Sticky matter: the persistence of animals as allegory in Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga and La Mujer sin Cabeza

Abstract

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.