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LUCRECIA MARTEL’S LA MUJER SIN CABEZA:

CINEMATIC FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE,
NOISE-SCAPE AND THE DISTRACTION
OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

MATT LOSADA
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IN the period between the first Perón presidency and the last military dic-
tatorship (1955 to 1976), Argentine political opposition privileged the pro-
tagonism of the popular masses over that of the intellectual as agent of
social change. But the intended audience of opposition cinema – such as
that of the Grupo Cine Liberación – was often what populist historical
revisionism referred to as the intelligentsia, the middle-class intellectual it
intended to inspire to commitment to the mobilization of the masses. As
Fernando “Pino” Solanas, co-maker of La hora de los hornos (1968), said
in a 1969 interview, his work addressed “the imperious necessity for the
militant intelligentsia to root itself in Argentine reality and to contribute to
the process of internal liberation of the movement of the masses.”1
In the years since the politically polarized 1960s, the military dicta-
torship’s repression and the ensuing imposition of neoliberal economic
policy – which produced the illusory boom in the 1990s under president

1
Quoted by Pick (59), from “Cinema as a Gun: An Interview with Fernando
Solanas,” an interview that originally appeared in Cineaste in 1969. In Solanas and
Getino’s manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” they wrote that “the intellectual…must
become increasingly radicalized to avoid denial of self and to carry out what is expected
of him in our times” (50). This radicalization is needed to combat the usual role of the
middle classes, which they describe: “The middle sectors were and are the best recipients
of cultural neocolonialism. Their ambivalent class condition, their buffer position
between social polarities, and their broader possibilities of access to civilization offer
imperialism a base of social support which has attained considerable importance in some
Latin American countries” (48).

307
308 ROMANCE NOTES

Carlos Menem – have fragmented the collective struggle and destroyed

the “militant intelligentsia,” rendering more current (or “modern”) the
individual struggle for prosperity. Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza
illustrates the predicament of an Argentine opposition politics that has
largely lost the middle class, by demonstrating the functioning of the
mechanisms that depoliticize and prevent individuals from acting in soli-
darity with the concerns of other, more exploited sectors of society.
Martel is one the central figures in the decade-old rebirth of inde-
pendent Argentine cinema known as the Nuevo Cine Argentino, film-
makers who in the 1990s began to explore alternative funding strategies
that later made it possible to produce non-industrial films that engaged
with national realities, often through formal experimentation. Her first
contribution, the 1995 short Rey muerto, was followed by La cienaga
(2001) and La niña santa (2004), both of which brought to light class
and gender tensions while avoiding the didacticism that for many con-
temporary viewers often lessens more explicitly political Argentine
films.
La mujer sin cabeza is Martel’s third feature film, released in cine-
ma in Argentina and elsewhere in 2008. Like her previous features, it is
set in the highly stratified society of the provincial Argentine city of
Salta. Where it differs from Martel’s earlier features however, is in its
subjective narration: the extent of the information provided to the view-
er is restricted to that known to the protagonist, whose psychological
perturbations are made visible in the image and sound through the use
of what Pier Paolo Pasolini named cinematic free indirect discourse, in
which, analogous to its literary equivalent, the filmmakers’ stylistic
decisions are based on his or her immersion in the mind of a character.
In the resulting variation from cinema’s “objective” formal norms the
protagonist’s subjectivity is expressed even when she is seen in the
frame, a strategy that allows Martel to explore throughout the film (not
just in point-of-view shots of states such as hallucinations, dreams or
fantasies) a psychological crisis of a privileged inhabitant of a lingering
neocolonial order that naturalizes a social hierarchy based on skin-tone
and accent.
Pasolini’s theorization of cinematic free indirect discourse demon-
strated a clear preoccupation with the effects that one’s social class has
on the way they perceive the world:
 LUCRECIA MARTEL’S LA MUJER SIN CABEZA 309

the ‘gaze’ of a peasant, perhaps even of an entire town or region in prehistoric conditions
of underdevelopment, embraces another type of reality than the gaze given to that same
reality by an educated bourgeois. Not only do the two actually see different sets of things,
but even a single thing in itself appears different through the two different ‘gazes.’ (177)

Where Pasolini privileged the subjectivity of the peasantry and the

society-changing possibilities inherent to it, Martel’s film explores how
a middle-class gaze, instead of catalyzing social change like the militant
intelligentsia audience coveted by Solanas, contributes to the conserva-
tion of the status quo. By placing a bourgeoise in crisis she is able to
explore a perturbed gaze that defamiliarizes the decadent, neocolonial
order of her world, while exposing the temporary breakdown, and even-
tual efficacy, of the mechanisms of forgetting that make possible an
oblivious but bearably guilt-free existence and the defusion of the sub-
ject’s potentiality as critic of the status quo and agent of change of the
type seen as an “imperious necessity” by Solanas.
In the Argentine case the theme of guilt and its denial belongs to dis-
courses both old and new, from the 19th through the 21st-century, in suc-
cessive updatings of the nation’s foundational “civilization and bar-
barism” opposition, which enabled a willful ignorance of abuses
committed against the indigenous other. Thus Martel’s film could be
read as a critique of attempts, born in the writings of the national
próceres, especially Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 book Facun-
do: Civilización y Barbarie, to naturalize the disregard for “barbarie”
and the dehumanization of its inhabitants. In Vero’s world, accent and
skin-tone signify difference between classes that cohabitate in inequali-
ty, a “natural” injustice built into the system. Dark skin marks one as
maid or laborer, light skin as one who gives orders.
The film foregrounds these themes formally, with the elements of
the mise-en-scène carefully managed to produce visceral reactions. The
narration focuses on Vero, and the image reflects her psychology, but it
is in the film’s use of sound – specifically the variations from an “objec-
tive” norm – where Martel is particularly effective in demonstrating the
crisis suffered by the protagonist and the mechanism by which she is
reassured back to normalcy. While the notion of an extrinsic stylistic
norm in today’s cinema is problematic, in Martel’s film an intrinsic
norm is quite easy to identify, since there is a clear moment of trauma
that triggers the crisis suffered by the protagonist, separating a “before”
310 ROMANCE NOTES

from an “after,” marked in the film by a cut to a black screen upon

which the title of the film appears.
The “before” is pre-crisis bourgeois normalcy. In these opening
eight minutes or so the narration is fairly objective and omniscient. In
the first sequence three young, dark-skinned boys run along a country
road and a canal, and in the second, several lighter-skinned middle-class
women are dropping off their children, probably at school. Relative to
the rest of the film, in these sequences the story information provided is
not as restricted to that known to the protagonist, and the narration does
not explore subjective psychological depth. The images are fairly con-
ventional, as is the sound, the sources of which are easily identifiable in
the diegesis, but then comes the trauma.
While Vero, a white, provincial middle-class dentist, is driving along
a rural road, she hits something or someone, a dog or a dark-skinned
child – neither she nor the viewer can be sure – but doesn’t stop to find
out what it is. This sin of omission results in her disconnection from the
quotidian stimuli of her comfortably bourgeois existence. This turning-
point, marked by the cut to black and the title card reading “La mujer
sin cabeza,” marks the profound alteration of Vero’s subjectivity and,
consequently, of the stylistic norms of the film. The disconnect pulls
back the veil of illusion that seems to have enabled her to exist in com-
fortable ignorance of the abundant hypocrisies of her class. Disoriented,
Vero drifts through her days on auto-pilot, as caring friends, family and
generous strangers try their best to reassure her back into normalcy, lay-
ing bare for the viewer the device of denial. For both her and the viewer
the guilt of privilege has passed into the world of phenomena, defying
the efforts of other characters to reassure it away, and the crisis-driven
defamiliarization of her reality motivates the film’s visual and sound
design from this point on.
The widescreen image is often divided through precise framing and
a shallow focus to leave parts of the image illegible, fleshed out by dis-
concerting sounds, often acousmatic – as Michel Chion calls those
sounds that the viewer hears without seeing their source – that come
from the illegible or offscreen spaces.2 Sometimes these seem momen-

2
Chion defines acousmatic: “Acousmatic sound is that which one hears without see-
ing its source. This is in principle the case in media such as the telephone and the radio,
but also occurs often in the cinema, the television, etc….and of course in everyday
 LUCRECIA MARTEL’S LA MUJER SIN CABEZA 311

tarily to be internal to Vero’s mind, but then a source usually appears in

the frame after a few seconds. At other moments sound bridges between
sequences cause certain sounds from one diegetic space to appear in
another, when the cut between sequences comes earlier in the sound
track than in the image track, disorienting the viewer until the new
image containing the source of the sound appears and matches up to the
audio. These techniques create short-lived illusions of extradiegetic or
internal (to Vero’s mind) sound, but end up reinforcing the film’s intrin-
sic norm under which all sound can be attributed to a source within the
diegesis and exterior to the protagonist’s mind.
Having established this norm, Martel uses Vero’s perturbation to cre-
ate a zone of subjective undecidability in what could be called a free
indirect noise-scape. The abundance of intensified acousmatic sounds –
continuous deep roars or hums that emanate from off-screen space, punc-
tuated by beepers, buzzers, sirens, alarms, and other noises – is Martel’s
most effective tool for exposing the mechanism by which the subject is
brought back from a potentially productive crisis into the middle-class
comfort zone. The noise-scape is formed by acousmatic sounds that form
an ambient noise, and the free indirect aspect comes into play in the dis-
tortions in volume, pitch and timbre that correspond to the protagonist’s
ever-changing psychological condition: when she is experiencing
moments of crisis these sharpen, but when she is reassured by friends or
family or simply distracted, they fade into the degree zero of background
murmur that filmmakers call “room tone.” To demonstrate this function-
ing I will discuss two specific instances of this use of noise-scape.
The most notable episode happens when Vero makes love with her
cousin. As the two characters enter a hotel room a continuous, unidenti-
fiable hollow urban roar, like a subway passing underground, is heard,
along with other muffled noises coming from the off-screen space. This
noise, which might otherwise blend into the background, is sharpened
well beyond mere room tone, but when Vero initiates physical contact
and they begin to make love, the sounds begin to diminish and soon dis-
appear. The momentary distraction from psychological crisis provided
by the extramarital incest does not last long however. Immediately after

acoustic situations in which a sound reaches us without the cause being visible: from
behind us, behind a wall, in the fog, or a tree – a hidden bird – etc.” (translation mine, n.
pag.).
312 ROMANCE NOTES

the act a cell phone rings and the invasive noise-scape returns, indicat-
ing the return of Vero’s psychological crisis. This is a typical instance
that shows how people or events distract her from her crisis at other
moments in the film, so I will jump to the last sequence, which displays
the eventual efficacy of the mechanisms that restore the bourgeois gaze
to its non-critical, complacent condition.
In the final sequence, after the passage of time and various events
permit Vero to begin forgetting – she has changed her hair color, her
husband has fixed the dent in the car made by whatever she hit, the
police have concluded that a boy found in the canal near the scene of the
accident had not been killed by a car, but had instead drowned – the
“juntada” (or “get-together”) announced earlier in the film takes place.
Seen through the glass doors of the restaurant in which they meet, which
soften the sharp edges of Vero’s post-accident world, a caring group of
family and friends gathers to comfort her. They engage her in conversa-
tion, replacing the unnerving noise-scape with happy chatter. In one of
the few instances in the film, music is heard that is not from its Salta
setting. This decontextualized pop music, free of all connection to and
reminders of Vero’s own world, further drowns out the noise-scape, and
it appears that the comfort offered by her friends and family has pulled
Vero back from the precipice and allowed for a “happy” ending, at least
on an individual level. But from a less-individual, more collective view,
this represents the restoration of a politically-nullified subject, relieved
of the guilt that might have awakened a political conscience and poten-
tialized Vero as an agent of change.
To conclude, in La mujer sin cabeza, Lucrecia Martel employs a free
indirect noise-scape to represent the subjective crises of her protagonist,
and to thus call attention to a comforting, but depoliticizing and thus
injustice-perpetuating, mechanism that facilitates a willful oblivion.
This forgetting defuses the potentially change-producing crises pro-
duced by the same injustices that it conserves. At the same time, the film
illustrates a predicament of politically-inclined filmmaking at present. It
is no secret that pleasure is the fuel that runs commercial cinema, but
since psychological crisis and the ugly truths it reveals are seldom
sources of pleasure, Martel’s particular use of formal means to indict
reassuring illusions has resulted in commercial limitations. Despite great
critical appreciation, her film enjoyed limited public appeal in Argenti-
na. Opening in Buenos Aires during the long run of the light comedy
 LUCRECIA MARTEL’S LA MUJER SIN CABEZA 313

blockbuster Un novio para mi mujer (Juan Taratuto, 2008), in many the-

aters La mujer sin cabeza did not bring in enough public to stay on
screen beyond the first week, an unsurprising, but telling fact about the
current relationship between culture and politics in Argentina.

SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY

WORKS CITED

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision et acoulogie. Web. 15 Jan. 2010.

La mujer sin cabeza. Dir. Lucrecia Martel. El Deseo. 2008. DVD.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “The ‘Cinema of Poetry.’” Heretical Empiricism. Trans. Ben Law-
ton and Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005.
Pick, Zuzana. The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project. Austin: Universi-
ty of Texas, 1993.
Sarmiento, Domingo F. Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie. Buenos Aires: Edicol, 2006.
Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. “Towards a Third Cinema.” Movies and Methods,
Volume 1. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.