View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Cork Open Research Archive Title No place like home: trauma and the moral subject in contemporary Argentine cinema Author(s) Clancy, Fiona Publication date 2017 Original citation Clancy, F. 2017. No place like home: trauma and the moral subject in contemporary Argentine cinema. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Rights © 2017, Fiona Clancy. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Embargo information Not applicable Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/6820 from Downloaded on 2018-09-21T13:41:37Z NO PLACE LIKE HOME: TRAUMA AND THE MORAL SUBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE CINEMA THESIS PRESENTED BY FIONA CLANCY, BA, HDIP (ARTS), MRES FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK, IRELAND DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH, PORTUGUESE AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES JANUARY 2017 HEAD OF DEPARTMENT: PROFESSOR NUALA FINNEGAN SUPERVISORS: DR CARA LEVEY AND PROFESSOR NUALA FINNEGAN Declaration This is to certify that the work I am submitting is my own and has not been submitted for another degree, either at University College Cork or elsewhere. All external references and sources are clearly acknowledged and identified within the contents. I have read and understood the regulations of University College Cork concerning plagiarism. Signed…………………………………………………………………… 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4 INTRODUCTION Beyond New Argentine Cinema: Placing Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero in Context 6 CHAPTER ONE Blurred Boundaries: Towards a New Understanding of Trauma 34 CHAPTER TWO Written in the Body: Violence, Silence and Contagion in Albertina Carri’s La rabia 82 CHAPTER THREE Motherhood in Crisis in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy 114 CHAPTER FOUR Flesh and Blood in the Globalized Age: Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado and Carancho 140 CONCLUSION 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY 172 FILMOGRAPHY 185 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis was completed with the support, kindness and guidance of a number of people. First and foremost, I am indebted to my supervisor Cara Levey for her advice, time and encouragement throughout all of the funding applications, publication submissions, drafting and writing of the thesis, and planning the research visit to Argentina. I am also most grateful to Helena Buffery for her enthusiasm, encouragement and assistance, particularly in the final stages of the thesis, and to Nuala Finnegan for her support and advice throughout my studies and teaching. Special thanks also to all of the staff and my fellow postgraduate students, past and present, in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork for their support and friendship, in particular Donna Maria Alexander, Elisa Serra Porteiro, Cian Warfield, Pedro Fernández, Craig Neville and Emer Clifford. I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at UCC, who awarded me a PhD scholarship for the first year of my doctoral studies. I am also grateful for their funding support, which enabled me to attend the Argentine Film Festival in London in August 2016 and the conference “Me, Myself and Others: A Cinematic Approach to Latin American Encounters” at the University of Leicester in October 2014. I am grateful to the Irish Research Council for generously funding my research since 2014, which also enabled me to travel to Buenos Aires in April 2017 to attend the BAFICI film festival. Versions of the chapters of this thesis have been published elsewhere. An earlier version of Chapter Three, “Motherhood in Crisis in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy”, was published by Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Issue 10, Winter 2015. A previous draft of Chapter Four, “Flesh and Blood in the Globalized Age: Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (Born and Bred) and Carancho (The Vulture)”, was published in Scars and Wounds: Film and Legacies of Trauma, Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar. Eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 4 2016. I would like to thank Amit Thakkar, Nick Hodgin, Abigail Keating and the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments on both of these chapters. Special thanks to Mette Lebech (NUI Maynooth) for giving up her time to read Chapter One of the thesis, meeting with me, and offering her expert advice on how Edith Stein’s theory might best be applied to my work. I am also grateful to Álvaro Fernández Bravo (Universidad de San Andrés) for his time during his visit to UCC in 2014 and his helpful advice and encouragement on my work. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother, Kim Clancy, for her generosity, patience and support throughout my studies and always, and to my family and friends for their encouragement, especially my sister Siobhan Mhic Craith, John Hegarty, Geraldine Heffernan for her companionship in Buenos Aires, Mary Rafferty Clancy and Miriam Walsh. Finally, I would also like to thank Aishling O’Connor at Dungarvan Enterprise Centre for kindly providing me with a space in which to work during the final stages of writing. I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my father, Liam Clancy, who always encouraged me to write, and to my son, Finn Hegarty. 5 INTRODUCTION Beyond New Argentine Cinema: Placing Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero in Context This thesis investigates the representation of trauma in a group of Argentine films – by Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero – produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century, during a new wave of Argentine cinema that began in the mid-1990s. This in-depth exploration builds on extant criticism of these films, which tends to focus on the broader (socio-)political contexts. Although these readings are pertinent, given Argentina’s history of dictatorship and political violence, particularly in the 1970s, and the hardening of neoliberalization and associated crisis in the 1990s and early 2000s, this thesis argues that the kinds of allegorical readings that have previously been favoured in post-dictatorship cinema are insufficient. Placing six recent Argentine films in comparative perspective, the thesis establishes an original framework for exploring trauma, offering a nuanced approach to the myriad ways in which trauma is presented in cinematic production. Indeed, each film was chosen for this study precisely because of the way it powerfully captures, in different ways, the complex dynamics of physical and psychological trauma, and demonstrates that trauma is more than a psychic phenomenon or a physical wound – it is also a social construct. In them, shocking events, such as brutal sexual violence and car crashes, implicate not only the body and psyche, but profound moral dilemmas and ethical complexities. A mute, autistic child, who witnesses her mother engaging in acts of sexual depravity and violence, can only process her horror through somatic symptoms and non-verbal self-expression in Albertina Carri’s La rabia (2008). The shock of a car accident shakes a woman out of the comfort of all that she knows in Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza (2008), and sends a father to the literal ends of the earth, the frozen wastelands of Patagonia, in search of his identity in Pablo Trapero’s Nacido y criado (2006). Such shocks are multiple in Trapero’s Carancho (2010), in which car crashes function as a form of currency for a society that feeds on flesh and blood. The way trauma inhabits the interstices between physical and psychological, individual and collective, and 6 private and public in these films makes clear that a new, more inclusive framework is needed for understanding the nuances of these multifarious representations of trauma. Therefore my analysis seeks to interrogate how trauma is transmitted from body to body at the level of biochemistry and neurological systems. Indeed, it is not only evident that conceptions of trauma that insist on its unrepresentability need revising in order to read these films; they also reveal much about how trauma affects the interconnections between seemingly discrete phenomena. Thus, they point to structure, not only of the individual body and psyche, but one that must incorporate analysis of the broader global surroundings and environment. In applying a structural approach to trauma to the work of these three directors, whose films all engage with permutations of trauma in distinct ways, this thesis also moves away from the typically post-Holocaust notion of trauma as ‘unrepresentable’ (Luckhurst 2008: 5), which calls to mind the impossibility of cultural representation. 1 Although the representation of trauma in the selected corpus of films is complex and problematic, all three directors approach trauma through diverse cinematic and thematic strategies. When thinking about trauma, it is helpful to turn to the term’s opposite, or antithesis, as a starting point; several images can be viewed as antithetical to trauma. Psychological terms that relate to mental health, or more abstract ideas, such as ‘wellbeing’ or ‘wholeness’, perhaps come to mind, but none of these is sufficiently nuanced. In contemplating this thesis I have sought a philosophical category or tangible metaphor that most fully captures the condition, or mode of being, that is the antithesis of trauma presented in these films. That metaphor is ‘home’. ‘To be at home means to be embedded in a dense pattern of relationships to people and place which gives rise to an inherently meaningful experience of the world’, Paul O’Connor writes (2016: 1).2 In these films, trauma is not merely a psychological condition, nor a physiological condition – although this thesis asserts that it is both these things – nor even a social or political condition. It is homelessness. To be fully ‘at home’ in one’s own skin, body, mind, in the house where one lives, one’s family, one’s country – that is the antithesis of trauma as 1 Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited dictum that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1981: 34) perhaps best exemplifies this standpoint.