Queer-haptic_aesthetics_in_the_films_of.docx

1 This is a pre-publication version of an essay published in Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14: 1 (2017): 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1386/slac.14.1.95_1

Queer-haptic aesthetics in the films of Lucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri Missy Molloy, Victoria University of Wellington

Abstract Lucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri are contemporaneous Argentine directors whose films are frequently included in the category ‘New Argentine Cinema’. Often interpreted as indictments of bourgeois cultural values, Martel’s La ciénaga (The Swamp) (Martel, 2001), La niña santa (The Holy Girl) (Martel, 2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) (Martel, 2008) spotlight sexual, racial and economic inequalities that manifest in unconventional desires and sudden violence. Although more explicitly sexual and violent, Géminis (Geminis) (Carri, 2005) and La rabia (Anger) (Carri, 2008) similarly undermine heteronormative social conventions, the former film depicting sibling incest and the latter displacing idealized representations of rural life with images of sexual deviance and animal cruelty. This article presents haptic and queer analyses of these filmmakers' works to reveal overlaps in their sociopolitical critiques. The interpretations also demonstrate the utility of queer-haptic cinematic strategies, through which Martel and Carri expose alternative vantages on queer desires.

Keywords

2 Albertina Carri Lucrecia Martel haptic film criticism queer film studies new Argentine cinema contemporary women filmmakers

Released in 2005, Albertina Carri’s Géminis (Geminis) (Carri, 2005) opens with an extreme close-up of a needle pricking skin and a vial slowly filling with blood (Insert Figure 1 here). At first, the image is blurred, only becoming legible as the camera pulls back slightly and focuses. The first shot frustrates the viewer’s impulse to make sense of the image, an initial disorientation that colours the imminent, sensually provocative cinematic experience. Lucrecia Martel’s first feature film, La ciénaga (The Swamp) (Martel, 2001),1 begins with a close-up of a hand shakily pouring red wine into a glass. In the next shot, the camera tracks the slow movements of a nearly off-screen body; only a forearm and hand clutching a wineglass are visible. The hand’s tremors might indicate intoxication; however, a medium shot of the midsections of several middle-aged bodies slowly dragging lawn chairs across an outdoor patio reveals that everything is vibrating. Like Géminis, La ciénaga also opens enigmatically, the shots above functioning as atypical establishing shots. Both Carri and Martel eschew decipherability to stress the corporality of bodies over their narrative relevance. By doing so, these

3 contemporaneous Argentine filmmakers encourage relationships between films and viewers based not on recognizable narrative situations but on the physical experiences of their characters. The way Martel sequences La ciénaga’s opening shots is illustrative; first, she focuses our attention on an individual (showing us only an isolated part of her), then she offers a broader view of bodies simultaneously being moved by forces beyond their control (in this case, an impending storm). These sequences, and many others in Martel’s and Carri’s films, feature characteristics associated with the turn towards explicitly sensational cinema, which film scholars theorize using the term haptic to foreground the tactile dimensions of cinematic expression. One of the main proponents of haptic film analysis, Martine Beugnet, succinctly sums up the shift from optic- to hapticoriented film production and theory in Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression:

Haptic images dehierarchise perception, drawing attention back to tactile details and the material surface where figure and ground start to fuse. Haptic images thus encourage a mode of visual perception akin to the sense of touch, where the eye, sensitized to the image’s concrete appearance, becomes responsive to qualities usually made out through skin contact. (Beugnet 2007: 66)

As in the films from the ‘New French extremity’ that Beugnet analyses, haptic

4 images in Martel’s and Carri’s films disturb and provoke viewers, at times jarringly so. For example, the shot of the needle piercing skin in Géminis has the tactile element Beugnet describes, which has an invasive effect on viewers, who are likely to be slightly repelled by the vicarious sensation of being pricked with a needle. Martel and Carri use haptic images to expose viewers to desires that challenge social conventions, including sibling incest in Géminis and adolescent lesbian desires in all of Martel’s feature films, La ciénaga, La niña santa (The Holy Girl) (Martel, 2004), and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) (Martel, 2008). Additionally, the haptic images implicate viewers in the non-normative sexualities on-screen that defy Argentine upper-middle class values. Furthermore, by undermining heteronormative social conventions, Martel and Carri reveal the toxic roots that maintain class-based privilege. La ciénaga’s main setting, ‘La Mandrágora’,2 an upper-class family’s country estate well past its prime, epitomizes a view of society – apparent in both directors’ feature films – as decadent and in an advanced state of decay. Often interpreted as indictments of bourgeois cultural values, these films grapple with complex tensions, which, while being habitually repressed, surface in unconventional desires and unanticipated violence. This article cites examples from each of their narrative feature-length films, including Carri’s second and most recent, La Rabia (Anger) (Carri, 2008), to establish clear overlaps in their cinematic styles. My purpose is not to suggest that they always or only use the same strategies, but to argue that the ones they share illustrate queer-haptic cinematic techniques, which effectively subvert the heteronormative defaults of classical film conventions.

5 Rural settings and social stagnation Beginning feature-length film careers at roughly the same time, Martel and Carri are categorized together according to multiple sets of criteria; for instance, they appear in lists of directors associated with ‘New Argentine Cinema’ and of female auteurs in Latin, South American and global contexts.3 While Martel’s films have inspired a significant amount of scholarly publications in English and Spanish, English language publications on Carri are scarce and mainly focus on her experimental documentary and first feature film, Los Rubios (The Blonds) (Carri, 2003).4 Pointing out similarities in their films contributes to the existing scholarship on their work; more importantly, though, it indicates that these similarities are more than circumstantial. Like other internationally recognized female directors, Martel and Carri avoid visual conventions traditionally associated with Classical Hollywood cinema and, in film theory, with Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’ (Mulvey 1975: 837). However, I argue that Martel and Carri don’t replace a male gaze with a female one; instead, they facilitate queer, multi-sensory engagements with their characters’ experiences. In addition, both focus on childhood and adolescence to stress the corruptive influence of older generations on the young. Finally, they include incestuous sibling desire among the non-normative behaviours they spotlight as indicative of broad social decay. By doing so, they suggest that conventional social values stimulate convoluted forms of intimacy, which compound already complex processes of adolescent sexual maturation. Moreover, each director implicates natural settings in the corrupt communities she depicts.5 For example, early shots of beautiful landscapes in La

6 rabia show a young girl, Nati, urinating in an open field and a slightly older boy, Ladeado, methodically beating a sack of live animals against a tree before tossing it into a dirty pond (Insert Figure 2 here). A high angle long take of the sack slowly sinking as movement within records the trapped animals’ struggles to escape recalls a similar shot in La ciénaga when Momi, a middle child in the large, formerly wealthy family central to La ciénaga’s narrative, dives into the filthy pool behind their country house. A high angle long take implies looking down into the murky water (from the other children’s perspectives) to see when, or whether, Momi emerges. [missing period] Thus, both films use natural images of stagnant water to counter idealized representations of rural life and suggest that pervasive social dysfunction impacts their characters’ social behaviours. Unlike films that cultivate ironic or exaggerated tones to highlight otherness, thereby situating cultural norms as a default, Martel’s La ciénaga sidesteps normalcy as a cultural relative, offering a sensually dense world in its stead. This strategy has a different impact than satirizing normalcy – for example, in a film such as American Beauty (Mendes, 1999) whose obvious referent is mainstream culture. On the contrary, La ciénaga marginalizes social norms, instead asserting its own ‘society of urges, desires, taboos, and prejudices’ as primary (Rich 2005). In ‘Analyzing the woman Auteur: The female/feminist gazes of Isabel Coixet and Lucrecia Martel’, Jennifer Slobodian offers a relevant evaluation of Martel’s stance on non-normative desires: ‘Martel, through a series of atypical corporeal, erotic situations that are not stigmatized within the context of the film, is able to convey a more fluid concept of gender and sexual orientation’ (2012: 172). Focusing

7 primarily on La niña santa, Slobodian argues that Martel ‘provides a feminized view of Amalia’s story through unconventional filmmaking’ (2012: 173). While aspects of my interpretations complement Slobodian’s, I stress that in Martel’s films, queer desires are the norm. Moreover, in line with the goals of queer theory, Martel activates haptic viewing experiences to ‘challenge or deconstruct traditional ideas of sexuality and gender, especially the acceptance of heterosexuality as normative and the perception of a rigid dichotomy of male and female traits’ (OED Online 2016). Thus, my approach to the concept of ‘queer cinema’ aligns with Barbara Mennel’s in Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys: ‘Queer Cinema goes beyond a taxonomy of gay and lesbian films to participate in a larger project of queer Film Studies: an archaeology of an alternative cinematic aesthetics organised around non-normative desires’ (Mennel 2012: 1). While Martel and Carri’s films represent same-sex desires, they also feature non-normative, heterosexual desires. Therefore, I argue that their films are queer in the broader sense Mennel describes. Further, Mennel’s elaboration of queer cinema applies to the range of sexualities presented in these films: ‘“Queer" encapsulates “perverse” sexualities without fixing them into specific identities and can therefore capture different configurations of cinematic representation and non-normative desire, even regarding films that do not include explicit representations of homosexuality’ (2010: 4). Martel and Carri’s queer-haptic techniques stimulate alternative vantages on a wide spectrum of sexual desires that oppose heterosexist norms and the social values they uphold. In La ciénaga’s opening scene, an auditory sound bridge augments heavily tactile images of the family matriarch Mecha’s glass-plastered chest after she has

8 tripped, fallen and cut herself with shards from her broken wineglass. The sound of shattering glass remains startlingly clear after the image has already cut to register the reactions of Momi and her slightly older sister, Veró, in their bedroom. In Martel’s films, while one sense may appear momentarily primary, closer attention reveals that secondary or tertiary sensory elements are simultaneously influencing viewers’ perceptions. In this particular sequence, a high angle shot of the adults on the patio calmly sipping wine is placed between the reaction shot of the girls and their frantic arrival to help their mother, who lies on the concrete patio near the indifferent adults. Thus, the sequencing juxtaposes the adults’ lack of empathy with the girls’ concern, while the sound layering highlights emotional disjunctions within the small community. This vitality, palpable in all Martel’s films, is an effect of her assured sensory coordination, which sustains compelling emotional atmospheres even when a scene’s plot relevance is vague. Cinematic strategies such as these encourage multi-sensory viewer engagement and contribute to Martel’s revelations of pervasively corrupt societies. Several haptic-oriented analyses of Martel’s work stress her unconventional approach to sound to explain how Martel disrupts what Hugo Ríos refers to as ‘the hegemony of the visual’ in ‘The poetics of the senses in the films of Lucrecia Martel’. Ríos argues that ‘the extension and focusing of the sound field of Martel's films invite not dismissal of the image, but a return to its totality; to work with it in conjunction, to dethrone its monopoly by establishing a plurality of senses’ (2008: 17; my translation). Meanwhile, Slobodian claims that Martel’s multi-sensory compositions aim to disrupt dominant cultural binaries: ‘Martel’s use of multiple

9 senses to produce a reaction from the viewer operates as an alternative cinema that subverts the clear binaries of perceiver/perceived, masculine/feminine, and allows for new spaces of contact’ (2012: 171). In a particularly haptic sequence that functions as a transition between José, Mecha’s eledest son in Buenos Aires, and his sisters in La Ciénaga (the town near ‘La Mandrágora’), loud, diegetic popular music precedes a montage of extremely short takes in which the sisters and their girlfriends squeal as they try to escape a pack of boys throwing water balloons at them. We see one balloon splatter against the window of a clothing store the girls disappear into, before hearing others pound the glass in quick succession. Meanwhile, a quick insert frames, in extreme close-up, a girl’s lips mouthing inaudible words. Two seconds in duration, this soundless image punctuates the sequence, which initially appears dominated by the chaotic movements of the fleeing girls whose bodies are too fragmented to recognize as specific characters. The dreamlike close-up, however, impacts viewers too briefly and subtly in combination with other sensory stimuli for viewers to completely register it. As Ríos’ argues, ‘the sound is detached from the image and takes its own paths through the take, interrupting the narrative with ideas that do not directly obey the plot’ (2008: 15, my translation), while also illustrating that Martel’s firm grasp of the sequence’s multiple sensory elements disorients interpretation. A haptic sequence such as this one places viewers in close proximity to the characters to implicate them in the experiences featured on-screen. Carri’s Géminis details the incestuous relationship between twins (Meme and Jere), which their brother, Ezequiel, and mother, Lucia, eventually discover. Midway through the film

10 the twin’s dance at a club with Ezequiel and his new wife, Montse, before disappearing into the bathroom to have sex in a stall. Strobe lights reveal tightly framed bodies dancing before the image cuts to the twins having sex, their bodies only visible in the right side of the frame while the left remains dark. The scene then crosscuts between the twins and their sister-in-law, who thrashes under the glaring lights, high on ecstasy. The parallel montage thus forges a link between different forms of intimacy, connecting Montse’s frenetic movements to the twin’s frantic coupling and keeping us closely engaged with all three characters’ intense experiences. Similarly, in Martel’s third feature film, La mujer sin cabeza, viewers are kept in extremely close contact with the traumatized and passive Veró for the entire ninetyminute screening time, during which Veró suffers from the belief that she hit a boy with her car and caused his death. Although the car accident takes place in the first several minutes of the film, Veró doesn’t display strong emotions until approximately 38 minutes in, when she suddenly breaks down in a public toilet. The preceding scene ends with an eye-line match from Veró’s perspective, the sequence implying that the sight of an injured boy lying on a fútbol field propels her repressed guilt to the surface. Her sudden emotional outburst in the bathroom is framed in a medium-long shot in which Veró, off-centre screen left, is partially hidden by a wall (Insert Figure 3 here). Her face is not visible, but her back convulses with emotion.

Haptic aesthetics Such sequences strike me as literally sensational, meaning ‘dependent upon

11 sensation or the senses’, rather than in the modern sense of ‘aiming at violently exciting effects’ (OED Online 2016). The fact that Veró’s face is hidden suggests that Martel’s goal is not to provoke ‘violently exciting effects’, but to maintain a spatial relationship between viewers and Veró that mimics the distancing psychological manoeuvres through which she manages her existence. The dark left side of the frame in the shot of the twins having sex in the bathroom stall has a similar impact. In other words, these compositions stress the characters’ orientations to their transgressive behaviours rather than their emotions. In line with texts by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks that pioneered corporeal-focused analyses of film, haptic film analysts typically applaud the erosion of the subject/object division that has continually challenged efforts to make sense of the dynamic between film and spectator. In Marks’ words, ‘This relationship does not require an initial separation between perceiver and object that is mediated by representations’ (2000: 64). Haptic theories offer ways around the theoretical impasses associated with ocularcentric theories, specifically those focused on the gaze and the various identifications it inspires, forecloses or elides. Marks’ phrase ‘does not require an initial separation’ suggests that a sensational dynamic between spectator and film is progressive. However, such a view does not take into account the disturbing quality of many haptic images, which is surprisingly under-theorized, particularly in non-European cinemas. In Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener warn against oversimplifying haptic theoretical models to replace an oppressive gaze, a ‘surveilling, controlling and punishing eye’, with a ‘caressing

12 hand’ and stress that ‘the skin holds contradictions one should not ignore if one does not want to overburden a new paradigm with the demand of solving all the problems accumulated by previous theories’ (Elsaesser and Malte 2010: 115). On one hand, if the turn towards haptic film theory is motivated only by the perceived failures of ocularcentrism, then theorists are likely to exaggerate the theoretical potentials of thinking cinema according to skin, touch and embodiment, and to neglect the new ambiguities these theories produce. On the other, by theoretically undermining ‘the hegemony of the visual’, haptic analyses create space to consider other sensory elements. Therefore, while I employ haptic theories to analyse the multi-sensory complexity of Carri’s and Martel’s films, I continually emphasize the often unpleasant nature of their virtual caresses, which, I propose, is meant to inspire awareness of critical social problems. Carri and Martel’s haptic strategies link dominant social conventions to their characters’ transgressive behaviours. And unlike many internationally successful Argentine films, their films are set mainly in the countryside. In ‘The Salta Trilogy: The Civilised Barbarism in Lucrecia Martel’s Films’, Pedro Lange-Churión interprets Martel’s focus on a peripheral province in relationship to the films’ unconventional takes on gender and narrative and their immersive formal elements. Lange-Churión outlines three strategies that constitute Martel’s approach to ‘Argentine Alterity’: her focus on a peripheral province, her emphasis on ‘the lives of women’ and her avoidance of Classical Hollywood cinema conventions ‘in favour of stories that seem to weave themselves together out of the syncopation of gestures, moods, repeated motifs, incomplete and almost spasmodic dialogues, parallel framing and the

13 incredibly eloquent aural registry of her films’ (Lange-Churión 2012: 468–69). Lange-Churión concludes that Martel’s purpose is to disrupt the conventional dynamic between bourgeois and subaltern sustained by hegemonic cinema. Like Lange-Churión, I interpret these formal elements in Martel’s films as efforts to establish a state of radical alienation from cultural norms. I argue, however, that her main purpose is to mobilize queer perspectives on socially sanctioned desires and behaviours. Unlike other films associated with New Argentine Cinema (such as Carri’s experimental documentary Los rubios) Martel’s and Carri’s fiction films do not directly address recent histories of political violence in Argentina, but they are political because they spotlight tensions that maintain social inequalities. Slobodian classifies Martel as part of a ‘new wave’ of Argentinean directors that broke from the ‘auteur style’, which ‘immediately follow[ed] redemocratization [and] made ample use of allegory and documentalism’ (2012: 162). Los rubios, which has attracted the lion’s share of critical attention to Carri’s work, is more explicitly political than her fiction films and has more in common with films categorized in the ‘first wave’ of New Argentine Cinema. Meanwhile, although a number of scholars argue that Martel’s films are political, interpretations of the political content diverge. In ‘Little Red Riding Hood meets Freud in Lucrecia Martel's Salta Trilogy’, Paul Schroeder Rodríguez argues that a new group of Argentine directors focus ‘on the micropolitics of emotion’ rather than on ‘societies or extraordinary individuals in upheaval’ (Schroeder Rodríguez 2014: 94–95). Schroeder Rodríguez cites melodrama, in particular, as a genre rejected by the

14 previous generation ‘out of principle’, then adopted by second wave directors to express a ‘micropolitics of emotion’. Géminis illustrates this repurposing of melodramatic conventions for critical purposes. For instance, the melodramatic tableaux of the naked, sobbing twins draped over their shocked mother functions as the climactic image of the film’s culminating scene, in which Lucia discovers her children’s affair (Insert Figure 4 here). Calling attention to its roots in classical melodrama, the composition of the image does not satirize the dramatic mode, but rather, incites alternative responses to the familiar. Claudia Fogg argues,

The contrast between the seemingly satirical approach to a middle-class porteño family drama and the occasional shots which reached out and gently brushed one’s cheek, causing seconds of pleasant surprise, was altogether unusual and called for the audience to repeatedly sit up and pay attention. (Fogg 2006)

By combining melodramatic and haptic properties, Carri places viewers in a tactile relationship with an extreme situation that would, if represented in a traditional manner, have a less striking impact. Despite Schroeder Rodríguez’s promising claim about a new ‘micropolitics’ of emotion, he narrowly interprets the Salta trilogy as representing distinct political moments in the 1970s (La ciénaga), 1980s (La niña santa), and 1990s (La mujer sin cabeza), thus reducing the films’ protagonists to ‘metaphors of Argentina’s civil society’ transitioning from ‘infantilized social agent’, to ‘brazen adolescent’, and

15 finally, to ‘accommodating accomplice of neo-liberalism’ (2014: 95). In my view, the films discourage such direct analogies. Deborah Martin also offers a more convincing account of Martel’s political stance when she interprets Veró’s emotional turmoil as a process of ‘coming to awareness of a political context to which she had been (wilfully) blind’ (Martin 2013: 146). In one sense, Martin’s interpretation of Veró echoes Schroeder Rodríguez’s description of her as ‘an accommodating accomplice of neo-liberalism’. However, Martin proposes ‘redemptive possibilities’ in Veró’s ‘slow and limited coming to consciousness of the political structures she inhabits’ (2013: 146). In the process, she argues that the two queer characters – Veró’s niece, Candita, and her Indigenous girlfriend, Cuca – represent greater potential for social and political change than Veró:

Candita and Cuca offer a radical escape from the intermeshing matrices of class, gender, and sexuality which Veró is ultimately trapped in […] Cuca is a go-between, moving easily between Candita’s house and the slums; a figure of transgression, she subverts the dominant order through boundarycrossing and her suggested unspoken understanding of Veró’s crime. (2013: 146–47)

Concluding that these peripheral characters ‘draw our attention to what is at the boundaries of adult, “rational", privileged, heteronormative and white society’, Martin identifies the queering of sexual, racial and class boundaries as central to Martel’s political critique (2013: 148). I agree, although Martel queers ‘sexual, racial

16 and class boundaries’ less by foregrounding explicitly queer characters, such as Candita, than by using haptic aesthetics to evoke diegetic worlds in which queer desires are normal. Thus in La mujer sin cabeza, Cuca and Candita underscore the queerness of Veró, who gradually becomes aware of her personal investment in social structures that maintain class-based inequalities (Insert Figure 5 here). Thus, in a shot taken over Candita’s right shoulder, Cuca gazes affectionately back at her while Veró is situated between the two, angling her head to share in the exchange.

Queer vantages on pervasive social problems In Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmed argues,

If we return to the word ‘queer’ […] we can see that the word itself ‘twists,’ with a twist that allows us to move between sexual and social registers, without flattening them or reducing them to a single line. Although this approach risks losing the specificity of queer as a commitment to a life of social deviation, it also sustains the significance of ‘deviation’ in what makes queer lives queer. (Ahmed 2006: 161)

Ahmed’s statement resonates in Martel’s and Carri’s oblique stances towards sexualities conventionally considered deviant. Because they present ‘deviant’ sexual behaviours as widespread, they discourage viewers from distinguishing queer from ‘normal’ desires. The fluidity ‘between sexual and social registers’ in Martel and

17 Carri’s films indicates that sexual and social practices are complementary and ‘norms’ misleading. For instance, because every character in La rabia illustrates some form of aberrant desire, the film totally displaces concepts of normal sexual behaviour. As a corollary, both filmmakers suggest that extreme social inequalities directly affect desire and its expression. Therefore, Momi’s desire for Isabel in La ciénaga is partly fuelled by Isabel’s inferior social status. Several reviews of La rabia suggest that Carri ‘goes too far’ in her fixation on disturbing violent and sexual images (Marshall 2009). Beugnet defends Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001) against similar charges of ‘gratuitous sensationalism’ by interpreting its ‘lack of proper narrative structure’ as essential to the film’s ‘affective and aesthetic force’ (Beugnet 2007: 38). According to Beugnet, art cinema traditionally balances ‘stylization with representation mediated by a critical vision’; therefore, when images disrupt this balance, films become vulnerable to charges of ‘audio-visual excess’ (2007: 38–40). Arguing that films like Trouble Every Day require new conceptual approaches, Beugnet proposes a different stance on their excesses:

It is in the gratuitous or ‘surplus’ nature of the vision, in its beholding of the forces of chaos, and in the way it engages us emotionally as well as aesthetically with the irrational and unacceptable, that the critical edge lies. (2007: 40)

She concludes that analysing Trouble Every Day requires integrating theoretical

18 approaches developed in response to art cinema and the body genres. Like Denis’ films, Martel and Carri’s demand hybrid conceptual approaches. Their increasingly graphic and sensually provocative images reflect expanded receptive thresholds. The high frequency of extremely sensual cinematography in twenty-first century films validates film theories attuned to the synaesthetic dimensions of the medium, including haptic theory. However, while haptic theories illuminate aesthetic and political aspects of Martel’s and Carri’s films, I reiterate that haptic aesthetics don’t necessarily indicate that a film is either transgressive or sensually appealing. Ideas proposed in other theoretical contexts, notably queer film studies, shed light on the behaviours these films document, as well as their social implications. In Géminis, the setting shifts dramatically from suburban Buenos Aires to the family’s country home, where Ezequiel renews his vows to Montse. The new location significantly alters the tenor of the twin’s illicit relationship. While they had developed a system for hiding their affair in the city, in this different space, they falter, so much so that Ezequiel discovers them; consequently, the threat of exposure forces the twins to reevaluate their behaviour. The juxtaposition of the two locations emphasizes their different behavioural effects: in this case, the regimented city life facilitated their secret, while the lax country atmosphere exposes them. In a parallel montage during the family’s celebration of Ezequiel and Montse’s marriage, Carri stresses the disruptive impact of nature via shots of Jere, taking out his frustration on a tree bough, and Meme seeking refuge in the woods during

19 the wedding party (Insert Figure 6 here). A close-up of Meme’s high heels as she stumbles through the forest implies a porous boundary between civilized and aberrant social behaviours. Géminis presents corrupt desires, figured in the opening shots of the needle as contagious and epitomized by the twin’s incest, as a feature of modern society that transgresses class divisions. A subplot involving the family’s maid, Olga, develops tangentially to the main plot regarding the twin’s affair. Lucia continually bemoans Olga’s personal problems, which, she suspects, stem from Olga’s husband sexually abusing his daughters. Her sympathetic expressions are mixed with condescension, the latter conveying her belief that incest is a lower class problem. Ríos points out an analogous irony in Mecha’s racist and classist remarks in La ciénaga, which her children unfortunately imitate. He argues that Mecha and her family’s prejudiced comments reveal more about their lifestyle than those of local Indigenous communities: ‘This is not the only time Joaquín makes a racist comment, echoing the words of his mother and, at the same time, creating a mirror of the living situation of Mecha’s family in their country house’ (Ríos 2008: 12– 13; my translation). In other words, Lucia’s, Mecha’s and Joaquín’s racist and classist remarks perform a mirroring function, which reveals that they transfer disgust for their own habits onto ethnically ‘other’, lower classes. Lange-Churión draws a similar conclusion: ‘The racist values that sustain the civilization/barbarism national narrative, along with its ethnic and social elements are mirrored inside the heterotopic confine’ (Lange-Churión 2012:

20 477). Géminis’ dramatic climax – Lucia’s discovery of her own children having sex – stresses the tragic irony of her prejudices. Géminis and La ciénaga propose that supposedly aberrant social behaviours are in fact common, despite the illusion of superiority sustained by class prejudices. Furthermore, a plot featured in Olga’s favourite telenovela, the revelation that two lovers are siblings, underscores Lucia’s fascination with incest in Olga’s family. While the telenovela plot obviously foreshadows the final dénouement, it also suggests that not only incest, but also the fascination with incest transcends class boundaries. Malena Verardi argues that the social exclusions Mecha’s family reproduces through their racist attitudes create an aura of fascination, which fuels the characters’ desires (Verardi 2013: 17). For instance, class prejudices influence Momi’s desire for Isabel and her efforts to assuage her disappointment at Isabel’s continual rebuffs. Thus when Isabel rejects the family and Momi along with it, Momi repeats an insulting, racist remark Mecha made about Isabel earlier in the film.6 In other words, the fascination inspired by pervasive class and racial prejudices stimulates transgressive desires with destructive social potentials. Géminis builds to the shattering climax in which Lucia clutches the naked twins to her chest. The image of Lucia clutching the naked, sobbing twins recalls Julia Kristeva’s infamous account of abjection in Powers of Horror:

The abject confronts us […] with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before existing outside of her […] It is a violent,

21 clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling. (Kristeva 1982: 13)

The wordlessness of the twins and their mother, sobbing and intertwined, could signify regression to prelinguistic intimacy, a reading the twin’s nakedness supports. In this case, the intimacy is traumatic rather than comforting. Through Lucia’s discovery, Carri stages an inverted primal scene wherein the mother rejects her children, unable to process their temporally inappropriate intimacy. Lucia leaves the twins, crawls down the stairs, and finally collapses, all while sobbing. Subsequently, she breaks a wine glass and cuts Jere’s face, the camera panning slowly right to reveal his silently observing father – invisible up to this point – whose interpretation of the scene is unclear. Meanwhile, ‘let’s toast the bride and groom’, emits from an off-screen television playing Ezequiel’s wedding footage. In the next scene, when Jere lies about what occurred between the twins and their mother, an off-screen female voice comments, ‘what a rotten country’, while Jere’s anxious face is framed in medium close-up. Through these off-screen comments, Carri connects compulsory heterosexuality, epitomized in the wedding footage, and widespread social corruption with the twins’ aberrant behaviour and betrayal of their mother. Offering oblique perspectives on desires that oppose cultural norms, Carri and Martel do not provide sufficient exposition to allow viewers to easily judge characters’ behaviours. While Martin states, ‘It is strongly intimated that the white, privileged Candita and the dark-skinned, working class Cuca are girlfriends’ (Martin

22 2013: 146), Martel is determinedly vague about their relationship, which Martin honours via the phrase, ‘strongly intimated’. Martel also elides events of considerable dramatic impact or stages them in the background of shallow-focus shots. For example, when La niña santa’s Amalia trespasses into Dr Jano’s hotel room, she leans over to whisper something in his ear, but viewers aren’t able to eavesdrop, finding themselves only able to observe. This encounter builds on a series of scenes in which Amalia attempts to make contact with Dr Jano, who had initially engaged her sexually without consent.7 Because her words are inaudible, their narrative impact is subordinated to the characters’ body language. Spectators must respond to what is in the frame without precise information regarding why. In these instances, disorientation provokes different reactions than conventional narration and editing would have. By asking viewers to encounter non-normative desires without the comforts of conventional cinema, the directors shift the focus to relationships that undercut traditional family and social models. In Géminis, Carri alternates between formal compositions reminiscent of art cinema to haptic, extreme close-ups that solicit imaginative complicity with the twin’s incestuous desires, for instance, in the haptic scene of the twin’s dancing, then having sex in the club. In La ciénaga, José nurtures an incestuous flirtation with his sister, Veró; meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, he is having an affair with a much older woman, Mercedes, who was once his father’s mistress. Furthermore, in the country house, he is unusually intimate with not only Veró, but also his mother. On multiple occasions, José refers to his sister as ‘Dirty Momi’, and in fact, Momi does seem averse to bathing – Isabel chides Momi for not

23 bathing for four days and swimming in the filthy pool in the interim. But Momi’s dirtiness cannot be mistaken as a sign of her aberrant desire for Isabel when the most direct image of cleanliness is Veró shampooing the filth of stagnant pool water from her hair while José provocatively reaches his leg around the shower curtain to rinse his mud soaked sneaker (Insert Figure 7 here). Martel complicates the social connotations of all the relationships she represents, thereby discouraging conventional interpretations of the desires her characters express. In conjunction, haptic and queer analyses of Martel’s and Carri’s films illuminate the formal, aesthetic and narrative techniques that promote viewing experiences, which, in Beugnet’s words, focus ‘less on the film’s representational dimension and narrative structure in order to allow for an empathetic reaction to moods and sensory correspondences’ (Beugnet 2007: 40). I conclude by elaborating on the sequences that open La ciénaga and La rabia as final illustrations of queerhaptic interpretation. Momi’s attachment to Isabel is introduced in a parallel montage during the first scene before either’s role in the family is clear. The moving shadow of curtains projected onto the wall of a dark room signals the transition from the patio to a room inside the house, in which two barely discernible figures lay in a bed under the open window. The spoken line – ’Thank you, God, for giving me Isabel’ – precedes the first close-up of Momi’s face. Without a narrative framework through which to interpret the scene, viewers can only respond to the tone established by the image of bodies lying close together in a dark room on a sunny day (Insert figure 8 here). The edit thereby promotes ‘sensory correspondence[s]’ before providing details that clarify the characters’ actions. Also,

24 by offering Momi’s invocation before her face is visible, viewers can’t attach the spoken line to a body. If viewers identify with the emotions Momi’s voice expresses, then Martel successfully undermines their potential resistance to the awkward image, featured seconds later, of Momi pressing Isabel’s T-shirt to her nostrils, which establishes the queerness of Momi’s attraction to Isabel well before viewers understand that it transgresses class, gender and racial boundaries. Isabel, subordinate to the family economically and racially, is key to the film’s relational structure. Through her, Mecha expresses her social superiority and frustration and Momi her feelings of alienation from the social class to which she belongs and from which Isabel is excluded, except as hired help. Isabel clarifies Martel’s social critique; devoid of social worth from Mecha’s perspective, Isabel gestures to an alternative system of determining social values, one in which Mecha is sterile and Isabel abundant (and indeed, Isabel is pregnant at the end of the film). From this other perspective, Momi’s attraction to Isabel and rejection of Mecha appear natural instead of queer. Thus, the film’s disorienting strategies are not gratuitous; they have a clear aim: to activate sensory responses before providing context that could lead viewers to reject socially censured desires, like Momi’s. The third strand of the parallel montage that opens La ciénaga shows a pack of young boys playing in the mountains. The harrowing sounds of a suffering animal anticipate their discovery of a steer trapped in the mud. Not only does Martel avoid sentimentalizing the boys’ reactions to the steer’s suffering, she plays-up their insensitivity. While the boys shout and jeer, a furiously barking dog hovers by the steer. La rabia begins with a similar sequence. First, after the two striking shots,

25 mentioned earlier, of a desolate landscape lit progressively by dawn, the third shot features Nati staring angrily towards viewers. Then, she climbs gracelessly through a rundown fence that separates two overgrown fields and, in a shot nearly identical to the first, squats in the grass to urinate (Insert Figure 9). The scene then cuts abruptly to the image of Ladeado slamming the burlap sack into the tree trunk. When the focus returns to Nati, she takes off her dress while staring, still angrily, offscreen. She then creeps along a wall, fixated on something beyond the upper righthand corner of the frame. The camera pulls back, revealing a partially undressed couple peering from a window. As the woman leans out, the man suddenly slaps her ass; he turns away, and she smiles. As in La ciénaga’s opening montage, Carri offers a series of images that obscurely links animal brutality, non-normative desires, and rural settings. In both scenes, the landscape complements the elliptical narration as the directors contradict the notion of rural spaces as peaceful respites from urban life. By doing so, they challenge the idea that individuals can escape from social problems and instead represent the problem of socially censured desires as omnipresent. They may be felt differently in the country than in the city, and in adolescence and adulthood, but they are inescapable. Because information that would allow viewers to ‘make sense’ of the provocative images and situations is withheld, viewers are more likely to participate in the queer encounters on-screen. My analyses have emphasized how these films push interpretive boundaries. Consequently, firm judgements on the marginal figures in Carri’s and Martel’s films – the bored teenagers, dissatisfied help, and angry, mute children – are not easy. By

26 representing experiences that transgress heteronormative boundaries as normal, Carri and Martel pose ethical questions that probe the ideologies societies superficially maintain, yet habitually violate. And by innovating normal viewing conventions, they prohibit traditional spectatorship. Finally, by straying outside clearly demarcated narrative and aesthetic paths, Martel and Carri invigorate peripheral spaces and desires, thereby subverting the heteronormative assumptions upheld by conventional filmmaking.

References

Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press.

Beugnet, M. (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Carri, Albertina (2005), Géminis, DVD, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Mantanza Cine.

____ (2008), La rabia, DVD, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Hubert Bals Fund, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA) and Mantanza Cine.

Elsaesser, Thomas and Hagener, Malte (2009), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

27

Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World (2011), vol. 1, California: Sage Publications.

Fogg, C. (2006), ‘Geminis by Albertina Carri’, Netribution, 24 December.

Forcinito, A. (2013), ‘Lo invisible y lo invivible: el nuevo cine argentino de mujeres y sus huellas acústicas’, Chasqui, 42:1, pp. 37–53.

Godart, C. (2016), The Dimensions of Difference: Space, Time and Bodies in Women's Cinema and Continental Philosophy, London: Roman and Littlefield International.

Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lange-Churión, P. (2012), ‘The Salta Trilogy: The civilised barbarism in Lucrecia Martel's films’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22:4, pp. 467–84.

Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Marshall, L. (2009), ‘La Rabi.’, Screen Daily, 19 February.

Martel, Lucrecia (2001), La cié naga (The Swamp), DVD, Chicago: Home Vision Entertainment.

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____ (2008), La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman), DVD, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones.

____ (2004), La niña santa (The Holy Girl), DVD, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones.

Martin, D. (2013), ‘Childhood, youth, and the in-between: The ethics and aesthetics of Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza’, Hispanic Research Journal, 14:2, pp. 144– 58.

Mennel, B. (2010), Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys, New York, NY: Wallflower Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16:3, pp. 6–18.

"queer, adj.1". OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236?redirectedFrom=queer+theory (accessed March 29, 2017). Ríos, H. (2008), ‘La Poética de los Sentidos en los Filmes de Lucrecia Martel’,. Atenea, 28:2, pp. 9–22.

29 Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A. (2014), ‘Little Red Riding Hood meets Freud in Lucrecia Martel's Salta trilogy’, Camera Obscura: A Journal Of Feminism, Culture, And Media Studies, 29:3, 87, pp. 93–115.

"sensational, adj. and n.". OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/175941?redirectedFrom=sensational (accessed March 29, 2017).

Slobodian, J. (2012), ‘Analyzing the woman auteur: The female/feminist gazes of Isabel Coixet and Lucrecia Martel’, The Comparatist, 36:1, pp. 160–77.

Verardi, M. (2013), ‘La ciénaga: el tiempo suspendido’, Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual, 7, pp. 1–21.

Contributor details Missy Molloy is a Lecturer in the Film Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She is co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and her work has appeared in a number of journals, including PsyArt (2014), East-West Cultural Passage (2015) and the Journal of Popular Television (2017). Her current research focuses on women’s screen authorship and long-form narrative in post-network television.

30 Notes 1

La ciénaga is literally translated as ‘The Swamp’, but the translated title is rarely

used, even in English language contexts. 2

The English translation of ‘La Mandrágora’ is ‘the mandrake’, a Mediterranean

herb, which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, was ‘used especially to promote conception, as a cathartic, or as a narcotic and soporific’. Interestingly, ‘La Mandrágora’ was also the name of a Chilean Surrealist group founded in 1938. 3

For example, both directors appear in a list of notable female film directors in the

‘Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico’ section of the Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World, Vol. 1 (2011). They are also categorized together in scholarship on ‘New Argentine Cinema’ (for instance, in Jens Andermann’s New Argentine Cinema, published in 2011 in the Tauris World Cinema Series) and in screening programs (for instance, in a 2015 retrospective series at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, ‘Nuevo Cine Argentino’). 4

I reference a number of significant articles written on Lucrecia Martel, including

Ríos (2008), Lange-Churión (2012), Martin (2013) and Schroeder Rodríguez (2014). Additionally, a chapter on La niña santa appears in Caroline Godart’s The Dimensions of Difference: Space, Time and Bodies in Women's Cinema and Continental Philosophy (2015) and in Patricia White’s Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015). There are only a few scholarly articles published on Albertina Carri, and most are in Spanish (e.g., Ocampo: 2013) and focus on Los Rubios (The Blonds) (e.g., Forcinito 2010).

31

5

Inela Selimovic’s recent article, ‘The social spaces in mutation: Sex, violence and

autism in Albertina Carri’s La rabia (2008)’ (2015), makes similar claims regarding La rabia’s treatment of natural locations; however, she interprets the film as an exploration of the effects of undiagnosed autism. 6

Under her breath, Momi calls Isabel ‘colla carnavalera’.

7

He had rubbed himself against her from behind while they were standing in a tight

crowd.