TY - JOUR
AU - O’Brien,, Sarah
AB - 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 are often referred to as her ‘Salta trilogy’.1 No other explicit narrative ties connect La Ciénaga/The Swamp (2001), La Niña Santa/The Holy Girl (2004) and La Mujer sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008); they are, rather, deftly bound together by repetitions and doublings that, while diffuse, secure them firmly in this place and this moment. The Salta trilogy is pervaded by a sustained, if often oblique, critique 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 initiate a potent critique of the country’s abiding patterns of stagnation and repression. In the growing scholarship on her work, this submerged politics proves to be one of the defining stamps of her auteurism. Critics point, in particular, to the ways in which Martel lays bare and unsettles the historically entrenched binary of ‘civilized’ upper-class whites and ‘barbaric’ indigenous peoples. Pedro Lange-Churión, for example, observes that her films ‘subtly deconstruct’ this binary by various means: displacing the narrative loci from the centre (Buenos Aires) to the periphery (Salta); inverting the conventional focus on male protagonists, casting men as, at most, foils to the female characters; and opting out of all narrative conventions that privilege linearity, momentum and coherence. Of this last move, Lange-Churión writes, the classical plot akin to the paradigmatic Hollywood classical cinema is disrupted in favour of stories that seem to weave themselves out of a syncopation of gestures, moods, repeated motifs, incomplete and almost spasmodic dialogues, parallel framing and [an] incredibly eloquent aural registry.2 Lange-Churión’s term ‘syncopation’ aptly describes how sound, image and narrative operate symbiotically in Martel’s films by way of elision, displacement and irregularly placed accents. Martel, meanwhile, avers of her methods, ‘there’s a way of administering information through depth with respect to the frame, through superimposition, that allows for all of the themes, problems or issues to be simultaneously present’.3 Without exception, scholarship on Martel’s oeuvre focuses on these syncopations and superimpositions. Indeed this work collectively (and quite perceptively) demonstrates how these operations refract an intersectional critique of social inequities that persist in a country troubled by the long aftermath of the Dirty War, the Economic Crisis of 2001 and the unremitting economic turmoil attendant on neoliberalism.4 Elaborating on this scholarship, I contend here that the politically inflected work of syncopation and superimposition in the Salta trilogy also operates across species lines, and frequently in ways that complicate the comparatively more pronounced transversals of race, class and gender dynamics. Nonhuman animals repeatedly wander through – and often become lodged inside – the films of the Salta trilogy, yet only brief attention has been paid to their presence. While scholarship on human–animal encounters in film has flourished in the last two decades, it has thus far tended to focus on North American and European cinemas.5 Of the handful of articles devoted to animals in Latin American cinema, two commence with reference to the first and last films of Martel’s trilogy before turning to sustained discussions of contemporary films by other directors.6 Responding to this implication that human–animal boundaries in Martel’s film not only matter but may even be indicative of larger patterns of meaning in the (trans)national and regional cinemas to which they belong, in this essay I undertake close and sustained analysis of the interspecies doublings that drive The Swamp and The Headless Woman – specifically, the parallel editing of a slowly sinking cow and humans in the former film, and the disorienting collision of humans and a 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 films together, Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez borrows from quantum mechanics the term ‘entanglement’, which ‘refers to the phenomenon whereby particles that are not physically connected across space can still affect one another’;7 this is possible, according to string theory, because these physically unconnected particles are part of the same string or wave. An analogous phenomenon links the female protagonists of Martel’s disconnected films, Schroeder Rodríguez observes, with the string being ‘the protagonists’ condition as privileged, intelligent and desiring women in patriarchy; and the particles [being] events and situations connected noncausally across films in the trilogy’.8 My reading extends the bounds of this entanglement to include both nonhuman animals within the Salta trilogy and heterogeneous texts that fall more and less adjacent to it. Thus my analysis attends to conditions of desiring within a society that is not only patriarchal but also anthropocentric, and in encompassing filmic and literary texts it extends beyond the closed circuit of a strictly auteurist reading. I endeavour to make these two strategies work in tandem, with the films’ intertexts illuminating cross-species entanglements, and these entanglements in turn pointing up intertextual connections. The first film of the Salta trilogy, The Swamp, presents a portrait of a dissolute bourgeois family (‘family’ in a loose sense – with its staggered generations, unclear blood relationships and intimations of incest, the family here is constituted against the indigenous servants who encircle it). The film opens with adult members of the family sitting languidly drinking around the turbid swimming pool on their declining estate, eerily named la Mandrágora, or the Mandrake. Mecha, the wobbly matriarch (played by one of the grandes dames of Argentine cinema, Graciela Borges) drunkenly trips and falls onto the concrete, drawing blood and earning disdainful stares from her husband and guests. Meanwhile the adolescent cousins have gone out hunting in the mountains that surround the property. Their dogs lead them to a cow marooned in la ciénaga – the name for the swampy earth of the region and also for the nearby town in which the extended family lives – and Joaquín (Diego Baenas) raises his rifle to shoot it.9 The film cuts back to the pool as sounds of gunshot reverberate with the gathering thunder, indicating the fulfilment of his intent (here as elsewhere, the moment of violent impact is kept offscreen, just out of sight).10 Parallel editing connects the pool and swamp scenes at the Mandrágora to a scene in town: a young boy, Luciano (Sebastián Montagna), cuts his leg in an 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 local water tower: ‘I didn’t see anything’.11 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Martín, left, and Joaquín, right, consider shooting the cow again. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Martín, left, and Joaquín, right, consider shooting the cow again. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The only visible evidence of Luciano’s fatal fall. La Ciénaga/The Swamp (Lucrecia Martel, 2001). Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The only visible evidence of Luciano’s fatal fall. La Ciénaga/The Swamp (Lucrecia Martel, 2001). 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 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 María 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. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide One of the boys runs with his dog. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide One of the boys runs with his dog. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The rearview window reveals Vero’s victim. La Mujer sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The rearview window reveals Vero’s victim. La Mujer sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). 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 invariably defined by what it is not: a concerted artistic movement.12 With fortunes running counter to the nation’s economic decline, this wave of films emerged in the mid 1990s, coalesced around the time of the 2001 Crisis, and ran through the early 2000s.13 The establishment and growth of federal subsidies for the film industry, national film schools, international film festivals, and film criticism in the mid 1990s coincided to produce a climate comparatively hospitable to the production and distribution of films.14 Modest in scale, these incentives generated a cinema unified by a spare, economical style. As Joanna Page puts it, their styles flaunted the roughness and the informality of their production, made as they were ‘on the hoof’, wherever locations could be found, whenever funds permitted, and with whomever could be persuaded to act or to provide technical assistance for little or no pay.15 As if to confirm the impossibility of defining New Argentine Cinema, Martel’s films simultaneously occupy a central and liminal space within it.16 Her first film, Rey muerto/Dead King (1995), is often heralded as one of the inaugural films of New Argentine Cinema, and no scholarly foray into this corpus fails to detail her Salta trilogy. Yet Dead King garnered immediate acclaim, paving the way for international funding and collaboration with the likes of Lita Stantic, Pedro Almodóvar and Agustín Almodóvar, and concomitantly to higher production values and international art-house prestige. While Martel’s work does not share the constrained production contexts associated with New Argentine Cinema, it does conform to the neorealist style occasioned by those conditions, and thus evinces one of the cinema’s primary gestures – the eschewal of allegory.17 Daniel Quirós observes that the output of New Argentine Cinema is ‘concentrated in “micro spaces” or individuals’ narratives that are sometimes difficult to relate allegorically to the national body’,18 while Edgardo Dieleke writes that these films are characterized by the ‘demarcation of new areas of the present, while not intervening in it explicatively or allegorically’.19 Other critics go further, describing New Argentine Cinema’s relationship to allegory not in terms of difficulty or hesitancy but rather as a deliberate rejection of what had become the dominant narrative form in the nation’s cinema. Jens Andermann explains that Argentine cinema in the second half of the 1990s and the first years after the millennium changed from being a producer of allegorical narratives of the nation’s plight – as it had been during the period following the end of the military dictatorship in 1983 – into a collector of indexical marks, a means of observing and investigating the social worlds of the present.20 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 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 niña santa is not Argentina; it is, quite simply, a hotel.21 In sum, this cinema’s resistance to allegory is born of a refusal of the neat 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 social problems’.22 Yet as my preceding summaries indicate, the narratives of both The 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, interplay of individualized human characters and haunting animal figures, and it is this negotiation that renders the films’ political critique legible.23 Certainly the cow in The Swamp is a cow and the dog in The Headless Woman is a dog, yet these animals are also proxies for the human children who bear the brunt of the adult characters’ destructive negligence; more to the point, they are allegorical stand-ins for the powerless who fall in the path of those bent on blotting out the past. If the refusal of allegory defines both Martel’s auteurism and New Argentine Cinema, it bears asking why and how it is that nonhuman animals persist in The Swamp and The Headless Woman as the remaining material susceptible to allegorical inference. Martel asserts that in her films, animals are ‘an omen, and at the same time [they] have all the mystery that some animals attract’.24 The filmmaker’s use of animals – real and imaginary, material and symbolic – is bound up with the idiosyncratic aural registries that distinguish her work. Martel casts these entwined elements as auteurist signatures incubated since childhood. Of her influences, she explains, ‘I feel closer to narrative traditions than to the tradition of Argentine cinema. I paid attention to the story, to the form of speaking, to conversations.’25 The most formative of these stories came from her grandmother, who, Martel would later learn, was paraphrasing the fiction of the Uruguayan-Argentine writer Horacio Quiroga.26 Quiroga’s story ‘El Almohadón de plumas’ (‘The big down pillow’), about a woman whose blood is slowly drained by a parasite that takes on the size and shape of her pillow, is echoed in The Swamp’s story about a woman who 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 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 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 vulnerability and callousness.29 These contrary values – and the ease with which animals slide between them – matter, because they suggest that animals, particularly in death, are not so easily dislodged from their metaphorical and allegorical slots. Understanding these functions matters, furthermore, because in order to confront the vast systems of material violence in which animals are enmeshed along with humans, it is also necessary to confront the metaphorical scaffolding that feeds into and upholds these systems. The use of animal death as a metaphor for human trauma has a complex, transnational cinematic lineage, and we can begin to discern the specificity of Martel’s reliance on it by placing it in this larger context.30 The trope appears, most famously, in the prototypical Soviet montage sequence that pits found footage of a bull’s slaughter against dramatic scenes of workers being shot down at the end of Sergei Eisenstein’s Stachka/Strike (1925). It also features in the startling hunting sequence that first disturbs the placid surface of Jean Renoir’s neorealist masterpiece La Règle du Jeu/Rules of the Game (1939), and in the scene 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 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, Martín (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. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Martín brings home the hare. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Martín brings home the hare. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Luciano considers the hare, in The Swamp. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Luciano considers the hare, in The Swamp. 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 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. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide The deer carcass in Vero’s kitchen. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide The deer carcass in Vero’s kitchen. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero watches her husband and servant discuss what do with the carcass, in The Headless Woman. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero watches her husband and servant discuss what do with the carcass, in The Headless Woman. 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 stalking the scene. In chasing after an animal or person, there is some 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 forever.32 Moreover, both the scene of the dead hare in The Swamp and that of the deer carcass in The Headless Woman disclose the presence of a class of vulnerable and largely ignored beings in the margins of the films’ diegesis, a class itself composed of unequal subclasses (lap dogs, street dogs, hunted prey, roadkill, vermin). These scenes, particularly the 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 Echeverría’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 Echeverría’s and Martel’s stories are set in motion by torrential downpours. Comparison to Echeverría’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 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 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 young characters, both real (Luciano, Momi) and potential (‘someone’).34 The sudden deaths of animal-children around which The Swamp and The Headless Woman are moored introduce doublings that trouble both species and generational divisions. As stated, The Swamp builds on a reiterated comparison between the cold detachment with which the 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, Joaquín, and Tali’s youngest, Luciano, act as poles of callous cruelty and vulnerable curiosity. Joaquín, 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 Joaquín 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 Joaquín 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. Joaquín crudely expresses this view while he himself roughly caresses the hindquarters of a dog.35 Like his crude cousin, Luciano is regularly associated with animals; yet unlike Joaquín (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 towards the half-sunk, eyeless carcass (figure 9). For Valeria de los Ríos, the marooned cow ‘is a metaphorised synechdoche of the film since Luciano […] is at the centre of the frame and the line of fire at the moment the shot goes off. Child and animal share the shot, satisfying the requirements for montage proposed by Bazin.’36 As mentioned, Luciano’s first appearance in the film subtly presages his death at the end. He enters the kitchen to wash his cut leg and, while there, peers at the carcass his brother has deposited on the counter. When Tali takes Luciano to have the cut stitched up, she tells the doctor – something she 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 (figure 11).37 When Tali’s family visits the convalescing Mecha, Luciano overhears his older cousin, Vero (Leonora Balcarce, not to be confused with the ‘headless’ Vero of the later film), telling an urban myth about a woman who took in a stray dog, only to have it kill and devour her cats while she slept at night. The woman took the animal to the vet, who cut it open and, unclasping its jaw to reveal two rows of teeth, explained to the woman that she had mistaken an African rat for a dog. Luciano is 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. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Luciano approaches the sunken cow. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Luciano approaches the sunken cow. Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Tali examines Luciano’s dogtooth, in The Swamp. Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Tali examines Luciano’s dogtooth, in The Swamp. Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero examines the teeth of working-class children. Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero examines the teeth of working-class children. 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 the film’s title: obscured by the X-ray machine, Vero is headless (figure 12).38 The X-ray itself never appears, as Vero leaves the hospital before a doctor can examine her, and later her husband and his brother somehow make her hospital records disappear. If this image did exist it would index an erasure – an absence quite unlike the phantom fangs embedded in Luciano’s mouth. Whereas Luciano’s X-ray hints at a threatening yet exhilarating fusion of humans and animals, Vero’s simply marks a void – nothing. A brief excursus into The Holy Girl, a film that traces the blurred sexual and religious coming of age of the teenage Amalia (María Alche), suggests that this difference is in fact a disappearance that unfolds across the trilogy. Animals figure less overtly in this second film, yet they are nonetheless present in, for example, Amalia’s recitation of a nursery rhyme about hunting with tired dogs, in the meat the cooks are cutting in the hotel kitchen, and in the 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 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. Fig. 12. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero being X-rayed, in The Headless Woman. Fig. 12. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero being X-rayed, in The Headless Woman. 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 other without fusion.39 One of Beckman’s most generative readings is of Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 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 García 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 Echevarría), 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 superficial.40 Vero’s crash is a false start, a collision that triggers her awakening to the privilege she acquires and the paternalistic oversight she endures as an upper-class white women in a racially and economically stratified society. Any critical insight this awakening brings is short lived: she gives one of the dead boy’s friends some hand-me-down T-shirts, assuaging her guilt and washing her hands of the entanglement. Reading Martel’s films as an auteurist progression of themes, the violent ingestions of The Swamp and the crash of The Headless Woman emerge as contrasting models for encounters between self and other, human and animal. What is more, The Headless Woman bears the faint traces of a synthesis of the two in the child’s handprint that, impressed on the car window, hovers above Vero as she contemplates what she has just hit (figure 13). As an index this handprint is overdetermined: it points most directly back to the boy she may have hit (did his arm shoot up, slapping the window on impact?); to the comparatively sheltered children of Vero’s friends who played in her car before she set out; and 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 Echeverría’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. Fig. 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero fixes her gaze ahead, in The Headless Woman. Fig. 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Vero fixes her gaze ahead, in The Headless Woman. Fig. 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Luciano contemplates the world outside the car, in The Swamp. Fig. 14. Open in new tabDownload slide 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, from movement to stillness.41 This is not the case in Martel’s films, where the moment of impact – of death – is always kept offscreen. Of Luciano’s death, Martel explains, ‘the grace of movement, which the dead boy has lost, is something so terrible that it is not sufficient to linger on it’.42 Instead, the conclusion of The Swamp gathers the moments of stillness, emptiness and silence that follow his death, and which collectively summon all of his lost potential. This, Martel explains, ‘is this absence which most interests me’.43 What then of the enduring presence of dead animals in her films? In 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 through traffic.44 A similar pattern of ‘competing vectors’ propels Martel’s films, though it encompasses the falls of both animals and 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 down, or, simply, to be unable to get up.46 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 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. Footnotes " 1 At the time of writing, Martel’s fourth film, Zama [2017], a historical epic adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel and set in an unspecified Latin American country at the end of the eighteenth century, had just premiered in Argentina and at international film festivals, " 2 Pedro Lange-Churión, ‘The Salta trilogy: the civilised barbarism in Lucrecia Martel’s films’, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 4 (2012), p. 469. " 3 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’, BOMB: Artists in Conversation, October 2009, <http://bombmagazine.org/article/3220/lucrecia-martel> accessed 3 October 2017. " 4 For a thorough analysis of the political and economic contexts of Martel’s work and New Argentine Cinema more broadly, see Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). " 5 The same may be said of the lag in attention that animal studies (or human–animal studies) has received in other Latin American fields, such as history. Zeb Tortorici and Martha Few observe this lag or lack in their introduction to a volume intended to ‘counteract the relative invisibility of animals in Latin American historiography’, and assert that devoting attention to cultural histories of animals in Latin America is particularly urgent, given ‘the environmental exchanges and consequences of European conquest and colonialism in Latin America, competing Mesoamerican, Andean, and other indigenous conceptions of animals in the natural world, and the construction of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual hierarchies that mirrored and interacted with the reconceptualization of human-nonhuman animal hierarchies.’ ‘Introduction. Writing animal histories’, in Zeb Tortorici and Martha Few (eds), Centering Animals in Latin American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 5. " 6 Christian Gundermann, ‘The new cinema going to the dogs? The encounter with animal otherness in the film El Aura ’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2014), pp. 17–31. Valeria de los Ríos, ‘Look(ing) at the animals: the presence of the animal in contemporary southern cone cinema and in Carlos Busqued’s Bajo este Sol Tremendo ’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (2015), pp. 33–46. " 7 Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, ‘Little Red Riding Hood meets Freud in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy’, Camera Obscura, vol. 87, no. 3 (2014), p. 96. " 8 Ibid. " 9 Or is it a bull? The animal has short horns, which depending on breed may denote the male sex. In keeping with the film’s association between the sinking matriarch and stranded animal, I stick here with female gendering. The presence of the animal is explained by the fact that feral cattle roam the region, perhaps a legacy of Salta’s mid nineteenth-century heyday in the tannery industry. James R. Scobie, Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta and Mendoza, 1885–1910 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 192. " 10 This summary is also up for debate, as the viewer’s interpretation of events depends on her reading of offscreen space and sound. As I understand it, the film indicates that the cow is killed in the opening sequence, in parallel with Mecha’s fall. The animal is motionless when the cousins return with Luciano and Momi, who raises her T-shirt as protection from the stench that presumably emanates from its rotting flesh. David Oubiña reads the order of events differently, surmising that the cousins shoot the cow in an act of mercy. He does not account for the children’s two visits to the swamp, and without attention to this staggered temporality it is difficult to interpret their intentions. David Oubiña, Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga: Entrevista a Lucrecia Martel (Buenos Aires: Picnic Editorial, 2007), p. 46. " 11 All translations in this essay are my own. " 12 One could also place Martel’s work in a contemporary global framework, as B. Ruby Rich did when she heralded Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-Liang as practitioners of ‘new New Queer Cinema’ at Screen’s conference in 2007. Adding Sarah Turner to Rich’s list, Sophie Mayer observes the significant ways in which this cinema ‘disrupt[s] the identification of landscape with white colonial heteronormativity’, in her ‘Dirty pictures: framing pollution and desire in “new New Queer Cinema”’, in Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 145, 148. " 13 For a ‘hindsight’ view of New Argentine Cinema, see Jens Andermann, New Argentine Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2011). " 14 Page, Crisis and Capitalism, pp. 2–3. " 15 Ibid., p. 2. " 16 For more on the ‘ambiguous’ placement of Martel’s work in New Argentine Cinema, see Oubiña, Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 10. " 17 Edgardo Dieleke cites Italian neorealism, particularly as it is valorized by André Bazin, as a central point of comparison to New Argentine Cinema, in his ‘The return of the real: landscape, nature and the place of fiction’, in New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Reality Effects (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), p. 59. " 18 Daniel Quirós, ‘“La época está en desorden”: reflexiones sobre la temporalidad en Bolivia de Adrián Caetano y La mujer sin cabeza de Lucrecia Martel’, A Contra Corriente: una Revista de Historia Social y Literatura de América Latina, vol. 8, no. 1 (2010), p. 232. " 19 Dieleke, ‘The return of the natural’, p. 59. " 20 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, pp. xi–xii. " 21 Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine Film: Other Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 16–17. " 22 Ana Forcinato, ‘Mirada cinematográfico y género sexual’, Chasqui, vol. 35, no. 2 (2006), pp. 112, 118. " 23 Gundermann, among others, directly ascribes an ‘allegorical function’ to Martel’s animals, in ‘The new cinema going to the dogs’, p. 19. Others adopt different terminology. For Schroeder Rodríguez, in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, p. 108, the animals cast the Salta trilogy as a series of ‘fairy tales’ and ‘fables’, defined by ‘a preoccupation with moral choices’. De los Ríos, meanwhile refers to the cow of The Swamp as a ‘metaphorised synecdoche’, in ‘Looking at the animals’, p. 35. This plurality of figurative terms suggests various ways of understanding how and why animals stand in for humans in these film. " 24 This remark is made in the context of a comparison to William Faulkner’s work. Martel, interview by Guest. " 25 ‘Me siento más cerca de las tradiciones de narración que de la tradición del cine argentino. Le presté atención al relato, a la forma de hablar, a las conversaciones.’ Oubiña, Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 56. " 26 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’. " 27 Ibid. " 28 Ibid. " 29 On human and nonhuman animals’ shared vulnerability, see Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011). " 30 Seminal work on the (non)metaphorical uses of animals in film includes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘The death of an animal’, Film Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1 (2002), and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002). For a succinct overview of cinema’s longstanding interest in animal life and death, see Laura McMahon, ‘Screen animals dossier: introduction’, Screen, vol. 56, no. 1 (2015), pp. 81–87. " 31 ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’. " 32 Prior to embarking on a film degree, Martel considered careers in, among other things, art history, zootechnic, and forensic photography and ballistics. Oubiña, Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 81. " 33 Ibid., p. 65. " 34 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 836. " 35 Oubiña offers a similar reading of the dynamic, in Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 37 " 36 De los Ríos, ‘Look(ing) at the animals’, p. 35. For more on Bazin’s fascination with the film frame’s capacity for the ‘cohabitation’ of radical difference (and particularly the radical differences of humans and animals), see Jennifer Fay, ‘Seeing/loving animals: André Bazin’s posthumanism’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7, no. 1 (2008), pp. 41–64. " 37 With the important distinction that the children Vero perfunctorily examines are working-class children, queueing for a mandated dental examination; whereas Tali’s examination is fuelled by parental concern, Vero’s is mechanical. ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’. " 38 Although the English translation of the film’s title fittingly connotes the horror-film image of a headless woman, the Spanish sin cabeza is an idiomatic expression that means having lost one’s bearings, typically as a result of falling in love. See Schroeder Rodríguez, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, p. 98. This shot not only plays on the film’s title, but also presents an example of one of Martel’s signature compositions: a medium or medium closeup shot of a character’s torso, shorn of head and feet – a point-of-view shot of a younger (that is, shorter) observer. " 39 Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 24. " 40 The collision of The Headless Woman is an important and specific sociohistorical marker of the nonfictional realities of Salta. Martel explains that Vero’s fictional crash comes out of her concern with a noticeable uptick in hit-and-run crashes in the province in the late 1990s. Quirós attributes this phenomenon to neoliberalism and the attendant growing breach between the rich and poor, the former being all too willing to flee from any offence they commit against the latter. Quirós, ‘“La época está en desorden”’, p. 246. Mayer also points out that the flash flood that follows Vero’s crash corresponds to severe flooding in the province in 2007 and 2008, in ‘Dirty pictures’, p. 153. " 41 See Vivian Sobchack’s discussion of cinema’s (in)capacity to index human and animal death, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2004). See also Sarah O’Brien, ‘Why look at dead animals?’, Framework, vol. 57, no. 1 (2016), pp. 32–57. " 42 Oubiña, Estudio Crítico sobre La Ciénaga, p. 59. " 43 Ibid., p. 59. " 44 Beckman, Crash, p. 184. " 45 Ibid. " 46 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, p. 42. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
TI - Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga and La Mujer sin Cabeza
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjx038
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sticky-matter-the-persistence-of-animals-as-allegory-in-lucrecia-NK2s7StgMD
SP - 458
VL - 58
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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