The Salta Trilogy of Lucrecia Martel

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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

THE SALTA TRILOGY OF LUCRECIA MARTEL

Oscar Jubis

A THESIS

Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Coral Gables, Florida

December 2009

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

THE SALTA TRILOGY OF LUCRECIA MARTEL

Oscar Jubis

Approved:

______William Rothman, Ph.D. Terri A. Scandura, Ph.D. Professor of Motion Pictures Dean of the Graduate School

______Christina Lane, Ph.D. Yvonne Gavela, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Motion Pictures Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures

JUBIS, OSCAR (M.A., Film Studies)

The Salta Trilogy of Lucrecia Martel (December 2009)

Abstract of a thesis at the University of Miami

Thesis supervised by Professor William Rothman Number of pages in text (109)

During the past decade, Lucrecia Martel has emerged as the most respected

filmmaker from South America. This thesis is motivated by my conviction that

Martel’s films are worthy of serious engagement and critical scrutiny. It is also motivated by my curiosity about the seemingly inexhaustible pleasure and edification I derive from them. Martel describes her filmmaking as “cine de autor”

(auteur cinema). Indeed, her films evidence a personal involvement in every

aspect of filmmaking. This thesis will define and explore the characteristics and

conditions of her authorship. This thesis constitutes an expression of the

enduring usefulness of auteurist criticism. In this case, this critical approach is

entirely appropriate and likely to yield the deepest insights into the films.

The introduction to my thesis provides pertinent biographical information and

the necessary socio-cultural context to set the stage for an intellectual immersion

into her three features to date: The Swamp (2001), The Holy Girl (2004) and The

Headless Woman (2008). I propose that these films constitute a trilogy that

distills Martel’s experience of growing up in the remote province of Salta and

critiques the social and cultural forces at play in provincial Latin American life. However, no matter how specific the sense of place the films convey and how grounded they are in subjective experience, they illuminate universal aspects of being a person in the world and contain progressive prescriptions for living from which anyone can benefit.

My research into the literature on the films of Lucrecia Martel failed to find any serious and thorough appraisal of Lucrecia Martel’s films as a trilogy. While my analysis benefits from familiarity with the available literature, the operative critical approach privileges my direct experience with the audiovisual material provided by the films. Each film will be subjected to a close reading illustrated with images from it. These readings focus sharply on certain sequences I deem crucial to the conveyance of characterization, meaning and ideology. These readings aim to think with the films rather than think against or about them. They explore the themes and issues that arise within the narratives of the films as well as the formal means by which they do.

DEDICATIONS

This thesis is dedicated to Professor Bill Rothman whose work in Film Studies fueled my desire to pursue a degree in the field, and to Cristi Jubis whose support and encouragement made it possible.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Chapter

1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………..1 A Work of Auteurist Criticism………………………………... 7 The Film Career of Lucrecia Martel………………………… 14 Nuevo Cine Argentino………………………………………....15 Rey Muerto...... 20 The Girl from Salta……………………………………………..21

2 THE SWAMP…………………………………………………...24

3 THE HOLY GIRL…………………………………………….....53

4 THE HEADLESS WOMAN……………………………………78

References……………………………………………………………106

Chapter One Introduction

This thesis is motivated by my strong conviction that the films written and directed by Lucrecia Martel are worthy of serious engagement and critical scrutiny. It is also motivated by my curiosity about the seemingly inexhaustible pleasure and edification I derive from her films. While it is significant that Martel calls what she does cine de autor (auteur cinema), this is less important than whether her films provide evidence of Martel as a film author. Indeed, her films evidence her personal involvement in every aspect of filmmaking at every step in the production process. This thesis will define and explore the characteristics and conditions of her authorship.

This introduction to The Salta Trilogy of Lucrecia Martel will provide the necessary socio-cultural context and pertinent biographical information about

Martel to set the stage for an intellectual immersion into her three features: The

Swamp (La ciénaga, 2001), The Holy Girl (La niña santa, 2004) and The

Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008). This introduction also addresses challenges to the idea of film authorship and the practice of auteurist criticism.

The remainder of my thesis is dependent on close readings of the films accompanied by screen captures. A work of criticism of a primarily visual art form is enhanced by visual material excerpted from the film(s) because it serves to illustrate the critical commentary. It is an approach to criticism I learned from

Professor Bill Rothman, beginning with a reading of his groundbreaking

Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze (1982). This approach is flexible enough to suit criticism of films as disparate as Hitchcock’s and Martel’s and rightfully based solely on the writer’s experience with the audiovisual material the films provide. 3

In other words, I subscribe to the idea that the best film criticism is firmly grounded on and originates from observable and audible detail. The complexity and density of these films demand a close scrutiny of their detailed fabric in order to offer deep insights into their meaning and artistry.

My experience with the films reveals a number of stylistic trademarks and identifies a series of recurring themes. Martel’s cinema is essentially autobiographic in that the films originate from memories of life in the province during her formative years. These memories are, to a remarkable extent, processed through the senses. A great deal of attention is devoted to how her characters perceive the world around them, the link between perception and emotion, and the interpretation of reality based on those perceptions and influenced by those emotions. The films are replete with scenes of characters engaged in sensory perception, in the reception of stimuli on which their views of the world are based. Additionally, as I will illustrate, the films elicit metaphorical allusions from the activities of the senses.

The tendency to show characters at the moment of perception corresponds to a sensualist view that underscores that sensations are the building blocks of cognition. In view of how the first two films of the trilogy depict the limitations of traditional worship, it can be argued that Martel’s worldview borrows from the positivism of Auguste Comte. I am referring specifically to the notion that a

“religion of humanity” would or should fulfill the role of fomenting social cohesion once held by organized religion. The films endorse a universal morality based on 4

the commonality of human nature and the need to respond to human frailty and transgression with acknowledgement and compassion.

Working within a primarily visual medium, Lucrecia Martel aims to elevate sound to a position of equality with the images. The script and the sound design of her films are painstakingly constructed over a long period of time until they are perfectly calibrated and faithfully followed during the shoot. What I call extra- imaged sound, aural stimuli produced outside our views of the world-on-film, is

particularly important to narrative thrust and the conveyance of meaning. It calls attention to the space that exists beyond what the screen allows us to see. Very often in Martel’s films, sound precedes the image with which it is associated to

make the viewer conscious of its ability to have independent impact on thought

and emotion.

Whereas the soundtracks of Martel’s films are planned beforehand, their

mise-en-scène is fluid and improvised. Camera placement and movement,

number and length of shots, blocking (the positioning of actors within a filmic

space), and lighting are determined on the set. These aspects are worked out 5 depending on what each scene is meant to communicate to the spectator. There is no conscious effort to either adhere to an established or “classical” style or to disregard it just for the sake of being original or on the “cutting-edge”. At times, reaction shots precede views of the action that motivates them, forcing the viewer to reconsider the connection between cause and effect. One salient characteristic of Martel’s aesthetics is the almost total absence of orientation or establishing shots, which she finds too impersonal to suit her. It is incumbent upon the viewer to be keenly attentive and observant to clues in order to achieve the temporal and spatial orientation that establishing shots usually provide.

Generally, Martel thinks of the camera as offering the point of view of a child who perceives everything that is happening in the world-on-film but cannot form judgments about it yet. However, the philosophical perspective of the films as whole entities is that of the Lucrecia Martel. She reviews her youth from the adult, analytical perspective afforded by geographic and temporal distance. And yet, her analysis is grounded in the concrete details of daily living made possible by the proximity and accessibility of her memories. Martel’s films are not difficult 6 but they demand a viewer’s active participation. They are accessible to every viewer willing to approach them in a state of contemplation and reflection.

Lucrecia Martel’s films reveal a number of preoccupations and thematic concerns: the lives of middle-class girls living in provinces where class and race are sharply defined, the conflict between a powerful, natural sensuality and religious, or more specifically Catholic, dogma, the exercise of patriarchal power, class privilege and disavowal, the decadence of bourgeois society, the transmission of dysfunctional patterns of behavior across generations, and, perhaps most forcefully, the need to hold oneself accountable and to assume personal responsibility.

The narratives of her films are reticent and elliptical. They are built from an accretion of relatively insignificant observations that accrue significance and resonance as the films progress. Their suspended endings require the viewer’s active and alert participation in order to achieve closure. The refusal to render a judgment on the characters, and the ambiguity and subtlety that permeate the films can make them seem cold and elusive to some viewers, whereas others are fascinated by the freedom to ponder a variety of possible interpretations and character judgments. These qualities make the films such fascinating subjects for film criticism. It is important to note that no matter how specific the sense of place the films convey and how grounded they are in Martel’s personal experience, the films illuminate universal aspects of being a person in the world and contain progressive prescriptions for living from which anyone can benefit. 7

A Work of Auteurist Criticism

Auteurist criticism had its genesis in the writings of Cahiers du Cinema writers

such as François Truffaut and was popularized in the United States by Andrew

Sarris. These texts privileged certain Hollywood directors as being the rightful authors of the films they directed. Auteurist criticism has been challenged based on a number of alleged limitations. I will enumerate some of the most pertinent and discuss how they apply, or fail to apply, to an auteurist analysis of Martel’s films. My purpose is to provide the evidence necessary to unequivocally designate Lucrecia Martel as the author of these films.

1) The fact that the films under study by auteurist critics were made under the

aegis of a studio system that exerted a great degree of creative influence on them. The production of Hollywood films of the Golden Era followed an industrial method, largely motivated by financial considerations. There is a direct

correlation between the size of a film’s budget and the extent to which producers

and studio executives become involved in artistically relevant aspects of film

production.

Martel’s films are not produced by a studio. They are the products of the

transnational funding and spectatorship that characterize a globalized film

culture. The Swamp and The Holy Girl were produced by Lita Stantic. She

gained prominence as the producer of the films of the late, feminist director Maria

Luisa Bemberg (Camila, Nobody’s Wife, Miss Mary) and has an impeccable

reputation as a producer who “respects the auteur.”1 During the past decade, her 8 connections with European and local funding sources have facilitated the financing of several prominent films by a new generation of Argentine directors.

Martel’s films are financed through numerous funding entities from several countries. Pedro and Agustin Almodovar loved The Swamp and proceeded to co- finance The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman through their production company El Deseo, S.A. However, no single funding source is indispensable.

My research uncovered a single, isolated institutional attempt to influence the content of a film by Martel. The Sundance jury who gave an award to Martel for her script of The Swamp recommended that the ambitious narrative be pared down and given a more conventional structure. Martel refused to make any changes, resulting in a particularly challenging film with seemingly inexhaustible riches. Moreover, the small size of the budgets of the films contributes to

Lucrecia Martel’s complete creative control over them. Consequently, criticism of auteur theory based on its preclusion of the economic pressures exerted by the

“industry” is simply irrelevant in this case.

2) Underestimation or neglect of the artistic contribution of the scriptwriter and the writer of the original material on which scripts are sometimes based.

Lucrecia Martel writes her own scripts. They are based on her own memories, experiences, and observations. She has made a number of statements over the years that attest to the personal, even more precisely autobiographical, nature of the narratives of the Salta trilogy. Martel’s writing process is long and arduous.

She reveals that deviations from the script during shooting are extremely rare. 9

Martel has recently completed a script for what might become her fourth feature,

“El Eternauta”, which would be her first film based on existing literary material. “El

Eternauta” (Sailor of Eternity) is an allegorical, serialized, science fiction novel written by Héctor Oesterheld in the 1950s. It revolves around an extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires. Martel has been attached to this project since May of

2008, when it was announced at Cannes and reported in Variety. Certainly, a critical approach to such a film would have to consider the layer of meaning provided by the original material and the process of adaptation from novel to film.

Martel’s mere willingness to involve herself in such a project suggests that a phase in her artistic trajectory has ended and a distinctive new phase in set to begin. It strengthens my conviction that this is a particularly apt time to appraise and analyze Martel’s filmic career to date.

3) It has also been argued that auteurist criticism tends to ignore the structure of meaning films inherit from the prevailing conventions of the genre to which they belong.

The Salta trilogy does not have antecedents in any recognized, well-defined genre. However, Martel has for years expressed an interest in making a genre film, perhaps a horror film. If the “El Eternauta” project comes to fruition, the resulting film would be her first genre film. A thorough reading of such a film would have to include a consideration of it as a sci-fi movie but the films of the

Salta trilogy are free of genre indebtedness. 10

4) Neglect of the fact that some actors are “stars” whose persona and the

perceived expectations of their fan base influence creative aspects such as

characterization. The term “star vehicle” conveys most eloquently the potential

constraints on the director as sole author of his or her films as a consequence of the casting of a prominent, popular actor.

None of Lucrecia Martel’s films to date feature “stars” of Argentine cinema such as Cecilia Roth, Norma Aleandro, Ricardo Darín, Federico Luppi, and

Daniel Hendler. She prefers to cast so-called character actors in major adult

roles. Graciela Borges, who plays Mecha in The Swamp, played important roles

in the films directed by the great Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson from the late 1950s to

the early 1970s. However, she has had a lower profile since then and had not

appeared in any films for almost a decade prior to her award-winning

performance in Martel’s film. Mercedes Morán gained notoriety only after she

appeared in The Swamp and The Holy Girl. Martel invariably casts non-actors in

child and adolescent roles.

5) Neglect of the influence of governing bodies and regulatory agencies such as

Classical-era production codes or the National Board of Review on film content.

At certain historical moments, governments may meddle with film production in

various ways. For instance, the governments of several countries took a more

active role in regulating their film industries during World War II. Argentinean

films made when the country was governed by a dictatorial military junta were not

free to express contrary political viewpoints. 11

During this decade, Argentines enjoy wide freedom of expression. There is no censorship of film content. There is a Ratings Board in Argentina similar to the one operated in the United States by the Motion Pictures Association of America to provide guidance to parents. It tends to be more liberal than its American counterpart. Martel’s films, which received “R” ratings in the U.S., were deemed appropriate for persons 13 years and older in Argentina.

6) Neglect of the input of other members of a film crew who sometimes have decision-making power in their areas of expertise and leave their indelible, discernible mark on the film. It would be grossly inadequate, for example, to discuss the films directed by Emilio Fernández, arguably the most important director of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, without considering the artistic contribution of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

Notwithstanding the collaborative nature of filmmaking, I must note that the crew of Martel’s films does not include anyone with a comparably strong presence or artistic trajectory. Producer Lisa Stantic explains: “Lucrecia even 12 decides what the most insignificant of the extras will wear. She is involved in everything, supervises everything. She herself has to oversee every single element that plays a part in the film.”2 Veteran cinematographer Felix Monti on his experience working in The Holy Girl: “Everything pertaining to the mise-en- scène: the lighting, camera placement, the narrative style…is absolutely, uniquely and unreproducibly Lucrecia’s.”3 Monti explains that it was Martel who entrusted him to devise a unique lighting scheme for The Holy Girl. She wanted to avoid lighting that produced shadows so light would have to be distributed evenly around each set. She wanted to be free to move the camera and shoot the action from any angle without having to change the lighting setups. This is an example of how the crews in Martel’s films endeavor to serve her vision.

7. The criticism of auteurism based on theories borrowed from linguistics and psychoanalysis has assumed many variations. An essay titled ‘Death of the

Author” by French literary critic Roland Barthes has been greatly influential since its publication in 1967. Barthes argues against inferring what a text means on the basis of aspects of the identity of its author. I subscribe to the idea that the distillation of meaning from a film stems from the critic’s experience of viewing and thinking about the film. Using the terminology of postmodernism, meaning and ideology originate in the text as received by the spectator. I propose that the films written and directed by Lucrecia Martel internalize the concept of the spectator being an active producer of meaning. Their reticent narratives, suspended endings, and nonjudgmental stance towards the characters not merely invite but demand the viewer’s participation. 13

I subscribe to postmodern views of identity as dynamic and made up of

fragments. The films written and directed by Lucrecia Martel are engaged with

the contemporary debates about the nature of identity. The social image and self-

concept of the characters are in a perpetual state of flux. This is shown to be a

consequence of their social interactions and the exteroceptions the films

represent so insistently. Moreover, The Headless Woman is intimately

concerned with a person’s efforts to reacquire a sense of identity by weaving a

concept of self from isolated threads. The film is a meditation on the never-

ending and imperfect struggle to integrate the human self.

My readings of the films are not based on the director’s identity. Perhaps the

opposite is true. Given her authorial position, my close readings of the films

constitute interpretations of a fragment of the identity of Lucrecia Martel at the

time of their making. The author is never positioned above the text in these

readings. However, my thesis neither overvalues nor disregards Martel’s

statements about herself and about her films. Comments about her perceived

self-identity, her conscious intentions, and her creative process provide hints and

suggestions for a search for meaning that can only be found in the films and can

only be evidenced by them. Martel’s creative process begins by her gathering of

memorized fragments of subjective experience which are shaped into film

narratives that achieve closure and meaning in the mind of the viewer. I propose that these films which originate from concrete, subjective experience manage to broach universal aspects of living that concern every human being. 14

In the case of the Salta trilogy of Lucrecia Martel, auteurist criticism is entirely

appropriate and likely to yield the deepest insights into the films. While this thesis

is not meant as an unqualified or comprehensive endorsement of auteurist

criticism, it constitutes a passionate expression of its enduring usefulness.

The Film Career of Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel (1966) has become the best known film director from

Argentina over the course of a few years. Her three features have brought her

worldwide recognition as an important and accomplished filmmaker. The Swamp

had its world premiere at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival, where it

received the Alfred Bauer Award. The following year, Martel was invited to serve in that festival’s jury. The Swamp also won the Grand Prix at the Toulouse Film

Festival, the most important European showcase for films from Latin America. At

home, Martel’s debut feature received three awards from the Argentinean Film

Critics Association (AFCA), including Best First Film. Both The Holy Girl and The

Headless Woman premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where

Martel was a member of the jury of the 2006 edition (she has also served as

member of the jury at the Sundance and Venice film festivals). Both films

received multiple AFCA nominations.

The films of Lucrecia Martel have received more widespread distribution

around the globe than it is typical of films from Latin America. For instance, The

Holy Girl enjoyed commercial runs in Turkey and Israel, countries where

audiences normally have access to Spanish-language films only when screened 15

as part of film festivals. The three features had their American premieres at the

very selective New York Film Festival and were subsequently released

commercially in the United States. Their critical reception has been almost

uniformly positive, with the most enthusiastic reviews coming from the most

experienced and reputable critics. Among her most fervent admirers is Kent

Jones, who wrote in a Film Comment essay: “Filmmakers all over the world,

good and bad, beat their brains in trying to achieve what comes most naturally to

this director_ it’s difficult to think of anyone else who manages such a precise

balance between all the various elements of cinema with such apparent ease.”4

Nuevo Cine Argentino

Lucrecia Martel is typically associated with Nuevo Cine Argentino (New

Argentine Cinema), a flourishing of filmmaking of distinction that has emerged in

Argentina during the past decade or so. A detailed exploration of the social,

political, economic and cultural factors that facilitated the development of this

new “wave” is beyond the scope of this thesis. But it is imperative to make a brief stab at defining New Argentine Cinema and how Martel fits within it.

The usual difficulties of attempting to define an artistic movement arise in connection with the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA). It defies generalizations. This is certainly not a monolithic or homogeneous movement. There is no dominant ideology. It does not have a credo or a manifesto. Its members are as heterogeneous as Nouvelle Vague directors like Jean Luc Godard and Eric 16

Rohmer or the directors associated with Nuevo Cine Español. Generally

speaking, NCA directors Adrian Caetano, Albertina Carri, Lisandro Alonso,

Martin Rejtman, Pablo Trapero, Ana Katz, and Martel aim to make films that

differ from those made within the Argentine film industry in their avoidance of

genre formulas and costumbrismo, an artistic tendency to romanticize and

trivialize representations of social customs. Quintin states:

Whether polished like Martel’s The Swamp or untidy like Modelo 73, these films share a desire for cinematic truth and an air of being an artistic adventure with no safety net. At a time when most of the world’s films are moving towards a hybrid cinema, adding local, exotic elements to conventional and globalized dramatic developments, Argentina has the luxury of producing a collection of works which are genuinely local, more free than perfect, more valuable as explorations than as merchandise.5 To generalize about the commonalities between the films made by directors

associated with the NCA is to risk being inaccurately reductive and categorical.

However, having offered this cautionary note, I notice that the vast majority of the

NCA films I have watched place a greater responsibility on the viewer to

consummate the narrative and to infer meaning. They generally demand

considerable attention, alertness and concentration on the part of the viewer.

This is a consequence of the prevalence of elliptical narrative structures,

ambiguous characterizations, and enigmatic endings.

In “Other Worlds: New Argentine Film”, Gonzalo Aguilar identifies some differences between older and mainstream Argentinean versus NCA films. In the former, he argues, sound is subordinated to the image and conventionally serves to complete the narrative whereas a significant number of NCA films treat sound 17

as a realm “that has a relative autonomy with respect to the image or that

provides it with new dimensions.”6 He also notices how many of the NCA films

incorporate television broadcasts and depict characters watching them to register

the impact of mass media on private and public life. Besides Aguilar, my

bibliographic research failed to find other authors making such specific claims

about NCA films as a whole. Aguilar’s observations do apply to the films of

Lucrecia Martel. However, it behooves me to declare that I am not in a position to

judge the validity of such generalizations about the numerous and

heterogeneous NCA films.

The films made by NCA directors are almost invariably set in the present,

intimate rather than epic in scope, and have scripts written by the filmmakers. It

is safe to say that most of these directors are the product of academia. Lucrecia

Martel was briefly enrolled at the short-lived Avellaneda Experimental School and

at the well-regarded Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización

Cinematográfica (ENERC) but did not earn a degree. It is perhaps indicative of

her maverick personality that she often refers to herself as being a “self-taught”

director.

Generally speaking, NCA directors were part of a significant increase in

enrollment in film schools during the 1990s. They belong to a post-dictatorship

generation that experienced wild swings in the economic health of their country. I

venture to say that most of the films avoid being overly didactic or taking a

specifically political stance. Their socio-political commentary is delivered subtly or

obliquely, in direct contrast to the Oscar-winner The Official Story, the best- 18 known Argentine film of the 1980s. For instance, the economic morass in which

Argentina found itself at the time The Swamp was released is never discussed by the characters of that film. The financial downturn is merely reflected in the dilapidated condition of the farm house where half the film is set. Similarly, it is the primary setting of The Holy Girl, a once luxurious hotel and spa, which stands as a testament to the South American nation’s illustrious and affluent past. By evoking that past, Martel makes us aware of the contemporary decline in economic health. However, the film does not theorize about the possible causes and potential solutions to such a state of affairs. I propose that the Salta trilogy’s last film, The Headless Woman constitutes a Martel’s conscious move towards engagement with Argentina’s political history. This film dramatizes the mechanisms by which a ruling class maintains power and protects its own. Then it draws a connection between the characters and the generation of their parents, who propped up a dictatorship and presided over a period of severe human rights violations. Even so, the correlation is achieved obliquely, through analogy, metaphor, and anachronistic use of popular music. Even Albertina Carri’s The

Blondes (Los rubios, 2002), a film about the kidnapping and murder of her parents during the dictatorship, unfolds as more of a meditation on the impossibility of apprehending and reconstructing the past than an denunciation of an authoritarian regime.

Another characteristic of Nuevo Cine Argentino is that the films generally have lower budgets than those financed directly through Argentina’s film industry. The 19

films were often labeled “independent” meaning, in this case, made outside

traditional avenues of financing such as well-established production companies.

The revival of the film festivals in Buenos Aires and Mar de Plata, a film school

boom, and increased institutional subsidies played roles in the emergence of

NCA. The enthusiastic critical reception of Pablo Trapero’s Crane World (Mundo

grua, 1999) and Adrian Caetano’s Pizza, Beer and Smokes (Pizza, birra, faso,

1998), which attracted a sizable, young audience, provided encouragement to

the young filmmakers. At Rotterdam, Crane World won both the Jury Prize and

the FIPRESCI prize. At the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, Lucrecia Martel

received the Sundance/NHK Filmmakers award for her script for The Swamp.

Other Argentinean films received similar recognition at major European festivals.

The filmmakers began to tap into European film subsidies, including the

Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals Fund. In 2000, 43% of new releases in

Argentina were debut features. The number jumped to “60% in 2001,”7 the year

The Swamp premiered as a competition selection at the 2001 Berlinale. A

successful tour of the festival circuit and commercial distribution deals followed,

making Lucrecia Martel a household name in the globalized film culture.

It can be argued that the birth of Nuevo Cine Argentino took place in May of

1995. Several directors including Trapero and Martel released their short films as

part of the anthology feature Historias breves (Brief Stories). In this regard, there is congruence between the emergence of NCA and the development of

Taiwanese national cinema, which was inaugurated with the release of In Our

Time (1982), the portmanteau feature which includes first films by I-Chen Ko and 20 the late, great Edward Yang (A Brighter Summer Day, Yi Yi). This strategy of composing a feature out of short films from promising new directors to enhance their visibility has been repeated a number of times in Argentina. There are now four “sequels” to the original Historias breves.

Rey muerto

Martel’s contribution to Historias breves is titled Rey muerto, a feminist western with an uncharacteristic palette of saturated, bright colors. The 12- minute film opens with a view of a televised image followed by a shot of a man who has a crush on the woman doing live broadcasting. The next scene shows the brutish man driving a pickup along a dusty road. When he hits a pedestrian, he exits the vehicle and proceeds to finish off the poor guy. Cabezas, they call him, an alcoholic thug with a wife named Juana. She is introduced to us after she has finally decided to run away with their three children. There is a flashback, the only one in Martel’s filmography, to a domestic abuse scenario. Cabezas gets 21 word of Juana’s actions and attempts to stop her but Juana prevails, in surprising fashion. It is squarely a feminist statement devoid of subtlety.

The short film’s title means “dead king” and refers to both Cabezas and a small town in the province of Salta. Martel calls Rey muerto “my first little film school”, “an attempt to make a Western of my own”, and something that “feels separate from my other movies.”8 Without disowning Rey muerto, Martel qualifies it as a learning opportunity and a revisionist genre exercise. It evidences Martel’s trademark elliptical narrative, an early tendency to keep the camera in a fixed position, and her eschewing of establishing shots. But Martel had yet to develop a mature, personal aesthetics. She still had to figure out how to make her movies fully reflect her own way of seeing and perceiving the world.

Unlike the features, Rey Muerto has clearly demarcated heroes and villains and, consequently, a narrow interpretative range. Martel points out that the important link between the short and the features is “the geography.”9

The Girl from Salta

Lucrecia Martel (1966) was born and raised in the province of Salta. All her films are set in its rural small towns and unassuming cities. This province, located far from sophisticated Buenos Aires, borders Bolivia and shares that country’s ethnic division between upper and middle-class descendants of European immigrants and an indigenous lower-class. The whole northeast region of

Argentina, including Salta, has been marginalized culturally. The country’s cultural identity is tied to the beef-producing Pampas, its vineyards, the tango, 22 and Buenos Aires, a city still referred as “the Paris of South America”. Salta has not been incorporated into the national identity. Martel‘s films, given their cache and recognition, insert the landlocked province into the cultural map of a nation engaged in an ongoing process of self-definition. Her three features constitute what I call her Salta trilogy.

In a way, Martel’s films replicate the experience of a girl enraptured by stories pregnant with poetry and myth told by her parents and grandparents; partially understood tales that incite a child’s imagination and reverberate indefinitely. Her father’s purchase of a movie camera was an event of significant formative import.

Perhaps due to the bulk and weight of cameras sold in the 1980s, or perhaps out of sheer intuition, little Lucrecia would simply place the camera in a high traffic area of the house (atop the kitchen counter, for instance, as she has explained) rather than attempt to track the action. Martel was fascinated by the sounds and images captured by a fixed camera as people moved in and out of frame. She seems to have developed a sense of realism characterized by 23

overlapping layers of audiovisual activity and grasped the concept of off-screen

space at a very early age.

The Salta Trilogy of Lucrecia Martel aims not simply to identify and explore

the recurring themes and stylistic trademarks that characterize Martel as a film author with a unique vision. My thesis is valuable to the extent that it increases the readers’ understanding of the films and enhances their enjoyment of them.

Martel’s creative process begins by her gathering of memorized fragments of

subjective experience which are shaped into film narratives that require a

viewer’s inference to reveal their rich meaning. I propose that these films built on

the most elemental and personal components of experience manage to tackle

complex issues and achieve universal relevance. I hope my close readings bear

this out.

Chapter Two The Swamp

24 25

The Swamp concerns two families: one living in the city of Salta and another

living a few miles away, in a decaying estate next to a small farm where bell

peppers are grown. Mecha lives there with her husband Gregorio, teenage

daughters Vero and Momi, and pubescent son Joaquin. Their place is called La

Mandragora, Spanish for mandrake, a plant with alleged hallucinogenic and

sedative effects historically used in pagan rituals.

First, Martel wants us to attend to the film’s soundtrack. The screen is black

as we hear sounds of crickets chirping and wind passing through leafy trees.

There is a shot of tree tops against a cloudy sky. The next view shows red

peppers left out to ripen. We hear an ominous blast that could be a gunshot or

thunder announcing an impending storm. Martel’s expressive use of what I will

call extra-imaged sound10, aural stimuli produced beyond our views of a film’s

fictional world, becomes an authorial signature.

In fact, Martel conceives the film’s soundtrack in a very deliberate manner

before any consideration of the mise-en-scène, which is mostly improvised.

Martel ascribes the primacy of sound in her films to the auditory nature of her earliest encounters with narrative, through the tradition of oral storytelling. The first scene shows an indolent, inebriated middle-aged group at the edge of a dirty oval pool. Martel uses diegetic sound expressively. The metal chairs they use

make a harsh, grating sound when dragged over the concrete floor. When Martel

isolates and intensifies this sound for our perception, it acquires a power of

signification the sound does not have naturally. So treated, the sound becomes

something for the viewer to remember and incorporate into his or her search for 26

meaning. Mecha trips on a chair and falls down, breaking the empty glasses she has collected from her guests. Gregorio insensitively tells her to get up without offering assistance. He walks around his wife to get to where he can refill his glass. Their guests do not notice or never mind. Perhaps we are meant to associate the unpleasantness of the sound with this bunch, dragging their deck chairs like the debris of their own lives.

Inside the house, the young women slumber. A bedroom scene, the first of many, introduces 15 year-old Momi and Isabel, the maid. Momi wakes up from a siesta next to Isabel, grabs the edge of Isabel’s sleeve and smells it praying:

“Lord, thanks for giving me Isabel”. This is the first of a type of image that is characteristic of Martel’s approach to characterization: images of characters in the process of perception. Martel isolates characters engaged in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. In her second film, The Holy Girl, the emphasis on these activities becomes even more pronounced by means of close-ups, of ears and hands for instance.

The interaction between Isabel and Momi has a definite sensual quality. Their special intimacy is depicted with wordless clarity when Isabel, in the most casual manner, feeds Momi.

The impression one gets is that Isabel, almost by default, occupies a place in

Momi’s affective universe that her mother has vacated. Mecha has been too wrapped up in her own problems and too intoxicated by alcohol to properly care for her children.

Momi overlooks or ignores certain unwritten norms about class relations.

Judging by the pejoratives used liberally in the film to refer to those in the lower or servant class, the class divide is inherently racial. Even Momi resorts to ethnic slurs when upset with Isabel. Momi’s emotional attachment and dependence on

Isabel becomes intensified by Mecha’s threats to fire her for allegedly stealing towels and sheets. Momi lives in a state of anxiety because of her fear of losing

Isabel. When Momi confides to Vero that she “doesn’t want to be with anyone but

Isabel”, her feelings are tinged with nascent sexual desire, which will remain latent throughout the film. 28

Joaquin, Mecha’s youngest child, is introduced as part of a group of boys chasing their dogs to the titular swamp that borders La Mandragora. They are guided by the smell and the bawling of a cow stuck in the mud, fated to die a slow death.

A flash close-up of Joaquin shows his scarred face and injured right eye.

We later learn that he had an accident that permanently damaged his eye and that he needs plastic surgery. Mecha and Gregorio have waited almost two years to take him to the plastic surgeon. It is the most glaring example of their general neglect and apathy. Theirs is a family in decadence. They have stopped taking care of themselves, their kids and La Mandragora. No one seems concerned 29

about the polluted pool or the upkeep of the house, which have seen better times. It is at precisely this time, because of the proximity between the images of

Joaquin and the cow, that it dawns on the viewer that Mecha’s family is caught in their own swamp; an existential, moral one. The allegorical implication is that perhaps a social class or a whole society is stuck in a kind of morass. Martel’s films both encourage allegorical readings and resist being contained by them.

Film criticism of her films in Argentina reflects this tension, as illustrated by this quote from an essay by Luciano Monteagudo:

Mecha trips or collapses in a haze of alcohol. Something besides broken glass remains on the ground. It would seem that along with Mecha, whom nobody is fit enough to help out, something else collapses, maybe a social class or certain notion of a country. There’s nothing symbolic in The Swamp. Everything has a strange, disquieting materiality; a sometimes overwhelming physical presence. Yet you can’t help being aware of a reality larger than the film itself. The Swamp is capable of rendering visible the profound, subterranean strains of a society through a group of well-defined characters.11 In fact, this dense and complex film resists being explained away or contained by any allegorical reading. It is too reductive, for instance, to say simply that The

Swamp is about the decay of the bourgeoisie. Critics with limited print space are particularly challenged. The film demands a close, detailed reading like this one in order to take significant steps towards an insightful and considerable, albeit less than perfect, understanding of it. Many newspaper reviews of The Swamp address it rather superficially; others focus only on certain aspects. Stephen

Holden of The New York Times does not even mention Momi, who many regard as the most important character in a film without a clear protagonist. Writing for the same daily, B. Ruby Rich correctly points out that it is difficult to convey in 30

writing the film’s considerable achievements and sui generis quality. Then she proves it by enlisting several references of dubious appropriateness in a failed effort to describe the film:

You’d have to imagine the family photographs of someone like Sally Mann mixed with the mother-daughter disintegration in the classic documentary Grey Gardens; then you’d have to infuse it with the dynamic energy of Harmony Korine’s Gummo and add a precise script with the sensibility of David Lynch to have a proximate idea of Martel’s accomplishments.12

Martel’s filmmaking is characterized by a near total lack of transitional and establishing shots. The sole exception is a view of a boy getting off a pickup truck

in a busy city street and entering the house where he lives. This unique shot is the exception that proves the rule. Martel uses it to establish two distinct, geographically separate locations where the film unfolds. It is significant that the camera is placed at a lower height than that of a grown person. This is consistent with Martel’s conception of the camera adopting the visual perspective of a child. 31

It closes a chapter about Mecha’s nuclear family to introduce her cousin Tali, her husband Rafael, and their four children. A friend of Tali is telling her on the phone about a recent trip to Bolivia, where she bought school supplies at bargain prices.

The boy who jumped off the bed of the truck is Tali’s son. He walks into the house with a hare he killed while hunting with Joaquin. He places it on the kitchen counter. Luciano, the accident-prone youngest boy, is fascinated with the

dead animal. He looks at it closely then climbs onto the counter to wash off the blood from a cut in his leg. The film jumps from Tali’s apartment in Salta to a modern one without the transitional shot that would tell us it is located in Buenos

Aires. That is something to be figured out through attentive observation. It comes as no surprise that the first geographical clue is auditory: sirens in the 32

background. We gradually infer that the young man on the phone with Vero is

Juan, her oldest brother, being told about Mecha’s accident, and that he works

for and lives with a middle-aged woman called Mercedes. Details about

characters and their relationships become manifest in future sequences in a way

that registers as organic and random. One never gets the impression that the

words spoken by the characters have been written down or that they have been

consciously composed with a specific purpose in mind. When Tali and Rafael

drive to La Mandragora to pay a visit to a convalescing Mecha, their casual conversation reveals that their old friend Mercedes once had an affair with

Gregorio. It is a significant detail that an inattentive viewer might miss. Rafael

warns Tali that they should not discuss adultery in front of the kids. Martel’s

framing of Tali changes from a near-profile medium shot to a near-frontal close- up when she retorts that kids ought to be aware of these things “otherwise history repeats itself”.

The camera announces the significance of the cross-generational behavioral patterning alluded by Tali. It develops as a major theme of The Swamp through the accretion of well-observed details of a world captured and transformed by

Martel’s camera. The significance of any isolated moment in this film rarely 33

registers as particularly important when it appears. It only acquires thematic and dramatic resonance when that moment is associated with subsequent ones. The camera’s point of view at any given moment often evokes the presence of a curious, pre-adolescent attuned sensorially to the world-on-film but yet to form judgments about it. However the camera’s point of view at any single moment is not equated to the overall perspective of the film, to the effect of the accumulation of images and sounds and the way they have been arranged. The perspective of the film as a whole is, of course, that of Lucrecia Martel as an adult filmmaker. It is the view of someone who moved away and established enough distance from her youth and her native region to develop a critical and analytical perspective on them. However, Martel’s films are driven and facilitated by her ability to call forth formative memories, by her interior proximity to the sights, sounds and textures of her provincial past.

As illustrated by Jose’s introduction, there is rarely anything in Martel’s filmmaking, in its succession of shots, in the placement of the camera, art direction, dialogue, etc. aimed exclusively at orienting the viewer as to time, place or person. There are, for instance, no scenes showing Jose leaving his

Buenos Aires apartment or in route to La Mandragora to visit his mother. Instead, he suddenly appears laying in Mecha’s bed, next to her. However, Martel has no intention to obfuscate and confuse the viewer. Having clearly established that the main action unfolds alternately at La Mandragora and in the city center, she trusts the viewer to remain alert and observant to the narrative shifts from one locale to the other. There is also no need to absorb every narrative detail or 34

nuance of characterization to feel one has experienced a unique and substantial film. A single viewing of a film by Lucrecia Martel does not begin to exhaust its capacity to provide insights into the characters and their world. A single viewing leaves me with the impression there are more discoveries to be made and the second and third viewings provide corroboration. Perhaps there are still more discoveries to be made.

Tali brings Luciano to get stitches at the same clinic where Mecha has been interned but Mecha cannot talk to her because she is under sedation. Martel cuts to a TV broadcast about a woman who claims that the Virgin Mary appeared to her daughter next to their water tank. Momi is at home watching it. Martel periodically intercuts TV coverage of the crowd that congregates outside the house where the apparition allegedly took place with scenes set inside La

Mandragora. The TV footage and a number of religious artifacts convey the influence of Catholicism on this provincial society. However, Momi, who was introduced to us while praying, is the only character who appears to truly have

faith in God. Martel sustains framings of her next to a picture of Jesus for a relatively long time. Conversely, every scene set in Mecha’s room shows only the 35

bottom of the picture of the Virgin hanging on the wall behind her bed. The Virgin is a “headless woman” in every framing in which her alleged apparition is the topic of conversation between the two mothers.

A parallel has been made between The Swamp and William Faulkner’s novels. Martel states she “identifies” with Faulkner because the North in

Argentina has similarities with the American Deep South of many Faulkner novels. Both regions have an agricultural economy and sweltering, muggy summers. Most importantly, in both regions, status and social class are largely determined by race. Of all the characters in The Swamp, Joaquin, the boy with the scarred face, is the most outwardly racist. He expounds on the uncivilized, animalistic lifestyle of “these kollos” (the Kolla are an indigenous group native of the provinces of Salta and Jujuy). How they disregard hygiene, sleep “on top of each other”, and practice bestiality. But it is Joaquin who seems most comfortable in the woods, where he appears to be perpetually hunting. It is he who gets reprimanded for lacking table manners and fondling dogs. Joaquin becomes the clearest exponent of the hypocrisy and racial contempt that appears to typify Salta’s middle class. The treatment of “Indians” as commodities 36

or objects by other characters in the film is only slightly less malignant. Jose makes advances towards Isabel at the city’s carnival dance not out of genuine interest but as a sort of derecho de pernada, the feudal lord’s right to sleep with peasant women. It is something he does just for kicks. Jose seems to welcome the wrath of “Perro” (Spanish for dog. Incidentally, there are three kinds of canines in this film: regular dogs, a human “dog”, and an imaginary, mythical one that fosters a tragedy), Isabel’s boyfriend, and the two end up in a fight. This race and class-based privilege is not exercised only by the boys.

The girls go shopping for a shirt for Jose. Momi spots Perro and Isabel outside the store and points this out to Vero. She asks Momi to fetch Perro so she can use him as a sort of model or mannequin. Vero gives a roguish look at her cousin Agustina as Perro enters the store with Momi and Isabel. Perro warns

Vero that Jose is bigger than him but she insists. Perro gazes at Isabel, who looks annoyed.

Then he peels off his shirt as Isabel looks down and away in wordless disapproval. Momi plays nervously with the collar of her shirt and then puts it 37

in her mouth. She stares at Perro with the expression of someone aware of her complicity. Perhaps her motivation is to create a rift between him and Isabel. As they walk out of the store, Vero smells the shirt Perro tried on, makes a gesture of disgust, and tosses it away.

It is significant that every time we get a view of Isabel and Perro together, the shot is preceded by a close-up of Momi, signaling that the camera is adopting her point of view. The views create a certain ambiguity as to whether Momi regards

Perro simply as someone who could take Isabel away from La Mandragora or

more specifically as a romantic rival. Whether Isabel is a mother figure to Momi, an object of sexual desire, or a combination of both is debatable. In The Swamp, 38

Martel expresses firm, unequivocal opinions about the provincial middle-class via

close observation of several summer days in the lives of two families. And yet,

she not only trusts viewers to find their way within the world-on-film’s temporal

and spatial dimensions, but creates enough interpretative space so that

characterization becomes a creative process completed by the viewer. The

viewer is expected to achieve a rough equality with the director and the actors

through his or her active engagement with the film.

The most affectively intense relationship in The Swamp is between Momi and

Isabel. Even if one disregards the sensual nature of their behavior towards each

other, there would still remain a subversive, taboo aspect to the emotional

proximity between the two young women. Momi’s parents are ineffectual, her

sister Vero is rather distant, and older brother Jose finds her disgusting. He calls

her “dirty Momi” and not without reason: she goes days without a bath and she’s

the only character who takes a dive in the polluted pool. Perhaps Momi seeks

Isabel almost by default, because of the scarcity of other sources of affection and

affiliation. However, it would be myopic to fail to acknowledge Isabel’s special

qualities. She is a warm, easygoing, caring and attractive young woman. Momi

recognizes those attributes. What remains ambiguous is to what extent she understands her complex feelings for Isabel.

The Swamp’s most dramatic sequence opens with a two-shot of Tali applying some talcum to Mecha’s scarred chest. 39

She blames the accident on “these useless kids” leaving towels on the ground

and again accuses Isabel of stealing. A cut to a frontal positioning of the camera

reveals Momi listening in the background.

Martel briefly returns to the first set up so that Momi is out of view when she

joins the conversation. The frontal view is repeated as Momi defiantly defends

Isabel and blames the accident on Mecha being drunk, embarrassing her in front of Tali. Mecha angrily reprehends her daughter for “hanging around Isabel all day” and for her greasy hair. She tells Momi to “Shut up!”, and then begs Tali not to take Momi’s claims seriously. Mecha orders Momi to leave the room and Momi exits the frame. However, when Martel cuts back to the initial view from a slightly higher angle, we see Momi lingering in the background next to the door frame. “I

know how this will end”, she interjects. A new shot is introduced at precisely this 40

moment. The camera is now positioned just behind Momi’s left shoulder.

The view reveals that the action is set in Mecha’s room. Momi delivers a most devastating prognosis: “You’ll never leave your room again, just like grandmother.” Mecha grabs a pair of magazines from the night table and hurls them in Momi’s direction: “Get out at once! And if I wanted to lock myself in, I’d do it!” The view that initiated the sequence is brought back as a more composed

Mecha says: “Let’s go to Bolivia for the weekend, Tali, ok?” They agree to prepare for the trip. The scene ends when Mecha verbalizes her biggest fear, the one that Momi has exploited to great effect: “What if I do end up confined to my room like my mom?”

The sequence identifies Momi has the only member of her family who seems consciously aware of her family’s atrophy and moral decadence. She is the only one who challenges Mecha’s tendency to project blame for her difficulties onto others. It is Momi who warns Mecha of the potential consequences of her choices and compels Mecha to take responsibility for her own actions. This theme will recur within the The Swamp with regards to both Momi and Tali. 41

Moreover, personal responsibility and accountability become integral parts of the moral dilemmas confronting The Holy Girl’s Dr. Jano and the protagonist of The

Headless Woman.

The ghost of Mecha’s mother, who spent “her last 10 or 15 years cooped up in her room” hovers over La Mandragora. Tali believes children need to be aware of adult mistakes to avoid repeating their history. However, Mecha’s knowledge of her mother’s life is no safeguard. She is like that desperate cow stuck in the mud realizing she has stepped into a swamp and it is possibly too late to extricate herself.

Jose is having an affair with his father’s former mistress. He also mirrors his father’s vainglory and callous attitude towards others. He is supposed to return to

Buenos Aires but prolongs his stay for no apparent reason, as if addicted to the narcotic effects of La Mandragora. Life there adopts a recurrent structure, like a vicious circle. Time appears to have become compressed into one second prolonged indefinitely. The Swamp takes place over the course of several days but it is the digital clock in Mecha’s room, blinking 12:00 because no one cares to set it, that defines its temporal orientation.

As I stated earlier, The Swamp resists being contained by any allegorical reading. There are scenes that neither contradict nor conform to the overall film’s implacable critique of this society, immobilized like the cow in the swamp.

These scenes may hint at solutions, serve as respite from the turmoil, or provide a contrast. For instance, Mecha’s room becomes a merry place when an 42

impromptu dance is instigated by Jose and Vero. Mecha cannot join because she

is injured but we can hear her hearty laughter before the camera, handheld in

this scene, gives us a view of her experiencing pure delight. At one point, a large

group that includes Isabel, Perro and his friends as well as Momi, Vero and Tali’s

daughter Agustina take an excursion to a nearby dam to play in the water. The

communal fun they have implies that the younger generation could manage to

resolve the chasm created by social class and race. Moreover, we witness a

series of tender exchanges between Tali and Rafael and their younger kids. A

particularly moving scene shows Rafael putting little Luciano to bed. The boy

insists on sleeping with the light on because of the “dog-rat” that spooks him ever since he heard a tale poolside at Mecha’s. So Rafael decides to lie down next to him. There are scenes of boys chasing giggling girls with water balloons. The TV broadcasts the festive Salta carnival. And Mecha sincerely wants to leave La

Mandragora to go to Bolivia with Tali and the children for a few days.

They will not go to Bolivia, or anywhere else. The characters of The Swamp

are like the bourgeois revelers in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) who continuously run into obstacles that keep them confined to their host’s living 43

room. They are trapped by forces they scarcely comprehend. All along, Rafael has tried to dissuade Tali from taking the trip for one reason or another. The couple experiences a failure to communicate. Tali wants to go to Bolivia to have a project of her own, to experience a bit of adventure, and to give her cousin

Mecha a respite from the stifling atmosphere of La Mandragora. This is not what she tells her husband. She has told Rafael she wants to go because school supplies are cheaper across the border. Rafael does not understand, apparently, that there are much more important reasons. He is a good provider and a hands- on father to their four children but he is not attuned to his wife’s needs. He buys

all the school supplies himself without telling anyone. There is no denying Tali’s dejection and disappointment when she finds the supplies in the trunk of the station wagon. She does not even want to touch them. She storms into house after asking little Mariana and Luciano to unload boxes, which are obviously too heavy for the children to carry.

All along, Mecha’s worthless marriage to Rafael has stood in contrast to the apparently functional and supportive relationship between Tali and Rafael. The 44

latter repeatedly pities Mecha for being married to a “no good” guy and wonders why she has not divorced him. The Swamp reveals that what motivates Rafael’s protectiveness of Tali is more a need to control her than genuine concern. He does not consider Tali as an equal partner in their relationship. The symptoms might be different but Tali’s marriage is likely to devolve into a union not dissimilar to that of the couple at La Mandragora. Later, Tali is heard trying to convince herself that it was too dangerous and too expensive to make the trip.

Then she calls Mecha and characterizes Rafael’s purchase of the supplies as an act of gallantry. “What an extraordinary man you have” Mecha tells Tali. “We’ll go some other time, no doubt”, she adds. But there is no conviction in Mecha’s tone of voice. And the small refrigerator she has just bought for her room is a step closer to her mother’s legendary social isolation; a step closer to a virtual entombment.

Isabel hesitantly tells Mecha to look for another “girl” because her sister needs her and she is going to live with her. The young maid looks troubled in our views of her near The Swamp’s conclusion. Mecha calls her an “ingrate” and hints at the possibility that she is pregnant, but this is not confirmed. In her Director’s

Statement, Martel explains that unlike “classical narrative”, “there is not any link between cause and effect in the events affecting Mecha and Tali’s two families.”13 What I think she means to say is that, in The Swamp, there is not a clear and single link between events and what makes them happen. There are signifiers or clues that establish multiple links between cause and effect without any single one being privileged over the others. The film’s etiology is closer to the 45

complex causation of events in daily life than it is to the simplified and emphasized causation in most classical and commercial films. I think Martel’s statement applies to varying degrees to the three features.

Isabel weeps as she packs her belongings. Momi sits on Isabel’s bed looking at her silently with a mixture of sadness and stunned disbelief. Perhaps she is shocked that God did not listen to her prayers. Martel shows us Isabel walking out the backdoor, across the yard to where Perro awaits with his bicycle. Martel has taught us to associate this sight with Momi’s perspective. There is no need to show us Momi looking out the window for us to know the camera has adopted her point of view. This time Martel cuts from Isabel and Perro exiting the frame to

a powerful yet understated shot of Momi grieving privately and quietly in the shower. The fact that both Momi and Tali internalize their pain does not bode well for either woman.

The Swamp is bookended by accidents. At the beginning, Mecha falls by the pool at La Mandragora and, near the end, Luciano falls down in the patio of his house. We have been witnesses to how a fantastic tale about a vicious “African 46

dog- rat” with two rows of teeth has insinuated itself into the boy’s imagination.

He asks his father if such creatures exist .He is easily startled by noises and becomes afraid of the dark. At one point, Luciano identifies with the monster. He has an extra tooth growing in his palate and tells Tali that he is actually growing

“many extra teeth”. Usually though, he associates the fictional animal with the dog-next-door, which he can hear barking and growling but cannot see. He worries about the animal possibly breaking through the wall to attack him.

Tali and her children have congregated in her room. Luciano wanders off alone, hears the dog barking, and walks into the patio. Tali has told the little ones they are forbidden to climb the ladder but she forgot to put it away. Luciano

climbs up the steps to the top of the ladder, hoping to see the animal. The top step breaks off and he falls to the concrete floor, presumably to his death.

It is a death foretold. Lucrecia Martel has presaged it all along. We have the abovementioned shot of Luciano next to the dead hare, and his intense curiosity about it. There is a scene in which the boys return to the swamp to check on the cow that got swallowed by the mud. Luciano steps in between the dead cow and 47

his older brother, who has a rifle pointed at it. Then the film cuts to a landscape

shot. We hear the rifle go off, and we wonder if Luciano was injured. In another

instance, Luciano, his sister Mariana and another girl are playing hide ‘n seek.

Luciano gets tagged and the girls excitedly proclaim “you’re dead!”. Luciano

proceeds to lie down on the very same spot in the patio where he will fall. It’s a

pretend death before the actual one.

Rafael believes the trip to Bolivia is dangerous and Tali rationalizes not having traveled by claiming that perhaps a tragedy was averted. It turns out that

Luciano’s fall would not have happened if he was in route to Bolivia with his mother. Death is capricious and unpredictable. The line separating life and death 48

is very thin. So is the demarcation between reality and fiction. The pretend death

and the actual death are both shot from a distance, from inside the house. The

difference between the views is that Tali is present during the pretend death, next

to the ladder, and that, when Luciano falls, Martel places the camera even further back. It is as if she wishes to spare us from such a tragic, unpleasant sight, or at least show respect by increasing the distance between the camera and the little boy. Martel does not show us the excruciating pain his family will experience when they find him. The melodramatic scene will have to be imagined by the viewer. Instead, she gives us three depopulated indoor shots that register the absence caused by his passing, the emptiness resulting from his not being there.

A long shot taken from a high angle shows Momi walking towards the pool.

There is a cut to Momi grabbing a lawn chair and dragging it over the floor so she can sit next to Vero. This action repeats the unpleasant, harsh sound that

introduced her parents and their friends. The cross- generational connection is further emphasized by visual composition: a framing of the two teenagers is the

exact inverse of a shot of their parents lounging next to the pool at the beginning of the film. Mecha steps into her mother’s shoes by barricading herself inside her bedroom. Jose shares his father’s shallow vanity and settles for an affair with his father’s ex-lover. The final shot could be interpreted to signal that Momi, Vero and their generation are also bound to repeat their parents’ mistakes and adopt the same noxious behavior patterns. As Tali has said: “beware, because history repeats itself”.

Tali has come to the realization that something is seriously wrong with her marriage. She chooses not to confront her husband and to pretend that all is well. What is to keep her marriage from becoming as worthless as Mecha’s? The film’s characters are caught in a social and ideological swamp but do not know what to do to save themselves from sinking further. While driving to La

Mandragora, Tali stated that what is required to lead a good life is knowledge or awareness. But her awareness of her lack of agency within her marriage does not make her situation any better. And Mecha’s substantiated fear of self- 50

imposed isolation certainly does not make it any less likely that she will turn into her mother, so to speak. Tali recognizes the danger posed by the ladder. She even forbids the kids to climb on it. This does not prevent the accident. Tali neglects to put away the ladder after using it. The Swamp strikes a cautionary note. Luciano’s death dramatizes the consequences of the characters’ failure to be mindful and take action. Knowledge or awareness is truly beneficial only when it serves as a catalyst for action; only when it serves as the foundation for change.

Martel explains that something that caused her “much anguish during adolescence was that (her) life would be a reprise of the lives of other members of my family. There’s a moment when the similarity with the lives of your elders is celebrated. But if you don’t see any virtue in that, and you see yourself on that road, it produces a terrible anguish in you. Probably the film has many elements of that traumatic provincial life”14. The Swamp is an attempt on the part of its

maker to transcend her family history and heal the damage done by the traumas

of her provincial rearing. Lucrecia Martel did not leave Salta simply so that she

could learn how to make movies. She left for Buenos Aires so she could make movies that saved her sanity.

The Swamp closing line of dialogue is spoken by Momi: “I went to where the

Virgin appeared”, she tells Vero: “I didn’t see a thing”. This is the note on which

Martel consciously chooses to end her debut feature. The failure of Momi’s

prayers to keep Isabel from leaving and her unproductive visit to where the Virgin

allegedly appeared can be interpreted as an atheist statement. One can argue 51

that Momi “didn’t see a thing” because there was nothing to “see”. One can argue

that the film insinuates that it is just as fanciful to believe that there is a vicious

rat-dog next door who devours humans as it is to believe that there is a Virgin

Mary making appearances and a God who grants the wishes of those who pray to Him. To a large extent, Momi serves as Martel’s alter-ego. She confides that:

“The fundamental conflict from which I attempted to explain the world to myself was the moment when I stopped believing in God, after being a very fervent

Catholic. That moment of divine desertion…to feel one is alone in the planet with other people and there is nothing else.”15 This is precisely the moment dramatized in that powerful shot of Momi in the center of the frame, weeping against the wall in the shower stall not simply to grieve Isabel’s parting but also

God’s failure to respond to her prayers. The last-minute visit to the house where the Virgin allegedly appears only serves to confirm her prior realization that there is nothing to see.

Perhaps it is easier for lapsed or apostate Catholics to identify strongly with

both Martel and with her Momi. However, I think there is something more

universal at play. Martel’s films are grounded in the specificity of regional culture

while managing to address everyone. Part of the process of human maturation

involves negotiating between the beliefs you are taught as a child and the

subjective criterion you develop to evaluate such teachings. This applies to every religion and belief system. Perhaps sharing Martel and Momi’s Catholic upbringing might contribute to the intense sensation that The Swamp is 52

addressing me, personally. And yet, the film’s heartfelt exhortation to be mindful, self-reliant and responsible should resonate with every human being.

It is debatable whether The Swamp is making an atheist statement. What is clear is that the film proclaims with certainty and conviction that belief in God does not offer a solution to the problems-in-living experienced by the characters.

Human beings need to assume control and responsibility over our fates, rather than expect superhuman forces to make good things happen. That is what I think

Momi learns by film’s end. Suddenly “one holds in one’s hands all the possibilities.”16 Pain yields to a feeling of empowerment that stems from the wonderful realization that happiness is something we can build ourselves, brick by brick.

Chapter Three The Holy Girl

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one.17

The opening credits are set against a black background which changes to

aquatic blue when the names of the cast appear. The shade of blue matches that

of the pool where several key scenes of The Holy Girl are set. The cast credits move slowly and horizontally like bodies floating on water, which will be the film’s final image. Water, of course, is symbolic of life, nature, the feminine, and fluidity.

The credits are accompanied by an instrumental piece played on the theremin which segues to the voice of a woman singing a musicalization of Saint Teresa de Avila’s “Vuestra Soy” (I Am Yours). Here, diegetic sound precedes image in a manner congruent with Martel’s creative process of devising each scene’s sound design before its mise-en-scène. Surprisingly, the first image is not of the source of the voice but a group of girls, an audience. This inversion of the classical order of action and reaction shots “gives a rich sense of the utter weirdness of adolescent girlhood, equal parts tenderness and ferocity, innocence just starting to mingle with experience.”18 That view of the girls appears at the exact moment

when Inés, the leader of their catechism group, sings the line: “Look at the

extreme vileness who sings to you”. The self-loathing in that lyric suggests the

effects of a certain regressive religious culture that promotes disgust of the

human body. 55

Inés struggles to hide her tears as she sings rapturously about surrendering to

God’s commands. Religious ecstasy plays a role in many of the world’s religions.

There is a rich mystic tradition within Catholicism that finds a sensual, even erotic aspect to the relationship between human beings and God. By means of the personification trope, the soul is configured as feminine and God as masculine.

This can be readily explored in texts such as the excerpt from Saint Teresa’s autobiography that opens this chapter and famous art works like Bernini’s The

Ecstasy of St. Teresa. The relevancy of these references becomes even more evident when we consider that the literal translation of the film’s original title is

“The Girl Saint” and that Teresa de Avila was reportedly very young when she had experiences like the ones described in her book. She spoke of a “blessing of tears” to characterize the emotion that Inés appears to show at the start of The

Holy Girl.

Nowadays, the Catholic church seems almost embarrassed about expressions of religious ecstasy and connections between the spirit and the body.”The established church makes a big effort to conceal the carnal aspects of the lives of the saints and mystics apart from stories of laceration or 56

flagellation”19. We are not allowed “to know about mysticism’s powerful

celebration of the body.”20 To an extent, The Holy Girl is an exploration of the

intersection between religious belief and the realm of emerging sexual desire.

The camera increasingly signalizes two of a dozen teenage girls packed tightly

inside the room. Josefina is peculiarly invested in telling her friend Amalia about

being a witness to the heavy petting of the seemingly pious and modest Inés.

The topic of the meeting is how to figure out God’s plan for each of the girls, how

to prepare to hear His calling. One can picture these girls at the site of the

alleged apparition of the Virgin in The Swamp, not at home watching a TV

broadcast of it like the characters of that film.

In the mid 1970s, Lucrecia Martel used to vacation with her parents and six

siblings at the Hotel Termas in the town of Rosario de La Frontera. Most of the

The Holy Girl was shot in this legendary hotel and spa before it underwent major renovations. Like La Mandragora, the hotel gives the impression of a place stuck in the past, a place that has lost some of its luster, a decaying place that is a shadow of its old self. As if to underline this, there is a nameless chambermaid walking periodically into the rooms where the tale unfolds to spray some kind of deodorant or insect repellent. A subtextual significance of setting the film

precisely at this hotel would elude most viewers, even many Argentines. The

opulent Hotel Termas was frequented by foreign dignitaries and the political,

artistic, and business elites of Argentina from the 1880s to roughly 1930. During

those years, Argentina was one of the 10 wealthiest nations in the world and a

desirable destination for European immigrants. The lower profile of the hotel 57

relative to its illustrious past and the state of decay and neglect as it appears in

The Holy Girl reflects a similar downturn experienced by the country as a whole.

Male voices filter into the room where the girls have congregated. A group of otorhinolaryngologists have checked-in for a medical convention being held at the family-owned hotel. Viewers of The Swamp would not be surprised by the absence of establishing shots indicating where the girls are meeting relative to the hotel. At this point, background sounds are the only clue that the girls are in or very near the hotel. Freddy, one of the owners, guides a handful of doctors to their rooms. The camera assumes the point of view of Dr. Jano, who looks through the open window of a room and gazes intently at a woman with her back to the window. It is a gaze that objectifies this woman, named Helena, and the first sign of Jano’s attraction for her. In this shot, because the window frame

allows only a partial view of her, Helena looks headless. Jano’s gaze turns

Helena into a fetish. It is important to point out Helena’s own complicity in placing herself as an object of desire within a traditional patriarchy. She contemplates herself in the mirror during her first scene, and constantly seeks others’ opinions about her appearance and worries about how she looks to others. As for Jano, 58

the fragmented views of Helena from his perspective foreshadow a functional

inadequacy within a more holistic and mature sexual intimacy.

In a most subterranean manner, Martel had already introduced the character

of Dr. Jano in The Swamp. There is a little quotidian scene in which Mariana,

Tali’s youngest child, sings a ditty next to a fan to experiment with the way the air

waves distort her voice. It is about the young doctor in the popular 1970s TV

show Medical Center. The dubbed version shown in Spanish-speaking countries

changed the character’s name from Gannon to Jano. The ditty exhorts the young

doctor not to fall in love with a patient. “There was something in those verses that

sparked the imagination (or the memories) of the director.”21

The Holy Girl returns to the catechism group. Inés, emphatically: “What is

important is to be alert to the call from God. He calls us to save and be saved

and that is the only meaning our life should have.” The valid questions the girls

pose such as “what if He asks me to kill, like it happened to Abraham?” frustrate

Inés because she does not know how to answer them. Again, Josefina whispers

rumors about the erotic exploits of Inés to Amalia. Music coming from the street

wafts through an open window. It is played on the theremin, an instrument in

which pitch and tone are determined by the distance between the player’s hands

and two metal rods. Consequently, the instrument does not have to be touched

to produce music.

Meanwhile, Helena learns that her ex-husband Manuel called to share the news that he and his new wife are expecting twins. Helena seems mildly 59

perturbed and unable to decide whether to call Manuel to congratulate him or

wait for him to call again. She opts not to call. Later on, Helena receives calls

from both Manuel and his new wife but always finds excuses not to take the calls.

The pregnancy of her ex-husband’s new wife is making her lose her head, so to

speak. Nonetheless, the call she has to accept pales in comparison to the

daunting task of the teen girls of recognizing and accepting a call from God.

The sound of a car horn makes Inés smile for the first time, but almost

imperceptibly. It is a decidedly earthly calling. She closes the meeting. Several

girls go into the street to watch the theremin performance. Dr. Jano stands

behind Amalia and molests her by pushing his crotch against her buttocks22.

Amalia remains quiet, perplexed, and unable to react for 25 seconds that feel like

an eternity. She turns around and manages to get a glimpse of Jano as he walks away. She smiles faintly at Josefina who was standing next to her without realizing what happened. Later, while lying in bed with Helena, who is her mother, Amalia recognizes Jano in the medical conference brochure. She does not tell Helena about it. 60

Like The Swamp, many of the most significant scenes in The Holy Girl occur in the bedroom or by the pool. Perhaps my favorite scene in the film begins with views of Helena and Amalia lounging in a sunbathing platform from which one can look down at the pool. Amalia does precisely that while softly but audibly reciting prayers. The action and the composition of the shot establish an

affiliation between Amalia and The Swamp’s Momi. In a way, Momi is The

Swamp’s holy girl and Helena is The Holy Girl’s headless woman. The scene alternates between close-ups of Amalia and shots from her point of view. It is

Jano she gazes at, as he emerges from the pool, puts on a t-shirt and sits on a deck chair. Martel not only associates Amalia’s interest in Jano with her praying but also inverts their roles. It is at this point that Amalia transforms from anonymous molestation victim to a voyeur who, from above, literally preys on 61

(and prays for?) the objectified Jano. The last view of Amalia, who continues to spy on Jano while praying, is followed by a cut to a closer view of the doctor, with his back to the camera. When he turns his head to the left, Martel cuts to a shot of Helena disrobing and getting in the pool wearing a bathing cap. The framings

get tighter as shots of Jano and shots of Helena from his point of view are alternated. Thus Helena’s allure for Jano is reasserted. We notice that Helena’s

right ear is bothering her and forces her to get out of the pool. The sequence has a circular structure. A view of Amalia praying and Jano seen from her point of view are repeated. Then, when Helena returns from the pool, a brief two-shot of

Helena and Amalia is followed by alternate views of them in shot/counter-shot style. The mother wonders if there is anything more useful that Amalia can do than memorizing and reciting prayers. Amalia retorts simply that she likes it. 62

Whereas previous scenes show a passive Amalia, this sequence is where her agency and willfulness are established. It visualizes the film’s predominant erotic triangle and defines the coordinates of desire. The women get distracted by the male voices coming from below. The scene ends with a close-up of Amalia’s ear.

It is one of numerous framings in which ears become the focal point. In fact, one of the salient characteristics of The Holy Girl’s visual style is a preponderance of close-ups that call attention to the perception of significant stimuli and the special meaning of certain gestures.

The sense of sight is given a position of prevalence within the world of The

Swamp. In that film, a woman becomes a celebrity based on her vision of the

Virgin, Joaquin loses an eye in an accident and Luciano’s accidental death is precipitated by his need to see what is behind a high wall. Moreover, faith in God was symbolized by seeing versus not-seeing. In The Holy Girl, hearing and touch become the signifying modes of perception.

Helena is awakened, in the middle of the night by a voice calling “mamá, mamá!” She looks at Amalia, who sleeps next to her, but the voice is coming from the television. Briefly, Martel incorporates what is being shown on TV, just like she did in Rey Muerto and The Swamp. As pointed out in the introduction, several NCA directors do this. I tend to think that it is a rather universal practice that simply reflects the conspicuousness of the media in people’s public and private lives nowadays. Helena has fallen asleep while watching a movie on TV.

It is Heroína (1972), a popular movie directed by Raul de la Torre and starring

Graciela Borges, who played Mecha in The Swamp. Besides being a homage, it 63

serves to suggest that something about Helena is off-kilter. Freddy, who turns out to be Helena’s brother, knocks on the door because he has lost the key to his room. Helena tells him she was watching a “beautiful movie.” One does not have to be familiar with Heroína, a harrowing tale about a traumatized, suicidal woman, to know it does not seem “beautiful.” The brief images shown suffice.

Then Helena neurotically complains about Manuel not calling to announce his wife’s pregnancy when she knows he has been trying to reach her.

Amalia’s gradual pursuit of Jano advances with a scene that mirrors the street scene. She was standing in the corner of the elevator when Jano and two other

doctors get inside. Amalia approaches Jano from behind and touches his hand.

He moves his hand away without looking back and exits the elevator. Amalia walks down the hall to Jano’s room, which is being cleaned. She puts a dab of his shaving cream on the collar of her blouse and smells it. If it were possible to make a film that would activate our olfactory sense with the same directness that cinema engages our sight and hearing, Martel most certainly would. Then we could truly experience Jano’s shaving cream and the substance being sprayed 64

inside the hotel. Amalia’s gesture is reminiscent of The Swamp’s Momi smelling

Isabel’s clothing.

The next morning, Jano talks to his wife on his room phone, sends kisses for the kids, and discusses with two doctors the closing of the conference with a dramatization of an ideal patient interview. One doctor mentions the need to illustrate the “difficulties of interpretation”, meaning the ability to understand the patient’s description of symptoms in order to diagnose accurately. However, the importance of the term for the viewer concerns the misreading of behavioral signs within the intricate web of relational connections between the characters.

For instance, our first impression of the relationship between siblings Helena and

Freddy, who comes into her room in the middle of the night, is that they are romantically linked. Martel often makes us aware of how we are quick to assess and judge based on insufficient information by deferring information about characters and their interrelation. It brings to mind a line spoken by Tracy Lord

(Katherine Hepburn) in The Philadelphia Story: “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”

We know enough about Jano (Spanish for Janus) at this stage to begin to consider the implications of his given name. In Roman mythology, Janus is usually depicted with two faces or heads looking in opposite directions. Jano is by all appearances a good husband and father, and a doctor who is highly respected by his peers. Yet he has this other face; he displays a regressive perversion; an infantile, sexual acting-out. 65

The Holy Girl leaves the hotel environs for the first time with Josefina’s visit to

his grandmother’s house. She finds her cousin Julián napping in their

grandmother’s bed and joins him. They kiss and touch each other. Josefina says

she does not want to have “premarital relations”, then lays on her stomach and

appears to take her jeans off under the covers. The boy gets on top of her and

whispers something in her ear. She tells him not to talk. Josefina’s behavior now

compels us to reconsider her comments about Inés’ alleged sexual activity;

comments that may reveal more about Josefina than about Inés.

Gonzalo Aguilar concludes unambiguously that Inés is “passionately in love

with a man who initiates her into the world of sex” and that it is her “guilt that

makes her cry in the movie’s opening scene”23 While this interpretation is valid, it

is only one of several possible interpretations and it runs counter to the spirit of

Martel’s cinema to present it as the absolute truth, without any qualifications. In

their essay about the film, Eva-Lynn Jagoe and John Cant include three possible

explanations for the tears of Inés: religious emotion (St. Teresa’s “blessing of

tears”), something that worries or disquiets her (like guilt, as interpreted by

Aguilar), and sexual frustration. In support of the latter, they point out that: “We never see the body of the woman, only her head and shoulders.”24 Inés’ body is

denied to us as if her body was not brought into play. Moreover, the choice of

name for this character implies possession of certain attributes such as piety and

innocence. Inés is the Spanish transliteration of Agnes, from the Greek meaning

pure and virginal. The two predominant Ineses in the Spanish-speaking world are

Agnes of Rome, the patron saint of chastity, and Doña Inés, the character from 66

Juan Zorilla’s iconic play Don Juan Tenorio who maintains her virginity despite having Don Juan as her fiancée.

There is an insistence and a relish in Josefina’s delivery of her comments about Inés that imply certain psychological gains, no matter how much or how little truth there is in them. Do they help assuage any feeling of guilt engendered by her encounters with Julián? Do they provide vicarious pleasure? Do they help

Josefina rationalize her own behavior? As I indicated in Chapter Two, in Martel’s films, event etiology and character motivation are presented as a complex web of possibilities to be sorted out by the viewer. I think it would be wrong to dismiss

Josefina’s faith and devoutness because, for instance, she is distracted during catechism. We will soon learn she has volunteered to have her beautiful tresses cut and used for the wig of an effigy of the Virgin. Josefina seems to have managed to skirt around the Church’s sexual repression but not, as we shall see, without a bit of trickery and hypocrisy.

Freddy introduces Helena to Jano, who like Martel stayed in the hotel as a child. The hotel had a regulation pool back then. Jano surprises Helena by remembering she used to delight the hotel guests by diving from a high platform.

They talk after a medical lecture. In college, Jano knew Freddy, who laments having dropped out of school and misses his sons, who live in Chile with his ex- wife. Jano inquires about Helena’s ear problem. She invites him to sit at her table for dinner. He could meet her daughter then, she says. 67

The Holy Girl has a clearer narrative trajectory than The Swamp. Yet there is a little scene that initially seems gratuitous because it does not serve to forward the plot. A few girls take a bus out of town for no special reason. They explore the woods adjacent to the highway. The outdoors does provide a respite from the enclosed spaces of the rest of the film although nature in Martel’s films is never picturesque. Moreover, in retrospect, after seeing the complete Salta trilogy, one realizes that the scene provides a link between the films by recalling The Swamp and presaging The Headless Woman. The latter opens with a group of kids playing excitedly near a highway and almost getting run over when they cross to the other side of the road, just like Amalia, Josefina, and pals in The Holy Girl.

The girls walk into the woods and become agitated at same blast of shotguns that kicks off The Swamp. Then we see, in the background, two boys hunting. I wondered if it they were Martin and Joaquin, a bit taller but still waiting to have that perpetually procrastinated eye operation. There are resonances between the three films that inspire one to regard them not only as sharing a common geography and cultural milieu but a whole, unique cosmology. It is the universe according to Lucrecia Martel.

In the third meeting of the catechism group, Inés attempts to give closure to the debate by reading a quote that states, among other things, that God’s mysterious callings utilize all means available to him. The fact that she is reading from a Church-sanctioned book imbues her with authority. And yet, the words are inadequate to the task of helping the characters make sense of their experiences as perceived through the senses. The quote seems to corroborate Amalia’s 68

intuition that God wants her to “save” Jano. After sniffing the collar of her blouse during a visit to Josefina, she tells her: “I think I already have a mission”. Amalia considers someone with Jano’s perversion with empathy and pity; in her eyes, he is someone who needs to be “saved.” And María Calle’s eyes are magnificently expressive and suggestive of a wealth of emotions that the dialogue does not make explicit25. In the background, we overhear Josefina’s mother talking to a friend about the maid in terms that recall Mecha’s racist harangues against Isabel in The Swamp. The girls are seen doing their homework in the foreground. Then we hear loud noises coming from the patio. Surprisingly, a naked man has fallen from his second floor balcony. He walks into the living room through the sliding door. The girls stare in disbelief. Josefina’s younger sister, a girl in the throes of puberty, is unambiguously shown with her gaze fixed on the man’s genitals26.

When Amalia comes home, she relates the episode to Helena, insisting it is a miracle that the man was not injured. She does not say anything when Helena mentions that Jano will be dining at their table the next day.

Helena and Jano dine together but Amalia is absent. There seems to be a mutual attraction. Jano diagnoses Helena’s malady as tinnitus, a condition that 69

involves the hearing of sounds not having concrete, external provenance. Later,

Helena agrees to play herself in the clinical demonstration being staged as the closing event of the festival. Jano and colleagues administer an auditory test that confirms her dysfunction. It is noteworthy that one of the words Helena is told to repeat is beso (kiss) and that the word she heard is rezo (prayer).27

People congregate in the street to witness another theremin demonstration.

Amalia is near the front with a few friends. She sees Jano joining the spectators.

Amalia walks to the rear, where Jano stands, and positions herself with her back to him. It is not coincidental that the tune being played is the habanera from

Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The lyrics of the aria, sung by the determined titular character, include this recurring line: si je t'aime, prends garde à toi! (if I love you, you’d best beware!). This time, when Jano initiates the frottage, she kindly grabs his hand. Jano is startled. Amalia turns to look him in the eye as he flees. That

night, Amalia opens the door of Jano’s room just to look at him. When she closes the door, he wakes up perturbed. At the pool, the next morning, she spies on him and appears to be summoning him by tapping on the metal rings of a plastic screen. The aural nature of this calling is perfectly congruent with Martel’s elevation of sound as a conveyor of meaning that is just as important as the

realm of the visual. Jano is made uncomfortable by Amalia’s stalking . He gets out of the pool and walks to his room. At the door, he catches Amalia tracking behind him and orders her not to follow him. Unfazed, she goes inside his room.

He grabs something I assume to be money, hands it to her, tells her to catch a cab, and to never return to the hotel. Of course, Jano does not know Amalia is

Helena’s daughter. He does not even know her name. Jano has been effectively transformed from predator to prey, from master of the action to subject in someone else’s project.

At a store, Amalia weeps while being comforted by Josefina, who suggests consulting Inés. Amalia replies: “You promised you wouldn’t say anything if I told you. No one needs to know. It’s my mission. I know that.” Josefina promises not to tell anyone. Amalia believes God has called her to save this clearly tormented, 71

perverse man. Perhaps seducing him is akin to turning the other cheek and acquiescing to him is a sign of upmost humility and compassion; an expression

of self-sacrificial love. Then again, Martel makes us aware of Amalia’s budding sexuality. For instance, she is shown masturbating under the covers and, later, she shares a casual but sensual kiss with Josefina28. When this happens, the girls are resting on a cot in a corner of the hotel’s laundry room. It is the clearest example of the collapsing of public and private space observed throughout a film dealing with a family making a home out of a hotel.

Amalia sincerely wishes to hear God’s calling and to abide by the Church’s teachings but she is also responding to natural urges, to the undeniable forces of nature acting upon her body. Her mission constitutes a synthesis of the spiritual and the corporeal. Amalia’s “profane and anarchic interpretations of the nature of salvation and vocation threaten the sacred authority of the words” read by Inés by “creating subversive meanings not programmed by the Church.”29

Helena introduces Amalia to Jano. As expected, he is shocked to learn they are related. He seems paralyzed but manages to leave without saying anything. 72

Helena notices his behavior is odd. Jano receives a call from his wife and tries to dissuade her from coming to the hotel with their kids as initially planned. It is

Jano whom Amalia summons in the middle of the night to check on Amalia, who is feverish. The girl is literally lovesick. When he gets close to examine her,

Amalia whispers in his ear: “Sometimes when you sleep you stop breathing for a few seconds. You could suffocate.” Indeed, Jano is virtually suffocating already.

At breakfast the next morning, Freddy tells Jano and Helena about an

“inconvenience” involving Dr. Vesalio and one of the young women who work for a laboratory company. The doctor plans to leave the conference. Jano’s self- consciousness and sense of guilt is such that, even though it is absolutely clear that the incident does not concern him, he wonders at one point whether it is himself about whom Freddy is referring. Moreover, Helena also needs reassurance that the incident involves Dr. Vesalio. She seems to have an intuition that there is something tormenting Jano.

In the hotel’s kitchen, Helena has a chat with a few women including Mirta, an older woman who helps her run the hotel and has worked there for decades. All along, Mirta has been critical of Helena’s flirtations with Jano because he is married. Mirta is an upholder of a traditional morality that is slowly but inexorably fading. For instance, she disapproves of her own daughter’s profession as a physical therapist and masseuse because of the degree of body contact involved. Helena points out that Jano is acting very strangely. She states she is losing her desire to appear in the staged demonstration. Mirta opines that Jano is experiencing a “sentimental conflict” brought out by the imminent arrival of his 73

family. Their presence is introduced from Amalia’s point of view. She is in the

pool looking at Jano when a woman sitting next to him, who turns out to be his

wife, caresses his hair. A sad, self-absorbed Amalia casts her eyes downward,

as if signaling Jano’s downfall.

There is a swift cut to Josefina and Julián having sex in their Grandma’s

house. Josefina’s mother and father come in unexpectedly. Josefina manages to

pull up her panties, pull down her skirt and sit on the bed. Josefina’s mother

gasps: “My God! What have you done to Grandma?!” It is unclear whether the

statement implies they have defiled her home by having sex there or whether she is more concretely referring to the messy condition of the room. The quick-witted

Josefina deflects the situation: “Something horrible happened.” She breaks the

promise she made to her friend when she tells her mother that one of the doctors at the conference molested Amalia. Josefina’s mother decides she must tell

Helena. It is unclear whether or not Josefina’s parents realize she and Julián were having sex. It is possible they decide to ignore the obvious because they do not want to accept it and do not know how to deal with it.

At the hotel, Jano’s wife and kids leave their room to go sightseeing. Jano will

save a front seat for his wife at the conference. The voices of Jano’s kids can still

be heard on the background when Amalia enters his room. He looks at her with a

grave expression. The camera is placed so that we see Jano looking in one

direction towards Amalia while his reflection in the mirror faces the opposite 74

direction. He is split in two like the mythical Janus. The splintered Jano, absorbed

in thought, makes himself whole by moving within the frame so that the camera

no longer sees his reflection in the mirror. Then he announces with a calm, clear

voice: “I will tell your mother everything”. Jano’s short physical movement

corresponds to a significant spiritual advancement. Martel finds the appropriate

images to express the psychological growth of the character with elegant

understatement and visual economy.

Amalia sits next to Jano. She whispers something in his ear. Jano sighs and shakes his head. She puts her head on his shoulders then puts her arms around

his neck and says softly: “You are a good man.” She does not dissuade him from

telling Helena, as one might expect. Jano looks down, furrows his brow, and

shakes his head in disagreement. His breathing is labored. She repeats the

phrase and tries to kiss him. He rebuffs her, and pinches her eye unintentionally. 75

She lays down and covers her eyes with her hands. Jano turns to check on her,

clearly concerned. She sits up and opens her eyes. There is a satisfied

expression on her face and a faint smile, as if she has just realized that she has

indeed been instrumental in saving Jano, who is now willing to take responsibility

and be held accountable. Note that Jano has no idea that he is about to be

denounced by Josefina’s mother. His resolution to come clean is genuine. He is

clearly remorseful. Martel insinuates that even someone who behaves as

objectionably as Jano is worthy of compassion and capable of redemption. The

title of the film is not meant to be taken ironically. The healing and rehabilitation

of people like Jano require remarkable, visionary individuals like Amalia. Jagoe

and Cant elaborate as follows:

“Martel proposes that a post-Catholic culture of the body is possible without an abandonment of notions of solidarity and personal responsibility. The girl’s progress towards a more humane culture contrasts with the confusions and sufferings of her parents’ generation, who struggle with the contradictions inherent to their traditional culture and their authoritarian, irrational, and guilt-ridden visions of love, sexuality, and eschatology.”30 Jano goes to Helena’s room. He is seen visibly struggling to find the right words and muster up the courage to say what he came to say. We are aware of 76

Helena’s “difficulties of interpretation” so we are not surprised when she impatiently assumes that what mortifies Jano is his extra-marital passion for her.

Helena kisses him and he responds. He leaves without saying a word. I propose that Jano is aware that Helena craves the stage, that she needs to indulge her acting bug, and that Jano merely decides to defer his confession.

Jano’s and Josefina’s family share the lobby. Josefina’s mother tells her:

“Lose the long face. Remember you’re helping her.” Josefina leaves to search for

Amalia. Jano’s daughter overhears a conversation between Mirta and Josefina’s mother. There is a cut to the conference room, where Jano’s wife and daughter tell him there is going to be a scandal involving a doctor who molested “the girl from the hotel.” Jano is summoned backstage to prepare for his entrance. The speaker introduces Helena and the audience applauds. Backstage, Jano puts on his white coat. Jano composes himself as he prepares to enter the stage. There is a cut to Josefina’s parents waiting in the lobby as we hear the applause, which indicates the dramatization is ready to commence. Josefina’s parents have arrived too late to prevent Amalia’s triumphant rehabilitation of Jano and

Helena’s moment in the spotlight.

The narrative fuse is suspended just before the fireworks. The scandal never becomes manifest before our eyes. Perhaps it will not be as devastating as anticipated. However, it is up to the viewer to imagine how the denouement will unfold. I find it conceivable that someone like Amalia can forgive Josefina’s betrayal. I wonder if, just like Momi came to the conclusion that there is no Virgin to see and that God does not answer her prayers, Amalia will soon figure that 77

God is not calling. Or perhaps, Amalia will conclude that it is the Church and its most righteous members who most grievously misinterpret God’s message.

Jano’s fate is also difficult to predict and highly dependent on how Helena handles the accusations delivered by Josefina’s mother, a bastion of traditional, bourgeois culture. Helena, who is favorably predisposed towards Jano, may not simply take the accusations as fact. Regardless of the outcome, Jano is a better man now than when he arrived and Amalia knows she played a major role in his growth. She has come closer the spirit of the Judeo-Christian exhortation to “love thy neighbor” than anyone else.

The final scene brings us back to the pool, where Amalia is seen in the background immersed in the warm, blue water and Josefina stands in the foreground. Amalia smiles broadly, thrilled to see her friend. Her face has never registered such joy and warmth before. She laughs when Josefina gets into the pool in her underwear. Josefina declares their sisterhood. The girls float on their backs, swimming slowly by moving only their lower legs, enjoying each other’s company and the smell of orange blossoms.

Chapter Four The Headless Woman

Lucrecia Martel’s camera struggles to keep up with a boy and his dog running along the embankment of a country road. The opening shot of The Headless

Woman has two surprises for spectators familiar with her previous films. That it is a long tracking shot and that it adopts a frame with a 2.35:1 ratio, often called

Cinemascope (or simply ‘Scope). Martel’s first-time use of this widescreen format is most significant. One of the director’s trademarks is the synchronous occurrence of more than one action or event. She likes to think of these actions or events as co-existing “layers” or threads that take center stage alternately.

Sometimes there is a primary locus of attention in the foreground of the frame with something of lesser importance occurring in the background but, more often than not, secondary events within the diegesis are primarily expressed by the use of extra-imaged sound. In The Headless Woman, Martel does not eschew the use of sound that originates outside of the visual frame. However, the extra visual space of the Cinemascope frame facilitates, whenever she feels inclined to do so, the visual representation to two narrative layers within the frame.

The boy we first see is Aldo, and he is playing boisterously with two other dark-skinned boys near a country road. They chase and hide from each other.

Their potential endangerment is depicted by having a bus speed by as they are about to cross to the other side of the road in the exact manner as the catechism girls from The Holy Girl. One of the boys somersaults into a canal that borders the road and, temporarily, disappears from view. Only in retrospect can the viewer realize the shot’s foreboding nature. The scene ends with Aldo and his 80

German shepherd going away while the other boys climb a roadside advertisement sign.

There is a typically abrupt cut to a view of a middle-class woman helping another adjust her false eyelashes31. The women are shown reflected on a car window. However, this scene is linked to the previous one sonically by the voices of kids at play heard in the recesses of the sound mix. Subsequent shots make us aware of a large group of middle-aged women and their kids who are preparing to return home from a social gathering. There are several overlapping exchanges with a predominant one about the upcoming inauguration of a new swimming pool at their social club. It is being built adjacent to a veterinary clinic where marine turtles are kept, something that one of the women finds

“disgusting”. Another one worries about the turtles drifting into the pool area and wonders what diseases turtles carry. This may seem like just idle chatter but it is the kind of detail that accrues significance as the film moves along. The

Headless Woman exposes the insularity and exclusivity of the specific social class to which these women belong. 81

Towards the end of the sequence, the views single out Vero, a tall, warm and lively woman with newly tinted blond hair. She gets into her car alone. A view

from inside a car of the same curvy road seen in the opening scene is followed by a profile view of Vero driving as she listens to the innocuous pop song “Solay,

Solay” on the radio. Both views are accompanied by rings of a cellular phone.

The second ring causes Vero to take her eyes off the road to search for the phone. The camera is fixed on Vero and we hear two loud thuds. The car lunges as it collides with something and then lunges again as it hits something a second time. We also hear objects being displaced about the cabin and tires coming to a stop. Vero catches her breath, reaches for the door handle seemingly intending to go out to see the damage done, but decides not to do that. Then she picks her fashion sunglasses off the floor, puts them back on, restarts the engine and drives away. The 77-second take concludes with a cut to a long shot of a dog32 lying motionless on the road. It reflects the perspective of someone inside the car, perhaps a child, looking backwards through the rear window. 82

Early into an even longer take, at over two minutes perhaps the longest in

Martel’s filmography to date, Vero takes off her glasses to reveal a grave expression on her face. Her breathing betrays a state of controlled agitation. A bit farther away, she stops the car and gets out. The camera, placed on the front

passenger seat to get a profile view of Vero, now pivots clockwise slightly. It shows Vero pacing outside, in and out of the sides of the filmic space, possibly deliberating what to do. We hear the engines of cars passing by, and the thunder that preceded the title in The Swamp. Vero’s head is almost always cut off at the top of the frame. Thick raindrops begin to fall on the windshield. Then she stops her pacing and stands still. Against a black background accompanied by a few seconds of ominous silence, the title of the film appears.

The final film of Martel’s Salta trilogy will follow Vero for the remainder of its duration. All three films are equally ambitious in their thematic resonance and feature complex, multi-layered plots. However, the narratives of the films evidence a reduction in the number of leading characters and important secondary characters. The Swamp has at least three characters, Momi, Mecha 83

and Tali, whom one can call protagonists. The Holy Girl feels more concentrated,

not only because most of the action is set in and around a single location, but

also because the number of secondary characters is reduced slightly and one

character, Amalia, emerges as more of a protagonist than anyone else. In The

Headless Woman, there is no doubt that its eponymous character is the

protagonist.

It is raining now and Vero rides in the passenger seat of a car driven by an unidentified person. The next shot finds her in a hospital. She has a small bandage on her right temple33. During Vero’s brief hospital visit, we witness the

arrival of a handcuffed female prisoner brought by guards into the hospital to

receive some kind of medical treatment. When Vero is in the bathroom, the

prisoner hides in one of the stalls and refuses to come out. Those well

acquainted with Martel’s oeuvre know that she would not add this scenario

simply as a diversion or a kind of local color. Its significance or resonance will

reveal itself in time. The same applies to the actions of a little girl, who gives Vero

a hug and pulls the side of her mouth to reveal a missing tooth. Vero does not

appear to recognize her.

Vero undergoes a cranium x-ray. The slowness of her movements and the

paucity of her verbal responses indicate she is in shock. In the registration form,

she writes the name embroidered on the nurse’s coat rather than her own. Then

she walks away before signing the form, although the staff recognizes her as the

sister of Dr. Berardo. Again, Vero is riding as a passenger on a vehicle. This time

we figure it is a taxi because we hear the voice of the dispatcher. There is 84

another elliptical cut, to a hotel room. Vero takes a nap and goes to the cafeteria.

A man walks in, sees her and asks her: “Vero, what are you doing here at this hour?” “I wanted a cup of tea” she replies but stays quiet when he asks “What’s going on?” They go up to her room. When he says he is leaving, she hugs him and pulls him towards her. Their familiarity with each other gives the impression it is not the first time they have sex. We do not know the man’s name and how he is related to Vero, except that they are lovers.

They spend the night together. In the morning, Vero’s phone rings while they are getting dressed. The ringtone is evocative of the accident. Vero answers but hangs up when she hears a man’s voice. The ringing of the phone is the first of many instances in which sounds and images evoke the film’s precipitating event.

The unidentified lover asks Vero whether she wants to be dropped off in front of the house or at the corner. She just answers: “Ok”. Vero’s husband comes into the house carrying a dead animal, which reminds us of the dog on the road. He places a calf atop the kitchen counter precisely like Tali’s son in The Swamp when he came home from hunting with a dead hare. When he walks into the foyer and greets her, Vero runs up the steps and locks herself in the bathroom.

He comes after her. Thus The Headless Woman establishes analogical associations between Vero and the inmate brought to the hospital, and between her husband and the inmate’s guards. I wondered at this stretch whether Vero feels like a prisoner within her marriage or, more generally, entrapped within a larger social system. 85

Vero prepares the shower while her husband explains why he arrived late from hunting. He asks where her car is but gets no answer. Vero gets in the shower with her clothes on. There is undeniably something comical about Vero’s daffy behavior. Does she keep her clothes on and the shower curtain open because she does not want to feel as vulnerable as Psycho’s Marion? Is she so beside herself that she forgets to undress? Does she cry in the shower like Momi after Isabel leaves? Is she washing off her lover’s scent? Her husband tries to coax her into coming out but she is unresponsive to him. Later on, when she goes to the kitchen to make coffee, the sight of the dead calf perturbs her. As her husband leaves, the maid answers the phone. She tells Vero that they are waiting for her at the clinic. Since Vero does not have a car, the maid arranges for a taxi to pick her up and take her to the “odontological center”. A trace of recognition crosses Vero’s face when she hears her destination but she looks

puzzled. This is the first leading role for Maria Onetto, who exudes anomie and betrays an air of mysteriousness. The personal qualities of the actress seem to have motivated her casting, as revealed by Martel: “I had the feeling that I would 86

never get to know her. This was, of course, fascinating to me. Because of this, we could never be friends.”34 The glaze over Vero’s eyes complicates the reading of her facial expressions.

The patients waiting to see the dentist at the odontological center and the receptionist are astonished and bemused when Vero walks in and sits in the waiting room. She has “lost her head”. She suffers from depersonalization, a common symptom of acute stress reaction. Vero is a dentist and the little girl who hugged her at the hospital is likely also her patient. We learn she left her car keys at the hospital. Vero feels the need to explain her hospital visit, and perhaps her mental state. She ends up saying that her stomach is upset. Whether her distress is experienced psychosomatically or she is just providing an excuse is not clear. Vero’s office manager asks if she wants her brother, also a dentist, to take her patients but she says no. Later she fails to recognize her car until she turns on the car’s alarm and does not seem to remember the name of a daughter, who attends law school out of town. Vero suffers from severe emotional shock.

The viewer may resist identification with such an opaque, imploded character as Vero but there is congruence between her mental condition and the viewer’s disorientation with regards to time, place, and the identity and nature of the characters. To put it simply, we never know more than what Vero knows and that is a disquieting place to be. I think this personal insight by critic Amy Taubin about her reaction at her first viewing of The Headless Woman is probably common: “My desire to distance myself from the film and its spoiled, 87

neurasthenic protagonist obviously paralleled said protagonist’s desire to disavow a crime she may have committed.”35 The camera may not represent her point of view but the narrative alignment between protagonist and viewer invites the latter to identify with Vero. Her lack of agency, her passivity, and her disavowal incite the viewer to reject that invitation.

Vero goes to the house of her cousin Josefina, where their aunt Lala lives.

There are many relatives at the house, and older women from Lala’s church group who are there to pray the rosary. The most interesting scene in the sequence is set in Lala’s room, which is used as a kind of forum because she is bedridden (and because bedrooms are places where relatives congregate in

Martel’s universe). When the scene opens the frame has been taken over by

Vero’s wedding video, which Lala is watching while providing a running commentary. An eerie black & white image shows a vertical line between a young, brunette Vero and her husband Marcos as they exit the church. It is as if the camera that shot that image was portending a kind of psychic estrangement between them. At one point, Lala agitatedly hands the remote control to the maid and asks her to rewind the movie. Lala catches a glimpse of someone at the 88

reception she is convinced was already dead at that time. The Headless Woman is a mystery in that it engages the viewer in a search for clues revolving around an event but there is also an element of horror or ghost story at play. At one point, Vero finally speaks. She protests Lala calling someone named Juan

Manuel “effeminate”. It turns out Juan Manuel is Vero’s lover. What is striking is

Lala’s response, that Vero’s voice does not sound like it belongs to her, as if

Vero had been possessed by an alien entity.

Ghostly intimations continue at Vero’s house when a boy comes to the door asking if they need a car wash. The use of shallow focus causes the boy to appear like a disembodied spirit. It resonates later when we hear of a boy’s disappearance. At the moment, it can be read as a visualization of the anonymity and insubstantiality of the members of the lower class to bourgeois eyes. Next,

Vero, Josefina, and her two sons are on their way to the country club. They need to drive on “the canal road”. One of the boys throws the other one’s shoe out the window in jest. Vero steps out and walks in the direction of the shoe. The boy runs to it. When a car comes around the bend towards the boy, Vero, visibly 89

upset, turns around swiftly. It is as if she is reliving aspects of the accident from the perspective of someone walking down the road.

The next cut takes us to yet another evocation of the accident. At the club,

Vero is among several women walking around the perimeter of a soccer field. At one point, a strange clashing sound, a thud and a dog’s bark is heard, immediately followed by a view of a boy lying motionless on the ground. Whereas

The Swamp keeps presaging Luciano’s accidental death, The Headless Woman incessantly evokes an accident that has already occurred.

It is too much to bear. As if the whole world is conspiring not to let Vero forget the immorality of not getting out of her car to find out the consequences of her 90

negligence. In the bathroom of the club, Vero breaks down and weeps. There is a worker doing some welding in the room. Vero composes herself and tells him

the water is not running. Then she cries again, puts an arm around the man’s

shoulder and gasps. The man comes back with a tall bottle and pours water on

her hand and neck. Vero exhales loudly, puts her sunglasses on, and says

goodbye. While in a check-out line at the store, Vero matter-of-factly tells

Marcos: “I killed someone on the road”.

They drive by the accident site. Marcos is convinced all she hit was a dog which is still by the roadside but Vero’s worry is not assuaged. Next morning,

Vero’s brother tells her he will see her patients with emergencies. He is wearing a camouflage vest as if going into battle. She asks him what she should do. He tells her to get some rest. Marcos recruits Juan Manuel. When he arrives, we notice Juan Manuel and Vero are wearing sweaters of the exact same color and we learn that he is Marcos’ cousin36. Vero tells him: “I killed someone on the

road”. Juan Manuel explains that he has not heard of any deaths on that road.

He says that he would know because the police would have to inform him (he is

a doctor, perhaps he works at the emergency room or the morgue). Vero

explains she did not get out of the car, perhaps regretting not doing so. Marcos

and Juan Manuel examine the front of Vero’s car and the latter conducts phone

inquiries. It is noteworthy that Marcos asks the maid to leave the room and close

the door before these calls are made as if a whole social class is closing ranks to

protect one of its members. It turns out nothing has been reported. The next 91

morning, the rain has finally stopped and Vero appears more upbeat and responsive.

Vero and Josefina drive out of town to a plant nursery. We notice that

Changila, one of the three boys seen in the opening scene, works there. The man in charge tells them they will have to return for the pots because he is missing a chango37 to carry them. Vero is again behaving in the carefree, pleasant manner she displayed before the accident. Her respite soon comes to an end. On the way back to the city, on the canal road, onlookers and rescue personnel have congregated. They are told that the water flow in the canal is

obstructed, perhaps by a drowned animal or even a person. Even after they have passed the site, a preoccupied Vero stares back. At Josefina’s house, aunt Lala again remarks that Vero’s voice sounds strange and speaks about the spirits of the dead. “Ignore them, and they go away”, she tells Vero.

At the club, they have finished the pool. There is a scene that perfectly illustrates how Martel utilizes the widescreen format. Josefina is inside the pool having a conversation with Vero, who stands outside the pool in the foreground 92

of the image. Juan Manuel sits with Marcos on a bench in the background, somewhat out of focus but clearly recognizable. When a woman walks along the far side of the pool and hands a cell phone to Juan Manuel, Josefina and Vero shift their attention to the men. And so does the viewer. Juan Manuel’s gestures evidence that the call, which we do not hear, is important and that the call is of interest to Marcos. They walk away, telling the women that they are just going to have a coffee with a friend. There is too much going on and the distance between foreground and background action is too long for the shot to work

using the 1.85:1 ratio of the first two films. Martel would be forced to break it down into several views using a variety of camera setups. The wider frame facilitates longer takes. The sequence ends with a profile close-up of Vero staring at them showing she is intrigued by the behavior of the men. None of the frames in the scene is shot from the point of view of Vero. Again, the angles suggest the visual perspective of a child.

By the time Vero wakes up the following morning, Marcos has already left in her car. In her backyard, the gardener finds a buried water structure, perhaps a 93

pool or a fountain. She picks up a newspaper brought by the gardener and becomes absorbed by it.

Later that day at Josefina’s house, Vero’s niece Candita insists on accompanying her to the nursery even though she is running a high fever.”I’m bored” she complains, “I want to see where they found the boy that was murdered”. “He drowned” retorts Vero. During this conversation, Candita makes an attempt to kiss Vero on the lips. Vero rebuffs her niece’s gesture without commentary. Candita does not seem troubled or surprised by the rejection. The moment recalls the sensuality in the scenes between Momi and Isabel in Martel’s debut and the kiss between Amalia and Josefina in The Holy Girl. The films regard erotic or sensual affection involving young females as unremarkable.

They also regard minor flirtations and intimacies between relatives as natural and beyond judgment.

Only a friend of Candita goes with Vero to the nursery. She takes a circuitous route to avoid driving on the canal road. Vero wants huge clay pots because the structure buried in her backyard would inhibit the growth of trees planted directly on the ground. The old guy who owns the nursery has a bad back and cannot 94

bring them down from where “that boy” stored them. He promises to have “his brother Changila” bring the pots down and deliver them the following week.

“What a disgrace for his family”, the man comments, “almost a whole week looking for him”. The man’s remarks about the damage caused to the community by the flood is one of several elements which come together to elaborate a pernicious view of nature. For example, there is the possibility that Aldo died from drowning in the canal rather than from colliding with a moving vehicle. And Vero’s most acute dissociative phase is accompanied by constant rain. Additionally,

Josefina expresses a recurrent preoccupation with the pool water being contaminated. The layering of these details may not coalesce consciously in the mind of the viewer until he or she reflects after the film has concluded, or during repeat viewings. The richness of Martel’s films, particularly The Headless

Woman, will not fully manifest itself immediately after one viewing.

A woman asks Candita’s friend, a working class girl despised by Josefina, to deliver something to Changila’s mother. She lives in a small settlement of

substandard housing. When they arrive, the camera, stationed inside the new model car, can only provide a fuzzy view of Candita’s friend giving a comforting hug to Changila’s mother. The shot conveys the incomplete picture of the poor had by those in the middle class. Conversely, a girl from the settlement struggles to give Vero simple directions to the city, suggesting the difficulty of climbing the social ladder. The rich and the poor interact but they live in different worlds.

Vero stops by the hospital. Her admission record and x-rays cannot be found in the records room. It is as if she was never there. She goes to the radiology department, sits where patients await their turn, overhears the same instructions from the technician she heard before, and opts to leave without talking to anyone there. Her brother tells her he retrieved all her records, and that there is no reason to worry. To varying degrees, every Martel film takes gender politics into consideration. Even though in The Headless Woman the class divide predominates, it is no coincidence that it is the men in Vero’s life who have the access to the evidence and the power to conceal it. The secrecy that characterizes their manipulation of the system contributes to Vero’s disorientation. Once her inquiries and the men’s admissions make Vero aware of what is being done for her protection, her attitude towards the cover-up is one of passive acquiescence.

She is resting the next morning when someone rings the doorbell. When she gets up to open the door, we notice her head is wrapped in a towel. It is the boy who washes cars. Vero asks him to unload the plants from the SUV. When she unwraps the towel, we notice she has tinted her hair brown. She acts generously, 96

offering the boy food, drink, even some clothing to take with him. It is highly unlikely that Vero will revolt against the system of privilege and disavowal. She will not own up to the possibility that she is responsible for the death of Aldo.

Nonetheless, her graciousness and magnanimity towards this boy imply a shift in attitude, even if it is motivated by guilt. In the ongoing process of self-definition, this new, brunette Vero is more mindful of the humanity of people like Aldo.

There is a cut to a scene set at an elementary school. She gives quick dental check-ups to the kids. I have a strong impression that this is a public school and the screenings are free of charge. Vero’s professionalism is a sign of her recovery. Her head is back on. However, if that is all the sequence is meant to convey then it would logically unfold at Vero’s office. The contiguity between this school scene and the preceding one reinforce my view that Vero’s social consciousness has developed as a consequence of the accident and its repercussions.

The change in her hair signifies a willful transformation, like that of the protagonist in Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 and the Kim Novak character in

Vertigo. Marcos returns from Tucumán in Vero’s car, which has been repaired.

However, Vero points out that there is still some minor but visible damage to the side of the chassis. The traces of the accident have not been erased completely.

Likewise, the effects of the accident on Vero cannot be undone. A residual effect lingers. The pick-up truck from the nursery arrives. Aldo has been replaced by a new boy, who helps Changila carry the pots into the house. 97

It is Friday, and family and friends are having a get-together in a meeting room at the hotel where Vero spent the night of the accident. In the bathroom,

Josefina notices something in Vero’s expression and excuses herself. Then we

realize she is teary-eyed. Josefina seems to know the cause but will not talk

about it. Vero will never be able to completely get over the incident. She will have

a cross to bear, silently and privately. The Headless Woman registers Vero’s suffering. It is a climactic gesture of empathy and compassion on the part of

Martel towards a protagonist whose deplorable behavior propels the film. When

briefly alone, Vero goes to the reception desk and asks if room 818 was occupied

last weekend. The receptionist indicates the room was vacant all weekend. The

metal keys to the hotel rooms begin to tinkle in the backboard as if trying to say

something. Is this the work of Aldo’s ghost? Will Vero ignore him, like aunt Lala

would recommend, so that it goes away?

The final scene of The Headless Woman concerns this clan’s weekly reunion.

Yet, the camera stays just outside the meeting room’s swinging, glass doors for a 98

long time. It signifies a border between them and the outside world that is not

easy to penetrate. When we go inside, the crowded shots depict Vero’s mingling elegantly and smoothly. This is where she belongs.

Well, did she hit Aldo causing his death or did the boy fell into the canal for some other reason and drowned? Where is the omniscient narrator or the tell-all flashback to give us concrete answers? The Headless Woman gives the impression of belonging to the mystery genre, but how can it ultimately fit within that tradition when the mystery is never solved? How can a mystery incorporate a newspaper with a headline about the precipitating incident and not offer a close-up so that we can read it? I do not mean to imply that The Headless

Woman is so abstract and reticent that one cannot develop theories about what 99

exactly happened. My point is that the evidence needed to arrive at an unequivocal solution is repressed because it does not really matter. What is important is that Vero chooses not to get out and find out what her carelessness has caused and that the mere possibility that she accidentally killed someone sets in motion a protective cover-up and a disavowal of responsibility. It is also significant that there is nothing specific about Vero and her men indicating they are behaving differently than it is characteristic of their class under these circumstances. In fact, the actions of the characters are aligned with the concept of cultural hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci to show how a social class exerts dominance over the lower classes in order to maintain the status quo.

The Headless Woman pretends to be a mystery to engage the viewer’s attention only to deliver a character study and a social exposé. It illustrates and dramatizes how a social class conspires in order to maintain their grip on wealth and power and how they exercise their privileges in order to protect their own and maintain the status quo. The resolution to the mystery is unimportant because The Headless Woman assumes the perspective of the ruling class for whom the life of a low-class person, a chango, does not have the same value as that of a member of the ruling class. For them, boys like Aldo, Changila, and the one who goes from house to house offering car washes are anonymous and easily replaceable. They might as well be ghosts. Only his friends utter the boy’s name. Only Candita’s friend and the man who runs the nursery acknowledge the 100

suffering of the family of the dead boy.

Reviews of The Headless Woman often reference Michelangelo Antonioni and several of his films from the 1960s that use the materials of the mystery thriller without delivering the payoff. The ironic title of the first one of these,

L’Avventura, seems to take pleasure in “cheating” the audience by not providing

the eventful and exciting movie the title promises. The booing of that film during

its Cannes premiere is legendary. I am sure some viewers also feel cheated by

The Headless Woman. My hope is that the majority will conclude that what they

get in exchange for genre pleasures is something much more meaningful and

enduring. Another valid reason to reference Antonioni in discussions of The

Headless Woman is that some characters played by Monica Vitti in Antonioni

films share certain traits with Vero. The use of this kind of critical shorthand is

useful as far as giving prospective viewers a quick idea of the film in store.

However, I worry about its potential to deny the newcomer her uniqueness and

rob her films of their specificity by placing them into a category. 101

What is most specific and most local about The Headless Woman is its

political subtext. I have omitted to mention a crucial detail in the closing scene.

Within the filmography of an auteur who does not utilize music scores and rarely uses non-diegetic music, it is unique that the social gathering that closes The

Headless Woman is accompanied by Demis Rousseau’s “Mamy Blue”. The use of this song “at this juncture has the shivery effect of a cold coin pressed to the nape of the neck.”38 Like the song playing on Vero’s car radio during the

accident, it is a banal, escapist, easy-listening hit tune from the 1970s. The

anachronistic use of these songs in a film set in the present connects this

generation of upper-class men and women with their 1970s counterparts. This

story about a boy who disappears mysteriously evokes the fate of the

desaparecidos, the thousands of young people arrested by the right-wing dictatorship that governed Argentina in the 1970s. Years later, it was revealed that they were thrown into the Atlantic ocean from airplanes or buried clandestinely. Those in the upper class who were not directly implicated in the

conduct of the government chose to enjoy their pleasures and privileges while

turning a blind eye on the atrocities. The potential that Vero threw Aldo in the

canal with her car and the possibility that Vero could have offered assistance to,

perhaps, save his life but chose not to even get out to look , create strong cross-

generational parallels. The finding of something sinister buried in Vero’s

backyard and the anachronistic use of popular music reinforce the impression

that Martel indictment of, basically, her cohorts is particularly piercing. It is not

devoid of compassion, nonetheless. There are no real villains in Martel’s films. 102

Witness the empathy with which the camera seems to regard Vero’s troubled,

teary eyed expression in the penultimate scene. This multi-faceted attitude is

perfectly reflected in the following comment by the director:

This woman is going to carry this on her back like a corpse, like a bag of bones, forever. In Argentina, I see people who still carry the weight of the really bad stuff that they did not denounce back when it happened under the dictatorship. And now the same process is occurring, but it’s in relation to poverty. What we try not to see is that the entire legal system, health system, and education system are structured by social class. The same mechanism that we used in the past to ignore the suffering of others is still very present today.39

The fact that the films of Lucrecia Martel depict the particularities of life

in Salta, far from the metropolises where her films are exhibited, and that they are inspired by the director’s formative, subjective memories of living there during the 1970s and 1980s, do not keep the films from having contemporary relevance and from addressing themes of universal importance. Amy Taubin’s final analysis of her evolving, personal reaction to The Headless Woman over the course of several viewings is illustrative:

If, however, we resist Martel’s invitation to identify, it is not simply because Vero is an unlikeable character or that we are ignorant of Argentine society. Rather, it is that we are all, to one degree or another, headless women. I would not leave a dog or a child to die alone in the road, but the suffering I turn my back on every day is beyond measure.40 When I reviewed The Headless Woman last spring on the occasion of

its Miami Film Festival screening, I called it Martel’s “political move.” The

film bracingly lays bare the mechanisms by which the rich exercise their 103

political power. And yet, there is such grounding on the specifics of daily living as perceived subjectively that the film is no less personal and intimate than The Swamp and The Holy Girl.

The main characters in the films of the Salta trilogy are constantly engaged in a perpetual and imperfect process of self-definition. Martel’s sensualist films underscore that the building blocks of cognition is what the senses perceive. Each film includes examples of the effect of what a character sees, hears, smells or touches on self-definition and behavior.

They reflect a conceptualization of identity as dynamic and fragmented.

This is quite apparent when applied to adolescent characters like Momi,

Amalia and Josefina, who are living their so-called formative years.

However, it is just as germane to the adult characters. The Swamp’s

Mecha fights against the isolative living that is her mother’s legacy and

Tali aspires to redefine her marital role and establish her agency. The

Holy Girl’s Helena is existentially destabilized by the imminence of her ex- husband forming a new family and Dr. Jano is tormented by the need to integrate contradictory aspects of his personality. The fragility of our concept of self is forcefully dramatized in The Headless Woman, in which an accident causes the protagonist to experience a severe dissociative syndrome. She gradually endeavors to gather identifying fragments of her past but her resulting sense of self is marked by the trauma she experiences during the film’s diegesis. 104

The Headless Woman reasserts and amplifies the lessons of the previous two films of the trilogy. It underscores the need to recognize and acknowledge the full humanity of all others and take responsibility for our actions and omissions. This humanist perspective is exemplified in the way the films of the Salta trilogy develop the characterizations of Dr. Jano and Vero, their most reprehensible protagonists. The Holy Girl’s titular heroine serves as a model of the most progressive and beneficial reaction to Jano’s aberrant, anti-social behavior. The Headless Woman pauses twice to acknowledge Vero’s grief and despair. Additionally, the films believe in the human capacity for transformation and redemption. Both

Jano and Vero are shown taking steps towards more enlightened identities.

However, the films of Lucrecia Martel avoid didacticism. The process of production of meaning can only be achieved with the active participation of the viewer. The lack of orientation signposts alerts the viewer to this requirement. Moreover, the films refuse to prognosticate a future for the characters. There are only hints or suggestions as to whether they will practice what they have learned during the time of their lives depicted in the narratives. The suspended endings of the films make it imperative for them to achieve proper closure in the mind of the viewer.

I hope my thesis has shed light on the formal qualities of the films of

Lucrecia Martel; how they manage to manipulate everyday reality into strange and beautiful images and sounds. But these are merely the 105

means of expression, no matter how masterful their employment. The basic reason why these works will endure as most excellent examples of the art of film is because each film in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy provides deep insights into the conditions of living in this world as human beings. Moreover, each film proposes or, rather, suggests prescriptions for living a better life; ways of being more fully human present within the films yet needing to be inferred by the spectator. It is a distinct pleasure to call attention to the Salta trilogy of Lucrecia Martel via this effort to enhance and increase my understanding and enjoyment of the films, and hopefully also yours.

REFERENCES

CHAPTER ONE

1Gowland, María and Avruj, Nicolás, directors. The Making of La Niña Santa.(Lita Stantic Producciones, 2004). 2Ibid. 3Ibid. 4Jones, Kent. “In the Thick of It”. Film Comment. Volume 41, Issue 2.

March/April 2005. 22.

5Quintín, “From One Generation to Another: Is There a Dividing Line?,

Bernades, et al., New Argentine Cinema (Fipresci, Argentina, 2002) 116.

6Aguilar, Gonzalo. Other Worlds: New Argentina Cinema. (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008).84. 7Maranghello, Cesar. Breve Historia Del Cine Argentino (Barcelona, Laertes S.A., 2005). 258. 8Oubiña,David. Estudio Critico sobre La Cienaga (Buenos Aires, Picnic Editorial, 2007). 66. 9Oubiña 65.

CHAPTER TWO

10 In their essay “Vibraciones encarnadas en La Niña Santa de Lucrecia Martel”, Eva-Lynn Jagoe and John Cant use the term “sound from a secondary diegetic space.” I chose not to adopt the term because I think it is problematic to characterize any diegetic space in Martel’s films as being secondary. 11Luciano Monteagudo, “Lucrecia Martel: Whispers at Siesta Time”, Bernades, et al., New Argentine Cinema (Fipresci, Argentina 2002), 69.

106 107

12B. Ruby Rich, “Making Argentina Matter Again,” New York Times, 30 September 2001. 13Martel, Lucrecia. The Swamp DVD. (Homevision Entertainment, 2005) 14David Oubiña, Estudio Critico sobre La Cienaga (Buenos Aires, Picnic Editorial, 2007), 57. 15Garcia, Jorge and Rojas, Eduardo. “Desbordes del Deseo,” (El Amante, Issue 145, 2004) 13. 16Ibid.14.

CHAPTER THREE

17Avila, Teresa de. The Life of Teresa de Avila, 29:17. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/life.viii.xxx.html 18Jones, Kent. Film Comment. New York: Mar/Apr 2005. Vol. 41, Issue 2. 22.

19James, Nick. “Carnal Knowledge”, Sight & Sound. Ns15 No.2, 2005.20 20Ibid. 21Lerer, Diego. “Lobo Suelto, Cordero Atado”. El Clarín. Buenos Aires, Argentina. July 17th, 2003. http://www.clarin.com/diario/2003/07/17/c-00811.htm 22There is a precedent for this transgression in Martel’s filmography. In Rey Muerto, there is a mention of a TV woman getting pinched while engaged in live reporting. 23Aguilar, Gonzalo. Other Worlds: New Argentina Cinema. (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008).87. 24Jagoe, Eva-Lynn and Cant, John. “Vibraciones Encarnadas en La Niña Santa de Lucrecia Martel”.El Cine Argentino de Hoy: Entre el Arte y la Politica.Editorial Biblos. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007.180. 25One would think that that this role would serve as a launching pad to a substantial acting career for Calle. Yet, after The Holy Girl, she has only managed to be get substandard work. I wonder if the helmer’s gargantuan reputation is a hindrance. The performance might be seen as mostly coaxed and molded by Martel rather than indicative of Calle’s innate talent. Julieta Zylberberg, who is quite good in the admittedly less challenging role of Josefina, has suffered the same fate. Until recently that is, when she was cast as the protagonist of the new film by Diego Lerman (Suddenly, Meanwhile).

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26Perhaps it is illustrative of Argentina’s regional differences in terms of social mores that Martel was not able to cast girls from Salta in the roles of Amalia, Josefina and her sister. Martel explained that their parents would not allow it, so she had to cast “porteñas” (girls from the more liberal coastal cities of Buenos Aires and Mar de Plata). 27The English subtitles change the word pair to “kiss-hiss” because of the aural disparity between “kiss” and “prayer” but the thematic subtext is lost. 28It is Josefina who initiates the kiss. She is often referred by the diminutive of her name: Jose, a typically male name. I think Martel regards all human beings as having traditionally masculine and feminine attributes. And that Josefina exhibits a degree of masculinity. I do not think we are meant to regard this kiss in relation to the sexual orientation of the girls. Martel probably considers sexuality and sexual orientation as a very fluid concept, particularly when the subjects are adolescents. This comment would also apply to The Swamp’s Momi and to The Headless Woman’s Candita, who appear to desire other female characters. 29Page, Joanna. “Espacio Privado y Significación Política en el Cine de Lucrecia Martel”. El Cine Argentino de Hoy: Entre el Arte y la Politica.Editorial Biblos. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007.164. 30Jagoe, Eva-Lynn and Cant, John. “Vibraciones Encarnadas en La Niña Santa de Lucrecia Martel”.El Cine Argentino de Hoy: Entre el Arte y la Politica.Editorial Biblos. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007.170.

CHAPTER FOUR

31In a recent essay published in Film Comment magazine, Amy Taubin interprets the shot as a metaphorical indication that The Headless Woman is “a film about willful blindness.” My more concrete interpretation regarded the shot as a characterization of these women as a bit shallow and frivolous. 32That it is a dog that looks exactly like Aldo’s German shepherd is clear to those who watch the film in a theater or a very large television set. Those viewing the film on a standard set may have doubts. 33 It is odd because our views confirm that if her head made contact with anything at all during the accident it would have to be the left side of her head that did. Indeed, in the scene in the bathroom of the hospital, there are views of Vero with the bandage only on the left temple and one with the bandage on the right one. I think it is a continuity error but I am not sure. A few minutes later, in a hotel cafeteria, she removes the little bandage from her right temple. 34http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/a_woman_under_the_influence.php

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35 Taubin, Amy. “Identification of a Woman”. Film Comment. (July-August 2009).21-22. 36 Martel tends to downplay the significance of relatives sharing beds, flirting, and even having sex. In her view, this libidinous energy that cannot be contained by social norms and religious dogma is essentially positive. The almost erotic affection bestowed on Vero by niece Candita is treated as an afterthought. 37 In the region, the word means boy but it is only applied to young men of indigenous descent. The Changos are a South American native tribe. The fact that Martel’s script calls for this word rather than muchacho is clearly meant to emphasize that the boy is of a different race than these customers. The word is also used as an adjective meaning “unskilled” or “dumb”, which is indicative of a racist use of language. 38Quandt, James. “Art of Fugue”. Artforum. (New York: Summer 2009. Vol. 47, Iss. 10). 95 39 http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ja09/martel.htm 40Taubin, Amy. “Identification of a Woman”. Film Comment. (July-August 2009)