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Sticky matter: the persistence of
..
..
..
..
..
..
animals as allegory in Lucrecia
..
..
...
..
..
Martel’s La Ciénaga and
..
..
..
..
..
..
La Mujer sin Cabeza
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. SARAH O’BRIEN
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
.. In the films of the Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, more and less
..
..
.. transgressive attachments germinate in mundane spaces and gradually
..
.. accrete into something of a narrative force. The interiors oscillate
..
..
.. between semi-public and private, confining and liberatory – twilit hotel
..
..
..
.. suites, well-worn luxury cars, narrow swimming pools – while the
..
..
.. characters’ familial, romantic and working attachments approach, but
..
..
...
rarely realize, consummation, conflict and rupture. The larger setting is
..
..
..
the northwestern province of Salta, which hangs below the Bolivian
..
..
..
border and is mostly known for its farms and the dissipated upper-class
..
.. families who retain a tenuous control over the region’s agricultural
..
.. industry. The weight of place is such that Martel’s first three feature films
..
..
1 At the time of writing, Martel’s ..
.. are often referred to as her ‘Salta trilogy’.1 No other explicit narrative ties
..
fourth film, Zama [2017], a ..
.. connect La Ciénaga/The Swamp (2001), La Ni~na Santa/The Holy Girl
historical epic adapted from ..
Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel
..
.. (2004) and La Mujer sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008); they are,
..
and set in an unspecified Latin ..
...
rather, deftly bound together by repetitions and doublings that, while
American country at the end of the ..
..
..
diffuse, secure them firmly in this place and this moment.
eighteenth century, had just ..
premiered in Argentina and at ..
..
The Salta trilogy is pervaded by a sustained, if often oblique, critique
..
international film festivals, .. of class, race and gender inequalities – asymmetries which intersect with
..
.. Argentina’s particular post-dictatorship politics of memory and
..
..
.. forgetting. Martel only infrequently gestures to the broader sociopolitical
..
..
.. context in and beyond the films’ insular world, yet these rare openings

458 Screen 58:4 Winter 2017

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 ...
2 Pedro Lange-Churión, ‘The Salta ..
..
initiate a potent critique of the country’s abiding patterns of stagnation
trilogy: the civilised barbarism in ..
..
..
and repression. In the growing scholarship on her work, this submerged
Lucrecia Martel’s films’, ..
Contemporary Theatre Review, .. politics proves to be one of the defining stamps of her auteurism. Critics
..
..
vol. 22, no. 4 (2012), p. 469. .. point, in particular, to the ways in which Martel lays bare and unsettles
..
3 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’, .. the historically entrenched binary of ‘civilized’ upper-class whites and
..
BOMB: Artists in Conversation, ..
.. ‘barbaric’ indigenous peoples. Pedro Lange-Churión, for example,
October 2009, <http:// ..
..
bombmagazine.org/article/3220/ ..
.. observes that her films ‘subtly deconstruct’ this binary by various means:
..
lucrecia-martel> accessed .. displacing the narrative loci from the centre (Buenos Aires) to the
..
3 October 2017. ...
4 For a thorough analysis of the
..
..
periphery (Salta); inverting the conventional focus on male protagonists,
..
political and economic contexts of ..
..
casting men as, at most, foils to the female characters; and opting out of
Martel’s work and New Argentine ..
.. all narrative conventions that privilege linearity, momentum and
Cinema more broadly, see Joanna ..
..
Page, Crisis and Capitalism in .. coherence. Of this last move, Lange-Churión writes,
..
..
Contemporary Argentine Cinema ..
(Durham, NC: Duke University
..
..
the classical plot akin to the paradigmatic Hollywood classical cinema
..
Press, 2009). ..
..
is disrupted in favour of stories that seem to weave themselves out of a
5 The same may be said of the lag ..
..
..
syncopation of gestures, moods, repeated motifs, incomplete and
in attention that animal studies (or ..
human–animal studies) has ... almost spasmodic dialogues, parallel framing and [an] incredibly
..
received in other Latin American ..
.. eloquent aural registry.2
..
fields, such as history. Zeb ..
..
Tortorici and Martha Few observe ..
..
Lange-Churión’s term ‘syncopation’ aptly describes how sound, image
this lag or lack in their introduction ..
.. and narrative operate symbiotically in Martel’s films by way of elision,
to a volume intended to ..
.. displacement and irregularly placed accents. Martel, meanwhile, avers of
‘counteract the relative invisibility ..
..
.. her methods, ‘there’s a way of administering information through depth
of animals in Latin American ..
..
historiography’, and assert that .. with respect to the frame, through superimposition, that allows for all of
..
devoting attention to cultural ..
histories of animals in Latin
..
.. the themes, problems or issues to be simultaneously present’.3 Without
..
America is particularly urgent, ..
...
exception, scholarship on Martel’s oeuvre focuses on these syncopations
given ‘the environmental ..
..
..
and superimpositions. Indeed this work collectively (and quite
exchanges and consequences of ..
European conquest and .. perceptively) demonstrates how these operations refract an intersectional
..
..
colonialism in Latin America, .. critique of social inequities that persist in a country troubled by the long
..
competing Mesoamerican, .. aftermath of the Dirty War, the Economic Crisis of 2001 and the
..
Andean, and other indigenous ..
conceptions of animals in the
..
.. unremitting economic turmoil attendant on neoliberalism.4 Elaborating
..
natural world, and the construction ..
.. on this scholarship, I contend here that the politically inflected work of
..
of racial, ethnic, gender, and .. syncopation and superimposition in the Salta trilogy also operates across
..
sexual hierarchies that mirrored ..
and interacted with the
..
...
species lines, and frequently in ways that complicate the comparatively
..
reconceptualization of human- ..
..
more pronounced transversals of race, class and gender dynamics.
nonhuman animal hierarchies.’ ..
..
..
Nonhuman animals repeatedly wander through – and often become
‘Introduction. Writing animal ..
histories’, in Zeb Tortorici and .. lodged inside – the films of the Salta trilogy, yet only brief attention has
..
.. been paid to their presence. While scholarship on human–animal
Martha Few (eds), Centering ..
..
Animals in Latin American History .. encounters in film has flourished in the last two decades, it has thus far
..
(Durham, NC: Duke University ..
Press, 2013), p. 5.
..
.. tended to focus on North American and European cinemas.5 Of the
..
6 Christian Gundermann, ‘The new
..
.. handful of articles devoted to animals in Latin American cinema, two
..
cinema going to the dogs? The .. commence with reference to the first and last films of Martel’s trilogy
encounter with animal otherness ...
..
in the film El Aura ’, Journal of
..
..
before turning to sustained discussions of contemporary films by other
Latin American Cultural Studies,
..
..
..
directors.6 Responding to this implication that human–animal boundaries
vol. 23, no. 1 (2014), pp. 17–31. ..
.. in Martel’s film not only matter but may even be indicative of larger
Valeria de los Rı́os, ‘Look(ing) at ..
.. patterns of meaning in the (trans)national and regional cinemas to which
the animals: the presence of the ..
..
.. they belong, in this essay I undertake close and sustained analysis of
animal in contemporary southern ..
..
cone cinema and in Carlos .. the interspecies doublings that drive The Swamp and The Headless

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Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 Busqued’s Bajo este Sol ...
..
..
Woman – specifically, the parallel editing of a slowly sinking cow and
Tremendo ’, Journal of Latin ..
American Cultural Studies,
..
..
humans in the former film, and the disorienting collision of humans and a
..
vol. 24, no. 1 (2015), pp. 33–46. .. dog in the latter. I also briefly discuss how a short sequence midway
..
..
.. through The Holy Girl works as a hinge between these two, elliptically
..
.. connecting the series’ motifs of hunting and car crashes.
..
..
.. While it is deeply attuned to form, my approach to these films ventures
..
..
..
.. into intertextual territory through comparisons to the films and short
..
..
.. stories with which they resonate more and less directly. To read Martel’s
...
7 Paul A. Schroeder Rodrı́guez, ..
..
films together, Paul A. Schroeder Rodrı́guez borrows from quantum
‘Little Red Riding Hood meets ..
..
..
mechanics the term ‘entanglement’, which ‘refers to the phenomenon
Freud in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta ..
trilogy’, Camera Obscura, vol. 87, .. whereby particles that are not physically connected across space can still
..
no. 3 (2014), p. 96.
..
.. affect one another’;7 this is possible, according to string theory, because
..
8 Ibid. .. these physically unconnected particles are part of the same string or
..
9 Or is it a bull? The animal has ..
.. wave. An analogous phenomenon links the female protagonists of
short horns, which depending on ..
..
breed may denote the male sex. ..
.. Martel’s disconnected films, Schroeder Rodrı́guez observes, with the
..
In keeping with the film’s .. string being ‘the protagonists’ condition as privileged, intelligent and
..
association between the sinking ...
matriarch and stranded animal, I
..
..
desiring women in patriarchy; and the particles [being] events and
stick here with female gendering.
..
..
..
situations connected noncausally across films in the trilogy’.8 My reading
The presence of the animal is ..
..
..
extends the bounds of this entanglement to include both nonhuman
explained by the fact that feral ..
cattle roam the region, perhaps a .. animals within the Salta trilogy and heterogeneous texts that fall more
..
.. and less adjacent to it. Thus my analysis attends to conditions of desiring
legacy of Salta’s mid nineteenth- ..
..
century heyday in the tannery .. within a society that is not only patriarchal but also anthropocentric, and
..
industry. James R. Scobie, ..
Secondary Cities of Argentina:
..
.. in encompassing filmic and literary texts it extends beyond the closed
..
The Social History of Corrientes, ..
.. circuit of a strictly auteurist reading. I endeavour to make these two
..
Salta and Mendoza, 1885–1910 .. strategies work in tandem, with the films’ intertexts illuminating cross-
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University ...
..
Press, 1988), p. 192.
..
..
species entanglements, and these entanglements in turn pointing up
..
.. intertextual connections.
10 This summary is also up for ..
..
debate, as the viewer’s .. The first film of the Salta trilogy, The Swamp, presents a portrait of a
..
interpretation of events depends .. dissolute bourgeois family (‘family’ in a loose sense – with its staggered
..
..
on her reading of offscreen space ..
.. generations, unclear blood relationships and intimations of incest, the
and sound. As I understand it, the ..
film indicates that the cow is
..
.. family here is constituted against the indigenous servants who encircle
..
killed in the opening sequence, in ..
.. it). The film opens with adult members of the family sitting languidly
parallel with Mecha’s fall. The
..
..
...
drinking around the turbid swimming pool on their declining estate,
animal is motionless when the ..
cousins return with Luciano and ..
..
eerily named la Mandrágora, or the Mandrake. Mecha, the wobbly
..
Momi, who raises her T-shirt as ..
..
matriarch (played by one of the grandes dames of Argentine cinema,
protection from the stench that ..
.. Graciela Borges) drunkenly trips and falls onto the concrete, drawing
presumably emanates from its ..
.. blood and earning disdainful stares from her husband and guests.
rotting flesh. David Oubi~na reads ..
..
the order of events differently, .. Meanwhile the adolescent cousins have gone out hunting in the
..
..
surmising that the cousins shoot ..
.. mountains that surround the property. Their dogs lead them to a cow
the cow in an act of mercy. He ..
does not account for the
..
.. marooned in la ciénaga – the name for the swampy earth of the region
..
children’s two visits to the ..
...
and also for the nearby town in which the extended family lives – and
swamp, and without attention to ..
..
..
Joaquı́n (Diego Baenas) raises his rifle to shoot it.9 The film cuts back to
this staggered temporality it is ..
difficult to interpret their ..
..
the pool as sounds of gunshot reverberate with the gathering thunder,
..
intentions. David Oubi~na, Estudio .. indicating the fulfilment of his intent (here as elsewhere, the moment of
..
Crı́tico sobre La Ciénaga: ..
.. violent impact is kept offscreen, just out of sight).10 Parallel editing
Entrevista a Lucrecia Martel ..
.. connects the pool and swamp scenes at the Mandrágora to a scene in
(Buenos Aires: Picnic Editorial, ..
..
2007), p. 46. .. town: a young boy, Luciano (Sebastián Montagna), cuts his leg in an

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Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 1. Martı́n, left, and Joaquı́n, ...
..
right, consider shooting the cow ..
..
again. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 2. The only visible evidence of ..
..
Luciano’s fatal fall. La Ciénaga/ ..
..
..
The Swamp (Lucrecia Martel, ..
..
2001). ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
offscreen fall and his mother, Tali (Mercedes Morán, who appears as a
..
... quite different mother figure in The Holy Girl), takes him to the hospital,
..
.. where their story converges with that of Tali’s cousin Mecha, who is
..
..
.. being treated for the wounds sustained in her fall. Once these threads
..
..
.. connect, the film settles into an unhurried observation of the characters.
..
..
..
.. Mecha’s teenage daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto), whose unrequited
..
..
..
..
love for the servant Isabel (Andrea López) is also woven into the
..
..
..
introductory sequence, emerges as a distinct focal point, if not a
..
..
..
sympathetic protagonist. Later in the film, Momi and Luciano join the
... other cousins as they return to the woods to visit the cow’s half-
..
..
..
.. submerged carcass, again raising their rifles to shoot it at close range
..
.. (figure 1). The film concludes with Luciano falling to his death from a
..
..
.. ladder in the courtyard of their home in town (figure 2). A closing series
..
..
.. of shots details the quiet aftermath of the boy’s death, ending on Momi’s
..
..
..
.. flat refutation of the miraculous appearance, much touted in background
..
..
..
..
television broadcasts throughout the film, of the Virgin’s image on a
11 All translations in this essay are
..
.. local water tower: ‘I didn’t see anything’.11
my own. ...
..
.. While The Swamp describes a fall into a wholly inert stasis (the
..
..
.. enervating force is precisely that of being struck down and stuck in the
..
..
.. mud), the last film of the Salta trilogy expresses a kind of anxious
..
..
.. perpetual motion that goes nowhere. The opening sequence of The
..
..
.. Headless Woman trails three pre-adolescent indigenous boys as they
..
.. amuse themselves beside a desolate highway. They run along and inside

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 ...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
Fig. 3. One of the boys runs with ..
..
his dog. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 4. The rearview window ..
..
reveals Vero’s victim. La Mujer sin ..
..
..
Cabeza/The Headless Woman ..
..
(Lucrecia Martel, 2008). ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
a drainage ditch, chasing each other and a dog (figure 3). This play
..
.. sequence is ended by an abrupt cut to a prosaic farewell scene in a
...
..
.. driveway. A bottle-blonde woman named Verónica (Vero, played by
..
..
.. Marı́a Onetto) applies lipstick, extracts squirming children from her car
..
..
..
and replaces them with packages, and half listens as her friend (it could
..
..
..
equally be her sister or cousin, as the relationship, like most in the
..
..
..
trilogy, is never quite clear) recounts with horror that her private club’s
..
..
..
swimming pool is infested with turtles. Vero departs, drives down a
..
..
..
dusty road, and is distracted by the ring of her mobile phone. There is a
..
.. thud, then another, softer thud, and her car recoils. She collects herself
...
..
.. and resumes driving, and a shot from her rearview mirror reveals the
..
..
.. body of a dead dog in her wake (figure 4). The film proceeds in line with
..
..
.. Vero’s post-crash disorientation, and it emerges that the body of an
..
..
.. indigenous boy has been found in a canal near the crash site. Vero herself
..
..
.. comes to believe – or perhaps to acknowledge – that she hit this child,
..
..
.. instead of or in addition to the dog, yet the men in her family refuse to
..
..
.. entertain this theory and methodically erase any evidence that would
..
..
...
support it. She makes several feeble attempts to expiate her guilt, but
..
.. eventually acquiesces in this erasure.
..
..
.. The slow sonic stuttering and visually kaleidoscopic framing of The
..
.. Swamp and The Headless Woman produce something akin to canted
..
..
.. framing – a skewing that is more faithfully oriented to the way things
..
..
.. really are. This orientation is but one marker of the films’ affiliation with
..
..
.. New Argentine Cinema, a diffuse cinematic output that is almost

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Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
12 One could also place Martel’s ..
..
invariably defined by what it is not: a concerted artistic movement.12
work in a contemporary global ..
..
..
With fortunes running counter to the nation’s economic decline, this
framework, as B. Ruby Rich did ..
when she heralded Martel, ..
..
wave of films emerged in the mid 1990s, coalesced around the time of
Apichatpong Weerasethakul and
..
..
..
the 2001 Crisis, and ran through the early 2000s.13 The establishment and
Tsai Ming-Liang as practitioners ..
..
..
growth of federal subsidies for the film industry, national film schools,
of ‘new New Queer Cinema’ at
..
Screen’s conference in 2007. .. international film festivals, and film criticism in the mid 1990s coincided
..
..
Adding Sarah Turner to Rich’s .. to produce a climate comparatively hospitable to the production and
..
list, Sophie Mayer observes the ..
.. distribution of films.14 Modest in scale, these incentives generated a
significant ways in which this ...
cinema ‘disrupt[s] the ..
.. cinema unified by a spare, economical style. As Joanna Page puts it,
..
identification of landscape with ..
.. their styles flaunted the roughness and the informality of their
white colonial heteronormativity’, ..
..
in her ‘Dirty pictures: framing .. production, made as they were ‘on the hoof’, wherever locations could
..
pollution and desire in “new New ..
.. be found, whenever funds permitted, and with whomever could be
Queer Cinema”’, in Anat Pick and ..
..
Guinevere Narraway (eds),
..
.. persuaded to act or to provide technical assistance for little or no pay.15
..
Screening Nature: Cinema ..
..
Beyond the Human (New York, ..
..
As if to confirm the impossibility of defining New Argentine Cinema,
..
NY: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 145, .. Martel’s films simultaneously occupy a central and liminal space within
148. ...
13 For a ‘hindsight’ view of New
..
.. it.16 Her first film, Rey muerto/Dead King (1995), is often heralded as
..
Argentine Cinema, see Jens ..
.. one of the inaugural films of New Argentine Cinema, and no scholarly
..
Andermann, New Argentine .. foray into this corpus fails to detail her Salta trilogy. Yet Dead King
..
Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2011). ..
14 Page, Crisis and Capitalism,
..
.. garnered immediate acclaim, paving the way for international funding
..
pp. 2–3. ..
.. and collaboration with the likes of Lita Stantic, Pedro Almodóvar and
..
15 Ibid., p. 2. .. Agustı́n Almodóvar, and concomitantly to higher production values and
..
16 For more on the ‘ambiguous’ ..
placement of Martel’s work in
..
.. international art-house prestige.
..
New Argentine Cinema, see ..
.. While Martel’s work does not share the constrained production
Oubi~na, Estudio Crı́tico sobre La ..
... contexts associated with New Argentine Cinema, it does conform to the
Ciénaga, p. 10. ..
..
17 Edgardo Dieleke cites Italian .. neorealist style occasioned by those conditions, and thus evinces one of
..
neorealism, particularly as it is
..
.. the cinema’s primary gestures – the eschewal of allegory.17 Daniel Quirós
..
valorized by André Bazin, as a .. observes that the output of New Argentine Cinema is ‘concentrated in
..
central point of comparison to ..
.. “micro spaces” or individuals’ narratives that are sometimes difficult to
New Argentine Cinema, in his ..
..
‘The return of the real: landscape, ..
.. relate allegorically to the national body’,18 while Edgardo Dieleke writes
..
nature and the place of fiction’, ..
.. that these films are characterized by the ‘demarcation of new areas of the
in New Argentine and Brazilian ..
Cinema: Reality Effects (New
..
.. present, while not intervening in it explicatively or allegorically’.19 Other
..
York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, ...
..
critics go further, describing New Argentine Cinema’s relationship to
2013), p. 59. ..
..
..
allegory not in terms of difficulty or hesitancy but rather as a deliberate
18 Daniel Quirós, ‘“La época está en ..
desorden”: reflexiones sobre la ..
..
rejection of what had become the dominant narrative form in the nation’s
..
temporalidad en Bolivia de ..
..
cinema. Jens Andermann explains that
Adrián Caetano y La mujer sin ..
..
cabeza de Lucrecia Martel’, A ..
.. Argentine cinema in the second half of the 1990s and the first years
Contra Corriente: una Revista de ..
..
.. after the millennium changed from being a producer of allegorical
Historia Social y Literatura de ..
América Latina, vol. 8, no. 1
..
.. narratives of the nation’s plight – as it had been during the period
..
(2010), p. 232. ..
...
following the end of the military dictatorship in 1983 – into a collector
19 Dieleke, ‘The return of the ..
natural’, p. 59.
..
..
of indexical marks, a means of observing and investigating the social
20 Andermann, New Argentine
..
.. worlds of the present.20
..
Cinema, pp. xi–xii. ..
..
..
..
Citing Martel’s work as exemplary, Gonzalo Aguilar affirms:
..
..
.. One of the definitive characteristics of the new cinema is its avoidance
..
..
.. of allegorical stories. These films distance themselves from those that

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 ...
..
..
preceded them (for allegory had been the privileged mode by which
..
..
..
Argentine cinema referred to context) and from the imperative to
..
..
..
politicize to which, according to several critics of distinct orientation,
..
..
..
all texts from the Third World are subject [...] The films of the new
..
..
..
cinema, in contrast, insist upon the literal and tend to frustrate the
..
.. possibility of an allegorical reading: the hotel in La ni~na santa is not
..
21 Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine
..
.. Argentina; it is, quite simply, a hotel.21
..
Film: Other Worlds (London: ..
..
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ... In sum, this cinema’s resistance to allegory is born of a refusal of the neat
..
pp. 16–17. ..
.. political didacticism that the form so often entails, especially within the
..
.. overlapping traditions of Argentine literature and cinema. In Martel’s
..
..
.. work, Ana Forcinato further asserts, this refusal constitutes a feminist
..
..
..
.. move ‘to dismantle the allegorical function that women have had in Latin
..
..
.. American and Argentine cinema and to propose that feminine complexity
..
..
.. cannot be reduced to a transparent space through which one can view
..
22 Ana Forcinato, ‘Mirada ..
.. social problems’.22
cinematográfico y género sexual’, ..
...
..
Yet as my preceding summaries indicate, the narratives of both The
Chasqui, vol. 35, no. 2 (2006), ..
pp. 112, 118. ..
..
Swamp and The Headless Woman do hinge on something akin to
..
..
..
allegorical readings of animal death. I say ‘akin to’ because allegory is
..
..
..
generally understood as a submerged political reading of a text that
..
..
..
obtains from a sustained, systematic use of metaphor; the critical power
..
.. of Martel’s films rests in the sustained, if not entirely systematic,
..
..
23 Gundermann, among others, .. interplay of individualized human characters and haunting animal
..
directly ascribes an ‘allegorical ..
.. figures, and it is this negotiation that renders the films’ political critique
function’ to Martel’s animals, in ..
‘The new cinema going to the
..
.. legible.23 Certainly the cow in The Swamp is a cow and the dog in The
...
dogs’, p. 19. Others adopt ..
..
Headless Woman is a dog, yet these animals are also proxies for the
different terminology. For ..
..
..
human children who bear the brunt of the adult characters’ destructive
Schroeder Rodrı́guez, in ‘Little ..
Red Riding Hood’, p. 108, the ..
..
negligence; more to the point, they are allegorical stand-ins for the
..
animals cast the Salta trilogy as ..
..
powerless who fall in the path of those bent on blotting out the past.
a series of ‘fairy tales’ and ..
..
..
If the refusal of allegory defines both Martel’s auteurism and New
‘fables’, defined by ‘a ..
preoccupation with moral ..
..
Argentine Cinema, it bears asking why and how it is that nonhuman
..
choices’. De los Rı́os, meanwhile ..
..
animals persist in The Swamp and The Headless Woman as the remaining
refers to the cow of The Swamp ..
.. material susceptible to allegorical inference.
as a ‘metaphorised synecdoche’, ...
in ‘Looking at the animals’, p. 35.
..
.. Martel asserts that in her films, animals are ‘an omen, and at the same
..
This plurality of figurative terms ..
.. time [they] have all the mystery that some animals attract’.24
suggests various ways of ..
understanding how and why
..
.. The filmmaker’s use of animals – real and imaginary, material and
..
animals stand in for humans in ..
.. symbolic – is bound up with the idiosyncratic aural registries that
..
these film. ..
.. distinguish her work. Martel casts these entwined elements as auteurist
24 This remark is made in the ..
context of a comparison to
..
.. signatures incubated since childhood. Of her influences, she explains,
..
William Faulkner’s work. Martel, ..
.. ‘I feel closer to narrative traditions than to the tradition of Argentine
..
interview by Guest. .. cinema. I paid attention to the story, to the form of speaking, to
25 ‘Me siento más cerca de las ...
tradiciones de narración que de
..
.. conversations.’25 The most formative of these stories came from her
..
.. grandmother, who, Martel would later learn, was paraphrasing the fiction
la tradición del cine argentino. Le ..
..
presté atención al relato, a la ..
.. of the Uruguayan-Argentine writer Horacio Quiroga.26 Quiroga’s story
forma de hablar, a las ..
.. ‘El Almohadón de plumas’ (‘The big down pillow’), about a woman
conversaciones.’ Oubi~na, Estudio ..
..
Crı́tico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 56. .. whose blood is slowly drained by a parasite that takes on the size and
..
..
26 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’. .. shape of her pillow, is echoed in The Swamp’s story about a woman who

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 ...
..
..
adopts an African rat she has mistaken for a dog, only for it to kill and
..
..
..
devour her cats. I will discuss that story later, but for now suffice it to say
..
.. that Martel ascribes this intertextual resonance to being brought up ‘on
..
27 Ibid.
..
.. stories where fantastical things cohabitated with everyday life’.27 She is
..
.. careful to distinguish this co-presence from the tradition of magical
..
..
.. realism that dominates discussions of Latin American culture:
..
..
..
..
..
..
I don’t agree with this idea that there exists some sort of layer of magic
..
... over reality. Because this assumes that there is a concrete reality and
..
..
.. every now and then something magical appears. In contrast, our real
..
..
.. experience is based on the intermingling of reality and the
..
28 Ibid. ..
.. fantastical.28
..
..
.. Martel’s dissatisfaction with magical realism’s underhanded reaffirmation
..
..
.. of a fundamental reality is compelling. However, her positioning of
..
..
..
.. animals in her films in turn risks charging them with the full weight of
..
..
.. fantasy, burdening them with an aura of magic and mystery that occludes
...
..
..
their position as very real beings that are deeply implicated in the violent
..
..
..
network of intersectional oppressions under critique.
..
..
..
My aim here is to demystify the metaphorical and allegorical weight of
..
.. animals in Martel’s Salta trilogy. I do so by arguing that the intransigence
..
.. of animal metaphors in these films stems from two sets of ambivalent
..
..
.. values. First, animals are legible both as signs of local particularity and as
..
..
..
.. internationally recognizable metaphors; that is, they are fleshy material
..
..
.. embedded in this particular sociohistorical milieu, yet they also resonate
..
..
...
with global tropes. Second, the sporadic intrusion of violent animal death
..
..
..
refracts a range of contradictory meanings about the human characters
..
.. that feeds into the films’ overwhelming sense of impasse or being stuck;
..
..
.. most pointedly, this material underscores the humans’ coexisting
..
29 On human and nonhuman ..
.. vulnerability and callousness.29 These contrary values – and the ease with
..
animals’ shared vulnerability, see ..
.. which animals slide between them – matter, because they suggest that
Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: ..
Animality and Vulnerability in
..
.. animals, particularly in death, are not so easily dislodged from their
..
Literature and Film (New York, ..
.. metaphorical and allegorical slots. Understanding these functions
NY: Columbia University Press,
..
..
...
matters, furthermore, because in order to confront the vast systems of
2011). ..
..
..
material violence in which animals are enmeshed along with humans, it
..
30 Seminal work on the ..
..
is also necessary to confront the metaphorical scaffolding that feeds into
(non)metaphorical uses of ..
.. and upholds these systems.
animals in film includes Akira ..
..
Mizuta Lippit, ‘The death of an ..
..
animal’, Film Quarterly, vol. 56, ..
..
..
no. 1 (2002), and Electric Animal: ..
.. The use of animal death as a metaphor for human trauma has a complex,
Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife ..
(Minneapolis, MN: University of
..
.. transnational cinematic lineage, and we can begin to discern the
..
Minnesota Press, 2008); ..
...
specificity of Martel’s reliance on it by placing it in this larger context.30
Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film ..
..
..
The trope appears, most famously, in the prototypical Soviet montage
(London: Reaktion, 2002). For a ..
succinct overview of cinema’s ..
..
sequence that pits found footage of a bull’s slaughter against dramatic
..
longstanding interest in animal .. scenes of workers being shot down at the end of Sergei Eisenstein’s
..
life and death, see Laura ..
.. Stachka/Strike (1925). It also features in the startling hunting sequence
McMahon, ‘Screen animals ..
.. that first disturbs the placid surface of Jean Renoir’s neorealist
dossier: introduction’, Screen, ..
..
vol. 56, no. 1 (2015), pp. 81–87. .. masterpiece La Règle du Jeu/Rules of the Game (1939), and in the scene

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 ...
..
..
of the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo that signals Kurtz’s demise in
..
..
..
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Additional examples
..
.. from early to contemporary cinema abound, one of the most well-known
..
..
.. of recent times being the slaughtered cockerel in Michael Haneke’s
..
.. Caché/Hidden (2005).
..
..
.. This trope also has precedents in Argentine cinema, namely in Octavio
..
..
..
.. Getino and Fernando Solanas’s third cinema manifesto film, La Hora de
..
..
.. los Hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). Here, in a segment titled
...
..
..
‘La Dependencia’, voiceover narration unfolds a concise history lesson
..
..
..
of the ‘interminable colonial plundering’ of Latin America over a slow
..
.. pan across the Buenos Aires skyline, establishing the historical
..
..
.. framework for a montage sequence that juxtaposes shots of cows and
..
.. sheep unceremoniously processing through the stages of slaughter and
..
..
.. dismemberment, and gleaming advertising images for Fanta, Chevrolet,
..
..
..
.. Esso gasoline and other brand-name goods associated with 1960s
..
..
.. consumer culture and neocolonialism.
...
..
..
As with the aforementioned seminal scenes of slaughter and with
..
..
..
Martel’s work, the significance of violent animal death in The Hour of
..
..
..
the Furnaces asks to be read primarily in terms of its dialectical power –
..
.. that is, its capacity to forge meaning at the limits of representation: the
..
.. metaphorical upshot of the juxtaposition of the slaughter imagery and
..
..
.. advertising shots is that, under neocolonialism, the people of Latin
..
..
..
.. America (and specifically Argentina) are like cows and sheep,
..
..
.. systematically immobilized and ground down to total submission. Yet
..
..
...
looking back at the sequence today, this collision can also be said to
..
..
..
enact a metaphor that is simultaneously particular in its locality and
..
.. legible to international audiences. The montage of documentary slaughter
..
..
.. footage and highly stylized advertising images at once hooks into the
..
.. particular economic and cultural significance of meat in Argentina, and
..
..
.. into the longstanding, crosscultural comparison of the oppression of
..
..
..
.. humans to the slaughter of animals. Currently the world’s third-largest
..
..
.. exporter and second-largest consumer of beef, Argentina’s cultural
..
..
...
heritage and constitution as a nation are markedly associated with meat.
..
..
..
To name just three reference points in the country’s collective imaginary,
..
..
..
meat (specifically beef) recalls the now mythical nineteenth-century
..
.. gauchos who hunted and herded cattle in the pampas; the landed elites
..
.. who erected many of Buenos Aires’s architectural and cultural
..
..
.. institutions on the wealth of their grand estancias; and the popular
..
..
.. everyday consumption of asado, or barbecued meat. In this national
..
..
..
.. context, the montage sequence in The Hour of the Furnaces produces not
..
..
...
only a comparison between subjugated humans and animals, but also a
..
..
..
critical contrast between an authentic, essential indigenous good (raw
..
..
..
meat) and frivolous, invasive foreign commodities (fizzy drinks, cars).
..
.. Held next to Getino and Solanas’s critique of Coca-colonization, the
..
.. dead meat in Martel’s films emerges decidedly as even less like the
..
..
.. homogenizing outputs of mass production: this meat is the fruit of an
..
..
.. individual’s (or individuals’) hunt. In this light, Martel’s recourse to dead

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
Fig. 5. Martı́n brings home the ..
..
hare. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 6. Luciano considers the hare, ..
..
..
in The Swamp. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. animal flesh serves to mark the endurance of local practices of meat
..
...
..
procurement and production that, at least to an urban North American
..
..
..
viewer like myself, are striking in their proximity to the materiality of
..
..
..
animal death. For example, the appearance of a fresh carcass introduces
..
..
..
an early scene of contained domestic chaos in The Swamp: several
..
..
..
closeups foreground Tali talking on the phone while her older son,
..
..
..
Martı́n (Franco Veneranda), moves through the background, holding a
..
..
..
dead hare by the legs (figure 5). He glides off screen, leaving the
..
..
..
undressed animal on the kitchen counter; elliptically edited shots later
...
.. show Luciano contemplatively blowing on the dead hare (figure 6) and
..
..
.. then washing a cut on his leg in the sink beside it. While many critics
..
..
.. have noted how this scene of Luciano’s wound pairs with Mecha’s
..
..
..
..
drunken fall, the echoes between its oblique inclusion of a dead animal
..
..
..
and the twinned demises of Mecha and the cow at the Mandrágora have
..
..
..
gone unremarked. This inclusion is significant because it establishes
..
..
..
Luciano’s curious regard for animals, a curiosity that presages his fatal
..
.. fall.
...
..
.. A scene towards the beginning of The Headless Woman presents a
..
..
.. contrasting gaze at a dead animal body in domestic space. The morning
..
..
.. after the accident finds Vero adrift and apparently suffering memory loss.
..
..
.. She enters her kitchen and immediately confronts the carcass of a
..
..
.. medium-sized animal laying on a black bin-bag on the counter (figure 7).
..
.. It is a mammal, long and lanky, its fur slicked and abdomen gaping

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 ...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
Fig. 7. The deer carcass in Vero’s ..
..
kitchen. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 8. Vero watches her husband ..
..
..
and servant discuss what do with ..
..
the carcass, in The Headless ..
..
..
Woman. ..
..
..
..
..
..
.. bloodlessly open. Its cloven hooves suggest a deer or related species.
..
.. Vero’s husband Marcos (César Bordón), who had been out hunting the
..
...
..
..
night before, enters and quickly whisks the body to the back patio, where
..
..
..
a female servant prepares to skin it. The camera remains in the kitchen at
..
..
..
Vero’s side as she watches this through the window (figure 8) and as
..
..
..
Marcos and another servant come and go. Coupled with the competing
..
..
..
onscreen and offscreen sounds of the first servant whetting her knife and
..
..
..
the second dispatching phonecalls, the composition and editing of the
..
..
..
shots convey Vero’s muddled understanding of her place in this moment,
..
.. and particularly her relation to the animal body on the counter. The
...
..
.. deer’s supine position on the counter recalls that of the dead dog lying in
..
..
.. the wake of her car. Vero’s gaze remains fixed on it, and a range of
..
..
.. responses can be read into her mute stare: horror, bewilderment,
..
..
.. acceptance, denial. The only certainty, however, is that the presence of
..
..
.. this dead body threatens to dislodge her repressed memory of the body
..
..
.. (or bodies) she struck the day before.
..
..
.. As with the function of animals more generally in the Salta trilogy,
..
.. Martel offers a biographical explanation of the meanings behind hunting
...
..
.. and dead prey that is worth taking into consideration here, yet it should
..
.. not be viewed as the only, or even the primary, account of this trope in
..
..
.. her films. Hunting in the Salta trilogy appears much as she experienced it
..
..
.. as a child, on excursions with her father and brothers. In an interview she
..
..
.. connects the mix of brutality, love and desire she sensed on these trips to
..
..
.. her current practice as a filmmaker: ‘But that’s filmmaking too – you’re

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 ...
..
..
stalking the scene. In chasing after an animal or person, there is some
31 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’.
..
..
..
desire to meet and to know, and at the same time to destroy or to trap.’31
..
.. As with all of the films’ syncopations and superimpositions, the use of
..
..
.. hunting as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s pursuit of human characters
..
.. calls attention to the ethics of film style and craft – the ethics of
..
..
.. calculatedly tracking down, capturing and preserving others’ images
..
..
32 Prior to embarking on a film ..
.. forever.32 Moreover, both the scene of the dead hare in The Swamp and
..
degree, Martel considered .. that of the deer carcass in The Headless Woman disclose the presence of
..
careers in, among other things, ...
art history, zootechnic, and ..
..
a class of vulnerable and largely ignored beings in the margins of the
..
forensic photography and ..
..
films’ diegesis, a class itself composed of unequal subclasses (lap dogs,
ballistics. Oubi~na, Estudio Crı́tico ..
street dogs, hunted prey, roadkill, vermin). These scenes, particularly the
..
sobre La Ciénaga, p. 81. ..
..
.. device of a frame-within-a-frame in the servant-run kitchen of The
..
.. Headless Woman, accentuate a division of labour that is sociohistorically
..
..
.. specific: the ‘dirty work’ of animal killing is separate from Tali’s and
..
..
..
.. Vero’s lives, yet it is not invisible to them in the way that it would be to
..
..
.. women of comparable socioeconomic positions in, for example, North
...
..
..
American contexts, many of whom do not see dead animals until they
..
..
..
turn up as neatly wrapped pieces of meat in supermarkets.
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. The specificity of Martel’s dead animal metaphors comes into even
..
..
.. sharper focus through a consideration of a literary intertext, Esteban
..
..
..
.. Echeverrı́a’s ‘El matadero’ (‘The slaughter yard’), a text written between
..
..
.. 1838 and 1840 but not published until 1871, now regarded as Argentina’s
..
..
...
first short story. It critiques the regime of the caudillo Juan Manuel de
..
..
..
Rosas through twinned animal–human killings in a Buenos Aires
..
.. slaughterhouse: a young bull mistaken for a cow escapes and, in its frenzy
..
..
.. to evade the federal soldiers who pursue it, accidentally kills a small child;
..
.. later, a young, defiant Unitarian – the leftist party that the story celebrates
..
..
.. – passes by the slaughterhouse and, in an almost exact re-enactment of the
..
..
..
.. bull’s slaughter, the soldiers accost, torture and kill him.
..
..
.. On several counts ‘El matadero’ provides a more resonant intertext for
..
..
...
reading animal death in The Swamp and The Headless Woman than does
..
..
..
The Hour of the Furnaces, and not just because both Echeverrı́a’s and
..
..
..
Martel’s stories are set in motion by torrential downpours. Comparison to
..
.. Echeverrı́a’s story highlights the significance in Martel’s films of a
..
.. suggestive symbiosis between animals and human children. As noted,
..
..
.. much scholarly attention has been paid to Martel’s destabilizing framing
..
..
.. of the white bourgeois family and the indigenous servants against whom
..
..
..
.. it is constituted. This framing not only introduces reversals in the
..
..
...
civilization–barbarism binary, but also subverts the caregiving roles this
..
..
..
binary assigns: incapacitated to greater and lesser extremes, the principal
..
..
..
family members subsist thanks to the labour and care noiselessly
..
.. provided by their servants. This overturning of paternalistic roles is
..
.. further complicated by the presence of actual children who, as they are
..
..
.. metaphorically and materially conflated with animals, emerge at turns as
..
..
.. condensations of callous cruelty and vulnerable curiosity. The children

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 ...
..
..
not only embody these affects, but also redirect them in a gaze that
..
..
..
extends to the films as a whole. As Martel explains of her
..
.. cinematographic ethics,
..
..
..
..
..
What you see can’t be something seen by nobody; although it’s not a
..
..
..
single character in particular, the camera is someone [...] The character
..
..
..
who observes is younger than an adolescent and has a curiosity that
33 Ibid., p. 65.
..
..
..
allows him/her to suspend moral judgement.33
..
...
..
..
If, as Laura Mulvey claims, cinema is deeply ‘anthropomorphic’,
..
..
..
Martel’s cinema grounds that anthropomorphism in the points of view of
34 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure
..
.. young characters, both real (Luciano, Momi) and potential (‘someone’).34
..
and narrative cinema’, in Leo ..
.. The sudden deaths of animal-children around which The Swamp and
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), ..
.. The Headless Woman are moored introduce doublings that trouble both
Film Theory and Criticism: ..
..
Introductory Readings (New York, .. species and generational divisions. As stated, The Swamp builds on a
..
..
NY: Oxford University Press, ..
.. reiterated comparison between the cold detachment with which the
1999), p. 836. ..
..
.. family regards their matriarch’s decline, and the bored dispassion with
...
..
..
which the cousins shoot the cow. Among the participant-witnesses to
..
..
..
these doubled demises, Mecha’s youngest son, Joaquı́n, and Tali’s
..
..
..
youngest, Luciano, act as poles of callous cruelty and vulnerable
..
.. curiosity. Joaquı́n, an adolescent who has previously lost an eye in a
..
.. hunting accident, first shoots the marooned cow in the eye from several
..
..
.. yards away. Yet Joaquı́n is not unequivocally like the adults who
..
..
..
.. indifferently witness his mother’s collapse; he (like her) in fact requires
..
..
.. plastic surgery to make him less like the animal he enucleates. His
..
..
...
outward cruelty is a reactive violence to the way his own family, due to
..
..
..
his disfiguring injury, casts him as other – as, for example, in Mecha’s
..
.. disgusted reprimand of his eating habits as ‘like an animal’. In keeping
..
..
.. with its emphasis on the ways in which violent acts of othering intersect
..
.. with one another and proliferate, the film underscores how Joaquı́n
..
..
.. projects his treatment onto others. He and another cousin conjecture that
..
..
..
.. the indigenous servants engage in bestiality, a suspicion based on having
..
..
.. seen them petting dogs. Joaquı́n crudely expresses this view while he
..
35 Oubi~na offers a similar reading of ..
...
himself roughly caresses the hindquarters of a dog.35
the dynamic, in Estudio Crı́tico ..
..
..
Like his crude cousin, Luciano is regularly associated with animals;
sobre La Ciénaga, p. 37 ..
..
..
yet unlike Joaquı́n (unlike all the characters, for that matter), he
..
.. consistently demonstrates a tentative curiosity about them and even a
..
.. desire to coexist with them. When the children return to the scene of the
..
..
.. cow’s death, he wordlessly wades out into the muck, extending his hand
..
..
36 De los Rı́os, ‘Look(ing) at the ..
.. towards the half-sunk, eyeless carcass (figure 9). For Valeria de los Rı́os,
animals’, p. 35. For more on ..
Bazin’s fascination with the film
..
.. the marooned cow ‘is a metaphorised synechdoche of the film since
..
frame’s capacity for the ..
...
Luciano [...] is at the centre of the frame and the line of fire at the
‘cohabitation’ of radical ..
..
..
moment the shot goes off. Child and animal share the shot, satisfying the
difference (and particularly the
radical differences of humans
..
..
..
requirements for montage proposed by Bazin.’36 As mentioned,
..
and animals), see Jennifer Fay, .. Luciano’s first appearance in the film subtly presages his death at the
..
‘Seeing/loving animals: André ..
.. end. He enters the kitchen to wash his cut leg and, while there, peers at
Bazin’s posthumanism’, Journal ..
.. the carcass his brother has deposited on the counter. When Tali takes
of Visual Culture, vol. 7, no. 1 ..
..
(2008), pp. 41–64. .. Luciano to have the cut stitched up, she tells the doctor – something she

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 ...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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...
..
Fig. 9. Luciano approaches the ..
..
sunken cow. ..
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...
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..
Fig. 10. Tali examines Luciano’s ..
..
dogtooth, in The Swamp. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. anxiously repeats over the course of the film – that he has an extra tooth
..
..
... growing in his mouth (figure 10). Later, Tali and her husband
..
..
..
..
contemplate an X-ray of their son’s teeth. It it is no coincidence that
..
..
..
Vero, the headless woman, is a dentist by profession, and her
..
..
..
examinations recall Tali’s investigations of her son’s humanness
..
37 With the important distinction ..
.. (figure 11).37 When Tali’s family visits the convalescing Mecha, Luciano
that the children Vero ..
..
.. overhears his older cousin, Vero (Leonora Balcarce, not to be confused
perfunctorily examines are ..
working-class children, queueing
..
.. with the ‘headless’ Vero of the later film), telling an urban myth about a
..
for a mandated dental ..
.. woman who took in a stray dog, only to have it kill and devour her cats
examination; whereas Tali’s ...
examination is fuelled by
..
..
while she slept at night. The woman took the animal to the vet, who cut it
..
parental concern, Vero’s is ..
..
open and, unclasping its jaw to reveal two rows of teeth, explained to the
..
mechanical. ‘Lucrecia Martel by ..
..
woman that she had mistaken an African rat for a dog. Luciano is
Haden Guest’. ..
..
..
terrified by this story but also curious in the way that children so often
..
..
..
are about the things that most frighten them. He wonders if he might
..
..
..
have some affinity with this creature; he remarks on the ‘many teeth’
..
..
..
coming out in his mouth, and his cousins teasingly call him perra-rata
..
.. (bitch-rat). He also wonders if the dog barking on the other side of the
...
..
.. courtyard wall is perhaps also an African rat. A rainy afternoon affords
..
.. an opportunity to investigate. Drawn outside by a turtle trundling across
..
..
.. the patio, he climbs a ladder to see what is on the other side; one missed
..
..
.. step and he falls to his death.
..
..
..
.. The X-ray of Luciano’s teeth finds its negative in Vero’s post-crash
..
.. X-ray in The Headless Woman. This scene provides a literal image of

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
..
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..
..
..
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..
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..
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..
...
Fig. 11. Vero examines the teeth of ..
..
..
working-class children. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 12. Vero being X-rayed, in The ..
..
Headless Woman. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. the film’s title: obscured by the X-ray machine, Vero is headless
..
..
38 Although the English translation ...
..
(figure 12).38 The X-ray itself never appears, as Vero leaves the hospital
of the film’s title fittingly ..
..
..
before a doctor can examine her, and later her husband and his brother
connotes the horror-film image of ..
a headless woman, the Spanish
..
..
somehow make her hospital records disappear. If this image did exist it
..
sin cabeza is an idiomatic ..
..
would index an erasure – an absence quite unlike the phantom fangs
expression that means having ..
lost one’s bearings, typically as a
..
.. embedded in Luciano’s mouth. Whereas Luciano’s X-ray hints at a
..
result of falling in love. See ..
.. threatening yet exhilarating fusion of humans and animals, Vero’s simply
..
Schroeder Rodrı́guez, ‘Little Red ..
.. marks a void – nothing. A brief excursus into The Holy Girl, a film that
Riding Hood’, p. 98. This shot not ..
only plays on the film’s title, but
..
.. traces the blurred sexual and religious coming of age of the teenage
...
also presents an example of one ..
..
Amalia (Marı́a Alche), suggests that this difference is in fact a
of Martel’s signature ..
..
..
disappearance that unfolds across the trilogy. Animals figure less overtly
compositions: a medium or ..
medium closeup shot of a ..
..
in this second film, yet they are nonetheless present in, for example,
..
character’s torso, shorn of head ..
..
Amalia’s recitation of a nursery rhyme about hunting with tired dogs, in
and feet – a point-of-view shot of ..
..
..
the meat the cooks are cutting in the hotel kitchen, and in the
a younger (that is, shorter)
..
observer. ..
..
housekeeper’s anxiety over an outbreak of lice. The film’s entanglements
..
..
..
with the rest of the trilogy are likewise less pronounced, save for a scene
..
.. in which Amalia, her friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) and another girl
...
..
.. are truanting in the woods, drawn to the location by the haunting story of
..
..
.. a pregnant woman who died there in a car crash. The girls’ macabre
..
..
.. search for the wreckage is momentarily interrupted when two indigenous
..
..
.. boys and a dog run by, in pursuit of the body of a bird they have just
..
..
.. shot. This moment – and it is mere seconds – reaches both backwards
..
.. and forwards: the spectre of the dead pregnant woman recalls the dog-rat

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
of The Swamp, while the rumoured crash, the rural roadside setting and
..
..
..
the running boys summon the collision of The Headless Woman. This
..
.. moment functions as a cross-section of the trilogy, one that gestures
..
..
.. fleetingly towards animals and the unsettling alterity that they embody.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Almost translucent threads of interspecies doublings and reversals bind
..
..
.. the films of the Salta trilogy. The figure of accidents and the accidental,
...
..
..
specifically in the form of car crashes, offers a final way to draw out the
..
..
..
significance of these entanglements. A cinematic trope that resonates
..
.. with (and reaches almost as far back and as wide as) the medium’s
..
..
.. longstanding metaphorization of animal slaughter, the car crash provides
..
.. a visceral staging ground for encounters between self and other –
..
..
.. between the domesticated, individualistic and frequently feminized
..
..
..
.. interior space of the car and the chaotic, threatening world outside. In her
..
..
.. provocative analysis of cinema’s fascination with car crashes, Karen
...
..
..
Beckman ventures that
..
..
..
.. one may understand the compulsive ‘car crashing’ of contemporary
..
..
.. artists, writers, and filmmakers at least in part as a desire to capture,
..
..
..
and perhaps provoke in others, the risk, feeling, and transformational
..
..
..
possibilities of this clinematic ecstasy of sharing, of leaning toward the
39 Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema
..
..
..
other without fusion.39
and the Politics of Speed and ..
..
Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke ..
.. One of Beckman’s most generative readings is of Amores Perros
University Press, 2010), p. 24.
..
..
...
(Alejandro González I~nárritu, 2000), the first in the Mexican director’s
..
..
..
‘Death trilogy’ and a film that echoes the Salta trilogy in more ways than
..
.. one. Set in Mexico City, it follows three narrative threads involving
..
..
.. contrasting human–canine relationships that converge in a car crash. A
..
.. chase precipitates the collision: Octavio (Gael Garcı́a Bernal) is fleeing
..
..
.. his dog-fighting rivals, his wounded dog Cofi and friend in tow, when he
..
..
..
.. hits Valeria (Goya Toledo), a supermodel running an errand with her
..
..
.. fluffy lapdog, Richie. Octavio, Valeria and the dogs survive but
..
..
...
Octavio’s friend does not. While keeping Valeria company as she
..
..
..
recovers from a severe leg injury, Richie becomes trapped beneath the
..
..
..
floorboards of their condo and Valeria fears he has been eaten by the
..
.. ‘thousand rats’ she imagines below; he eventually resurfaces, but by then
..
.. Valeria has lost her leg to gangrene. Meanwhile El Chivo (The Goat,
..
..
.. played by Emilio Echevarrı́a), a family man turned guerrilla turned hit
..
..
.. man, takes in the wounded and abandoned Cofi, but no sooner does the
..
..
..
.. dog recover than he attacks and kills the rest of El Chivo’s pack of dogs.
..
..
...
These grisly encounters, bordering on cannibalism, bring to mind the
..
..
..
voracious dog-rat of The Swamp. In contrast to the model of ‘sharing’
..
..
..
that Beckman finds in the car crash, they enact a deadly fusion wherein
..
.. one does not lean towards, but rather becomes violently, fatally engulfed
..
.. by, the other. The crash-triggered narrative of The Headless Woman,
..
..
.. meanwhile, does evince the ‘leaning towards the other’ that Beckman
..
..
.. describes, but here the drive towards interpersonal connection is patently

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
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..
...
Fig. 13. Vero fixes her gaze ahead, ..
..
..
in The Headless Woman. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
40 The collision of The Headless ..
.. superficial.40 Vero’s crash is a false start, a collision that triggers her
Woman is an important and ..
..
.. awakening to the privilege she acquires and the paternalistic oversight she
specific sociohistorical marker of ..
the nonfictional realities of Salta.
..
.. endures as an upper-class white women in a racially and economically
..
Martel explains that Vero’s ..
.. stratified society. Any critical insight this awakening brings is short lived:
fictional crash comes out of her ..
... she gives one of the dead boy’s friends some hand-me-down T-shirts,
concern with a noticeable uptick ..
.. assuaging her guilt and washing her hands of the entanglement.
in hit-and-run crashes in the ..
..
province in the late 1990s. Quirós ..
.. Reading Martel’s films as an auteurist progression of themes, the
..
attributes this phenomenon to ..
.. violent ingestions of The Swamp and the crash of The Headless Woman
neoliberalism and the attendant ..
growing breach between the rich
..
.. emerge as contrasting models for encounters between self and other,
..
and poor, the former being all too ..
.. human and animal. What is more, The Headless Woman bears the faint
willing to flee from any offence ..
..
.. traces of a synthesis of the two in the child’s handprint that, impressed
they commit against the latter. ..
Quirós, ‘“La época está en
..
.. on the car window, hovers above Vero as she contemplates what she
..
desorden”’, p. 246. Mayer also ..
..
has just hit (figure 13). As an index this handprint is overdetermined: it
points out that the flash flood ... points most directly back to the boy she may have hit (did his arm shoot
..
that follows Vero’s crash ..
.. up, slapping the window on impact?); to the comparatively sheltered
corresponds to severe flooding in ..
..
the province in 2007 and 2008, in ..
.. children of Vero’s friends who played in her car before she set out; and
‘Dirty pictures’, p. 153.
..
..
.. even back to Luciano and his sisters, who invent games in their parents’
..
..
.. car in the first film of Martel’s triptych (figure 14). A medium closeup
..
..
.. holds on Vero, post-crash, as she puts on her sunglasses, smooths her
..
..
.. hair and resumes driving; the smudged handprint remains, gesturing
..
..
..
also towards the canine body left in the car’s wake. This faint
... impression in The Headless Woman marks a further movement away
..
..
.. from the human–animal amalgamations that emerge in The Swamp.
..
..
..
.. That first film condenses, in the small frame of Luciano, a barely
..
..
.. perceptible openness to animals and the alterity they embody.
..
..
.. Luciano’s dogtooth can be read as an atavistic remainder, a remnant of
..
..
.. a primordial mammalian past, yet it also instantiates the sort of collapse
..
..
.. of the fantastical and everyday that so interests Martel, and that is most
..
..
..
manifest in the Mandragora, with its screaming, humanoid roots. Like
... the old bull mistaken for a young cow in Echeverrı́a’s story, Luciano is
..
..
.. possessed of a distinct mutability – one that is cut short by his
..
..
..
.. precipitous death. Yet even as he falls in The Swamp and resurfaces in
..
..
.. The Headless Woman, he evinces a generational shift in the strict
..
..
.. divisions between human and animal.
..
..
..

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
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..
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..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 14. Luciano contemplates the ...
..
world outside the car, in The ..
..
Swamp. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. As the preceding readings demonstrate, animals persist as grist for the
..
..
.. allegorical mill thanks to their capacity to act as internationally
..
..
.. recognizable signs of the local and as metaphors for humans’ alternating
..
..
..
.. cruelty and vulnerability. If we steer away from these connotations, what
..
...
..
remains? To risk the obvious, we are left with the sometimes bloated,
..
..
..
almost always slick bodies of these nonhuman beings. Comparative
..
..
..
recourse to cinema’s long history of documenting violent animal death is
..
..
..
again instructive. Here the depiction of real animal death frequently
..
..
..
enables a view of the instant of death – the shift from being to nonbeing,
41 See Vivian Sobchack’s discussion
..
..
..
from movement to stillness.41 This is not the case in Martel’s films,
of cinema’s (in)capacity to index ..
..
..
where the moment of impact – of death – is always kept offscreen. Of
human and animal death, in ..
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment ..
..
Luciano’s death, Martel explains, ‘the grace of movement, which the
..
and Moving Image Culture .. dead boy has lost, is something so terrible that it is not sufficient to linger
...
(Oakland, CA: University of ..
.. on it’.42 Instead, the conclusion of The Swamp gathers the moments of
California Press, 2004). See also ..
Sarah O’Brien, ‘Why look at dead
..
.. stillness, emptiness and silence that follow his death, and which
..
animals?’, Framework, vol. 57, ..
.. collectively summon all of his lost potential. This, Martel explains, ‘is
..
no. 1 (2016), pp. 32–57. ..
..
this absence which most interests me’.43
42 Oubi~na, Estudio Crı́tico sobre La ..
Ciénaga, p. 59. ..
..
What then of the enduring presence of dead animals in her films? In
..
43 Ibid., p. 59. ..
..
her reading of Amores Perros, Beckman remarks on ‘the tension
..
..
..
between high-speed, technological horizontality and the slow,
..
.. downward animal fall’, referring in the second case to a shot of Cofi’s
...
..
.. wounded body sliding down the seat of Octavio’s car as they career
..
44 Beckman, Crash, p. 184. ..
.. through traffic.44 A similar pattern of ‘competing vectors’ propels
..
..
.. Martel’s films, though it encompasses the falls of both animals and
..
45 Ibid. ..
.. humans.45 As Aguilar writes of The Swamp,
..
..
..
..
..
bodies cannot stand up straight or rise up, and the two most important
..
..
..
ascents that are produced (the boy climbing the ladder and the Virgin
..
..
..
revealing herself in a stain in a water tank) must yield in the face of
... this tectonic force that causes them to be dragged down, to fall, to lie
..
..
46 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, ..
.. down, or, simply, to be unable to get up.46
p. 42. ..
..
.. This essay has shown how the human characters’ descents are rendered
..
..
.. legible by the accompanying entanglements of animals’ demises. Luchi’s
..
..
.. silent fall, Momi’s disillusionment, Mecha’s promise to take forever to
..
..
.. her bed, Vero’s wilful amnesia, the young boy’s death in the canal – the

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

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 ...
..
..
indelible political significance of these descents owes precisely to their
..
.. eerie coupling with animal death.
..
..
.. One of classical Hollywood cinema’s greatest tricks on audience
..
.. identification occurs in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), when Norman
..
..
..
.. Bates (Anthony Perkins) – and, by extension, the viewer – holds his
..
..
.. breath, hoping that the car belonging to his victim, Marion Crane (Janet
..
..
.. Leigh), will sink to the bottom of a boggy marsh. It does, to many
..
..
..
viewers’ immense relief. Neither the cow of The Swamp or the dog of
... The Headless Woman descend into oblivion so easily. They remain, and
..
..
..
.. the viewer is repeatedly asked to look at them: the cow, submerged; the
..
..
.. deer, shuffled about in a bin bag. Perhaps this is the most important effect
..
..
..
of Martel’s dead animals. They are grisly rem(a)inders of once living
..
..
..
beings that refuse to sink out of sight. While almost all of the human
..
..
..
characters pretend they cannot see them, the viewer cannot miss them,
..
..
..
framed as they are by the syncopations and superimpositions produced
..
.. by Martel’s particular ‘way of administering information’.
..
...
..
..
..
.. My thanks to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, who introduced me to the Salta trilogy, among so many things.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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...
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..

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Sarah O’Brien
Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/58/4/458/4772798

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