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
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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
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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 haptic-

oriented 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
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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.

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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

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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
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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
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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

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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
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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 ninety-

minute 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

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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

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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
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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

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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

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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 boundary-

crossing 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
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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
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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
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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:

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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 queer-

haptic 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, off-

screen. She then creeps along a wall, fixated on something beyond the upper right-

hand 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.
28

____ (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.