seems to confirm this. The difference between appearances and reality is pervasive in La niña santa. Characters are ambivalent, or doubled: they do one thing, and say another.3 True identities are concealed. Literal, physical veils, and semi-opaque screens proliferate in the mise-en-scène, whilst sound and off-screen space operate to suggest a reality we cannot see. As Gabriela Halac writes: ‘[En La niña santa] se hace evidente la imposi­ bilidad de percibir el todo’ (‘La niña santa makes evident the impossi­ bility of perceiving the whole’, 2005, 100). Like the Gothic and horror tradition with which it is in dialogue, La niña santa is a film about knowing and not knowing, about the secrets of desire, sexuality and pleasure. Like the archetypal Gothic heroine, its protagonist Amalia seeks to uncover these secrets: her quest is an epistemological one which leads her into the realms of desire and the body, yet is also a search for spiritual meaning. In this sense Amalia picks up where La ciénaga’s Momi left off. If Momi’s unproductive pilgrimage to see the Virgin ended with a recognition of the incapacity of the visual to provide meaning or answers, reflected in the film’s closing line: ‘no vi nada’, in La niña santa Amalia will move her quest into domains

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beyond the visual, relying on touch, sound and smell to guide her. As we have seen, Martel’s cinema attempts to counter the domestication of perception, and younger characters experiment with their percep­ tion, producing images which suggest opportunities for perceiving the world anew. For Amalia, such states of perceptual flux and experi­ mentation are a constant: she presses on her eyes to alter her visual perception and moves from trance-like lounging to feverish illness; these states complement her careful interstitial positioning between childhood and adolescence, saintliness and the demonic, hetero- and homosexuality, the earthly and the divine. She dehierarchises the senses, privileging the non-visual over the ocularcentric regimes in which her mother Helena (Mercedes Morán) – a kind of parody of the femme fatale, of feminine to-be-looked-at-ness – is enmeshed. Touch and sound are also insistently thematised in the film, assuming an important place in the narrative, which revolves around divine callings and hearing problems, around sexual and other kinds of touch. The film concerns the adolescence of Amalia who lives with her mother in their hotel where a medical conference is taking place. The film was shot at the Hotel Termas in Salta, an upper-crust estab­ lishment which has seen better days. A married doctor attending the conference, Jano (Carlos Belloso), begins a flirtation with Helena. Without realising the connection between mother and daughter, he also molests Amalia in the street, by rubbing his genitals up against her from behind. Amalia, imbued with Catholic teachings and instructed by Inés that ‘lo importante es estar alertas al llamado de Dios’, inter­ prets the contact as a divine calling, and decides her mission is to save Jano. She starts to seek him out, to spy on him. Meanwhile, Jano and Helena’s flirtation is being channelled into a scenario that is rich in reference to ideologies of power and the visual: the doctors need a ‘patient’ for a role-play with which they will end the conference, and Helena, who suffers from Ménière’s syndrome (which happens to be Jano’s specialism), agrees to play the part. The role-play is consistently flagged as the close of the conference, and we suspect, the film. The narrative trajectory is interrupted, however, when Amalia’s best friend Josefina (‘Jose’, Julieta Zylberberg), in order to divert attention from her own forbidden sexual activity, reveals the fact of Jano’s interfer­ ence with Amalia to the adult world. The film is left hanging in this moment: we never see either the much-anticipated role-play, or the effects of the revelation; the ending, then, constitutes another kind of veiling.

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La niña santa creates an unsettling atmosphere: events and conver­ sations continually happen just outside our vision or earshot, frames are visually overcrowded, and the soundtrack crammed full of noises which we must attempt to filter and prioritise, strange tappings, murmurings, and whispers, often coming from the building itself or from peripheral conversations, with the result that the domestic is perpetually constructed as a site of the unknown. There are also specific borrowings from the sound design and visual language of the horror film.4 Like horror, this film’s soundscape favours high-pitched, diegetic sound (Diffrient 2004, 58): shrill telephones, the ringing in Helena’s ears, tapping on and murmuring of metal pipes, and the repeated diegetic return to the Theremin, the eerie sound of which is often a feature of horror, and which, like much in this film, is inter­ stitial in the sense of its sliding between one musical note and the next. Visually, sudden cuts are combined with sudden, loud sounds to startle the spectator, for example when we cut from a poolside scene of Amalia murmuring prayers to the interior of Helena’s bedroom and a TV screen with a loud voice shouting ‘¡Mamá!’, a sound which startles both Helena and the spectator. 5 The domestic is, of course, particularly unhomely in this film in which the hotel inhabited by Helena, Amalia, Helena’s brother Freddy (Alejandro Urdapilleta), and a host of predominantly female servants is also ‘home’ to a constant through-traffic of guests, at present, the conference delegates. The relationship of Freddy and Helena, who occasionally sleep in the same bed, and exhibit a childish and tactile closeness, is another of those all-but-incestuous family relationships which characterise Martel’s filmmaking. The status of the hotel as a ‘home’ is put into question in the film explicitly through the comments of Jose’s mother, who never tires of contrasting it with her own, in her eyes more proper, hogar (home).6 In his often perceptive and useful analysis of La niña santa, Gonzalo Aguilar claims that whilst almost all the characters in the film are two-faced or ambivalent, Amalia is one of only two characters – the other is Dr Vesalio (Arturo Goetz), another delegate at the congress, with a reputation as a talented doctor but also for his sexual indiscre­ tions – who exhibit no ambivalence at all (2006, 99). In fact, I suggest, the film renders Amalia fundamentally ambivalent, uncanny and strange; subtly creepy, neither completely frightening nor completely sympathetic. As Vicky Lebeau puts it: ‘[in film] the child can always be used to make the familiar strange, the domestic uncanny’ (2008,

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176), and La niña santa is certainly in dialogue with this tradition. Amalia’s contact with the supernatural, her status as medium, clearly references the trope of the telepathic or possessed child.7 The visual styling of Amalia subtly echoes films in which the child figures as uncanny object, particularly in scenes where she appears to be in a trance-like state, where she is shot in close-up and asymmetrically, from angles which distort her features, her eyes rolling ever so slightly, murmuring Marian devotions (see figure 3). The appearance of ‘what might appear merely mechanical or automatic life, such as one might associate with trance’ (Royle 2003, 1) is one of a number of phenomena or images of the strangely familiar, the uncertain or the ambivalent, which Freud discusses as producing feelings of uncanni­ ness in his 1919 essay ‘The uncanny’ (1953a). As both niña santa and faintly demonic, Amalia echoes classic angelic demons such as the little girl in Fellini’s Toby Dammit. This inversion of religious symbols – for Freud another source of uncanny feeling – is of course a staple of horror film.8 9 If Inés, as the mouthpiece of Catholicism, is concerned to construct hard-and-fast boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and horror, La niña santa revels in the strangeness of a world in which everything, including its saintly-demonic heroine, and the moral and affective situations she negotiates, confounds these distinctions. In an interview on the film’s website Martel states ‘[m]e gusta pensar en los monstruos. En la antigüedad la aparición de un monstruo, alguien fisicamente contrahecho, era una señal divina […].

3  Uncanny child: Amalia’s trance-like state.

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El monstruo, el que señala, el que devela los designios divinos’ (‘I like thinking about monsters. In the old days the appearance of a monster, somebody physically deformed, was a sign from God […]. It is the monster who shows the way, who reveals the divine plan’).10 Robin Wood shows how those elements repressed by society – including children, feminine sexuality and homosexuality – are the ‘others’ which recur as monsters in horror film (2002, 29),11 whilst Nöel Carroll states that ‘[t]hings that are interstitial, that cross the bound­ aries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme, are impure […]. Many monsters of the horror genre are interstitial and/ or contradictory’ (1990, 31–2). Amalia’s careful interstitial positioning and the rendering of her as faintly demonic or monstrous signifies the return of society’s repressed elements: the child, feminine sexuality, and the desire which is repressed by medical and religious discourses; as Gómez puts it, ‘el despertar sexual de Amalia tiene el poder de desestabilizar un orden disciplinado’ (‘Amalia’s sexual awakening has the power to destabilise a disciplined order’, 2005 para. 6). Yet the threats Amalia poses to the dominant culture are not contained or expelled in La niña santa; lines – the divisions between holy girl and sexual, desiring girl, for example – are not re-drawn; the destabilisa­ tion of categories is rather allowed to proliferate. Amalia’s desire also challenges the cultural categories of heteroand homosexuality. When they are lying down together and Amalia refuses to open her eyes, Jose ‘wakes’ her with a long kiss, after which they tease one other about who used her tongue. The kiss is hidden in plain sight – whilst shown clearly on-screen, it remains a lesbian aporia haunting the ‘straight’ narrative, which revolves around the interactions between Amalia and Jano. Yet it tells of the further ‘dangers’ to the social order in uncontained, unchannelled adolescent female sexuality, the potential haunting of the heterosexual by the homosexual.12 Importantly, critics who do see Amalia as subversive neutralise this aspect of her subversiveness in their insistence on the lesbian kiss as ‘copy’ of a straight original. Gómez (2005 para. 11) sees the kiss as ‘parte de un juego de pasaje que asegura el éxito de la misma acción en una futura situación “real”’ (‘part of a rite of passage which ensures the success of the same action in a future, “real” situa­ tion’), an interpretation which reproduces heteronormative accounts of gay or lesbian sexuality as ‘always a kind of miming, a vain effort to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalised heterosex­ uality which will always and only fail’ (Butler 1991, 20–1). Aguilar also

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negates the sexuality of the kiss by claiming it as a manifestation of ‘pureza’ (‘purity’, 2006, 99). These critical perspectives confirm Terry Castle’s assertion that ‘[w]hen it comes to lesbians […] many people have trouble seeing what’s in front of them. The lesbian remains a kind of “ghost effect” in the cinema world of modern life: elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot’ (1993, 2). The film plays on, and these critical responses to it play out, this ‘blind spot’.13 The intermittent figuring of Amalia throughout the film as uncanny and demonic is, then, a knowing appropriation of conven­ tional cinematic codes, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the representation of her gaze. Forcinito sees Amalia as the bearer of a transgressive gaze, a subversive, feminine masquerade of patriarchal structures of looking, which she characterises as ambivalent mimicry (2006, 122–5). In scenes in which Amalia is exercising a transgres­ sive gaze, often scenes in which she is looking and not being seen, Martel gives her a demonic, monstrous or uncanny edge. In one such example she enters Jano’s hotel room unbidden whilst he sleeps on the bed. She appears in the doorway, the bright light outside the door giving her a supernatural glow and falling unevenly on her face in a way which makes her nose appear hooked. This styling of Amalia often coincides with her (at times sudden) appearance in doorways or other thresholds, a motif which is in turn associated with her creeping about, her spying, and ultimately the power of her gaze. At one such moment Jano’s sleeping body, being spied on by Amalia from the doorway of his room, appears as a reflection framed by an ornate mirror, luxuriously tangled in lustrous white sheets, in a painterly shot which recalls the tradition of the passive, fleshy depictions of the female nude which have characterised that tradition in the Western canon (see figure 4). Another salient example occurs when Jano believes himself to be alone in his hotel room. He is hanging clothes in the wardrobe when he jumps at a noise, and the closet’s interior mirror suddenly reveals Amalia to be standing, behind him, in the bedroom doorway. As Diffrient notes, doorways, closets and thresh­ olds are ‘iconographic representations of psychological and emotional thresholds, […] flung open in practically every horror film. […] Shock cuts conveniently sharpen those inquisitive moments when doors are unlocked and opened to reveal a threat’ (2004, 73). Amalia’s refusal to accept her status as object in the economy of gaze and touch initiated by Jano, and her dogged insistence on actively looking/desiring is especially threatening to the social order. In a

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4  Uncanny gaze: Amalia spies on Jano.

further scene in which Amalia is spying on Jano, this time whilst he is in the swimming pool, we see her silhouetted behind a semi-opaque screen, and her hand, closer to the screen than her body, moves along it in what we can make out is a dragging or clawing motion, a clear echo of the monster or villain behind the (shower) curtain, visible enough to arouse fear, yet hidden enough to remain unknowable. When she stops at the edge of the screen, she peers through it, a gap framing her eye. She can see, but cannot be fully seen. Tapping on the metal piping with a coin, she produces a rhythmic high-pitched sound which eventually gains Jano’s attention. His unease is palpable. Amalia’s powerful look at Jano is uncannily doubled during the moments of intense dramatic irony that characterise the film’s final sequences: Jano’s wife and children have arrived at the hotel, and overhear that one of the doctors at the conference has interfered with ‘la chica del hotel’ (‘the girl from the hotel’, Amalia). Just as Jano is about to go up to the stage for the role-play, his wife delivers this news to him, without realising that he is the doctor in question. As we watch Jano silently absorb the news of his own imminent disgrace, the camera lingers suggestively on the face of Jano’s daughter, a

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young adolescent of roughly the same age as Amalia, as she casts a piercing look – perhaps of knowledge or accusation – up at her father. The powerful, transgressive gaze of the adolescent girl is a prominent force in La niña santa.14 If, over the course of the film, Amalia displaces Jano as subject of the gaze (Forcinito, 2006, 121), it is in the scenes where this displacement is occurring that Amalia receives the treatment which most strongly suggests her uncanniness, a feeling which, according to Freud (1953a [1919], 230–1) accompanies the fear of losing one’s eyes (symbolic of castration anxiety) or, we might theorise, the power of the gaze. Later, when Amalia has followed Jano into his hotel room and leans towards him to kiss him, he lashes out and inadvertently catches her in the eyes, as if to blind her, an echo of the punishment of the female gaze – both diegetic and extra-diegetic – which feminist theorists have shown to be central to, in particular, horror film (Williams 2002, 61). The film provides a jokey visual counterpoint to Amalia’s veiling in the scene described above, and one which further comments on the disciplining of the female gaze. During the girls’ homework session, Amalia and Jose whisperingly discuss Amalia’s ‘mission’. Just as Jose asks her ‘¿tuviste una señal?’ (‘have you had a sign?’), a crash is heard outside. Frightened, everyone looks to the glass door in front of which a semi-transparent curtain partially obscures their vision. Gradually the figure of a naked man is revealed. The victim of a fall, he blunders in with arms outstretched, like a zombie in a B-movie, his hands falling heavily against the glass, to the sound of Jose’s quip ‘está muerto, son movimientos reflejos’ (‘he’s dead, those are reflex movements’). The fear of the unknown turns into amusement at the sudden revelation of vulnerable male sexuality, and one emotion after the other is written all over the girls’ faces, as they stare in rapt atten­ tion. As with horror we see a long reaction shot before we see the source of fear.15 All this is much to the dismay of Josefina’s mother, who almost, but not quite, shields the girls’ eyes. But in Martel, when the woman looks, she is not punished, fear gives way to humour, the monstrous to the comic, shielding the eyes to looking. If Amalia undermines the gendered codes of visual culture by usurping the male gaze, her interpretation of Jano’s advances also signifies a transgression of the traditionally passive and innocent roles in which society (and Jano) would cast her, as female and as child. The post-Enlightenment idea of the child as innocent and pure has endured despite the influence of Freudian theories of child sexuality,

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and has been widely critiqued as an adult construction intended to produce normative, Oedipal sexuality, and to suppress sexual dissi­ dence (Bond Stockton 2009; Pérez 2012; Rose 1984). Kathryn Bond Stockton, in her recent book on the queer child in literature and film, suggests that the innocent or normative child which has been ‘made famous by landmark studies of childhood and by the Romantic poets’ is the only kind of child which ‘seems safe to us and whom we therefore seek to safeguard at all costs’ (2009, 30). Amalia’s reading of Jano’s advances is unexpected in the sense that it contravenes the culturally entrenched understanding of the child as passive and asexual; in this sense the film resonates strongly with fellow El Deseo productions such as Pedro Almodóvar’s own La mala educación. In both films, the role of the Catholic Church in conditioning children’s subjectivity and sexuality is examined – whilst La niña santa focuses on girls and the construction of femininity, Almodóvar’s film looks at boys’ lives – and in both, children are presented as sexual beings with multiple objects of desire, including adult ones and same-sex ones. For Jorge Pérez, writing on the subversive nature of La mala educación’s portrayal of childhood, this final point is crucial, since, he argues, ‘it is as if Almodóvar were taking for granted, and therefore not judging, the issue of cross-generational sex, one of the biggest taboos in today’s society’ (Pérez, 148). Although La niña santa does not go as far as La mala educación, it too portrays the child as desiring – including of adults – and as sexually active, and it too refrains from judging the sexual and desiring relations it depicts. By resexualising children, as Pérez argues in relation to La mala educación, both films ‘[bestow] on them an agency to negotiate their affects’ (145), and run counter to the disciplining of child bodies and the silencing of child sexuality which has been argued to have as its aim the production of ‘normal’ adult subjects, as well as the ‘fixing’ of childhood as a safe, pure and innocent space which functions as antidote to adult ­anxieties.16 Such a story – middle-aged male doctor molests young teenage girl in the street – might be expected to elicit strong reactions, moral or emotional certainties, from a spectator, but La niña santa instead renders moral and emotional worlds uncertain, refusing to paint Jano as a monster or Amalia as a victim. It thus makes it harder to distin­ guish between, to paraphrase Inés, ‘lo feo y lo lindo, algo que te llena de felicidad y algo horripilante’. There is, indeed, a queerness in the refusal to separate these categories as well as in the refusal to judge the desires of any of the characters including those of Jano, as well as

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of secondary characters like Josefina, who reveals Jano’s misdeeds to her parents as a way of diverting attention from her own incestuous sexual relationship. The ideology of gender (and as queer readings of the film have argued, that of some strands of feminism)17 would see Amalia’s role as that of a victim of abuse. Yet Amalia disrupts this traditional positioning by turning Jano into the ‘victim’ of her own pursuit, producing an unexpected, ‘magical’ reading of the situation which emphasises her own agency and positions her as subject of her desire, through a subversive mimicking or re-citing of religious discourse and patriarchal ideology which functions to reveal their contradictions. As we have seen, Amalia perceives differently; and it is against the backdrop of her perceptual dexterity and flexibility that the film’s major moral or ideological point is made, as Amalia is open to perceiving differently the gendered and sexual relations into which she is initiated by Jano. Jano’s actions can be understood as a kind of interpellative call which would ideologically position Amalia as a gendered (feminine) subject, ushering in her social positioning as – in this situation – passive victim and more broadly as ‘feminine’. In Bodies that Matter, Butler draws on Louis Althusser’s notion of ideological interpellation, the call or address to which the subject ‘turns around’ in recognition and thus by which she or he is socially formed (1993, 121). For Butler, who explores the significance of the theory of interpellation for the formation of gender, Althusser’s conceptualis­ ation is too restrictive: ‘although he refers to the possibility of “bad subjects,” he does not consider the range of disobedience that such an interpellating law might produce’ (1993, 122). She continues: The law might not only be refused, but it might also be ruptured, forced into a rearticulation that calls into question the monotheistic force of its own unilateral operation. Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the behavioural conformity of the subject is commanded, there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of the parodic inhab­ iting of conformity in a way that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it. (1993, 122)

For Butler, the interpellative call regularly fails, and may be ‘turned around to’ in different ways, producing ‘a slippage between the discur­ sive command and the effects, a constitutive failure of the performa­ tive which might open possibilities for resignifying the terms’ (1993, 122). In La niña santa, there is a crucial and frequently comment­ ed-upon moment in which Amalia literally turns around to face Jano

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as he presses against her in the street (see figure 5) – an image given especial prominence through its use as the film’s publicity still and DVD cover – which supports the reading of La niña santa as a story of (failed) interpellation.18 If Jano’s approach to Amalia is understood as a form of interpellative call, then Amalia’s ‘turning around’ (both her literal, physical movement and the way she proceeds to respond to his advances during the remainder of the film) signifies a response to that address and a new self-recognition, but – crucially – as an agent of her desire rather than as a passive object (humiliated, powerless) of Jano’s desire. At the same time, Amalia’s interpretation of the interpellative call as divine calling parodically inhabits the conformity (to use Butler’s expression) which her religious teaching aspires to instigate in her. Amalia’s perceptual liminality opens her to something other than the dominant understanding of Jano’s actions, enabling her to resist that script, and thus to become an agent of her desire. That this moment of interpellative failure and resistive possibility occurs whilst at a street performance by a Theremin player is not incidental: the Theremin is an instrument which is played – seemingly ‘magically’ – without being touched. Whilst Jano is engaged in touching what he should not, the instrument produces sound which, common sense tells us, ‘should’ only be produced through touch. As the instrument is being played, the comedic and ever-enthusiastic Dr Vesalio exclaims, of the street performer, that ‘no toca nada, ¡nada!’ (‘he’s touching nothing, nothing!’), emphasising how the Theremin ruptures our common sense understanding of the processes by which sound is produced. The performance, then, constitutes a diegetic staging of sensory and perceptual disjuncture and possibility, of a failure of common sense which is associated with the glimpsing of alternative possibilities or realities, and which provides the musical accompaniment to Amalia’s production of a different reality. It is in part the manifold slippages in the Catholic teachings which open up the possibility for the kind of resignificatory response to interpellation for which Butler argues. La niña santa is interested in systems governed by strict rules yet rife with tensions and contra­ dictions: primarily Catholicism, but also medicine. There is, indeed, a deconstructive impulse to the film, which is especially concerned to explore how both these discourses undermine themselves from within, through purporting to banish an ever-present desire. In the film’s portrayal of medicine this contradiction is in particular embodied by Dr Vesalio, who leaves the conference after his sexual

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5  A moment of rupture and possibility: Amalia turns around to face Jano.

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indiscretion gets one of the young female laboratory reps working there into trouble. In terms of the film’s portrayal of Catholicism, by focusing so much attention on religious teachings – many scenes take place in the girls’ classes, or feature their discussions of what they are learning – the film suggests the irresistible unravelling of that which sets itself up as ‘truth’. During the lessons Inés’s attempts to communicate theological absolutes are continually undermined by the girls’ questions, misunderstandings or the exceptions they find. Their lessons centre around the ‘llamado de Dios’ (divine calling), a concept which the girls repeatedly challenge, much to Inés’s exasper­ ation. The written word as source of theological truth is also put into question, as the girls bring unattributed and contradictory texts to class. As Inés repeatedly tries to close down meaning, reassuring her pupils that ‘está clarito: todos los medios son buenos en las manos de Dios para llamarnos’ (‘it’s very clear: in God’s hands, any means at all are suitable for calling us’) (unwittingly allaying any doubts that Amalia might have harboured about whether the sexual advances of a married man might feature amongst those ‘medios’), her pupils open it up to other possibilities. As this process takes place we watch as time and again the pupils are distracted from the discussion by something happening off-screen, usually signalled by sounds, many of which come from the street, including at some points the Theremin. This continual incursion of acousmatic sound is a feature of the film as a whole, but it is particularly pronounced during the catechism, meaning that it enacts the emphasis placed in particular by the catechism scenes (but also throughout the film as a whole) on divine callings, on the hearing of something which is not embodied. At the same time it distracts attention (both the girls’ and the viewer’s) from and thus undermines the content of these classes, using sound to challenge the truth and centrality of the image with the ever-present suggestion of an elsewhere, an hors-champs, another story. It is in this atmosphere of intellectual doubt, of the unravelling and decentring of dominant discourses, that the narrative will foreground the contra­ dictions of Catholic models of femininity, as Amalia’s reading of her situation brings to the fore the desire latent in them by imagining a spiritual mission which is also a sexual-romantic pursuit, a divine calling which is also a sensual stirring. As Rangil notes, the contradic­ tory feminine models offered by Catholicism, and the way these clash with the reality of women’s lives may induce ambiguity, ambivalence, even schizophrenia (Rangil 2007, 220).19 In the sense that Amalia

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makes manifest these tensions, she becomes, as Brecht suggested characters should, a kind of ‘stage on which social contradictions are played out’ (Stam 2000, 146).20 The question of the banishing or repression of active desire is one which pertains more generally to the acquisition of femininity in a patriarchal culture. The film suggests that there is a particular uncan­ niness to feminine adolescence, and creates what critic Kent Jones has called ‘a rich sense of the utter weirdness of adolescent girlhood’ (2005, 24). Whilst numerous theorists have explored the link between the uncanny and the feminine or mother,21 La niña santa adds a new dimension to this rich theoretical vein: by showing how female adolescent experience can also be considered a site of the uncanny. In La niña santa, as we have seen, Amalia’s creepiness or monstrosity can be understood as a knowing representation of her as a threat to dominant cultural formations. Perhaps even more importantly, though, the extreme uncanniness – the horror? – of the acquisition of femininity is also brought to the fore. In Freudian psychoanalysis the girl has been understood as repressing the active or masculine part of her psyche in order to allow for the development of femininity. Although Freud’s views on the development of femininity changed over the course of his career, the idea of femininity as a somewhat difficult or conflicted path of development, even a tortuous one, in general characterises his theory. In ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’, Freud wrote that ‘the wave of repression […] at puberty will do away with a large amount of the girl’s masculine sexuality in order to make room for the develop­ ment of her femininity’ (1953c, 255). In ‘Femininity’, he wrote that ‘in the course of time […], a girl must change both her erotogenic zone and her object, both of which a boy retains’ as well as succumb to social forces which ensure the ‘suppression of [her] aggressiveness’ (2001 [1933], 119). The notion of adolescent femininity as conflicted, plagued by constitutive repressions, is present in the work of feminist theorists and girls’ studies scholars.22 The interactions between Amalia, Jano and Helena dramatise the inherent strangeness of ‘normal’ feminine development, through the mise-en-scène of conflict between Amalia’s active sexuality and the patriarchal requirement for her to give this up represented by Jano’s reactions. He is angered and rejects her attentions once she actively turns the tables on his desire, only comfortable when he is the initiator of contact/looking. If the uncanny ‘has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds

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with ourselves’ (Royle 2003, 6), then the atmosphere which pervades the film also represents the dislocation, the ‘familiar made unfamiliar’ of Amalia’s inner world. The uncanny, which ensues from a sense of the other within the self, can be read as closely associated with that sense of divided self produced by the social and cultural imposition of femininity-passivity on the desiring or active self of the pre-ado­ lescent girl. The acquisition of feminine sexuality is itself uncanny: the repressed must return, must silently inhere as the forbidden, concealed or unheimlich element. The mother–daughter relationship is explicitly figured as a further site of tension and uncanniness in the film. The mother is announced as a major preoccupation early on: as Helena lies dozing, the TV in front of her plays away to itself, and a voice suddenly shouting ‘Mamá, mamá!’ in distress awakens her, also startling the spectator, who has witnessed, in the preceding scene, Amalia’s trance-like recitation of Marian litanies: ‘Madre purísima/Madre castísima/Madre virginal/ Madre sin mancha/Madre inmaculada’ (‘Mother most pure/Mother most chaste/Mother inviolate/Mother undefiled/Mother immac­ ulate’). Helena herself is distressed and preoccupied by the news that her ex-husband’s new wife is expecting twins, that her status as mother has been replaced by a phantasmatic other, who is ‘present’ – through her many phone calls to Helena – though we never see her. Later in the film, when Helena’s hearing is being tested, she is asked to repeat words that are said to her whilst she sits in a sound booth. ‘Misa’ (mass), says the tester, ‘misa’ she repeats, correctly. A series of words are repeated, some correctly, some incorrectly. The final pairing is underlined by an abrupt cut to the next scene: ‘males’ (evils), says the tester, ‘madres’ (mothers) pronounces Helena. The problematic relationships of other mothers and daughters also serve to contex­ tualise that of Amalia and Helena. Mirta (Marta Lubos), Helena’s employee, practically runs the hotel, whilst her adult daughter Miriam (Miriam Díaz) works there also as both cook and physiother­ apist, considering the latter to be her true occupation, but obliged to engage in the former by her mother. The exchanges between the two are at once darkly funny and disturbing. Mirta constantly scolds her daughter, repeatedly asking her to leave her massage room to return to the kitchen. Miriam, infuriated, threatens ‘un día te voy a envenenar, mamá’ (‘one day I am going to poison you, mother’), symbolically plunging a large knife into a poultry carcass, but nevertheless finds it impossible to disobey her. The third relationship, that of Jose to

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her mother, is particularly important from a narrative perspective: it is Jose’s desperation to distract her mother’s attention from her own sexual activity that causes her to betray Amalia and which leads to the film’s dénouement. Like the Freudian uncanny, the mother–daughter relationship in La niña santa combines comfort, the familiar and cosy, with the unfamiliar and the hidden. Amalia’s relationship with her mother is centred around the bedroom, where the two frequently cuddle up together, where the mother fusses over the daughter and goes to sleep with her arms around her.23 24 Because of the high proportion of these bedroom scenes, compared to other scenes in which both charac­ ters feature, their relationship is bound up with this dark, reddish, womb-like space. Despite this intimacy, what is kept concealed is of course the sexual rivalry between mother and daughter, which escapes all three members of the triangle until relatively late in the narrative, when Helena, oblivious, introduces Amalia and Jano. This image of terrible sexual mistakes being made by actors blind to familial relationships and identities clearly echoes the Oedipal story.25 The relationship between mother and daughter is, then, homely yet unhomely, both ‘friendlily comfortable’ and containing devastating concealments. Martel’s editing highlights these paradoxes: after the first street scene in which Amalia is groped by Jano (just before his flirtation with Helena begins), she cuts to one of the many scenes in Helena’s bedroom. Amalia enters, and wakes her mother, saying ‘esto parece una tumba’ (‘it’s like a tomb in here’) and ‘estás helada’ (‘you’re freezing’), reminding us that the fear of the tomb can be read as a distorted projection of the womb fantasy (Freud 1953a [1919], 244). As does much of Amalia’s behaviour, the idea vaguely frightens Helena. Later, Amalia again enters the bedroom, and, as she does throughout the film, experiments with the distance between the transmission and reception of sensory stimuli, by holding her hand above her sleeping mother’s body for several seconds. Eventually, Helena awakens with a start, momentarily frightened, as if the daughter were some harbinger of doom. Following Kristeva’s analysis of the myth of Iõ, Molloy states that ‘sex, incest and murder, and contested sexual rights between mothers and daughters, not fathers and sons, lie at the origin of the foreign/uncanny’ (1999, 159, my emphasis). Iõ, a priestess of Hera, who was found by her to be involved in a relationship with Zeus, was exiled to wander the earth in the form of a calf: ‘like an incestuous daughter punished

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by her mother’s wrath, she saw no solution but to flee, continuously, banished from her native home, condemned to wander as if, as her mother’s rival, no land could be her own’ (Kristeva 1991, 43). Amalia, too, is cast out of her home, in this case by Jano. He discovers her skulking outside his bedroom door, but has yet to realise her identity. Mistaking a resident for an outsider he gives her money for a taxi, angrily commanding her not to return to the hotel, making explicit the daughter’s exile within this most unhomely of homes. As La niña santa intimates, the uncanny of the mother–daughter relationship lies in its coupling of sameness and knowledge with foreignness, exile and the concealed, the copy which is ‘the same but not quite’ which in turn engenders mother–daughter rivalry. We feel an uncanny shiver of dramatic irony when Helena tells Amalia that they will be dining with ‘el doctor Jano’, and adds: ‘así que arréglate un poco’, or when she makes use of her daughter’s fever as an excuse to call the doctor up to their quarters in the night. Editing creates mirroring effects between mother and daughter, as in the cut which takes us, and Jano, from a scene in which the daughter tries to kiss him to one in which he kisses the mother for the first and only time. This uncanny interchanging and doubling, the lack of clear bound­ aries between self and other, past and present, the film’s scrutiny of processes of female identity formation, is given metaphorical form in the film through the recurring image of the copy – in particular the many mentions of the photocopies which the girls make for their classes, the originality or authority of which are constant sources of anxiety. If the film narrativises gendered gazing in cinema (Forcinito 2006) this is an insight which can also be applied to considerations of female spectatorship and the film’s staging of mimetic relation­ ships between women both through the visual and through telling stories. Helena is only convinced to go on stage for the role-play after being told a story about a ‘beautiful’ singer who participated in a similar performance. Amalia develops feelings for an older man after having been told a story about the spiritual leader, Inés (whose beauty is dwelled upon by the camera and the diegetic gaze of her pupils, and contrasts with their rather plainer faces) having an older boyfriend. Women looking at women, women hearing stories about women, produces mimetic practices which meld desire, rivalry and identification in a way that engenders strange familiarities, a process which is particularly acute during adolescence, and in which cinema plays its part. The film’s investigation of these processes is part of a

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wider concern with female archetypes in Martel’s work. La ciénaga’s self-reflexive use of the iconic Graciela Borges is echoed in La niña santa’s treatment of Helena, whose obsession with her appearance, extreme consciousness of the male gaze and allusion to cinematic archetype of the femme fatale makes of her a kind of parodic citation of film star femininity.26 This concern with female archetypes extends to religion and particularly the figure of the Virgin. As Rangil argues in relation to La ciénaga, ‘es significativo […que] sea la Virgen la que se aparece, pues ella encarna el ideal de mujer: virgen, madre, sumisa, abnegada y es a través de esas características trasladadas a conductas y acciones como se puede llegar a la salvación […]. Unicamente siendo “virginal” se puede sobresalir y estar más allá de la bajeza de lo terrenal’ (‘it’s significant [that] it is the Virgin who appears, in that she embodies the ideal of womanhood: virgin, mother, submissive and self-abnegating, and the idea that it is through these character­ istics, turned into conduct and actions, that one achieves salvation […]. Only by being ‘virginal’ can one stand out, and go beyond the baseness of earthly existence’, 2007, 214). If archetypes of femininity are a central preoccupation of Martel’s oeuvre, it is in La niña santa that the Catholic model Rangil describes, and its implications, receive the most thorough investigation. My argument thus far has centred largely on representational readings of and gaze dynamics in La niña santa, yet in the film’s own aesthetic and narrative arrangement there is the suggestion of a move beyond or away from representation itself, as well as a shift away from the visual towards extra-visual epistemologies. As Gonzalo Aguilar has noted, the fact that the film hints at throughout, yet refuses to show, a closing ‘representation’ or performance (the role-play between Jano and Helena) suggests a stalling of representational and narrative drives, a refusal to tell a story, at least in the traditional way (2006, 104). Suggesting that the film instead privileges the idea of the closure or end of (systems of) performance/representation, Aguilar argues that the film’s ending places Amalia ‘más allá de la represent­ ación’ (‘beyond representation’, 2006, 105). For her part Joanna Page shows how Martel’s films ‘suggest symbolic readings while refusing to ground potential tropes within a defined frame of reference’ (2009, 183). Allegorical readings – the hotel as representative of a declining middle class, perhaps; the protagonist’s name which recalls the title of Argentina’s foundational novel – are suggested, but disrupted, a process that hints at the certainty and ‘plenitude’ afforded by tradi­

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tional allegorical relationships of reference, whilst simultaneously denying it (2009, 191).27 This hinting at, yet ultimate denial of narra­ tive closure and allegorical plenitude, alongside the frequent evoca­ tion of the supersensible, the divine or invisible mean that veiling is knit into the film’s narrative and symbolic construction. The play with surface and depth implied by these readings presents us with the ‘imposibilidad de percibir el todo’ (‘impossibility of perceiving the whole’), to which Halac refers (2005, 100), the veiled nature of the ‘llamado de Dios’ which preoccupies Amalia, and the way that reality is obscured for the characters.28 Surface is continually gestured to in other ways, too, as the shift away from traditional representational forms is accompanied by an emphatic focus on texture: rumpled sheets, the stroking of hair, the feeling of water on skin. The literal veils and screens which prolif­ erate in the film are also haptic ones, evoking the sense of touch, as discussed by Hugo Ríos in an important article on the film’s creation of a ‘poetics of the senses’ which decentres and challenges the diegesis (2008).29 The semi-opaque poolside screen against which we see Amalia’s fingers dragging as she stalks Jano is scratched and pitted with use, and filmed in close-up, eliciting a haptic gaze. The diegetic screens call our attention to the cinema screen as a veil suspended over, rather than the conduit of, representation and meaning: a tactile erotics of the screen rather than a hermeneutics. As Amalia walks through the hotel, she absent-mindedly drags her fingers along surfaces and objects of different textures, feeling the big gaps in the metal grille covering a window, the hair on the heads of children running in the opposite direction, a bunch of keys hanging out of a hotel room door and the softness of the feathers on a cleaner’s duster. She does this without looking at what she is touching, in a way that suggests Bachelard’s ‘poetics of reverie’, which has recently been used for theorising the representation of the child’s experience in cinema (Lury 2005, 13). Here, the activity of children is characterised by its idleness, the meaninglessness of ‘doing nothing’. Children’s daydreaming has been related to the spaces of idleness or boredom where this may occur (Philo 2003, 13–14), though in La niña santa the child’s absorption in ‘doing nothing’ seems to be evoked through touch. Like the child who returns again and again absent-mindedly to the scab on their knee, whose gaze is ‘unregulated […], timeless and ahistorical’ (Lury 2005, 314), Martel’s own filmic language is engaged in a childish return to texture, surface and the corporeal, in particular

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through the recurrent motif of hair, which is the subject of much discussion and is visually prominent in the film. The hotel shampoo and its suitability for everyday use is talked about at length. Mirta comments on its unsuitability to Helena who passes the information to Amalia, and we later learn that Helena has given a box of it to Jose’s mother, and see Jose using it to wash her hair. Jose announces she will cut her hair to donate to ‘la peluca de la vírgen’ (‘the Virgin’s wig’), and so Amalia is not the only one who will use religious discourse for her own subversive ends. Amalia, stroking Jose’s hair, says ‘tenés refulgente el pelo, no te lo cortes’ (‘your hair is so shiny, don’t cut it’). Helena strokes and plays with the hair of both Amalia and her brother Freddy, trying to help the latter to hide a bald patch, whilst an outbreak of lice at the hotel means that all the children of the employees must be treated. It is perhaps unsurprising that hair is such a recurrent image in the film, given its ambivalent nature as at once seductively beautiful and polluting/abject. Dead, yet seeming to be alive, hair symbolises the liminal space between the two, as evidenced by its presence in magic, ritual and memorial. Hair is also the site of an uncanny sensorial distancing similar to that of the Theremin: it can be cut off without causing pain. It is Amalia and Josefina who interrupt the (so-called) logical conclusion of the narrative, of desire (the role-play between Jano and Helena) by taking the final scene which stalls them, which stalls representation. The final scene, of Josefina’s arrival at the hotel pool in which Amalia is swimming, is a space uncontaminated by the scandal ensuing upstairs and hence by narrative. It is also a senso­ rially evocative scene in which skin is privileged and water’s action on skin evoked whilst the movement of the girls’ bodies in and out of the water simultaneously gives visual form to the aesthetic play with notions of surface and depth discussed. Critics also make signif­ icant use of the image of suspension in their description of the film’s ending (Aguilar 2006, 104; Forcinito 2006, 120). However, not only is the ending suspended but this final scene itself functions as a veil suspended over the expected ending; a reminder of the cinema screen, the materiality of film, and its nature as haptic medium which can resist both scopic drive and hermeneutic oppositions in its rejection of traditional narrative forms in favour of the (non-optical) senses. Like the literal veil of the earlier poolside scene which is important evidence for Ríos’s understanding of the film as appealing to the sense of touch (2008, 13–14), this metaphorical veil too is a haptic one, in

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which the texture of water is emphasised and the grid-like pattern of the white tiles in the background recalls the grainy texture of film itself. A haptic veil, then, to privilege erotics over hermeneutics, image over plot, adolescent over adult, and the relationship between Amalia and Josefina over the various heterosexual pairings in crisis (Amalia–Jano, Helena–Jano, Jano–wife). Like the final image of the girls’ insouciant, complicit smiles, this veil mocks our desire to see and know. Not only does it deny our gaze at the to-be-looked-at woman (Helena) and the representation/perfor­ mance of heterosexual desire/tragedy in the distant adult world, it also mocks any desire to know about desire between the two girls. The ambiguity of this veil, with its suggestion of butch sexuality in Jose’s playful hip-swagger as she gets into the water, plays on persistent discourses surrounding female–female desire as object of knowledge/ truth, and the concomitant ‘blind spot’ which insists on seeing it as camaraderie and solidarity, or as practice for ‘the real thing’. The final scene, a long take in which the girls swim in a stylised way around the pool, creates an ending of pure surface, pure style, which works against interpretative drives. Whilst the viewer knows something that Amalia does not – that Jose has ‘betrayed’ her friend by revealing her secret to the adults – this final sequence in fact privileges solidarity between the girls as José assures Amalia: ‘yo siempre te voy a cuidar, porque vos no tenés hermanos’ (I will always look after you, because you don’t have brothers or sisters’); specifying that what she really means is ‘hermanas’ (sisters). Again the film refuses a straightforward interpretation – this time of ‘betrayal’, and the positions of ‘betrayer’ and ‘betrayed’ – as Jose’s pronouncement and the girls’ solidarity and enjoyment as they play and swim in the pool function to decentre the dominant narratives associated with the adult world, and to which, in these final moments of the film, we are not granted access. In this tactile and aquatic space-beyond-narrative the girls seem to escape from dominant stories and interpretations. Significantly, this is once again a scene of sensory and perceptual experimentation, as the girls experiment with the effects of being underwater on their hearing, evoking new perceptual possibilities which, as we have seen, often herald in Martel’s work the potential for understanding reality differ­ ently, for making it anew. The girls, and in particular Amalia, suggest the possibility of resisting dominant narratives, a possibility with which the film is thematically and aesthetically engaged in multiple ways. The driving

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force behind the production of these possibilities is two-fold: firstly, as we have seen, the glimpsing of alternative realities which Martel’s films attempt to make manifest often happens in association with the perceptual experiments of children; here, those of Amalia, which once again echo the film’s own experimental and sensorial aesthetics. Secondly, La niña santa foregrounds the productive capacity of desire. It is Amalia’s desire, her interpretation of events through desire, and her acting upon desire, which makes her a radically ambivalent and transgressive character, and allows for the subversive inhabitation and rearticulation of the law, and thus for the queering of Catholic constructions of femininity. It is desire which propels the pursuit which undermines the male gaze, and it is desire which leads Amalia’s tactile, sonic and olfactory investigations and which, therefore ultimately decentres the gaze itself. Through Amalia’s desire, the film suggests the possibility of resistance to the subjective and identitarian roles and models into which we are socially summoned, of ‘turning around’ in myriad inventive, unexpected and subversive ways. The film thus works to foreground the radical potential of desire, and the fact that desire, as Martel herself has put it, ‘is precisely where we see the world can be anything’.30 Notes 1 From the aria ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s opera Carmen, which accompanies a crucial sequence from Bemberg’s De eso no se habla (see 16–17) and which is played on a Theremin during a crucial sequence of La niña santa (see 64–5). 2 This is a poem of Santa Teresa de Ávila (1515–82). 3 Aguilar makes this point in his analysis of the film (2006, 98). 4 The strong emphasis on sound itself is a crucial feature of horror film. As Diffrient writes: ‘[M]any horror films are carnivals of noise; every swish pan of the camera or unexpected movement of an actor is accentuated by delirious sound’ (Diffrient 2004, 57). 5 Martel’s cuts cannot properly be defined as ‘shock cuts’ as defined by Diffrient (2004, 54–5) though they do share some of their features. 6 However, the film itself makes a mockery of such distinctions: though not graphically shown, the bed of Jose’s grandmother is the site for the suggestion of incest and anal sex between Jose and her cousin. 7 Examples include Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, and The Exorcist. 8 Freud gives the example of ‘gods turned into demons’ as a source of uncanniness (1953a [1919], 236). 9 In particular, places of worship, religious symbols and figureheads all

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12

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have the potential to be perverted to become places of danger, symbols of evil or monsters, in what Cowan calls ‘the metataxis of horror, the inver­ sion or reversal of accepted cultural categories’ (2008, 7), an inversion referred to briefly by Freud in his discussion of the terror of the double (see note 8). See ‘Dice Lucrecia Martel en relación a La niña santa’. Available at: www. laniñasanta.com/entrevista (Accessed 4 December 2014). Whilst Wood’s schema is historically and culturally specific to 1970s North American horror (including some social and political ‘threats’ to the status quo which are not applicable in the same way elsewhere) the categories mentioned here are arguably universal ‘others’ and certainly applicable to this context. See, for example, Castle (1993). Royle points to ‘[t]he shared, secret history of the uncanny and the queer’ and lists others who have theorised such a link (2003, 43). This blind spot has been, as I discussed in the Introduction, redressed by more recent Anglo-american criticism (17). Shaw (2013) compares the transgressive gazes of adolescent female/ intersex protagonists in La niña santa and Lucía Puenzo’s XXY, and argues that this type of protagonist is a feature of a Latin American cinema now heavily defined by the decisions of European funding bodies (often social bodies and/or linked to film festivals) and their progressive gender and sexual politics. See Telotte, who discusses how horror reverses the ‘normal’ sequence of shots used by cinema, by ‘offering the reaction shot first and thus fostering a chilling suspense by holding the terrors in abeyance for a moment’ (1984, 25–6). Jacqueline Rose, for example, has argued that in dominant cultural understandings ‘the child is rendered innocent of all the contradictions which flaw our interaction with the world’ (1984, 9). She argues that Peter Pan, which she takes as emblematic of modern Western constructions of childhood, ‘shows innocence not as a property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire’ (xii). See Shaw (2013, 172). Jens Andermann (2012, 156–7) and Deborah Shaw (2013, 171) both comment on this image. For Rangil, the film meditates in particular on ‘la beatitud como caracter­ ística esencialmente femenina, el rol salvador y sanador de la religión, la misión religiosa que las personas (mujeres) debemos tener’ (‘beatitude as an essentially feminine characteristic, the role of religion as saviour and healer, and the religious mission that, as women, we are supposed to have’, Rangil 2007, 211). Stam is glossing here the long discussion of the use of character in Brecht’s ‘A short organum for the theatre’ (1964 [1949], 190–8).

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21 As Zwinger points out, Freud’s essay is one ‘haunted by virgins, monsters, the domestic, and their ever-present appendages: the oscil­ lating, repressed but returning, familiar/familial terrors that always lead back (in)to Mother’ (1992, 81). For Molloy, ‘[t]he uncanny, with its implica­ tions of doubling, merging, and return of the repressed, is the expression and effect of the feminine’ (1999, 160). For Jane Todd, too ‘[i]t is women who are unheimlich’. Their ghost-like presence in Freud’s essay ‘tell[s] a story about men’s fear of women and the social consequences of that fear’ (Todd 1986, 528). 22 See de Beauvoir (2009 [1949] 359–60), Walkerdine (1997, 169), Driscoll (2002, 231) and Pipher (1994, 39). I have explored these connections more fully in an article (see Martin 2013b). 23 Sleeping and waking is, as in La ciénaga, a recurrent theme in the film, and the beds of various characters provide the backdrop to many scenes. 24 Freud’s discussion of the term heimlich – in which he will eventually propose that the word’s opposite, unheimlich inheres – begins ‘[i]ntimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content […] so comfortable, so nice, so cosy’ (1953a [1919], 222). His exploration of the term makes frequent reference not just to the domestic but to rest and sleep: ‘you go to sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim’lig’ (223). 25 Classical allusions in the names of the characters have not gone unnoticed by critics. See Forcinito (2006, 120) and Aguilar (2006, 98). 26 Jagoe and Cant suggest the film’s citing of the conventions of noir femininity: ‘El cuerpo de una mujer [Helena] yace sobre un cubrecama satinado. El pelo revuelto, la ropa ceñida y la inmovilidad del cuerpo remiten a una imagen de film noir’ (‘The body of a woman [Helena] lies on a satin bedcover. Her tousled hair, clinging clothing and the stillness of her body suggest an image from film noir’, 2007, 169). This self-reflexive play with Helena and visual versions of femininity is reinforced by Jano’s comment to her: ‘yo pensé que usted era actriz’ (‘I thought you were an actress’), one in which Helena visibly delights. 27 ‘Amalia’, of course, recalls José Mármol’s foundational novel of the same name (1851/5), a name which as Doris Sommer comments ‘bears some resemblance to Argentina’s’ (1991, 102). 28 For Halac, writing on La niña santa, ‘[p]areciera que lo que realmente pasa no se muestra (como imagen) ni se dice (como discurso lingüístico) sino que está velado, y que emerge de la tensión resultante de la relación entre estos dos aspectos […]. Parece ser que en el detalle, en la pausa o en el silencio, en el fuera de cuadro, aparece el sentido’ (It is as if what is really happening is neither shown (as an image), nor spoken (as linguistic discourse), but rather that it is veiled, and that it emerges from the tension produced by the relationship between the two […]. It seems to be in the detail, in pauses or silences, or in the off-screen, that meaning is conveyed’ (2005, 101).

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29 Ríos’s analysis emphasises how La niña santa (along with La ciénaga) decentralises vision (2008, 12), and in addition to his discussion of the poolside scene mentioned here, he shows how the emphasis on texture and touch opens up space for new readings, which go against the narra­ tive, for example by imbuing the relationship between Helena and Freddy (which in the context of the narrative has no sexual significance) with an unprecedented eroticism when seen through the lens of the haptic: ‘A pesar de que el aspecto diegético no contribuye a esta lectura, la sensu­ alidad de las texturas realzadas por los códigos “haptic” sí sugieren este plano sexual’ (‘Although the diegesis itself does not contribute to a sexual reading, the sensuality of the textures produced by the “haptic” codes does contribute to such a reading’, 14). 30 In Guest (2009).

3

La mujer sin cabeza: haunting and community1

This spectral someone other looks at us […] (Derrida 1994, 6)

If historical and political allegory are suppressed, partial or even absent in Martel’s first two feature films, it is La mujer sin cabeza, which the director has described as ‘mi película más argentina’ (‘my most Argentine film’, Enríquez 2008) that appears to allude to the Argentine dictatorship of 1976–82 and to those ‘disappeared’ by that regime, and which follows the Argentine left-intellectual tendency to propose parallels between the violence and repression perpetrated by the junta and those of other historical periods. To reduce the film to any one political or historical reading would, though, be to deny the film’s allusive and multiplicitous nature, its polysemic inferences and metaphors, which, as in the previous features, open up La mujer sin cabeza to multiple interpretations. This openness is partly achieved by the care taken to avoid an obvious depiction of a particular histor­ ical period, a refusal to fix meaning or to provide obvious metaphor which led to a somewhat mixed reception on the festival circuit.2 The film depicts a late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century Salta, with ­particular nods to the 1970s and the 1990s in the music, the mise-en-scène and the plot.3 It does deal explicitly with questions of guilt, responsibility, trauma and amnesia, the central themes of postdictatorship Argentine culture (and of the many films which reflect more explicitly on that period)4 but nevertheless avoids making that reference explicitly, and as a result re-focuses our attention on the violence and impunity of poverty and social marginalisation contem­ porary with the film’s making and its vague setting (1990s–2000s), even whilst hinting at their broader historical resonances. The film thus suggests a counter-memory that avoids neat expositions of the

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past yet at the same time reflects upon its traces, iterations and irrup­ tions in the present. Unlike the first two features, La mujer sin cabeza revolves more clearly around a central protagonist, the eponymous, middle-aged and upper middle-class Vero (María Onetto), with whose perspective we are partially aligned. The film is also organised, perhaps less obviously at first viewing, through a repressed and spectral gaze which is often trained on Vero. In the film’s opening sequence, a group of indig­ enous boys and a German Shepherd dog play by a dusty, isolated roadside, flanked by a dry canal. One of them gets separated from, or perhaps hides from, the group. Then we see him, in close-up, his face partially covered by some branches of a tree he is hiding behind, putting his finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. This is the first, vivid instance of a repressed and partially occluded gaze, which is looking at us, and which will return throughout the film. We see the other boys running and somersaulting into the dry canal. A second sequence introduces us to the strikingly blond Vero, and her well-off female contemporaries of European descent, as they stand around their cars, ready to leave a social gathering. This second sequence is self-consciously cinematic, its initial shot awash with brilliant, shimmering colour, and contrasts with the muted browns and beiges of the previous one. If the first sequence privileged wide-open spaces and movement, with shots tracking the boys running, the second sequence is more static and claustrophobic, with bodies packed into and cropped by the frame. Now, femininity and domesticity prevail; beauty creams and tips are exchanged, hairstyles admired and serving dishes returned to their rightful owners. Bourgeois children play on the inside of cars, their sticky hands leaving prints on the windows. In the first two sequences, then, two worlds – that of the cabecitas negras (‘little black heads’) or indigenous poor, and the contrasting one of Vero and her privileged family and friends, are established. An abrupt cut and Vero is driving along the stretch of road where we have seen the boys playing. She passes the same dry canal, and, momentarily distracted by her mobile phone ringing, hits something. We very briefly, but clearly, see a dog in the rear-view mirror. Shaken, Vero’s eyes flicker tentatively towards the mirror, her hand towards the door handle, but she thinks the better of it, puts on her dark glasses (echoes, here, of La ciénaga’s Mecha) and drives off, to the sound of the car radio, which throughout this scene has been playing an incongruously sunny song, ‘Soley Soley’, a hit for the group Middle

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of the Road in the 1970s. As Vero drives away, we become aware of two little hand prints on the driver’s window, beyond Vero’s profile. The entire scene is filmed only from the front passenger seat and does not therefore give us complete visual access to the accident; rather than seeing it from a more omniscient position outside the car, we feel and hear the accident rather as two violent jolts or collisions; crucial information is delivered through sound. The two worlds established in the opening sequences seem to have violently collided, although the film, full of ambiguity and doubt, never confirms whether Vero hit just the dog, or whether she also hit one of the boys that we saw playing on the road in the opening sequence. However, as Martel points out, it is not whether Vero has killed a boy that is the important question of La mujer sin cabeza but how she responds to the possibility that she might have.5 Immediately after the accident, a heavy rainstorm occurs as if to collude in the possibility of ridding the scene of evidence. The title ‘La mujer sin cabeza’ appears on a black background, clearly marking a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in Vero’s perception or subjectivity. Over the next few days, Vero experiences a strange disconnection from those around her. On the night of the accident she has made her way to a hotel where she has an adulterous sexual encounter with an in-law, Juan Manuel (Daniel Genoud); perhaps a distraction, or an indication that the accident has loosened or muddled Vero’s social ties. She is mute and barely present in professional and social situations, and the titular image – the ‘headless’ woman who has lost her understanding of self and especially of how that self is constructed in relation to others – is given frequent illustration as in shot after shot she is ‘decap­ itated’ by the frame. The selective use of focus emphasises her confu­ sion, events seem to happen around her and to her without her full realisation or participation, but her traumatised and amnesiac state is permeated by a heightened awareness of the presence of children and by a series of reminders of the accident.6 In the supermarket she is mesmerised by the sight of a little girl and tells her husband Marcos (César Bordón): ‘maté a alguien en la ruta’ (‘I killed somebody on the road’). He is quick to try to dissuade her and takes her, at night, back to the site of the accident where he assures her that she hit only a dog. When news is made public that a child’s body has been found in the canal, Marcos, Juan Manuel and Vero’s brother – professionals with links to the police and justice system – cover up the story and Vero’s possible involvement in it quickly and easily. The ease with which

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they are able to remove evidence and communicate with one another indicates their power in public affairs and contrasts with her own relative ignorance and powerlessness. Her attempts to find out what has happened are subdued by her male relatives who pacify her with infantilising repetitions of ‘fue un susto’ (‘you’ve had a fright’) and ‘no pasó nada’ (‘nothing happened’), and who have removed evidence – x-rays, hotel occupancy records – of Vero’s presence at the various places she visited after the accident. The car, which had been dented, has been taken for repair. It is not just the car that has had ‘unos retoques’ (‘some touching up of the paintwork’). Vero, too, dyes her bottle-blond hair dark brown just before the film’s end. The relatives all approve of the new colour; the cover-up is complete. If Vero’s accident is the image of a violent collision with the under­ privileged social groups she had previously failed to see, afterwards it becomes difficult to ignore them. Their other world is glimpsed throughout, and the accident takes Vero to spaces she might other­ wise have been able to avoid: a dank and depressing hospital where poor people await medical attention and where in the bathroom a girl with indigenous features is handcuffed and led away. Throughout the film, the dusty outdoor locations of the world of the poor are contrasted with the comfortable interiors – of cars and well-appointed middleclass houses – where we see Vero and others of her class. Several important films contemporary with La mujer sin cabeza critique the increasing segregation of the Argentine middle and upper classes in gated communities, a phenomenon which characterised the late 1990s and 2000s in Argentina, and which Martel explores in her documen­ tary short La ciudad que huye (The City that Run [sic] Away) (2007).7 Although La mujer sin cabeza is not set in a gated community – these are located mainly around Buenos Aires, but also other large cities such as Córdoba, Mendoza and Rosario (Svampa 2001, 57–8) – it nevertheless offers a portrait of what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa has called ‘la sociedad excluyente’; the social transformations – increasing inequality, new forms of exclusion – that she attributes to the neo-liberal economic model and sees as characterising the 1990s.8 Segregation and exclusion is continually evoked visually in La mujer sin cabeza through the proliferation of barriers and divisions, in particular screens, doors and windows, and through the positioning of workingclass or servant characters on the far side of these. Vero’s physical appearance – her whiteness, blondeness and height – also serve to emphasise the difference and separation from the world of the poor, as

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in Argentina class difference is both imagined and lived along lines of ethnicity and colour. Vero’s blondeness – the film was released in Spain as La mujer rubia (The Blonde Woman) – and her tall stature insistently marks her difference from the other world, that of the dark-skinned and smaller cabecitas negras. 9 Her striking physical aspect makes her stand out from others, makes of her – despite the cover-up – ‘a body whose actions [can’t] be hidden’ (Martel, in Guillen 2009). As in La ciénaga and La niña santa, though, a marked feature of the portrayal of social class is that it shows not only stratification and separation but also the intermingling, the uncanny familiarity of groups separated by wealth and privilege existing alongside and around one another, especially through the presence in the middleclass home of servants. Like the previous features, too, La mujer sin cabeza creates a disturbing, uncanny atmosphere, but unlike them it alludes much more strongly to ghosts. Characters discuss ghostly presences, like the trees reputed to move alone or the domestic ghosts Vero’s aunt Lala (María Vaner) senses. Telephones ring and are cut off when answered, acousmatic sounds and musical references to the past pervade the soundtrack, ghostly versions of the characters’ selves return to puncture the present through home videos, and ghostly visual reminders of the missing boy recall him, the use of shallow focus creating a backdrop of spectral, ill-defined or shadowy figures, populated precisely by servants and the working class. Echoing the film’s title, Vero’s demeanour post-accident also subtly suggests the ghost or zombie.10 It becomes apparent just how much of Vero’s life depends on others: domestic staff, the gardener, and at her dental surgery the assistant and secretary. The presence of servants in the home suggests a strange mixture of intimacy and exclusion, accentu­ ated by the way that Vero’s self (in her post-accident state) comes to be replaced by these others. As Vero loses her grasp on her everyday life, and the various roles she plays, others step in and seamlessly assume her functions and duties. As Schwarzböck notes, ‘[d]e ese modo revela que quien es servido (y sobre todo, servido en demasía) en el fondo es un inútil, alguien “que no sirve para nada”’ (‘in this way she reveals that a person who is served [and, especially, served excessively] is essentially useless’ 2008, 171). We watch as Vero sleepwalks through her life, her domestic and professional duties carried out by these others. Sitting on the feverish, elderly aunt Lala’s bed, the two women experience a haunting presence, as Lala informs Vero: ‘Está llena la casa. Son espantos’ (‘The house is full. They’re ghosts’), whilst we

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hear an acousmatic rattling sound. At Lala’s words ‘Ya se están yendo’ (‘They’re leaving now’), suddenly, a little boy emerges from under the bed and into the frame, then turns to look back momentarily at Vero – and us – accusatory, before leaving the room. His figure remains blurred and his face is barely visible. Vero looks back at him, but Lala interrupts this moment of shared gazing, urging ‘No lo mires. No lo mires y se van’ (‘Don’t look. Don’t look and they’ll go’). Is the boy a ghost? Or perhaps the child of one of Lala’s domestic servants? The film, as usual, does not give any answer. Despite Lala’s exhortations to shut out and ignore the ghosts of the social – the path ultimately taken by Vero – the comfortable bourgeois world of La mujer sin cabeza is persistently challenged, as in this instance, by the ghostly, shadowy world of the underclass. Like the little boy in this sequence, the spectres which gaze at Vero throughout La mujer sin cabeza signal the victims of exterminations past and of social and economic marginalisation in the present, recalling the Derridean spectre or Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘spectrally human’ (2004, 91), those lives which, in her terms, are not ‘grievable’.11 In this sense the constant confusion between the terms ‘perro’ (dog) and ‘niño (pobre)’ ([poor] child) in the film is revealing: when Vero’s husband repeats ‘fue un perro, mataste un perro’ (‘It was a dog, you killed a dog’), and when it is never, finally, clarified whether what Vero hit was a dog or a (poor) child, the film underscores the equivalent value placed on the two terms by the social system portrayed. For Jacques Derrida, the spectre represents ‘the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, coloni­ alist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppres­ sions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism’ (1994, xviii). In Derrida’s thinking the spectre returns to demand justice by confronting us through its gaze (125). The little boy who goes missing, whose body is found in the canal, and the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by Vero’s family inevitably recall the 30,000 victims of state terror during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and the regime’s dumping of bodies in the River Plate. Costumes, music, car models and hairstyles also provide subtle nods to the 1970s. Yet the centrality of the car to the plot, as well as to the film’s symbol­ ising of social violence and segregation, simultaneously suggests the neo-liberal 1990s in Salta and the sharp increase in car ownership in the city during that period, one facet of the economic processes

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which led to the widening of the gap between rich and poor.12 The mobile telephone which distracts Vero as she is driving, and which makes recurrent appearances in the film, in turn gestures to times more contemporary with the film’s making. In a similar fashion the film employs many of the tropes of post-dictatorship Argentine culture, but in a way that does not allow a simple or a univocal histor­ ical meaning. Vero is the obvious ‘perpetrator’ yet after the accident she also plays the role of a traumatised victim. There are hints of a fixation on the missing child, attempts at working through the trauma through renewed contact with substitutes (for example, the offering of clothes and food to young boys who come to the house), and when Vero dyes her hair from blonde to dark brown there is a suggestion not only of the covering up of a crime but of the melancholic’s intro­ jection of the lost object. Recycling images from important texts of post-dictatorship Argentine cultural production,13 the film presents a traumatic yet hazy atmosphere in which mourning, guilt, responsi­ bility and victimhood are jumbled, and in which clear historical narra­ tives and roles cannot be defined. The spectator’s own role in this is similarly multiple and undefined, since as we shall see, the film also works to undermine fixed spectator identification. On many levels, then, the film resists an easy, linear or clear-cut presentation of history, and thus responds to Argentine philosopher and essayist Nicolás Casullo’s call for a ‘counter-memory’: que debería oponerse a las operatorias sobre el pasado como pulcra mostración, como diseño mimético, como simulacro o experiencia de retóricas […] que nos conducen a conflictos ya enmudecidos, ya homoge­ neizados, ya reciclados por una política y una ideología conciliadoras, y por ende incapacitados para abrirnos a lo que realmente nos espera más allá de las explicaciones legitimadas (which should be opposed to the means by which the past is produced as neat and expository, as a simula­ crum or as the experience of a rhetoric […] which leads to the silencing and homogenisation of conflicts and difficulties, that have been recycled by a conciliatory politics and ideology, and which are thus unable to open us up to what is really there beyond the legitimising explanations, 2004, 77).

Casullo’s perspective resonates strongly with approaches to history such as that of Greil Marcus, who urges us to ‘[b]eware of the smooth surface of history, looking backwards, making everything make sense’ (Wark, cit. in Marcus 1994, 18). Responding to such an imperative, the film proposes a hauntological approach to history, deconstructing

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established certainties, roles and truths, and privileging semantic flux.14 To this extent it ‘counter[s] the deceptive seamlessness of what goes down as history […] which edits out the bits that do not fit the master narrative […] by letting through the cracks and disturbances […]’ (Labanyi 2001). La mujer sin cabeza’s ghosts operate to counter conciliatory ideology, the closing down of meaning and the produc­ tion of neat and tidy historical and memorial narratives critiqued by Casullo; instead they are capacitados para abrirnos; they constitute and instigate a productive opening of meaning, an opening to the unknown. For Marcus, history is (like) a disappearance: ‘It’s as if parts of history, because they don’t fit the story a people wants to tell itself, can survive only as haunts and fairy tales, accessible only as specters and spooks’ (Marcus 1994, 24); La mujer sin cabeza allows these repressed elements to speak, to return in a way which is not easily definable and which defies historical categorisation. The film’s mixing of time periods also exposes the parallels between different moments in Argentine history, thus complicating any sense of historical linearity or teleology, and critiquing notions of progress as well as contemporary forms of violence and exclusion. Through exposing these parallels between the 1970s, the 1990s and the time of its making, the film emphasises the widely-held view of the 1976–82 dictatorship as the first phase of neo-liberal economic reform.15 In this sense it echoes the approach of historian David Viñas who understood the dictatorship as a contemporary manifestation of the genocidal imperative and subsequent silencing of the exterminations of indigenous populations which took place in the late nineteenth century. Suggesting those populations should be understood as ‘los desaparecidos de 1879’ (‘the disappeared of 1879’, 1982, 12), Viñas’s retrospective view with regard to the dictatorship’s pre-history detects the kind of uncanny repetitions that La mujer sin cabeza suggests between the dictatorship, neo-liberalism and the present. As both Derrida and Avery Gordon have discussed, the figure of the spectre is one that complicates our understanding of temporality and ‘alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future’ (Gordon 2008, xvi). The spectres haunting La mujer sin cabeza evoke precisely this ghostly historicity, the irruption of the past in the present and the uncanny repetitions characterising Argentine history. The film’s own internal construction also complicates linear under­ standings of time. As Daniel Quirós shows, the film ‘[quiebra] con un

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sentido de causa y efecto y cronología clara’ (‘disrupts any sense of cause and effect, or of clear chronology’, 2010, 247). For Quirós these devices are used to construct a filmic temporality ‘en oposición a la “aceleración” del mercado y el sistema económico y cultural global, revelando así […] las diferencias económicas que la condicionan’ (‘in opposition to the “acceleration” of the market and of the global economic and cultural system, in this way exposing […] the economic differences which condition it’, 233). He points out that it is often unclear in La mujer sin cabeza whether sequences are synchronous or chronological; that they do not obviously happen one after another (249), arguing that this temporal construction makes us aware of the gaps, fissures or absences between events, which dominant cinema encourages us to ignore. On an internal level, then, the film also allows for the emergence of narrative’s repressed elements, whilst the film does not allow us either a smooth or a unified understanding of history or narrative but rather leaves room for the absences, gaps and ghostly presences which haunt them. History enters the film obliquely in a variety of ways, then, but perhaps most obviously through the ghostly irruption in the film’s present of a home video, watched by Lala and Vero in Lala’s room. It is footage of the marriage ceremony of the now middle-aged Vero, and its grainy, jumpy and washed-out images lend a ghostly quality to the figures that it shows, the characters’ former selves. The time-frame – Vero is a young adult in the video – alludes to the military era. Lala insists she sees in the video a relative dead at the time of the wedding, ‘la Genoveva’, and comments on the presence at the event of Monseñor Pérez, the Archbishop of Salta throughout the military dictatorship, who famously described the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as ‘locas’ (‘madwomen’, Martel, in Enríquez 2008).16 The spectral presence in the video of its own past (la Genoveva), and in the film’s present of the prior time of the wedding/the dictatorship, again suggests a troubling of temporality and historical ontology. As Colin Davis reminds us, the Derridean spectre hover[s] between life and death, presence and absence, and mak[es] established certainties vacillate. […] Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in the expectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise. Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know. (2007, 11)

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I have argued that the creation of just such an ‘essential unknowing’, of doubts about reality, is a central project of Martel’s cinema, devel­ oped in each film through its approach to, among other aspects, time, narrative, character, the visual field and the soundscape. One of many moments in La mujer sin cabeza which draw attention to this unknowing occurs when Vero, Josefina (Claudia Cantero), Candita (Inés Efrón) and Cuca (Andrea Verdún) look out across a foggy wilder­ ness on a trip to an out-of-town nursery to buy garden pots. The trip takes the bourgeois characters out of their comfortable city existence and confronts them with hints and reminders of the accident. On this particular trip, just after the garden centre worker comments that he is missing one of his helpers (the same boy whose body, we later hear, has been found in the canal and the one who Vero fears she may have killed), the women stand looking out across a scrubland dotted with leafless trees and fallen branches which Candita claims are animate, able to move across the landscape on their own (see figure 6). The fog, alongside the unconfirmed suggestion of the branches’ movement, contributes to a ghostly sense of unknowing and uncertainty. Candita’s attitude of openness to the unknown contrasts with that of her mother Josefina (on the far right), who is representative of the dominant adult subjectivities to which, in Martel’s work, the supernatural and the unknown is often foreclosed, and who roundly dismisses her daugh­ ter’s suggestion of a ghostly presence. Against this foggy and ghostly backdrop, and the tension staged by mother and daughter about the unknown, in a subsequent shot we see the faces of Vero, and behind her Cuca (Candita’s working-class mestiza girlfriend), in profile. As

6  The haunted landscape of La mujer sin cabeza.

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they too gaze out across the landscape, Cuca’s words to Vero, ‘¿Ya se siente mejor?’ (‘Are you feeling better?’) are tinged with irony, as if she possessed undisclosed knowledge. Vero responds, ‘Sí, ya estoy bien. No era nada’ (‘Yes, I’m better now. It was nothing’). A faintly audible high-pitched whine is heard on the soundtrack, which has no obvious source – an example of the way sound is used throughout this film to suggest psychological states (Losada 2010, 311–12)17 – here alerting us to the fact that Cuca’s question and Vero’s answer consti­ tute a moment of intensity or crisis, replete with spectres, with the palpable presence of the unknown and unseen, hints and reminders of the missing boy, against the backdrop of those dead yet animate branches: ghosts haunting the landscape. Later, in another crucial sequence Vero and Cuca return alone to the garden centre to collect the pots. Now the worker confirms that his young helper, the child of a poor family living nearby, is dead, and as such is not available to help move the heavy pots which the worker, who suffers back problems, is unable to. Dialogue becomes very important here, as the worker repeats several times the phrases ‘pero, qué ocurrencia’ (‘what a terrible thing to happen’), ‘que desgracia lo de esa familia, casi una semana lo estaban buscando’ (‘that poor family, nearly a week they were looking for him’), and finally, addressing Vero, ‘pero no se aflija, señora’ (‘but don’t upset yourself, Madam’). Although he is ostensibly telling Vero not to worry because he will soon solve the problem of how to get the pots down (the dead boy’s brother, Changuila, will soon be replacing him), again these phrases suggest a hidden knowledge amongst the working classes of the

7  A spectral and knowing gaze is directed at Vero from the background of the shot.

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crime that has been committed. At the end of the sequence, a woman approaches Cuca and asks her to take a gift (of condolence?) to the mother of Changuila, and thus of the dead boy, and Cuca asks Vero for a lift, meaning that Vero is obliged to take her right to the house of the boy she could have killed, where Cuca alights and comforts his grieving mother. The fact that through a strange series of coinci­ dences Vero is drawn to the home of the boy she might have killed has an uncanny sense of the inevitable about it, accentuated by the fact that Vero is, as at the time of the accident, driving, though the fact that Cuca obliges Vero to go to the house of the dead boy can also be interpreted as an act of silent resistance. As Vero drives away, we see through the car’s dirty windows the figure of Changuila (Catalino Campos), the brother of the dead boy, walking along the side of the road, as he directs another of those fleeting, yet demanding, gazes of silent resistance at Vero. The haunting of Vero by a series of young boys, the haunting of La mujer sin cabeza more generally by a spectral realm – of servants, the poor, of undefined ghostly presences – constitutes a puncturing of the prevailing ideology and of the naturalised relations of domina­ tion which structure the social world portrayed. Ghosts open up a gap in reality, they constitute ‘an ethical injunction […] a wholly irrecu­ perable intrusion in our world’ (Davis 2007, 9). And in La mujer sin cabeza, they do this, as Derrida suggests, through their compelling gaze, since in this film they are not so much objects of the gaze (they generally remain blurry and indistinct) as subjects of an accusatory gaze – often trained on Vero, sometimes shared with, sometimes directed at, the viewer. Derrida writes that: ‘The specter first of all sees us. From the other side of the eye, visor effect, it looks at us even before we see it or even before we see period. We feel ourselves observed, sometimes under surveillance by it even before any appari­ tion’ (1994, 125). This visor effect – the ability to see without being seen – is evoked throughout the film by the bearers of the spectral gaze – the boy at the beginning peering through leaves; Changui­ la’s glance at Vero through a dirty windscreen, whilst her own eyes are on the road. It also relates metaphorically to the hidden knowl­ edge that Cuca and other working-class characters seem to have. This idea is strongly suggested by a sequence in Vero’s garden where she stands with her back to the gardener. As Vero, in the foreground of the shot, surreptitiously leafs through his newspaper looking for news of the accident, the gardener looks up from his work, leans on his fork

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and stares intently at the unaware Vero from the background of the shot (see figure 7). Like the little boy in Lala’s room, like Cuca in the sequence previously discussed, he remains out of focus. Instances such as these build up the sense of a knowing, shadowy or ghostly gaze which is often trained on Vero, a repository of knowledge, a sign of resistance and a (silent) demand for justice. At times, as with the gardener and the little boy in Lala’s room, this gaze is directed from the background of the shot towards Vero in the foreground, and at us. But at other times the tightly-framed shots which seem to have Vero under surveillance suggest a subjective camera aligned with the bearer(s) of this gaze. The spectral implies a curious play of visibility and invisibility: the ghosts of La mujer sin cabeza are only partially visible, yet they make manifest – make visible – that which is ignored or denied, and they do so through their gazing, often their intent gaze upon Vero. This rendering visible is especially important in a film which is so strongly concerned with concealment and denial, not only around the accident but also sexual relations (Vero’s liaison with Juan Manuel), sexuality (Josefina’s disavowal of her daughter’s lesbian desire – of which more later), and more oblique suggestions of concealment, such as the hidden pool which Vero’s gardener detects lying underneath her lawn.18 Spectres ‘open up a hole in reality as we like to think we know it’ (Labanyi 2001), causing a shift in perception and the percep­ tible. Vero’s accident and Lala’s illness rupture perception and enable them to perceive differently, to perceive what their ‘properly adjusted’ family members cannot: the presence of another side to reality, the ‘espantos’ (or social and racial others) which haunt their comfortable bourgeois existence. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on illness, Martel states that: ‘Our perception is educated – sometimes extreme events disorient the body so that you perceive something different […]. In the feverish state of illness, for example, you can perceive things differently’ (in Guillen 2009).19 Illness figures prominently in Martel’s work – alongside many episodes of sleeping and waking, and other means of altering the conditions of perception – as a privileged state of perceptual liminality, a liminality which admits the uncanny sensa­ tion that things might not be quite what they seem, or allows for the unknown to disturb the world of known reality.20 Vero, like characters in La niña santa, is several times shown in the moment of waking up, whilst her post-accident demeanour also suggests sleepwalking. If, as I have argued, the children’s experiments with the distortion of their

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perception in La ciénaga and La niña santa functioned as a staging of the films’ own propensity to rupture the conditions of filmic percep­ tion, then these experiments are appropriated even more fully in La mujer sin cabeza, as Vero’s hit-and-run accident plunges her (and us), through a shift in the use of focus, into an altered perceptual state which cleverly suggests both social blindness as well as a heightened awareness of social hierarchy and its casualties. La mujer sin cabeza’s use of focus strongly recalls that of Michelan­ gelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, in which the female protagonist Giuliana’s (Monica Vitti) alienation and heightened perception is communi­ cated in a similar way through shallow focus and fog. In La mujer sin cabeza, the use of focus defamiliarises both social relations and cinematic regimes, through the excessive invisibilising of a socially invisible underclass – the ‘espantos’ – often in the background and out of focus – and the excessive visibilising of the blonde, Hitchcockian heroine who is always in focus and close-up. In this way, Martel turns to artistic advantage the traditional limitations of the Cinemascope format,21 which she used for the first time on La mujer sin cabeza, and subsequently declared to be ‘[her] form’ and one she wished she had discovered earlier (in Taubin 2009). The cropped close-up and out-offocus background associated with Cinemascope is used in La mujer sin cabeza to communicate Vero’s altered psychological state. The accident – that cataclysmic collision across social class and ethnicity – ruptures the prevailing ideology, causing a shift in both Vero’s and the spectator’s perception which, by showing less (through the lack of focus) paradoxically allows her and us to perceive more, thus functioning to defamiliarise the social reality through visual excess, revealing more about social reality than might a realist aesthetic. The use of focus here is thus, as Stam glosses Brecht’s realism, ‘realist not in style but in terms of social representation’ (2000, 147). As Mullarkey, following Deleuze, argues: ‘When vision fails, we see (the truth of) vision […]. We see not the thing, but what it is to see (or not see) the thing. We see the process of seeing’ (2009, 184). It is the social and cinematic processes of seeing to which the failure of vision in La La mujer sin cabeza draws our attention, through a defamiliarisation of regimes of visibility. A further challenge to classical cinematic regimes, in spite of its more obvious protagonist, is La mujer sin cabeza’s undermining of identification and of clear spectator-positioning. Just as the film avoids attributing clear historical roles or creating a comfortable memory

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narrative, it also avoids defining the role of the spectator, firstly by undermining identification with Vero, and secondly by shifting our position in relation to both Vero, and to the repressed gaze which I have argued is associated with her social and ethnic other. In short, sometimes this ghostly, repressed gaze seems to be trained on us, and occasionally we are identified with it. Onetto’s inexpressive acting functions as a block to identification, as does the ‘denial of suture’ which characterises the audience’s relationship to Vero.22 In addition, subtle shifts in spectator-positioning with regard to Vero also happen throughout the film, meaning that the spectator shifts across the boundaries, segregations and screens which, as I mentioned earlier, structure the film’s spaces and psyches. Throughout the early part of the film, we follow Vero as, in her traumatised, semi-absent state, she moves through a world punctuated by reminders of the accident, the knowledge of which binds us to an extent to the protagonist. Shortly after the accident, though, Vero breaks down at the sight of an injured boy at a football game – one of the reminders in question – and enters a washroom where a workman is carrying out a welding job. An extremely ambiguous scene follows, in which Vero attempts to wash but finds the taps dry. She begins to cry and the workman wordlessly embraces her, then fetches a bottle and begins to wash a sobbing Vero, pouring the water over her head, in a gesture of potential purification or absolution – one of many acts of washing in which Vero engages. As frequently happens, Vero is here decapitated by the frame, whilst the dark-skinned workman is for a few seconds more fully present to the viewer than she is. Despite their moment of intimacy, Vero suddenly departs with only a formal ‘buenas tardes’ (‘good afternoon’) and the camera remains with the workman for a few seconds, causing a shift in identification as his bewilderment merges with our own. In the film’s final sequence, Vero goes to a gathering of family and friends which happens to be at the same hotel where she stayed on the night of the accident. Now strongly suspecting that the menfolk are acting to cover up her possible involvement in the death of the young boy, she asks at reception who stayed in the room she occupied on that night. The receptionist checks, but the room is recorded as empty on the night in question. The traces of her presence – just as at the hospital where she was treated – have been erased. As Vero symbolically acqui­ esces to the cover-up – moving from the hotel reception to the room full of family and friends where her secret is tacitly acknowledged and her decision to keep quiet silently sanctioned – she passes through

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a transparent screen door, one of the film’s many diegetic screens. Generally the spectator has been positioned alongside the bourgeois characters on the ‘inside’ (of houses or cars), whilst ‘others’, Cuca, servants, the children who recall the dead boy, have been positioned on the outside. In this final instance, Vero moves, away from the camera, into the room beyond the transparent door, whilst the camera remains in its original position on the near side of the door, framing the gap. As Vero is tacitly congratulated and rewarded by the smiles and greetings of her social group, the spectator remains on the near side of the door, looking through a gap in the screen. This, the film’s closing moment, refers back to its very first sequence, where the young boy – probably the one who was killed – peers through a gap in the trees, the moment which I have argued constitutes the inception of a repressed and ghostly gaze in the film. Power, represented by Vero’s social group, is displaced away from the gaze and onto the screen which the powerful group are initially seen through, but which rapidly becomes indis­ tinguishable from them.23 The sequence is a chilling one: it is the moment in which Vero finally forsakes truth and responsibility, and in which she resumes completely her place amongst her social group as it closes ranks around her. As she undergoes this complete reassimi­ lation, the chink in the screen door, which signifies the gap which had opened up in Vero’s reality, altering the conditions of her perception, disappears, as the camera slowly moves in on the gathering, yet the spectator remains on the near side of this screen of social division, that is to say, remains in the position of the bearer of the repressed gaze, and by association with the film’s first sequence, in the position of the dead child, looking in from the outside. As if we were seeing with the eyes of the victim, the dominant social group on the far side of the screen now comes to represent an object of fear, their faces strangely distorted by the glass. The sequence is accompanied by the song ‘Mamy Blue’, the first line of which ‘I may be your forgotten son’, further underscores the missing child’s invisible, spectral presence, the call of the dispossessed, at this moment of its utter, final denial by Vero and her social group. In her compelling analysis of La mujer sin cabeza, Cecilia Sosa argues that the film ‘places the viewers in a double role’ in that ‘each of the spectators becomes not only a witness but also a survivor, and thereby subtly compelled to respond’ (2009, 259), in the sense that it makes the audience a witness to the possible crime, yet also invites them to break the silence in which Vero and her relatives collude. In addition, through its play with identification and

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spectator-positioning, the film also allows for spectatorial mobility in relation to the social and historical positionalities of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’. Despite the chilling finality of this sequence, there is a strong sense in which the film poses a challenge to the dominant order, not only through the demands for justice which are contained within the repressed gazes and silent actions of the film’s working-class charac­ ters and the ghostly glances which, emanating from them, seem to pierce the world of the privileged, but also through the adolescent girls and their desire. Indeed, the spectral gaze of the excluded and the world of these girls occupy an overlapping place in the film. Vero’s niece Candita – whose name suggests candour – is the only character (aside from Vero herself) to state, in a matter of fact way, that a murder has taken place, referring openly to ‘el chico que mataron’ (‘the boy they killed’). This straightforward understanding of the reality denied by her elders is mirrored by her belief in the supernatural, which, as discussed, suggests an openness to realms of experience foreclosed to dominant subjectivities. It is important that Candita is represented as diseased, as contaminated by Hepatitis C, an illness which her mother mentions continually, and which is represented by yellow make-up. Hepatitis C generates a physical resemblance between the white, bourgeois Candita and her darker-skinned, working-class girlfriend Cuca. As a disease caused by contact with contamination (dirty water for example), it represents Candita’s sexual and social contamination by ‘undesirable’ elements (Cuca, the ‘leidis’),24 her abject status in the eyes of bourgeois society, just as other possible contaminants hover on the edge of the world of La mujer sin cabeza, sources of threat obses­ sively discussed by the bourgeois characters, like the turtles housed at a local vet’s, which it is feared might escape into the neighbouring swimming pool. As a virus which transforms her body into a rhizome, a connection with another organism, or organisms, Hepatitis suggests Candita’s as a body which is literally ‘becoming-other’, one which is hybrid and in a process of perpetual transformation.25 Cuca, for her part is a go-between, moving easily between Candita’s house and the much poorer neighbourhood. Subverting the spatial dynamics of the dominant order through this boundary-crossing, she is liter­ ally ‘matter out of place’, Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt (Douglas 2002, 50). Here, dirt takes on a much more liberatory significance than it does in La ciénaga, as together these ‘contaminated’ girls offer a radical escape from the mutually reinforcing matrices of class, gender

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and sexuality within which the adult female characters are enmeshed; of all Martel’s girls, it is they – as a cross-class, cross-ethnic, queer pair – who most clearly offer a metaphor for social change, justice and integration, they who seem most likely to reject and escape the oppressive codes upheld by adult society. Their positioning echoes the familiar figuring of the girl within post-structuralist theory as a site of escape from the Oedipal matrix, especially through metaphors of movement and flight (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 299; Driscoll 2000, 81). These metaphors are in particular suggested in the film by the peripatetic Cuca, whose motorbike riding both draws upon lesbian iconography and positions her beyond and in flight from the social stratification symbolised in this film by the car. Thirty minutes into La mujer sin cabeza Candita (who also sends love letters to, and makes passes at, her aunt), rubs jojoba oil into Vero’s hair. Vero is shot in close-up from behind, whilst Candita is visible on her far side, smiling. Her hands extend around her aunt’s head (see figure 8), such that what is closest to the camera is Vero’s abundant blonde hair as it is massaged by Candita’s hands, suggesting a de-organisation of the erotic body through the lingering touch on hair, a part of the body associated with both desire and disgust. As the camera lingers on this highly tactile, vaguely erotic image, the sound of background conversations momentarily fades to be replaced by the barely audible sound of breathing, adding to the erotic charge and to the invitation to shared embodiment briefly conjured here.26 This queer, tactile moment is interrupted by the sound of motorbikes pulling up, and of the words of Candita’s mother, Josefina, which again indicate the strict segregation of space: ‘Llegaron las “leidis” … Candita, qué no entren a la casa … dentro de la casa, no’ (‘The “ladies” are here … Candita, don’t let them in the house … not in the house’). Candita gets up and goes outside to greet her (lesbian?) friends, exchanging tender embraces and words with Cuca. The pair are visible in the background through a partially open door, whilst in the foreground, inside the house, Vero sits and listens to Josefina: ‘No sé de dónde saca esa gente, todo el día machoneando con esa moto’ (‘I don’t know where she finds these people … messing about with that bike all day like a bunch of dykes’). Candita’s body – site of queer abjection, of becoming, of transgressive materiality – is pushed outside, to the boundaries of what is liveable and thinkable, to the edge of the frame, to join the ghostly realm of abject bodies – servants, the poor, the ‘leidis’ – always hovering at the film’s visual periphery. At

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8  A tactile, queer moment: Candita and Vero.

another point, the camera is positioned in Candita’s bedroom, framing a half-open closet (a visual joke?) as it hovers above the bed, which we can’t see. As we hear Josefina’s footsteps approaching the bedroom, Cuca sits up and in this way enters the frame from its bottom edge, smoothing her hair. The subtle implication is that the two girls were together on the bed, yet lesbian desire or activity remains a sugges­ tion, just off-screen, allowing Josefina to remain obstinately blind to it in a way that echoes the denial surrounding Vero and the accident. At once severely homophobic and hyper-aware of homosexuality, pitying another friend for having a ‘machona’ (masculine) daughter precisely whilst Candita exchanges flirtatious looks and smiles with Cuca, she verbally yet indirectly punishes her daughter constantly through these barbed remarks. 27 I am not the first to note that there is a clear gendered dimension to the cover-up.28 The film explores the position of women – even well-off ones – in a highly conservative and patriarchal society, and the fact that it is men who have the power both to infantilise and ignore Vero, to repress her truth, perhaps her new social consciousness, and simultaneously to protect her by imposing a dominant version of reality, through their soothing and stylised repetition of ‘fue un susto’ (‘you’ve had a fright’), ‘no te aflijas’ (‘don’t upset yourself’) and ‘no pasó nada, nada’ (‘nothing has happened’), which creates a kind of dominant ‘voz patriarcal’ (‘patriarchal voice’) (Quirós 2010, 254). In this sense, the film resists a purely class-oriented analysis, by showing the mechanisms of gendered oppression to be crucial to the mainte­ nance of the status quo. Vero’s illicit relationship with Juan Manuel, Candita’s father, is entirely ironic; her one sexual transgression is

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performed, shortly after the accident, with a man who is self-iden­ tical to her own husband, and who collaborates with her husband to silence/protect her. Martel has spoken about Vero as inspired by Kim Novak in Vertigo (her name is a contraction of the earlier film’s title) and many images of La mujer sin cabeza – Vero’s hair-dos and shift from peroxide blonde to brunette, the visual and narrative centrality of driving, the blonde woman’s seemingly certain presence in a hotel room which, when investigated, reveals only absence – recall Hitchcock’s classic meditation on uncanny repetition. 29 Particularly pertinent are feminist critics’ readings of Vertigo who see in its elabo­ rate male charade a masculine anxiety about the absent centre of femininity.30 In La mujer sin cabeza, Vero’s lack of self – the frequent evocation of her as absent, and the anxious bolstering and silencing of Vero by the group of powerful men around her – inevitably suggests the position of women in a patriarchal society which denies women full access to subjectivity, in which women are also ‘other’.31 If Vero constitutes a central motif of the intermeshing of class structures with patriarchy, the peripheries of the film – both literal and figurative – are alive with hints of a queer community which challenge the normative world of the middle-class family, which is seen as perpetuating exclusion and hierarchy. Martel has commented that ‘I think the idea of the family contains so much … exclusion, racism. There are so many very negative values around the family that when the family is dissolved, I don’t think it’s a necessarily bad thing’ (in Wood 2006, 169–70). The film very clearly depicts the way in which the family functions to protect its own and becomes a socially regressive institution, yet through its positioning of Candita and Cuca, the film gestures to a different kind of community to come, to the possibility of a world beyond Vero’s, and beyond the stifling and exclusionary world of the family. These girls and their friends constitute a group that transgresses the social hierarchies that rigidly structure the world portrayed in the film. The film hints at a utopian queer politics, suggesting that queer forms of community trans­ gress previously established social hierarchies of class and ethnicity. These friends suggest a coming-together of different groups tradi­ tionally marginalised and discriminated against by the state, and when Candita stands with the others in the doorway just beyond the boundaries of the house, she is pictured as beyond the space of the dominant order constructed and demarcated by her mother’s words (‘qué no entren a la casa’), in a space of love and desire – signalled by

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the tender embraces and caresses the girls share – beyond the realm of the bourgeois family, an unenclosable queer love or desire which crosses social and ethnic boundaries, again proposing desire as a revolutionary force with a propensity to ‘[call] into question the estab­ lished order of society’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 116). As Sosa has argued, in the traumatic culture of post-dictatorship Argentina there has been a challenge to biological and normative models of kinship (2011). For her, in the years immediately following the dictatorship, the culture of mourning was dominated by normative kinship models; however, she writes that such ‘biological normativity […] restrains the resonances of trauma from traveling throughout a wider society’ (2011, 66), and has more recently been contested, for example through the ‘embryonic queer family’ (78) which is formed at the end of Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blondes, 2003), when the director Carri’s friends don blonde wigs as a performative and humorous gesture of community formation based on friendship rather than the blood ties which Carri, as a ‘daughter of the disap­ peared’ has ostensibly been engaged in tracing over the course of the documentary. In addition to the incipient queer community associated with Candita and Cuca, La mujer sin cabeza seems to call, obliquely, on further non-biological kinship possibilities, if we remember the lyrics with which the film ends, ‘I may be your forgotten son’, which are male vocals addressed to an eponymous maternal figure (‘Mamy Blue’). Whilst Vero, in her confused state, does in fact forget about the existence of her own daughters (she has no blood sons), the refer­ ence to a forgotten son strengthens the suggestion in the film of an imagined maternal connection with the missing child and opposes it strongly to the actual blood ties represented by Vero’s relations. Whilst the victim can be seen, following my interpretation of the song-lyric, as directing a demand for justice, kinship and community, the right not to be ‘forgotten’, at Vero, the blood relations are precisely those that conspire to ensure that any kinship, community or justice for this figure is denied. Martel has commented that ‘if one could organise social relations on a much more elemental, physical level, the concept of the family would also change. It would be unbearable for anybody to see an abandoned child’ (Wood 2006, 170). Even if Vero is ultimately able to bear the child’s loss, to turn her back on any demand for recognition and justice, the film stages a potential recog­ nition by Vero over and over again, as she is continually confronted by reminders of the accident, summoned by the spectres which call her

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to account, and as she tries to offer food and clothing to (to ‘mother’) young boys who come to the house looking for work. As with the incipient queer community, though, this ‘maternal’ connection – suggestive of non-normative forms of kinship and the assumption of collective responsibility for others – is no more than hinted at; it exists as a potential beyond the film, to be imagined, perhaps, by the spectator. La mujer sin cabeza can be seen, then, as the most optimistic of Martel’s features to date, in the sense that it offers more thorough­ going liberatory and communitarian possibilities, even whilst confining these possibilities largely to an existence at the edges of the frame or beyond the narrative. Though each of Martel’s features portrays a middle-class world, La mujer sin cabeza is the film in which the working-class and indigenous other most consistently punctures and challenges that world, through spectral gazes and ghostly appear­ ances, undisclosed or silent knowledge, and through moments of narrative agency or resistance, even becoming the fleeting and invis­ ible subject of enunciation in the film’s closing moments. In this sense the film prefigures Martel’s 2010 short film Nueva Argirópolis, which suggests indigenous political organising and resistance, power and resilience, with at least as much narrative and enunciative agency on the part of the indigenous internal migrants portrayed as is afforded the state forces which would attempt to control them. In terms of Martel’s filmmaking trajectory, this constitutes an – albeit subtle – shift away, then, from La ciénaga, in which as Aguilar has it, ‘[e]l pueblo es […] inaccesible. […U]na lengua muda y una imagen inalcan­ zable’ (‘the people are always beyond, […they are] a mute tongue and an inaccessible image’, 2006, 153–4). In this sense, whilst the film’s evocation of the spectral clearly signals social erasure, disposses­ sion and disappearance, it also, in the Derridean sense, suggests a powerful haunting force which places as much emphasis on progres­ sion and the future, as it does on repetition and memory. On the one hand these spectres allow for the historically repressed to emerge, and signal the uncanny repetition of these repressions in the present; in this way they articulate a refusal of a univocal history or memory. On the other, the non-normative and collective forms of desire, kinship and responsibility which exist at the edges of the frame, and within the realm of what the film makes thinkable, seem to gesture deter­ minedly towards the future.

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Notes 1 Parts of this chapter have been published previously as ‘Childhood, Youth, and the In-between: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza’, Hispanic Research Journal 14.2 (2013). Material is republished here with permission of Maney Publishing (permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.). 2 Whilst La ciénaga and La niña santa were generally well received on the international circuit, La mujer sin cabeza had a mixed reception at Cannes, seemingly due to the negative reaction of some Italian critics which led to the EFE news agency reporting that the film was a ‘flop’ (in Panozzo 2008, 12; 17). Others, including the director maintain that in fact responses at Cannes were more varied than these reports suggested (in Panozzo 2008, 12; 17), and Martel suspects that it was the lack of obvious national metaphors that led to the negative reaction (in Panozzo 2008, 17). Indeed, foreign reviews of the film (whether positive or negative) tend to emphasise its elusive, difficult or perplexing nature (see, for examples, Bradshaw [2008] and Boyero [2008]). Ironically, this negative media coverage then delayed the film’s premiere in Argentina (Enríquez 2008), where its subtle allusions to national history and politics were more likely to be picked up on. 3 Martel’s treatment of time recalls that of David Lynch, who in his Twin Peaks television series and film Blue Velvet (1986) gestures to a contem­ porary (1980s) reality, but uses music, costume and hairstyles to evoke the 1950s, whilst still conserving a certain temporal indefinability. 4 Following the end of the 1976–82 dictatorship, films such as La historia oficial (The Official Story, 1985) and La noche de los lápices (The Night of the Pencils, 1986) explicitly revisited the period by setting their action during the military era. Others such as Hombre mirando al sudeste (Man Facing Southeast, 1986) developed allegorical means of representing state repression, such as, in that case, a psychiatric hospital. Martel and her contemporaries have been associated with the advent of a cinema focused on the present rather than the past, without the obvious political didacti­ cism of the immediate post-dictatorship films, and with a lack of interest in the totalising allegorical systems of their cinematic forebears. 5 In Taubin 2009. 6 Martel has commented that the accident appears in some form in every scene (in Taubin 2009). 7 Several important Argentine films contemporary with La mujer sin cabeza are set in barrios privados (gated communities) or countries and critique the segregation of space along social and economic lines. These include Cara de queso: mi primer gueto (Cheese Head, 2006), Una semana solos (2008) and Las viudas de los jueves (2009). In Los que ganaron: la vida en los countries y barrios privados (2001), Maristella Svampa analyses this

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phenomenon as an expression of a fractured and increasingly privatised society. Svampa argues that in Argentina during the process of the globalisation of economic relations the changing economic model led to a change in class relations and intensified social polarisation, whereby wealth and power became increasingly concentrated in the upper and upper middle classes (2005, 96). In this respect the film dialogues interestingly with Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blondes, 2003). As Sosa notes, ‘in Argentina’s struggle of classes the opposition between the rich and the poor has often been drawn in ‘coloured’ terms [and] by presenting two different versions of the ‘deviant’ blonde, both films ironically call up the idea of the ‘cabecita negra’, an expression that usually refers to the working-class sectors’ (2009, 258). At the event ‘Planes of focus: a symposium on the films of Lucrecia Martel’ (University of Sussex, 9 June 2011), Catherine Grant presented a video-essay entitled ‘The haunting of The Headless Woman’ in which she read the film as belonging to the horror sub-genre of ‘spectral incogni­ sance’ in which the protagonist is unaware that she or he is dead. In a previous article (Martin 2013) I draw on Agamben’s discussions of the homo sacer (1998) to theorise the role of the missing boy in La mujer sin cabeza as figure of exception and liminality, and use these ideas to reflect on the boundary between political and natural life that the film explores through this figure. In her work, Cecilia Sosa draws primarily on Butler’s discussions in Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, arguing that the film ‘may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are, in a sense, “ungriev­ able”’ (Sosa 2009, 1). Quirós notes that, despite the many readings of the film which privilege the dictatorship, ‘Sin embargo la misma directora ha hecho una conexión en entrevistas entre la película y el momento de imposición neoliberal (específicamente el segundo gobierno de Menem), y es importante también analizar la película bajo este marco teórico, ya que representa varias de las problemáticas socio-económicas que caracterizan esta época’ (‘However, the director herself has made a connection in interviews between the film and the moment of the imposition of neo-liberalism [specifically Menem’s second government], and thus it is also important to analyse the film with this theoretical framework, since it represents several of the socio-economic issues which characterise that period’, 2010, 233–4). In addition to the reference to blondeness and the dialogue with Los rubios which Sosa (2009, 258) proposes, the film shares certain narra­ tive elements with La historia oficial (see Martin 2013, 146 and 149 n.9). Martel suggests this unwillingness to assign roles or create historical

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The cinema of Lucrecia Martel certainties when she comments on the subject of guilt in the film: ‘If you use the word “guilt” you’re saying there is something precise, that there is a reality, and I’m not sure about that. The Headless Woman is not about a woman who feels guilty; it’s about a woman whose worlds are nearing collapse’ (in Wisniewski, 2009). Luis Romero, for example, argues that ‘The year 1976 was a turning point in Argentine history. The changes that have taken place since then, whose significance in some ways remained hidden during the first years of the democratic transition, were demonstrated during the 1990s’ (2002, 319). Laura Tedesco writes that ‘The neo-liberal state of the 1990s has similar characteristics to the BA [Bureaucratic Authoritarian] state of the 1970s. Both attempt to subordinate, politically and economically, the working class. While the BA state attempted to de-politicise the working class, the neo-liberal state depoliticised the economy, “de-ideologised” politics and turned social issues into economic ones. […] The neo-liberal state is democratic but its political objectives are similar to the authoritarian state of the 1970s’ (1999, 169). Monseñor Carlos Mariano Pérez was Archbishop of Salta between 1964 and 1984. Losada argues that ‘Martel uses Vero’s perturbation to create a zone of subjective undecidability in what could be called a free indirect noisescape. The abundance of intensified acousmatic sounds – continuous deep roars or hums that emanate from off-screen space, punctuated by beepers, buzzers, sirens, alarms and other noises – is Martel’s most effec­ tive tool for exposing the mechanism by which the subject is brought back from a potentially productive crisis into the middle class comfort zone’ (2010, 311). This image of the pretty suburban garden, underneath which all is not what it seems, strongly recalls the opening sequence of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Martel is often compared to Lynch, and Sergio Wolf is one critic who has seriously considered the points of contact between the two directors. Although he does not consider the particular image that I have highlighted here, his observation that ‘el cine de Martel es diferente del de Lynch, que funciona a partir del acto mismo de borrar esa línea divisoria’ (‘Martel’s cinema is different from that of Lynch, which starts from the very act of erasing that dividing line’) which separates us from ‘lo que no puede filmarse, lo otro’ (‘that which cannot be filmed, the other side’, Wolf 2008, 42) illuminates well the distinction between the two directors’ approaches. For Martel, the suggestion of an other side, an underside (to the garden, to reality), whilst continual and integral to many aspects of her filmic world, is enough, whereas Lynch’s camera takes us down amongst the blades of grass and consistently into the ‘other side’. In ‘On being ill’, Virginia Woolf writes about the changes wrought in

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perception, the ‘truths blurted out’, the everyday ‘make-believe [which] ceases’ in states of illness (2008, 104). In ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’ Ernst Jentsch discusses depres­ sion and the border between sleeping and waking as psychological states provoking intellectual uncertainty and uncanniness (1906, 10). Cinemascope, a widescreen format launched in the 1950s, was ‘at once deep and flat, dense with realistic detail and yet as geometrically stylised as a freize, [and thus] epitomised the artistic possibilities of the contem­ porary cinema’ (Bordwell 2007, 282). However, as Bordwell discusses, one of the problems with the format was always ‘what [to] do about all that out-of-focus space’ when filming a character in close-up (2007, 290). Bev Zalcock identifies this mechanism (2014, 245), giving the example of the moments following the accident when Vero stops the car and gets out, but the spectator ‘is abandoned, positioned, in effect trapped, behind the steering wheel of the car, and left stranded’ (250). We can’t see what, if anything, Vero sees at this point. This equation of privilege and power with the spectacle, rather than the gaze, is proposed by Kaja Silverman (1992, 153). ‘Leidis’ (from the English ‘ladies’) is used in an ironic sense by Candita’s mother Josefina when referring to Cuca and her working-class friends who seem to fit neither with bourgeois conceptions of femininity nor with heterosexuality. Deleuze and Guattari propose that ‘[w]e form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals’ (2004, 11). For Quinlivan, the use of audible breathing in film gives ‘a particular impression of embodiment’ (2012, 5). La mujer sin cabeza’s homophobic adult Josefina shares her first name with La niña santa’s adolescent character Josefina, whose name is short­ ened to Jose and who can be read as butch (Martin 2011, 72). Following Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1990, 101), we might argue that La mujer sin cabeza’s Josefina embodies the post nineteenth-century tendency to produce the homosexual as a separate species, through her frequent use of specific, castigatory language (‘machona’, ‘machone­ ando’, ‘las leidis’). By contrast she also shows a fascination with conven­ tional femininity, her own and that of others. See Zalcock (2014), Sosa (2009) and Quirós (2010). Martel has commented that ‘[T]here is a kind of play with Kim Novak. I love Vertigo. But The Headless Woman is not an homage – not as a whole’ (in Wisnieswki 2008). See Modleski (1989, 87–100) and Bronfen (1992, 324–48). Zalcock, following Hannah Arendt, argues that Vero’s ‘personal power­ lessness is a valid excuse not to act’, and thus exonerates her (2014, 252).

4

Liquid worlds and aquatic life: the short films (2010–11)

In Martel’s films, water is never far away. Intense humidity, heavy rainstorms, water fights, showering and washing, droplets on window­ panes, all recur, as does the swimming pool. This chapter explores the three shorts Martel has made since completing La mujer sin cabeza: Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). Despite the diverse contexts within which these films arose, and their differing subject matter, their preoccupation with watery and liquid worlds can be read as part of a shared concern with fluid ontologies and becom­ ings, where the formlessness of water is suggestive of an opposition to established forms, recalling the meanings often assigned to water in myth.1 In Cinema 2, Deleuze observes the ‘liquid quality which […] marks the visual image in Marguerite Duras’, a quality which he sees in ‘the tropical Indian humidity which rises from the river, but which spreads out on the beach and in the sea as well [in India Song]’ and in ‘the dampness of Normandy which already drew Le camion from the Beauce to the sea […]’ (1989, 248). Such damp and liquid worlds create different perceptual conditions, or allow for the creation of a different kind of perception, as Deleuze puts it, a ‘liquid perception’, or a ‘marine perception that is deeper than that of things’ (1989, 248). Liquidity of perception is associated with the shift that Deleuze identi­ fies in modern cinema towards direct time-images which are produc­ tive of thought, which are ‘political thought-images’ (Colman 2011, 150).2 For Felicity Colman, following Deleuze, such ‘thought-images reconfigure the other images in the world – however radically or slightly’ (Colman 2011, 180). This chapter contends that Martel’s short films of 2010–11, less concerned with narrative and more dispersed and fragmented even than the features, are concerned instead with the creation of fluidity, of a liquidity of perception in which the certainties

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of social worlds and human ontologies dissolve. Their watery locales and aesthetics provide a setting for the undoing of fixities – of the human, of identity, of the image – and allow instead for becomings: becomings-animal, becomings-other, producing thought through the reconfiguration of would-be fixed images or ideas. Nueva Argirópolis Nueva Argirópolis was commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture as part of a project designed to commemorate the Bicen­ tennial of the Revolución de Mayo.3 Twenty-five Argentine directors contributed eight-minute short films to the collection, which was entitled 25 miradas: 200 minutos, and was screened at 125 cinemas around the country.4 Filmed in the Argentine provinces of Corrientes, Chaco and Salta, and featuring actors (trained and untrained) from the Qom tribes, as well as other non-professional Guaraní- and Tobaspeaking actors, Martel’s oblique contribution to the project presents the watery world of the Río Paraná, which a group of indigenous people are attempting to navigate on a raft when they are intercepted by the police. Through its inclusion in the 25 miradas project, Nueva Argirópolis inhabits the commemorative discourses of the nationstate, yet it does so subversively, overturning the values with which the project of national foundation and its commemoration are associated. It does this primarily through a radical resignification of the text from which it draws its name, a lesser-known work of nineteenth-century Argentine president and thinker Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811– 88), entitled Argirópolis o la Capital de los Estados Confederados del Río de la Plata (1850). Martel’s Nueva Argirópolis meditates on and reimag­ ines crucial terms of its Sarmientian precursor, especially the role of rivers and geography which were central to concepts of national foundation and progress in Sarmiento’s text and more broadly within nineteenth-century nation-building discourses. Sarmiento’s text is a utopian vision of an imaginary city, Argiróp­ olis, to be established on the Isla Martín García, in the River Plate, and which he proposed as the capital of the Confederation of the states of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. The basic argument of Argirópolis was that ease of navigability of the Rivers Paraná and Uruguay would aid economic development and progress, and that a capital of the Confederation established on Martín García would be beneficial to the development of all the states, in particular because it did not

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belong to any one of them. Argirópolis (meaning ‘city of silver’) was to be arranged for ease of commerce, and was to be a place to defend Sarmientian values of European and North American ‘civilisation’ from those of ‘barbarism’.5 These values were fundamental to the foundation of the modern nation state in Argentina, and, as David Viñas argues, constituted the ideological justification for the extermi­ nations of indigenous populations which reached their height with the 1879 Desert Campaign, or Conquista del Desierto,6 during which many indigenous leaders were in fact imprisoned on the Isla Martín Garcia, which had been used as a penal colony since 1765. Nueva Argirópolis also centres around riverine movement, but here it is associated, not (as in Sarmiento’s text) with the domination of nature and associated commercial possibilities but instead with a hinted-at movement of indigenous foundation and resistance which reaches the viewer only via fragments of news and rumours of what is happening. The film begins as ‘cuatro masculinos y un femenino sin documentación’ (‘four males and a female without papers’) – as they are described by a police officer – are intercepted on the river, and then interrogated in a police station. Later we watch as the authorities attempt to have speakers of indigenous languages translate a You Tube video which is circulating on the Internet (and which produces a witty mise-en-abyme given this film was also disseminated on You Tube), in which an indigenous elder exhorts her people: ‘Subamos a las balsas. Llevemos al trono a la noble igualdad. “Indígenas” de “indigente”. No tengan miedo de moverse. Somos invisibles…’ (‘Let’s take to the rafts. Let us see noble equality enthroned. “Indigenous” from “indigent”. Don’t be afraid of moving. We’re invisible’).7 Speaking in direct address to the camera, and filmed against a backdrop of books sugges­ tive of an environment of learning, the words of the elder hint at some kind of organised mobilisation: smiling, she promises her people that their invisibility and social marginalisation will protect them and enable their political activities to go undetected. In a further sequence apparently removed from the police station and the authorities’ inves­ tigations, a rural maestra teaches a group of indigenous and mestizo children about how islands are formed in the River Plate through the settling of mud which is carried there by the Paraná River from the mountainous regions of north-west Argentina (see figure 9). These landforms – which create the Paraná Delta – grow by up to ninety metres per year. In response to this lesson, a little girl says: ‘son unas islas sin dueño … no son de nadie’ (‘they are islands without owners

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… they don’t belong to anybody’), implicitly recalling the attributes of Isla Martín García in Sarmiento’s vision. Water dissolves that which seems most stable – the land beneath our feet – revealing the ultimate dispersal and mutability of matter, and implicitly questioning the attribution and the existence of private property. In speaking about the geographical shifts in her filmmaking between the earlier ‘Salta’ films, and the shorts Nueva Argirópolis and Muta which centre on the riverscapes of Chaco and Corrientes, Martel has commented that around the time of making these short films, ‘el río se transformó en algo muy fuerte para mí […] por muchas cosas, por su materialidad, porque me parece que es una materia que nos obliga a pensarlo de otra manera, más interesante’ (‘the river became very important to me, because it is a material that we have to consider in a different way, a more interesting way’, Martin 2011). There is a transgressiveness to the river: it challenges established forms and suggests a revolutionary potentiality, a privileging of movement over fixity: it opens up different kinds of thinking about land and property. If Sarmiento’s Argirópolis instrumentalises the river as a means of developing a capitalist economy and consolidating the power of the white elite through his vision of civilisation, the river in Nueva Argirópolis suggests a resist­ ance to these forms of domination. Furthermore, through knowledge of the short film’s Sarmientian intertext, we can posit that it will be the ‘islas’ identified by the little girl as ‘sin dueño’, which might be the

9  A rural maestra teaches children about the formation of islands in the Paraná Delta, in Nueva Argirópolis.

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site of any New Argirópolis, any new foundation of community which results from the organising of indigenous groups at which Nueva Argirópolis hints throughout. Such a foundation would thus also be a reclaiming and a resignification of island locales akin to those histor­ ically used to hold indigenous resistors captive. A politically charged element of Martel’s filmmaking, water often appears in the feature films domesticated in swimming pools to which only the well-off have access, yet also in other forms which challenge this containment and capture. Water fights in both La ciénaga and La niña santa are associated with explosions of energy and desire; in La mujer sin cabeza the swimming pool’s domestication and contain­ ment of water is in question: will it be contaminated by the vet’s surgery next door where aquatic turtles are being kept? Perhaps even more insistent than these diegetic moments or narrative occurrences, though, is the films’ saturation, the sheer screen presence of water in the form of heavy rain storms, drenched windows crisscrossed with rivulets, the palpable humidity of La ciénaga, as well as the engagement with the tactile and sound qualities of water in various ways across the features. Purification, absolution, contamination and pollution, all are evoked by their continual aquatic imagery, yet perhaps more important is the sense they give through this liquidity, through dampness or saturation, that despite pervasive attempts to contain and capture water in aggressive displays of wealth and power, just like desire, water gets everywhere; it flows. Martel has alluded in this regard to the title of a favourite film and influence on her work, John Cassavete’s Love Streams, citing Gena Rowlands’ line from the film: ‘Streams of love cannot be held back’ (in Guest 2009), an indication of the association between water and desire which struc­ tures these films. Just as desire in the features overrides society’s codes and channels, water also functions to demonstrate the impos­ sibility of capture. In Nueva Argirópolis there is a significant focus on such containment and commodification: from the police station’s dispenser from which tiny plastic cups are issued to the handcuffed detainees, to the plastic water bottles which are in evidence in many scenes. Yet in Nueva Argirópolis, as in the features, it seems these forms of containment are bound to be transgressed, as bottles are fashioned into rafts used by the indigenous, and other sequences foreground the river, flowing freely and glinting in the sunlight, the sound of water lapping on the soundtrack, or a laundry room hung with drying clothes, evoking a sense of dampness and humidity as

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well as water’s mutability, its propensity to elude capture through evaporation. In this way the mise-en-scène and soundtrack use water to foreground relations of capture and evasion, whilst also creating a certain liquidity of perception which sets the scene for the dissolving of form and fixity, for mutability and becoming. True to its emphasis on transformation and mutability, of re-working an oppressive discourse into something else, something liberatory, Nueva Argirópolis reconfigures some of the crucial terms of Sarmiento’s text and thus of national foundational discourses. In addition, it works to expose and undo the fixing of the indigenous as degenerate other in state discourses. Initially, when one of the officers communicates via radio to his chief that the group has been inter­ cepted on the river travelling on a camalote (or make-shift raft made of plant matter), we hear the chief reply ‘¿Cómo en un camalote? ¿Son restos humanos? (‘What do you mean on a camalote? Are they dead bodies?’), a joke on the part of the film which nods both to the film genres of invasion and the zombie as well as to the figuring of indig­ enous culture as a kind of fossil or relic, and thus to ideas of (a fixed) authenticity. Later, as detainees are waiting in the police station, we hear one officer remark to another: ‘¿De dónde vienen? Qué es lo que hacen? Qué es lo que tienen? Porque esa gente también puede estar transportando drogas … pregúntales, ¿de dónde son?’ (‘Where are they from? What are they doing? What have they got on them? ’Cause these people could be trafficking drugs you know … Ask them where they’re from’). These exchanges expose the circulation by the state and its representatives of discourses about the indigenous which on the one hand function to produce the indigenous other as relic (‘restos humanos’), on the other as criminal and degenerate (‘esa gente’). Whilst, in the second example, the officer’s anxious repetition of these characteristics seems intended to ‘fix’ the other, assigning a particular identity, in fact Nueva Argirópolis works to undermine the fixity associ­ ated with these commonplace stereotypes. The elder’s You Tube video associates her with learning and transformation as well as with partic­ ipation in contemporary political and digital cultures, thus countering the common association of indigenous cultures with ‘pastness’ and with passivity. Further, there is a mobility and a nomadism associ­ ated with the indigenous people, who are exhorted by the elder not to be afraid of moving, and to have confidence in their ability to move undetected and elude state capture. And this is true also in terms of their filmic presentation, in the sense that they evade visual capture

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and mastery: indeed, just where we seem to get closest to what the police are attempting to investigate – for example a sequence in which a group of indigenous people can be seen emerging from under­ neath a jetty aboard rafts – the film language functions to impede a dominant gaze and a clear vision of what is happening by using physical obstacles to our vision or insufficient depth of focus. The film contrasts indigenous mobility, transformation and resistance with the stereotyping and fixing language used by state representatives, whilst at the same time through its visual language countering the tendency of the visual to fix or produce the other. The aquatic, with its connota­ tions of capture and evasion, of mobility and mutability, here becomes associated with the dissolving of fixed categories of difference; the watery backdrop, the dampness and saturation of the film, are a way of ushering in a ‘liquid’ perception open to mutation and becoming. Nueva Argirópolis also effects a decentring of hegemonic language and linguistic practices. The soundtrack features multiple indigenous languages including Quechua and Toba, which are not subtitled, thus emphasising a plurilinguistic society and endeavouring to counter the hegemony of Spanish. The film stages diegetic encounters of transla­ tion and interpretation by featuring sequences in which the authori­ ties attempt to have the YouTube video interpreted by native speakers. However, these potential ‘native informants’ seem to translate the video only selectively, if at all. One phrase which is translated for the authorities is the line from the Argentine national anthem, ‘Llevemos al trono a la noble igualdad’, which, featuring as part of the elder’s speech, seems to have been reappropriated by her and deployed for political ends other than those for which it was originally intended, since the anthem is a text which supported the hegemonic national project and the consolidation of Creole power. In this way the film suggests a subversive mimicry of the hegemonic discourse as well as an unmooring of language from notions of originality and authority, and in this case, of Spanish from the control of dominant groups. The sounds of water as well as the whispers and murmurs present on the soundtrack of Nueva Argirópolis unsettle the hegemony of the visual image in the film, as well as confounding and challenging state power. Officials are hampered in their investigations by their lack of understanding of indigenous languages, but also troubled by barely audible, unidentifiable sounds. As discussed in the Introduction, for Martel sound is always potentially more revolutionary, more open to interpretation than the more coded and ontologically defined visual

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realm. In the final moments of the film we see a long shot of a large group of people, slightly out –of focus so as to remain indefinable, walking down to the river bank – about to follow, perhaps, the elder’s incitement to ‘take to the rafts’; the image is accompanied by strange and barely audible high-pitched sounds which recall the soundscapes of science fiction. This is followed by the film’s final shot of two policemen on a patrol boat. As they navigate the river, scanning the horizon, they are plagued by something barely audible, commenting to one another ‘escucho voces’ (‘I can hear voices’). There is a sense in Nueva Argirópolis in which the state exerts power through visual means – the patrol’s scanning of the river but also the x-raying of detainees which is foregrounded in an earlier sequence – and in which sound undermines this visual control. The policemen’s closing words also recall the closing moments of La niña santa, in which, floating in the pool, Amalia and Jose experiment with what can be heard when their ears are underwater, saying to one another, ‘Hola, hola, ¿escuchás?’ (‘Hello, hello, can you hear me?’). The reference, at the end of both films, to the possibility of sound (as opposed to a definite or concrete sound) is suggestive of an only partially perceptible elsewhere, of what lies outside the image and the narrative. That is to say, it is suggestive of an opening up of meaning, of a becoming of the image and of the film language. In Nueva Argirópolis this sonorous yet barely detectable outside signifies an unsettling of the visually-predicated language not only of cinema but also of the state initiative within which this film participates: the 25 miradas project. Pescados Pescados is a playful, absurd four-minute short made for the 2010 Notodofilmfest,8 in which, according to the brief synopsis accompa­ nying the film, ‘unos peces soñaron que eran un auto’ (‘Some fish dreamed they were a car’).9 This tongue-in-cheek meditation on the boundary between animal and machine and that between human and animal begins with a shot of a rainy highway at night through a windscreen intermittently crossed by wipers. The highway fades to black before we see the image which will dominate most of the film’s four minutes: a frame crammed with scores of carp whose open mouths emerge from the surface of the water of a pond or pool, reaching up towards the camera to breathe (see figure 10), their orange, yellow and white bodies visible below the surface, and beyond

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10  The immersive and tactile world of Pescados.

these, glittering coins on the bottom of the pond. Though the camera zooms in so that just one fish fills the frame, or out to show many fishes swimming over, under and around one another, the field never widens out to take in the edges of the pond, or the wider world. The world, in this short, is simply the fish-filled water – and beyond that, the road dreamed of by the fish – except for the merest hint of a reflec­ tion, in the water, of the camera and the human form operating it, a very faint suggestion of the author of this image. This barely present author ripples in and out of our consciousness as the fish continually disturb the surface of the water. The spartan visual information to which we are granted access in Pescados is counterbalanced by a wealth of tactile and auditory elements. Touch is evoked by the continual and multiple rupturing of the surface of the water by the fishes’ mouths as they come up for air, as well as by the film’s emphasis on the slipping and sliding of the fishy bodies over and under each other. Confinement and claus­ trophobia, the stifling and sensual nature of close quarters, a crucial ingredient of the features, is re-articulated here. Close enough to its objects (the fish/pool) that it avoids positioning these in relation to the surrounding environment, and emphasising tactile relation­ ships between the bodies themselves, and between these and the water, Pescados roundly rejects the tendency of visual forms to take a distance, instead restoring the visual as a form of contact. A strange and ethereal soundscape of music and voices was designed for the film by Argentine singer-songwriter and sound artist Juana Molina.

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The sounds are matched to the opening and closing of the fishes’ mouths, such that the fish appear to be producing a bizarre array of instrumental noises, murmurs, groans and words. The latter come in little flurries, moments when several voices at once will repeat a word or phrase: ‘auto’ (‘car’); ‘la ruta’ (‘the road’); ‘lo vi’ (‘I saw it’) and ‘no lo vi’ (‘I didn’t see it’), and finally ‘no, no, no’. The uncanny, distorted, semi-human voices range from the high-pitched and helium-induced to the low and sonorous, and the soundtrack thus works comically, seemingly giving the fish their own personalities.10 All the while, intertitles in Spanish give us a further layer of information about the content of the fishes’ dream: ‘Rodábamos por la ruta … todos eramos un auto […] No había perros’ (‘We were driving along the road…we were all a car […] There were no dogs’). The film’s wry humour comes from these bizarre phrases as well as from the incongruity of the fishes’ anthropomorphism, lines such as ‘Vamos señores’ (‘Let’s go, Gentlemen’), at once contrasting absurdly with their animal forms, and hinting strangely at a merging of the human and the animal. Indeed, the watery environment of Pescados seems to provide, again, a mise-en-scène for the dissolving of established ontologies. Despite the exclusive, close-up focus on fish in the visual field of Pescados, the quasi-human voices, and their semi-intelligible language, as well as the half-visible reflection in the water all allude to human presence; if the fish dream of being a car, then perhaps the human (through film, that repository of human dreams) dreams of being a fish. Or many fish. The image evokes the destabilisations of human identity and subjectivity associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming.11 For these thinkers ‘becoming-other’ or ‘becoming-molec­ ular’ signifies a dissipation of the subject, a revolt against or escape from individualisation and fixity. Instead, the subject is seen as in process and constantly undergoing change. A privileged mode of becoming for these thinkers is that of ‘becoming-animal’, under­ stood as a form of revolt against bodily programming and regulation. Becomings-animal serve as a means of deterritorialising or disinte­ grating Cartesian categories of difference which oppose human and animal, and suggest liberatory bodily relations and practices beyond the human. As Deleuze and Guattari write, becoming-animal ‘under­ mines the great molar powers of family, career and conjugality’, it is ‘an irresistible deterritorialisation that forestalls attempts at profes­ sional, conjugal or Oedipal reterritorialisation’ (2004, 257). It is, as in Pescados, a movement from the individual to the multiple: it ‘always

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involves […] a multiplicity’ or ‘modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling’ (264). Pescados’ dream of becoming an animal multiplicity recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that Virginia Woolf – an ideal figure for them – ‘experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish’ (264). They write: What we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. […] We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? (264)

In a joking, tongue-in-cheek way, then, Pescados presents a dream of the erasure of the subject, and gestures towards a post-humano­ centric state in which there is no greater aspiration than to be ‘like everybody else’ (279). The aquatic, here, serves as an environment of becoming par excellence, the site of a radical motility and lack of fixity which dissolves previously established forms, identities and catego­ ries of difference. Muta The title of Muta (‘it mutates’ or ‘she mutates’) again refers to transfor­ mation, and this six-minute short also suggests a kind of becominganimal, here deploying the idea ironically in a humorous critique of contemporary regimes of femininity and the visual. Muta was commissioned by fashion house Miu Miu as part of the ‘Women’s Tales’ Series which feature on the company’s website, which were directed by renowned female art-house directors and feature Miu Miu clothes and accessories.12 Martel’s film is both strange and unsettling, witty and parodic, a ‘complicitous critique’ (Hutcheon 1989, 13) of the versions of femininity established and upheld by the fashion industry.13 Linda Hutcheon argues that the work of postmodern feminist visual artists such as Cindy Sherman ‘deploys the postmodern strategy of parodic use and abuse of mass-culture representations of women, subverting them by excess, irony, and fragmented recontextualisa­ tion – all of which work to disrupt any passive consumption of such images’ (152).14 These strategies are shared by Muta, a hybrid of adver­ tising and short film which on the one hand ‘plays the game’, with its stick-thin models and their glamorous clothing and accessories, yet on the other works to make strange precisely these aspects of contem­ porary hypervisual femininity as constructed and maintained by the

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fashion industry, defamiliarising the fashion model’s body and its accoutrements through excess, and positing them as the monstrous site of animal becomings. Like Nueva Argirópolis, Muta begins with an establishing shot of a wide-open waterscape. It is sunrise and a large vessel, a cruise ship or ferry, is anchored on the water. As the camera approaches the ship and penetrates its interior – which has a faded 1970s glamour – lights flicker on. One flickering light is in the shape of the iconic skirted figure which signposts the doors of women’s toilets everywhere, and which here alerts us to the film’s theme: women, the feminine. This is, after all, a ‘Women’s Tale’. Or is it? An interior port-hole opens towards the camera and the emergent form – which strongly suggests an insect hatching or coming out of the pupal casing – is a long-legged fashion model, who comes out of the hatch feet first, with slow, then strangely speeded-up, scuttling movements (see figure 11).15 The play with speed, combined with the bizarre, stick-like legs and the strange way the model moves suggests a combination of insect-life and automatism. Martel has described the models in Muta as ‘bichos’ (‘bugs’, Martin 2011); they recall the defamiliarisation of the human body which we see in the opening of La ciénaga. More insect-robots emerge from the port-hole, and, once standing, file down an inner corridor, their movements uncannily synchronised, parodically mimicking those of the catwalk. In a further dehumanising move, all faces are completely hidden throughout the film’s six minutes, either by the models’ exces­ sively long and lustrous hair, by the position of the camera, or by the bizarre full-face diving masks that some of them wear, and which further blur the human-machine boundary, and function to defamil­ iarise the more conventional clothing and accessories sported by the models. These include glamorous dresses and cat eye sunglasses, and enormous false eyelashes which are just visible when they are filmed from behind, and which, when fluttered, are accompanied by strange clicking sounds. The film fulfils its brief in the showcasing of Miu Miu accessories, such as a small fur handbag, but wittily defamil­ iarises them, in this case by showing the bag (presumably with an electronic device inside it) twitching and vibrating as if it were alive. Making the bag resemble a small furry animal, this shot, like others of false eyelashes twitching alone on a dresser, uncannily blurs the categories of life and death, animate and inanimate. The rippling and movement of the bag’s furry surface also gives this moment a strong tactile appeal.

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11  A monstrous model ‘hatches’ from an interior porthole in Muta.

The models do not speak to one another as such, but instead seem to communicate via a code of clicks and murmurs; again, sound functions to complicate, to add further layers to, the visual realm, as the barely audible voices of models speaking in unidentified languages are intermittently present on the soundtrack. Small and large dramas ensue: one model slaps another and grabs a paper she is holding, then immediately tries to console her, leaning over her on a bed; there is another moment of intimacy as two models, only their beautifully clothed torsos visible, embrace – one pulling the other toward her; like Martel’s features, Muta assumes female–female desire, whilst allowing it to remain an allusion, only partially represented. The ship itself seems to be a living, communicating being: at one point it emits a threatening electronic fog-horn noise which causes the models to assemble on the deck. As they do there is a cut to a tongue-in-cheek shot redolent of Dead Calm or other marine thrillers: someone seems to have been lost overboard, but we see only a close-up of her hands as they cling onto, and slowly slip from, the side of the boat, watched by the others through binoculars from the deck. Whether these mutants are part-animal or part-robot is not clear: like much in Martel’s work these are suggestions or allusions rather than fully elaborated symbolic systems. On the one hand the film can be read as a parody, a complicitous critique, of the fashion indus­ try’s version of the female body. In a strategy of excess it overem­ phasises those visual aspects – tallness and thinness, robotic catwalk

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gait, long, thick hair – naturalised by fashion magazines and visual culture. It makes strange those (atypical) bodies which the fashion industry posits as ‘normal’. That it does so through an image of becoming-other (becoming-animal, becoming-machine) is a facet of this ironic defamiliarisation – a joke – yet it also suggests a certain liberatory potential, a revolt against bodily disciplining and program­ ming. If the fashion industry contributes to the construction of fixed ideals of femininity which in turn produce regimes of bodily regula­ tion and control, a kind of straight-jacket of the feminine in which only certain modes of being and looking are possible or desirable, then the image of becoming(-monstrous, -animal etc.) which in Muta is produced through the exaggeration of the industry’s norm, serves as an escape from that disciplining norm, as bodies move into a ‘zone of indetermination or uncertainty’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 301) in which there is room for other becomings, or ‘unnatural nuptials’ outside ‘the programmed body’ (2004, 301–2). For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings-animal constitute ‘an inhuman connivance with the animal’ (2004, 302). In Muta, then, becomings-animal both serve to ironically expose and defamiliarise the naturalisation of gender in visuality, as well as to open up lines of flight from the rigid straightjacket of the human and its categories of (sexual) difference. In her book Cinema and Sensation, Martine Beugnet writes that: [W]hen cinema becomes a cinema of the senses it starts to generate worlds of mutating sounds and images that often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, and where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main point of reference. One way or another, the cinema of sensation is always drawn towards the formless (l’informe): where background and foreground merge and the subjective body appears to melt into matter. (2007, 65)

As this chapter has argued, the short films Nueva Argirópolis, Pescados and Muta all draw on watery environments and settings to elicit a liquid perception, to move towards formlessness or to privilege images of becoming. There is an emphasis on the undoing of fixities – of both the physical forms and of the ontological categories of the human. In Nueva Argirópolis an aesthetics and thematics of water seems aligned with indigenous subjects and their resistance to the state and its discourses, whilst at the same time permitting or imaging the dissolving of fixity in relation to the conceptualisation of land and its ownership. In Pescados and Muta, the watery worlds represented are hosts to, and catalysts for, deterritorialisations and decompositions of

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human identity, in both cases through images of becomings-animal. As ever, ambiguous and unsettling soundscapes serve to enhance these atmospheres and perceptions: the barely audible murmurs, lapping and swashing in Nueva Argirópolis, the strange musical wailing of the fishes in Pescados, or the bizarre sighing, clicking and murmuring of Muta’s monstrous models. The visual image and its traditional emphasis on form and distance is decentred by sounds and voices, and strangeness in their pitch and intensity, as well as by extreme close-ups, movement and blurring. Nueva Argirópolis and Muta both comment explicitly on the institutions which commis­ sioned them and from within which they operate. Both films simul­ taneously inhabit and refute the institutional platforms which they occupy, suggesting a subversively mimetic relationship to power which redeploys the terms of hegemonic power structures in ways that undermine these structures; in the case of Nueva Argirópolis that of the 25 miradas project, and in that of Muta, the fashion industry and its visual regimes. Notes 1 See Eliade (1959, 131). 2 As Colman writes, ‘Cinema becomes political when it swings from this pole of movement – the sensory-motor function where we apprehend the clichés we can perceive – to the movement of the interval or break that will produce a political thought-image’ (2011, 150). Colman finds in the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul a similar treatment of the liquid to that which Deleuze finds in Duras, seeing it as an instance of the creation of thought-images (2011, 150). Martel’s work has often been compared to that of Weerasethakul (see Galt 2013; Mayer 2013). 3 The Revolución de Mayo in 1810 began the Argentine War of Indepen­ dence. Independence was finally declared in 1816. 4 For more information on the project, see: www.25miradas.gob.ar. (Accessed 11 December 2014). 5 Amaro Castro discusses Sarmiento’s vision as an ‘utopía de la “civili­ zación”’ (‘utopia of “civilization”’, 2003, 1) modelled on North American and European societies and which, like Sarmiento’s better-known writings, it opposes to a denigrated American ‘barbarism’ (2003, 10). 6 The Desert Campaign was a military expedition of extermination of indigenous populations in Patagonia led by the minister of war General Roca, in 1879. 7 The emphasised line is from the Argentine national anthem. 8 The film can be viewed on the website of the 8th edition of the Notodo­

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11 12

13 14

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filmfest. Catherine Grant has produced a subtitled version which can be viewed at: www.lucreciamartel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/fishy-little-curiolucrecia-martels.html. This is the synopsis which accompanies the film on the website and publicity of the Notodofilmfest. This play with the human voice recalls, for example, the experiments undertaken by Tali’s daughters in La ciénaga, in the sequence where they sing into a fan, analysed in Chapter 1, 45–6. See ‘1730: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-impercep­ tible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 256–41). The series is available at: www.miumiu.com/en/women_tales. (Accessed 20 November 2014). The other directors featured are Giada Colagrande, Zoe Cassavetes, Massy Tadjedin, Ava DuVerney, Hiam Abbass, So Yong Kim and Miranda July. Hutcheon (1989, 13). This calling upon, yet subverting of the norms of visual femininity has also, as I argue in the Introduction, been employed in the feature films’ representation of women which borrows in an at times excessive or defamiliarising way from cinematic icons of femininity. Butterflies tend to emerge from the pupal casing in the morning.

Conclusion: cinematic pleasures

As Robert Stam writes: ‘to be effective a film must offer its quantum of pleasure’ (2000, 150). Yet the pleasures associated with classical narrative cinematic forms have come to be seen as politically problem­ atic: they encourage emotional identification, induce spectatorial complacency and passivity, and thus acceptance of the status quo; they construct the viewer as (implicitly male) masterful and disembodied subject; they revolve around the voyeuristic fetishisation of women; through the action-image they foreclose possibilities for thought and allow for the perception solely of clichés, inducing a state of mental stagnation. Martel’s films work to disrupt these tendencies of dominant cinema. They share elements of the minimalism and austerity associ­ ated with avant-garde filmmaking and counter-cinema: they employ techniques to distance the spectator, and avoid or disrupt identifica­ tion; they undermine any masterful associations of vision, continually highlighting the off-screen and the unknown, creating doubts about reality and producing instead a generalised state of uncertainty. They deprive or overstimulate the eye, often featuring a lack or an overabun­ dance of oddly-framed visual information. They slow time down, privi­ leging eventlessness, or allowing events to take place off-screen; they allow time within the filmic construction for reflection. However, the disruption of conventional cinematic pleasures in Martel’s films does not imply a puritanism. Diegetic music often provides sensuality, relief or humour, whilst colour is used to offer moments of visual intensity and pleasure. In addition, the films seek out pleasures and elicit desire and affect in ways other than those of conventional narrative cinema, whilst also playfully – and pleasurably – citing its codes and conventions. Reflexivity has been understood as a crucial political strategy for filmmaking, whereby the highlighting

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of the processes and apparatus of cinema functions to undermine illusionism and the spectator’s suture, provoking a more critical and active spectator and demystifying ideology.1 With their emphasis on processes of looking and their foregrounding of diegetic screens and alternative modes of apprehension of the image, Martel’s films certainly exhibit such a reflexivity. As this book has argued, though, they are also reflexive in the sense of their parodic and excessive citation of the gender codes of classical narrative cinema, as well as their subversive employment of the codes and conventions of certain cinematic genres, in particular horror. In terms of their representation of women, the feature films allude to the classical cinematic feminin­ ities of Argentine cinema (Graciela Borges), as well as to those of classic Hollywood (for example, those of Vertigo). They also work with established conventions of to-be-looked-at-ness – especially through characters like Helena and Vero, and references to the femme fatale – citing these in an excessive and self-conscious way which serves to create distanciation and thus to make the spectator aware of cinematic constructions of femininity. In this way, the films call on the parod­ ically subversive power of drag, as theorised by Judith Butler;2 they exaggerate the gender ‘norm’ of classical cinematic femininity, revel­ ling in its excessive citation in order to expose its constructedness.3 However, like drag, they also assume and allow a certain pleasure in this performance, in this citing of conventional cinematic femininity, even as the code disintegrates or is deconstructed. The queer parody of cinematic femininity offered in Martel’s feature films and which also informs Muta denaturalises the gender ideology of cinema (or in Muta’s case, of the fashion industry) by reproducing femininity with a playful difference, ‘produc[ing] knowledge about it: that it is a role and not a nature’ (Tyler 2003, 23). As Butler notes, there is of course a danger that such repetitions of gender become ‘domesti­ cated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony’ (1990, 177). Importantly, though, each of the feature films also demonstrates the entrapment and ultimate powerlessness of the (middle-aged) woman who exists within or for the (male) gaze. In these films, youth (especially female youth) is associated with the shift away from gaze dynamics and towards the extra-visual senses with which the films’ experimental aesthetics are, in turn, identified. In a sequence from La mujer sin cabeza analysed in Chapter 3, Candita’s massaging of her aunt Vero’s hair enacts this shift; a queer and erotic moment which privileges touch and embodiment, it can also be understood as one

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which displaces the to-be-looked-at-ness of the normally excessively cinematic Vero: it turns her back to the camera, hides her face (just as the faces of Muta’s models are hidden), defamiliarising cinematic femininity and rendering her, rather than a visual object, a tactile one (see figure 8); in this sense the sequence performs the called-for destruction of visual pleasure, replacing it with a tactile one which is also an exploration of (women’s/queer) desire.4 Reading Martel’s films alongside one another allows for a greater appreciation of the gender political intervention made by these works, their challenging and parodying of a masculinist and visually-predi­ cated cinematic language, their concern with cinematic signifiers and treatments of femininity, and their broader concern with feminine identity, with women’s lives and desire, including female–female desire. As in the sequence just discussed, female–female desire is spectral in the feature films and in Muta, often implicit, hovering at the edges of the frame as a haunting presence/absence, occupying the space that commentators Terry Castle (1993) and Patricia White (1999, 61–93) argue it does more generally in modern culture and in cinema. For White, theorising the spectre of lesbianism in horror film, there is a special resonance between the anxious play with the edge of the frame and the evocation of what lies beyond it and the ‘problems of representability’ (63) posed by the homosexual. The features and Muta play knowingly on these problems. There is also a sense, though, in which the codes of horror are overturned, and in which the constant presence or incursion of the marginal – and not just the spectre of same-sex desire but all that which is abjected and excluded by the dominant culture and which also includes the indigenous characters, the ghost-child of La mujer sin cabeza, and the indigenous ‘restos humanos’ of Nueva Argirópolis – its recuperation, embracing, or identification with the film’s enunciatory position or its embodied consciousness, suggest a major reversal of classical horror’s expulsion or containment of the threat of the (sexually deviant or socially excluded) other. Instead, in Martel, the subversion of the dominant order always on some level flourishes, the repressed not just returning but continually suffusing and overturning that order, as I have argued is the case in La ciénaga’s embracing of the abject, in the way La niña santa allows threats to the dominant order to proliferate, and in La mujer sin cabeza’s final identification with the position of the ghost-child. Pervaded by the profound disjunctures and exclusions which characterise social relations, and attempting to

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subvert the dominant (adult, patriarchal, heteronormative, neocolo­ nial) worldview, the films suggest other, repressed or elided forms of knowledge and ways of seeing. The thrill and anxiety of these works is also a product of the visceral, tactile contact which they all to some extent establish with the viewer, and which further challenges distinctions between self and other, between the viewer’s body and that of the film. The films’ eliciting of a tactile gaze, use of haptic sound, even their occasionally olfac­ tory visuality, generates the uncertainty and anxiety associated with the questioning of subjective and bodily boundaries. Students report that after watching these films, one is not so much conscious of ‘what happened’ as one is aware of oneself as a body which has been touched; which has felt the heat, the sweat, the rain, the dirt or the decay. Indeed, Martel has spoken of her filmmaking as an attempt to overcome corporeal solitude, and to share embodied experience with others, commenting that: El cuerpo es una geografía de una soledad absoluta. Uno está en un lugar en donde nadie más puede estar. […] Pero existen estos pequeños trucos que hemos inventado y que, por unos instantes, de manera imper­ fecta, logran poner al otro en el cuerpo de uno. Permiten compartir lo imposible, permiten salvar esa soledad a la que uno está condenado de principio a fin. El cine reproduce de alguna manera la percepción de lo que tenemos afuera del cuerpo y el otro, por un tiempito, va a poder estar en el lugar del cuerpo de uno. (The body is a place of total solitude. We are each in a place where no one else can be. […] But there are small tricks we have invented which, just for a moment and imperfectly, allow someone else to be in our body. They allow us to share the impossible and to save us from the solitude to which we are condemned from birth to death. Cinema in some ways reproduces one’s perception of what is around us and lets other people, for a short time, inhabit the place of one’s own body.) (In Oubiña 2009, 80–1)

Laura Marks argues that film which calls on a tactile epistemology invites a mimetic, intersubjective relationship with the viewer, the kind of yielding and non-dominating relationship to otherness which is epitomised by La ciénaga’s Luchi. Luchi and other child characters suggest a diegetic staging of the relationship of intersubjective mimesis which the films want to instigate with the viewer. The films reach out, through images of touch for example, attempting to elicit a tactile gaze and thus to bring film and viewer together in a shared perceptual experience, attempting to overcome the solitude of the body.

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For Marks, tactile and haptic images such as those prevalent in Martel’s filmmaking throw into doubt our sense of separation between self and image (2002, 9), generating uncertainty around the subject’s boundaries, producing the uncanniness associated with a ‘danger to the subject, to the “integrity” of its body and thus to its very identity’ (Weber 1973, 1131).5 For Vivian Sobchack, in embodied spectatorship, ‘the body and [film] do not simply oppose or reflect each other. Rather they more radically in-form each other in a funda­ mentally ­non-hierarchical and reversive relationship that, in certain circumstances, manifests itself as a vacillating, ambivalent, often ambiguously undifferentiated, and thus “unnamable” or “undecid­ able” experience’ (2004, 73). Films which appeal to embodied knowl­ edge elicit a simultaneous thrill and anxiety, a mixture of pleasure and unpleasure, since they position the viewer ‘between the appeal of a sensuous perception […] and the close encounter with the abject, that is, the immersion in the anxiety of the self when individuality dissolves into the undifferentiated and formless’ (Beugnet 2007, 32). As Beugnet writes ‘we have become used to thinking of and enjoying feature films first and foremost in terms of plot and characters, identi­ fication and narrative logic. A sensual apprehension of film works to afford different, yet equally potent gratifications’ (5); in this sense, Martel’s work can be read as offering new kinds of cinematic (un) pleasure: the thrill and anxiety of the threat posed by embodied specta­ torship to the subject’s boundaries; the bringing of the viewer to a new consciousness of the body. Like their child characters, Martel’s films are highly playful with the senses and perception, engaging in an unrestrained disordering and dehierarchisation of the senses, displacing vision, and especially revelling in that which makes a familiar sensation or perceptual object strange. New theories of a bodily cinema have placed an emphasis on the possibilities of the opening of perception afforded by such a cinema.6 Discussions of Martel’s work have noted its emphasis on perception and perceptual crisis,7 especially in terms of how these play out diegetically, an element which, as I have argued, is of consid­ erable importance, especially in the films’ representation of ideolog­ ical rupture or glimpsing of alternative realities. However, there has been less discussion of how these films work cinematically to renew perception (including that of the viewer) in innovative ways, and thus of the means by which they rupture ideologically-indebted cinematic regimes of perception through their aesthetics. The Cinema of Lucrecia

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Martel has argued that through their (child’s) play the films ‘attack the dark organisation of clichés’ (Deleuze 1986, 214), which for Deleuze constituted the form of classical narrative cinema, thus not simply representing the renewal of perception on a diegetic level but also – crucially – producing it on an extra-diegetic one. A discussion of these films and their politics of perception and the senses is incomplete without an understanding of them as material as well as representa­ tional objects. Deleuzian film theory has emphasised the ways in which a material reading of film, attentive to the medium’s sensual capacities, opens up new political possibilities for film. We have seen how, in Martel’s films, corporeal aesthetics undo the viewing position of the disem­ bodied subject, as well as how the slowing of time and slackening of action allows for thought within the filmic construction. As Beugnet writes: ‘the loosening of the narrative causal chain and of the corre­ sponding film-making functions simultaneously allows for, and grows from, the greater involvement with the sensual dimension of the pro-filmic material’ (2007, 61). In turn this shift of emphasis towards the senses and the body has the capacity to undermine the stagnation of the brain brought on by the clichéd images of dominant cinema. The cinema has the capacity to produce a ‘shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’ (Deleuze 1989, 151), and it does this through sensation. As Flaxman writes: Sensation always initially betokens a kind of violence insofar as the dogmatic image of thought solidifies itself in its own inertia (habits, rituals, conventions), sensation is like the setting off of a trip wire, the communication of a kind of synaptic frenzy through the faculties (2000,  13).

For Deleuze sensation is that which ‘forces us to think’ (cit. in Flaxman 2000, 13) and which is comparable to the Kantian sublime, the point at which the imagination is confronted with its limits, produced by experiences of terror or wonder, and which brings about the agitation of thought.8 The industrial and economic positioning of cinema means it rarely fulfils the potential of producing such a shock to thought, or of opening the spectator to the edges of the think­ able. Yet certain films can ‘[provoke] us to see, to feel, to sense, and finally to think differently’ (Flaxman 2000, 3). The cinema of Lucrecia Martel privileges the sensorial and the extra-visual, dislodging the

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perceptual inertia produced by dominant cinematic forms, in order to produce a new form of embodied spectatorship which under­ mines the sedimented thought-patterns inculcated by hegemonic cinema, making the spectator perceive film differently, through the body, rather than through action–reaction clichés. In Martel’s films the extra-visual senses are activated – we come to ‘know’ through the body rather than solely through the visual or through the viewing of events – and the inertia produced by cinematic habit and conven­ tion is ruptured. If conventional cinematic practice and spectatorial positioning close down the possibilities of thought, Martel’s films invent new images and sounds, and new ways of sharing perceptual experience with the spectator, effecting a renewal of the thinkable and the cinematically perceptible. Martel’s cinema is interested in stretching the boundaries of the thinkable, the sensible, and of what it is possible to share through the mechanism of cinema. As we have seen, it is around this border between the known and the unknown, the tangible and the intangible, the thinkable and the beyond thought that the films hover both diegetically and formally. In this book I have relied on more traditional hermeneutic approaches to reading film – especially plot analysis and gaze analysis – alongside an understanding of film as material object, paying atten­ tion to the relationship between the two. And it is in this way that Martel’s films are best approached, for they do partake in elements of the conventional narrative as well as in the telling of stories which are less frequently told in cinema, stories of the senses and the body. These films are heavily self-conscious of gaze dynamics and self-re­ flexive about vision and visuality, even whilst they are engaged in enacting a shift of emphasis away from these dynamics, and from the ocularcentric. It is thus through the representational-narrative and the sensorial-material that these films’ political impact is made: through the disruption of dominant regimes of cinematic looking, the films work to disembed the dominant subjectivities which, on a representational level, they also expose and critique. The representa­ tional and the material complement one another in Martel’s work, since the diegetic representation of the opening of perception – the possibility of another relationship to reality or of another reality – is performed by the films themselves through experimental appeals to embodiment. Through their returns to sensory experimentation, the films break away from the sedimented thinking of dominant cinematic forms, and challenge the viewer’s perceptual capacities

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– meaning that we learn to perceive the world differently through Martel’s cinematic language. Notes 1 See Stam (1992, 10–17). 2 In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler makes the now well-known argument that ‘the parodic repetition of gender exposes […] the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance’ (1990, 200). 3 Indeed, although Butler concentrates mainly on the performance of femininity by biological males she also draws on discussions of female actresses such as Greta Garbo, who ‘“got in drag” whenever she took some heavy glamour part, whenever she melted in or out of a man’s arms, whenever she simply let that heavenly-flexed neck … bear the weight of her thrown-back head’ (Tyler, cit. in Butler 1990, 175). 4 In this sense the films respond to two seminal appeals of early feminist film theory: Mulvey’s advocating of the destruction of the visual pleasure associated with the positioning of woman in narrative cinema (1989 [1975], 26) and Claire Johnston’s insistence that women’s cinema must ‘embody the working through of desire’ (1975, 217). 5 In ‘The sideshow, or: remarks on a canny moment’, Weber argues that ‘the uncanny is […] bound up with a crisis of perception and of phenom­ enality, but concomitantly with a mortal danger to the subject’ produced by a threat to the body’s integrity (1973, 1131). 6 In a special issue of Cinema on ‘Embodiment and the body’, Patricia Castello Branco notes that the visual excess in the use of the senses and the body can be used ‘disruptively […]: as a place of resistance to the dominance of rational/verbal based social order and scientific and capitalistic ordering of the self. It is an erotics of the image, an “acinema” (Lyotard), a “cinema of the body” (Deleuze), a dilation of the senses, an ecstasy (Eisenstein), a “vertigo” (Picabia), a nervous excitation, but more than that, it is an opening of perception’ (2012, 2). 7 Andermann, for example, discusses the way perceptual routines are ‘kicked […] out of joint’ in La mujer sin cabeza, and proposes that ‘senso­ rial uncertainty [is] a mode of narrative organisation’ in Martel’s work (2012, 159). Page argues that, in La mujer sin cabeza, ‘we glimpse the fragility of the status quo, which can shatter at a few seconds’ notice […] and bring us into altered relations of distance and proximity with those around us as we become something other than the self we were previ­ ously’ (2013, 83). 8 See Flaxman’s useful discussion of Deleuze’s engagement with Kant (2000, 12–13).

Filmography

Television (as director) Magazine for fai (with Mex Urtizberea and Nora Moseinco) (1995–99) Script: Mex Urtizberea and Alberto Muñoz Producer: GP Producciones Las dependencias (documentary) (1999) Research and script: Adriana Mancini and Gabriela Speranza Producers: Lita Stantic and Ana de Skalon

Television (as director and co-scriptwriter) Historias de vida: Encarnación Ezcurra (documentary) (1998) Research and script: María Laura Ruggiero Producers: Lita Stantic and Ana de Skalon

Short films El 56 (animation) (1988) 1.28 min Co-directors: Carlos Belenda, Alberto Fasce, Jorge Lumbreras, Pedro Stelkic Piso 24 (1989) Producer: Lucrecia Martel No te la llevarás, maldito (1989) 2 min Producers: Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía and Centro Experimental y de Realización Cinematográfica Camera: Marcelo Felis Music: Ruy Folguera Photography: Diego Lublinsky La otra (1990) 9 min Producer: Diego S Kaplan Production: Centro Experimental y de Realización Cinematográfica Photography: Diego Lublinsky

Filmography Besos rojos (1991) 24 min Producer: Lucrecia Martel Rey Muerto (Dead King) (1995) 12 min Producers: Enrique Cortés, Roy Easdale Music: Laura Ruggiero Photography: Esteban Sapir Leading players: Rolly Serrano, Sandra Ceballos, Carlos Aldana La ciudad que huye (The City that Run Away [sic]) (2006) 5 min Production company: Estudio Fantasma Editing: Ariel Ledesma Becerro Investigative journalism: Laura Ruggiero Narration: Marina Ferraro Nueva Argirópolis (New Argiropolis) (2010) 8 min Producer: María Onis Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel Music: María Onis Photography: Alejandro Millán Pastori Editing: Pablo Barbieri, María Onis Pescados (Fish) (2010) 4 min Music: Juana Molina Editing and sound: María Onis Muta (2011) 6 min Production company: Hi! Productions, Lita Stantic Productions Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel, Alejandro Ros Music: María Onis Vigil Photography: Hugo Colace Art direction: Fabiana Tiscornia Editing: Ariel Ledesma Becerra

Feature films (audience and box office figures refer to domestic screenings only) La ciénaga (The Swamp) (Argentina, France, Spain) 2001, 103 min Production company: 4K Films, WandaVision S. A., T.S. Productions Producer: Lita Stantic Budget: US$ 900,000 Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel Photography: Hugo Colace (A.D.F.) Art direction: Graciela Oderigo Editing: Santiago Ricci Sound direction: Guido Berenblum

131

132

Filmography

Leading players: Graciela Borges (Mecha), Mercedes Morán (Tali) Premiere: 8 February 2001, Berlin Film Festival Audience: 130,874 Box office: ARS $ 610,183 La niña santa (The Holy Girl) (Argentina, Italy, Spain) 2004, 106 min Production company: Lita Stantic Productions, El Deseo, R&C Produzioni Producers: Lita Stantic Budget: €1,280,000 Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel Photography: Félix Monti Special effects: Sergio Rentero Music: Andrés Gerszenzon Art direction: Graciela Oderigo Editing: Santiago Ricci Sound direction: Marcos de Aguirre Leading players: Mercedes Morán (Helena), Carlos Belloso (Jano) Premiere: 6 May 2004, Argentina Audience: 112,461 Box office: ARS $ 649, 079 La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) (Argentina, France, Italy, Spain) 2008, 87 min Production company: Aquafilms, Lucrecia Martel El Deseo, Slot Machine, Teodora Films, R&C Produzioni Producers: Verónica Cura Budget: €1,700,000 Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel Music: Roberta Ainstein Photography: Barbara Álvarez Art direction: María Eugenia Sueiro Editing: Miguel Schverdfinger Sound direction: Guido Berenblum Leading players: María Onetto (Vero), Inés Efrón (Candita), María Vaner (Lala) Premiere: 21 May 2008, Cannes Film Festival Audience: 37,307 Box office: ARS $ 424, 189

Other films cited (in alphabetical order) Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986, USA). Bolivia (Israel Adrián Caetano, 2001, Argentina/Netherlands). Cara de queso: mi primer gueto (Cheese Head) (Ariel Winograd, 2006, Argen­ tina).

Filmography

133

Cosas insignificantes (Insignificant Things) (Andrea Martínez Crowther, 2008, Mexico/Spain). Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989, Australia). De eso no se habla (I Don’t Want to Talk About it) (María Luisa Bemberg, 1993, Argentina/Italy). El último verano de la boyita (The Last Summer of La Boyita) (Julia Solomonoff, 2009, Argentina/Spain/France). Hombre mirando al sudeste (Man Facing Southeast, Eliseo Subiela, 1986, Argentina). La historia oficial (The Official Story) (Luis Puenzo, 1985, Argentina). La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968, Argentina). La libertad (Freedom) (Lisandro Alonso, 2001, Argentina). La mala educación (Bad Education) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004, Spain). La noche de los lápices (Night of the Pencils) (Héctor Olivera,1986, Argentina). La rabia (Anger) (Albertina Carri, 2008, Argentina/Netherlands). Las viudas de los jueves (Marcelo Piñeyro, 2009 Argentina/Spain). Los rubios (The Blonds) (Albertina Carri, 2003, Argentina/USA). Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984, USA). Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink) (Alain Berliner, 1997, Belgium/France/UK). Mundo grúa (Crane World) (Pablo Trapero, 1999, Argentina). Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes) (Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, 1997, Argentina). Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy/France). Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968, USA). Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977, Italy). Tan de repente (Diego Lerman, 2002, Argentina, Netherlands). The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973, USA). The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, UK/USA). Toby Dammit (Fedderico Fellini, 1968, France/Italy). Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011, France). Una semana solos (A Week Alone) (Celina Murga, 2007, Argentina). Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA). XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007, Argentina, Spain, France).

Television Series Twin Peaks (David Lynch and Mark Frost, 1990–91, USA).

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page abject, the 34, 43–5, 49, 96, 97 see also dirt ACCA see Asociación de Cronistas Cinematográficos de Argen­ tina Adorno, Theodore and Max Hork­­ heimer 48–9 Agamben, Giorgio 103 n.11 allegory 35–6, 51 n.12, 72–3 national 78 n.27, 80 Almodóvar, Pedro 6–7, 25 n.20 La mala educación 7, 63 Alonso, Lisandro 11 La libertad 24 n.15, 53 n.34 animal, the 40, 41–2, 47–8, 52 n.23, 85, 113–16, 117–20 Antonioni, Michelangelo 7, 25 n.24 Red Desert 25 n.24, 93 Argento, Dario Suspiria 20 Asociación de Cronistas Cinema­­to­ gráficos de Argentina (ACCA) 1, 6, 25 n.17 auteurism 4–5 autobiography 5, 35, 51 n.12 Bachelard, Gaston 73 Barthes, Roland 24 n.13 Baudrillard, Jean 39

becoming 33, 96, 97, 106–7, 112, 115–16, 117–20, 121 n.11 Bemberg, María Luisa 4, 5, 16, 24  n.9, 27 n.40 De eso no se habla 16–17, 27 n.42, 76 n.1 Benjamin, Walter 46 biography (Martel) 2 body, the 20, 21, 25 n.24, 28 n.42, 31, 34, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 55, 119, 127, 128 see also embodiment Bordwell, David 105 n.21 Borges, Graciela 17, 18, 28 n.45, 28 n.46, 52 n.20, 123 Brecht, Bertolt 31, 68, 93 Burman, Daniel 2 Butler, Judith 44–5, 59–60, 64–5, 85, 123, 129 n.3 Caetano, Adrián 2–3, 6, 9 Bolivia 6, 53 n.34 and Bruno Stagnaro, Pizza, birra, faso 24 n.15, 51 n.13 Cannes Film Festival 6, 7 Carri, Albertina 24 n.9 La rabia 22, 53 n.34 Los rubios 100, 103 n.9, 103 n.13 Carroll, Noel 59

145

Index Cassavetes, John Love Streams 110 Casullo, Nicolás 86, 87 Catholicism 54, 56, 63, 64–8, 72, 76, 77 n.19 child, the 1, 7, 15, 19–20, 21, 22, 34, 40–1, 42, 46–8, 57–8, 59, 62–3, 73–4, 76, 77 n.16, 125, 126 see also gaze, child’s Chion, Michel 21 ciénaga, La 1, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23 n.2, 24 n.7, 30–53, 55, 72, 101, 110, 121 n.10, 124, 131 Cinemascope 93, 105 n.21 colour 51 n.20, 81, 122 counter-memory 86–7 Davis, Colin 88, 91 death drive 40, 48–9 defamiliarisation 9, 10, 12, 19, 31, 34, 43, 45–6, 49, 50, 117, 119, 121 n.14, 123, 126 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 20, 25 n.24, 28 n.51, 40, 50, 53 n.35, 53 n.36, 106, 127 and Felix Guattari 14, 100, 105  n.25, 115, 119, 121 n.11 dependencias, Las 23 n.3, 130 Derrida, Jacques 85–6, 88–9, 91, 101 Desert Campaign, the 108, 120 n.6 desire 14–15, 17, 31, 39, 41, 44, 52 n.22, 59, 63, 65, 71, 76, 96, 99–100, 110, 124 di Benedetto, Antonio Zama 23 n.6 dictatorship, Argentine (1976–82) 3, 35, 80, 85, 86, 87, 98, 100, 101, 102 n.4, 103 n.12 dirt 17, 33, 41, 43–4, 50, 91, 96, 125 see also abject ‘disappeared’, the 80, 85, 87, 100 distanciation see defamiliarisation distribution (film) 7, 25 n.21

Douglas, Mary 96 Duras, Marguerite 106 Dyer, Richard 5 editing 10, 26 n.32, 34, 35, 51 n.10, 62, 70, 71, 77 n.15 El Deseo Producciones 6–7 Eliade, Mircea 120 n.1 embodiment 21, 34, 43, 44–5, 46, 48, 49, 50, 97, 123, 125, 126, 129 n.6 see also body, the eternauta, El 23 n.6 family, the 2, 9, 14, 15–16, 23 n.2, 26 n.28, 34, 36, 41, 52 n.22, 57, 99, 100 see also incest; mother–daughter relationship fashion industry 116–20 Faulkner, William, 26 n.28, 51 n.18 Fellini, Federico Toby Dammit 58 femininity 5, 7, 12, 17, 18, 54, 64, 67–9, 72, 76, 77 n.19, 99, 105 n.24, 116–20, 121 n.14, 123 feminism 5, 15, 16, 17, 24 n.9, 27 n.37, 27 n.40, 28 n.43, 64 femme fatale 16, 56, 72, 78 n.26, 123 focus 11, 25 n.24, 32, 46, 82, 84, 92, 93, 105 n.21, 112, 113 Foucault, Michel 24 n.13, 105 n.27 Freud, Sigmund 10, 40, 58, 62, 68, 70, 76 n.8 see also death drive gaze child’s 20, 91 gendered 16, 19, 60–2, 71–2, 77 n.14 spectral 81, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 101 gender 3–4, 16, 37, 64, 96–7, 98, 123 see also femininity

146 Gente 23 n.6 ghosts 19, 84–5, 87, 88–92, 100, 124 girl, the 15, 17, 18, 43–4, 52 n.27, 68–9, 96–7 Gordon, Avery 87 Gothic 19, 55 hair 16, 74, 97, 123–4 haptic 10, 28 n.51, 31, 46, 73, 74–5, 79 n.29, 97, 125 haunting see ghosts hauntology 86–7 Haynes, Todd 28 n.44 Historias breves 2 Historias de vida: Encarnación Ezcurra 15, 23 n.3, 27 n.39, 130 history 35–6, 80–1, 85–7, 88, 95–6, 100, 101, 104 n.15, 107, 110 Hitchcock, Alfred 7, 17 Vertigo 99, 105 n.29, 123 horror 4, 7, 10, 18–19, 20, 24 n.12, 44, 57, 60, 62, 76 n.4, 77 n.15, 103 n.10, 123, 124 humour 62, 115, 122 Hutcheon, Linda 116 ideology 10, 11, 13, 26 n.32, 49, 54, 64, 91, 123 illness 13, 92, 104 n.19 INCAA see Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales incest 14, 41, 52 n.22, 57, 64, 70, 76 n.6 indigenous people 3, 9, 12, 31, 37, 38, 44, 51 n.13, 51 n.15, 81, 83, 87, 101, 107, 108–13, 119, 120 n.6, 124 Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA) 19, 23 n.5 interpellation 64–5 intertextuality 8, 26 n.27, 26 n.28, 45, 105 n.27

Index Jentsch, Ernst 27 n.36, 105 n.20 Johnston, Claire 129 n.4 Kristeva, Julia 43–4, 52 n.26, 70–1 language 27 n.39, 105 n.27, 108, 112, 118 Lerman, Diego Tan de repente 28 n.44 lesbian 5, 17, 44–5, 59–60, 75, 97–8, 124 Lynch, David Blue Velvet 102 n.3, 104 n.18 Twin Peaks 102 n.3 Marks, Laura 28 n.51, 31, 46, 48, 50 n.4, 125–6 Mármol, José Amalia 78 n.27 Martínez Crowther, Andrea Cosas insignificantes 24 n.16 medicine 14, 65 melodrama 7, 18–19, 28 n.47 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 21 mimesis 46–9, 53 n.32, 125 Modleski, Tania 105 n.30 mother 12, 16, 43, 101 –daughter relationship 69–71 mujer sin cabeza, La 2, 6, 12, 16, 19, 26 n.27, 80–105, 110, 124, 132 Mulvey, Laura 17, 129 n.4 see also to-be-looked-at-ness Murga, Celina Una semana solos 29 n.55, 102 n.7 music 15, 17, 18, 28 n.47, 37, 57, 65, 80, 84, 95, 102 n.3, 114, 120, 122 Muta 7, 8, 12, 18, 19, 31, 109, 116–20, 123, 124, 131 nation 3, 19, 24, 35, 36, 72, 78 n.27, 80, 102 n.2, 107–8, 111, 112 Navarro, Bertha 5–6, 24 n.12 neo-liberalism 3, 36, 39, 83, 85, 87, 103 n.8, 103 n.12, 104 n.15

Index neo-realism 11, 19, 24 n.10, 32, 50 n.5 New Argentine Cinema 1, 2–4, 6, 9, 15–16, 19, 23 n.4, 24 n.8, 24 n.10, 26 n.32, 37–8, 49 Nichols, Bill 13 niña santa, La 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23 n.2, 25 n.18, 25 n.19, 25 n.21, 26 n.27, 54–79, 110, 124, 132 No te la llevarás, maldito 23 n.3, 130 Nueva Argirópolis 8, 9, 19, 101, 107–13, 131 off-screen (space, sound etc.) 2, 5, 10, 55, 67, 78, 98, 104 n.17, 122 Olivera, Héctor La noche de los lápices 102 n.4 orality 8–9, 11–12, 29 n.54, 33, 50 n.7 see also speech otra, La 15, 130 perception 12, 13, 15, 20, 22, 42, 45, 49, 50, 56, 64, 65, 75–6, 93, 106, 126–9, 129 n.7 Pescados 106, 113–16, 120 131 Piñeyro, Marcelo Las viudas de los jueves 102 n.7 pleasure 17, 122, 123, 126 visual 124, 129 n.4 see also to-be-looked-at-ness politics 4, 9, 12, 15, 19, 22, 26 n.32, 34, 36, 86, 99, 104, 110, 120 n.2, 122–3, 127, 128 postmodernism 116 production 5–6, 24 n.15 Puenzo, Lucía 24 n.9 XXY 29 n.55, 77 n.14 Puenzo, Luis La historia oficial, 102 n.4, 103 n.13 queer 4, 5, 15, 16, 24 n.9, 44–5, 63, 77 n.12, 97, 99, 100, 101, 123 see also sexuality Quiroga, Horacio 41, 52 n.23

147 race 9, 12, 37–8, 41, 44–5, 51 n.18, 83–4, 92, 111–12 racism 26 n.28, 33, 37–8, 39, 44–5, 51 n.14, 51 n.17, 85, 99 111–12 reflexivity 25 n.16, 35, 49, 72, 78 n.26, 122–3, 128 Rejtman, Martín 2–3, 9, 51 n.13 religion 14, 31, 55, 58, 72, 74, 76 n.9 see also Catholicism repetition 9, 14, 22, 33, 39–41, 42, 83, 87, 99, 101 versus change 9, 14, 41, 97, 101 Rey Muerto 2, 8, 15, 24 n.12, 131 river 8, 18, 106–13 Rose, Jacqueline 63, 77 n.16 Salta 2, 3, 8–9, 26 n.29, 26 n.31, 56, 80, 85, 88 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 120  n.5 Argirópolis 107–8, 109 science fiction 19, 23 n.6, 113 screen 20, 48, 73, 74, 83, 94–5 script 5, 6, 11, 23 n.2, 32 senses 7, 18, 20, 21, 33, 43, 49, 56, 73, 126, 127 servants 9, 23 n.3, 33, 37–8, 44–5, 57, 69, 83, 84–5, 90, 91–2, 95, 97 sexuality 3–4, 12, 17, 19, 21, 22, 44–5, 59–60, 63, 75, 96–7, 105 n.24, 105 n.27 see also queer Sherman, Cindy 116 Shklovsky, Victor 12 sleep 13, 43, 78 n.23, 92, 105 n.20 smell 18, 21, 34, 44, 48–9, 56, 125 Sobchack, Vivian 48, 126 social class 3, 12, 19, 37–8, 42, 51 n.13, 52 n.22, 83–5, 91, 96–7, 98, 99, 101, 103 n.9, 105 n.24 Solanas, Fernando 3 and Octavio Getino La hora de los hornos 15 Solomonoff, Julia 21–2, 24 n.9

148

El último verano de la boyita 22, 53 n.34 Sommer, Doris 78 n.27 sound 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 22, 28 n.53, 28 n.54, 30–1, 45–6, 50 n.3, 50 n.4, 56, 57, 65, 67, 76 n.4, 82, 84–5, 90, 104 n.17, 110, 112–13, 114–15, 120, 125 space 8, 10, 34–5, 70, 74, 81, 83, 94, 97, 99, 102 n.7, 105 n.21 see also off-screen spectator 20, 21, 22, 28 n.52, 48–9, 50, 94, 95–6, 101, 122, 123, 125, 126 spectres see ghosts speech 26 n.33, 37, 43–4 see also orality Stagnaro, Bruno 2–3, 9 and Adrián Caetano, Pizza, birra, faso 24 n.15, 51 n.13 Stam, Robert 51 n.11, 68, 93, 122, 129 n.1 Stantic, Lita 5–6 Subiela, Eliseo 3 Hombre mirando al sudeste 102 n.4 sublime, Kantian 127 Sundance Festival 2, 7 Institute 6, 32 Svampa, Maristella 36, 83, 102 n.7, 103 n.8

Index time-image 13, 20, 43, 53 n.34, 106, 127 to-be-looked-at-ness 17, 56, 75, 123, 124 touch 7, 18, 19–20, 21, 22, 28 n.44, 30–1, 34, 43, 47, 49, 56, 65, 73, 74, 75, 79 n.29, 110, 114, 117, 123, 124, 125 transnational, the 7–8 Trapero, Pablo 3, 9 Mundo grúa 6, 24 n.15 uncanny 10, 13, 19, 20, 22, 27 n.36, 39, 46, 57–8, 60–2, 69–71, 74, 78 n.21, 78 n.24, 84, 92, 117, 126, 129 n.5 uncertainty 9, 10, 12, 13, 22, 27 n.36, 30, 46, 34, 88, 89, 105 n.20, 119, 122, 125, 126, 129 n.7 Vertov, Dziga 11 Villegas, Juan 11 Viñas, David 87, 108 vision 13, 33, 35, 42, 55, 57, 79 n.29, 93, 112, 122, 126, 128 water 13, 73, 74–5, 94, 96, 106–21 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 28 n.44, 120 n.2 Winograd, Ariel Cara de queso: mi primer gueto 102 n.7 Woolf, Virginia 92, 104 n.19

television 38–9 Zama 8, 23 n.6