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A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning: The Headless Woman (2008),

directed by Lucrecia Martel
Cecilia Sosa
Theory Culture Society 2009; 26; 250
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409349279

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A Counter-narrative of Argentine
Mourning
The Headless Woman (2008), directed by
Lucrecia Martel

Cecilia Sosa

Abstract
This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman (2008), the
latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New
Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema.
Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis-
appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre,
proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of
guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship (1976–83). By
presenting the existentialist drama of an upper-class woman involved in a
seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film
manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected
the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engage-
ment with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the
film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that
permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form
of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film
may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social
exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and
whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of
temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear
during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the
silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film
each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety
compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an
ethical key to future possibilities.

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(7–8): 250–262
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409349279

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 251

Key words
Argentina ■ cinema ■ counter-signature ■ dictatorship ■ kinship ■ mourning
■ trauma

I
N THE mid 1990s, during a profound economic crisis, an enthusiastic
‘new wave’ of Argentine film directors started shooting their mundane,
gritty and mostly urban features, stepping aside from the more rhetori-
cal declamations of their predecessors. From the oldest members of this new
generation, Martin Rejtman and Esteban Sapir, to the younger figures such
as Pablo Trapero, Adrián Caetano, Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alonso,1
all these directors have established a distance from a certain style of cinema
that they regarded as wordy, mannered and clichéd. Their dissimilar films
share a common claim: they build their minimal stories by using a bare
narrative without moral engagement that similarly rejects any sententious
political statement.2 Although the diversity of universes inside the so-called
New Argentine Cinema (NAC) resists any unifying tag, the fascination for
the social present, everyday life and marginal languages have been some of
its most distinctive markers (see Aguilar, 2006; Bernades et al., 2002;
Oubiña, 2000). The creative, low-budget and unconventional style of direc-
tion flourished thanks to the profusion of film schools, a new generation of
producers and the support of the local critics – a whole network that came
out of the closet during the first BAFICI, Buenos Aires’ Independent Film
Festival, in 1999.3
However, this cultural trend is entangled with a previous one. In the
context of a restored and fragile democracy after the last Argentine dictator-
ship (1976–83) – an extraordinary deployment of state terrorism that wiped
out more than 30,000 lives4 – different directors started to respond visually
to that traumatic past. For if The Official Story (1984), by Luis Puenzo, was
the emphatic and pompous point of departure for these films, and also the
first Latin American piece to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film, during recent decades, a long list of films directed by sons
and daughters of the ‘disappeared’ have followed. Despite the contribution
of these characteristically testimonial pieces to the consolidation of demo-
cratic culture, they mostly create a certain kind of narrative, a sort of monu-
mental view of the past that tends to establish a cult of ghosts.5 The unwritten
rule of the post-dictatorship cinema stipulates that descendants and survivors
must honour the name of their vanished parents and friends by raising strong
statements in relation to justice, truth and the right of identity, not only
comprising the elements for a pedagogic democratic conscience but also
establishing an emerging genre that has even been tagged as opportunistic.
What is more, in recent years, the appetite for the past has been given the
official seal of approval of the current government: President Nestor Kirchner
(2003–7) and his wife Cristina Kirchner, who succeeded him as Head of State
in 2007, embraced and appropriated the traditional discourse of human
rights by consecrating the idea of memory as a ‘national duty’.

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252 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

While both the New Argentine Cinema and the ‘cinema of the dis-
appeared’ are historically and culturally intertwined, to some extent they
have been running on separate paths.6 There are a few exceptions to this.
Los Rubios/The Blonds (2003), the provocative film directed by Albertina
Carri, daughter of a famous disappeared couple, is by far the most remark-
able. In her performative account of memory she has even dared to reverse
the cult of the ghost by converting the figures of her dead parents into plastic
toys.
I would like to locate my subsequent analysis of The Headless Woman
(2008) within this double context. In a similar vein to Los Rubios but coming
from the opposite direction, Lucrecia Martel’s latest film sits in the middle
of both traditions, reversing and ‘countersigning’ both of them. Drawing from
the subtractive style of the New Argentine Cinema, Martel presents a film
that can be read not only as a response but also as a countersign of the
‘cinema of the disappeared’. Rescinding all metaphors and faithful to her
textured and inextricable style, The Headless Woman goes beyond the cult
of the victims to produce an immersive and hallucinatory experience of
body-to-body transmission. A closer analysis of this film can help to de-
centre the traditional discourse of the human rights movement, to explore
the complex mixture of affects brought about by the dictatorship and to
throw light on the emergence of what I call a ‘new culture of mourning’, a
collective experience of grief that has gone far beyond those who have
directly suffered loss of loved ones. Inspired by Judith Butler’s appealing
account of the process of mourning developed in Precarious Life (2004), I
am proposing a more oblique examination of Argentina’s post-dictatorship
period to map the non-normative textures that surround an experience of
mourning that has permeated the whole of society.
The Uncanny Blondeness
When The Headless Woman was screened at the 2008 Cannes Festival, the
reaction could not have been more apprehensive, a kind of unpleasant
surprise at a supposed change of direction for a filmmaker whose earlier
pieces, The Swamp (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), had been enthusias-
tically received by the international festival circuit.7 For while Lucrecia
Martel had already become one of the most prominent stylists of contempo-
rary Latin America cinema, her latest piece is likely to remain her most
perplexing film. But from where does this obscurity arise? Is it possible to
explain why the film was regarded as so intricate and so evasive, especially
by foreign audiences? There is something specifically awkward about the
piece, something that does not line up, a feeling of strangeness that perhaps
goes beyond any directorial intention and addresses a special discomfort on
the part of the viewers. In this article, I will argue that the strangeness of
this film could be crucial to throw light on the process of mourning that
began after Argentina’s last dictatorship.
While The Swamp introduced a magnificent and oppressive portrait of
the decomposing local bourgeoisie around a muddy swimming pool in a rural

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 253

province, The Holy Girl offered an ambivalent reflection on sexual desire

through the mystical spark of a teenage girl in the improbable scenario of
an isolated medical congress. Not surprisingly, like the director’s previous
pieces, The Headless Woman is located in the never explicitly identified
territories of Salta, Martel’s home province in the north of Argentina.8 The
film could be classified as a Latin American thriller, an existentialist reflec-
tion, a murder mystery, a social satire, or even as a middle-aged woman’s
psychodrama. It winks at all these genres but does not conform to any of
them. Although it could be argued that these particular displacements are
part of Martel’s concerns, I will claim that the hushed mystery that under-
lies this piece goes, as never before, beyond any strictly cinematographic
reasoning. If The Headless Woman provokes such oblique responses it is
mainly because it is engaged with the uncanny resonances of a national
trauma. Although Martel’s films have never been political in the conven-
tional sense, her latest piece bears the traces of an experience of grief that
furnished a new sense of political community.
The plot of the film is simple, even dull. A mobile phone sounds in
the middle of a deserted provincial road. The driver, Vero, a bourgeois newly
peroxided blonde, tries to find the vibrating object within her bag, a slightly
careless search, and then a brutal crash. That’s it: the accident, an event
that opens a gap in the world, a before and an after. There has been a fatality.
A shapeless bulk, an anonymous corpse, lies on the tarmac. Apparently it
is a dog but there will never be enough hints to know. The blonde woman
trembles; she is shocked. Eventually, she puts on her sunglasses and starts
driving again. Only then do we get the film’s opening titles.
Immediately after the accident, when the corpse is still lying on the
road, we can see the traces of little handmarks on the windscreen of the car
as if they were trying to touch the woman’s face. To whom do they belong?
Presumably, they are the hands of the small children of Vero’s friends and
relatives who were playing in the car before she began her journey home:
the always-present childhood world that has been one of the main treasures
of Martel’s oeuvre. Or perhaps they refer to those other children, the poor;
those who haunted the highway at the beginning of the film and nobody
seemed to notice. In any case, isolated from any other environment, those
little hands seem to be asking for help: human hands falling from nowhere,
sticking to the window as if it were the last opportunity to survive. These
are hands that request responsibility, hands without a face. As I will argue,
Martel’s film deals with the violence to those who have become almost
invisible, those whom Judith Butler calls the faceless and whose lives seem
to have fallen outside the ‘human’.9
After the event Vero is lost. She is docile and humble. Everything is
beyond her control. Former familiar ties have now become senseless. She
struggles to recognize her relatives among the confusing faces that pass in
front of her lethargic, glazed eyes. In a sense, she has lost her head. This
sense of disconnection in relation to family bonds – so characteristic of
Martel’s films – is embodied by this blonde creature who wanders through

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254 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

her routines with an odd smile as if she were trapped inside a fish tank. Or
better, as if the world itself has bubbled into a fish tank.10
The morning after the event, Vero finds herself in a taxi en route to
her workplace, a dental surgery, where she proceeds to sit in the waiting
room, flicking a magazine instead of taking care of her patients’ dentistry
needs. Even class frontiers, once so clear, seem to be impossible to grasp.
She is surprised to learn about her past life while watching the video of her
own wedding, attended by all the senators of the province. Meanwhile, Lala,
her dying crazy aunt, whispers from her bed: ‘This voice doesn’t seem to be
yours.’ The old lady’s comment becomes all the more frightening if we
consider that the question of falsified identities still evokes the experiences
of the stolen children of the military period.
Sooner or later, the confession comes: ‘I have killed someone on the
road,’ Vero tells her husband at the supermarket. The man could not be more
embarrassed: why would someone incriminate herself in that childish, even
foolish way? Reluctantly, he glances all around, searching for potential
witnesses of such an inappropriate confession. Somehow, the couple make
their way back to the highway, the scene of the crime. ‘It is a dog. You got
scared, it is a dog,’ states her husband. ‘I think I ran over someone,’ Vero
insists. ‘It was nothing, just a dog,’ is the repeated, almost satisfied response.
‘It was nothing’: no other words, just the repetition of a script that erases all
responsibility.11
From this point on we can witness Vero’s process of re-apprehending
the world. Class barriers are progressively recovered. However, strange facts
keep unfolding in the film. Something smells bad. Not just the muddy waters
of the canal where a human body has been found. Not only Lala’s body that
remains murmuring from her bed. There is something weird buried in the
garden. Dead animals have drowned in the new swimming pool of the
village.12 Little children come knocking at the door asking for food. There
is a close but still unimagined marginal area from which it is difficult to
escape.
The circle of complicities has been expanded. The men of the family,
a syndicate of patriarchal kinship, seem to know exactly how to take care
of the ‘situation’. No traces of the anonymous body, no traces of Vero’s
medical exam, no traces of that night of storm where the anxiety of a crime
was smothered in a sexual encounter with her brother-in-law. Now, there are
new flowers in the garden. The smashed car has been fixed. Moreover, Vero
is not blonde anymore. She sports new, dark hair that suits her ‘so nicely’,
as the rest of the relatives chorus. In the outmoded grounds of a provincial
wealthy society, everything seems to be organized as if nothing had
happened: the perfect fortress.
‘Nothing Has Happened’
Interestingly enough, the muted tag-line of Martel’s film goes exactly against
the claim that human rights organizations raised after the end of Argentina’s
cruellest dictatorship: ‘Never again. Do not forget,’ was the collective shout

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 255

of the nation that was awakened at the beginning of the 1980s by the
macabre ‘surprise’ that thousands of lives had vanished into the air. The
murderous state had built a society of terror where everybody was under
suspicion. When democracy was recovered in 1983, the ‘disappearances’,
far from being mysterious acts of magic, were revealed as part of a system-
atic plan of kidnapping, torture and execution developed by the military
junta. Later investigations estimated at around 30,000 the lives that were
lost during the state terrorism. Despite the juridical freedom of most of the
military perpetrators of the crimes, despite several official therapies of
‘forgiveness’,13 despite the unparalleled fact that there were no bodies to be
buried, the experience of loss has opened up a new political path within
Argentine civil society.
While reflecting upon the relation between violence and mourning
after 11 September 2001 in the United States, Judith Butler searches for a
new idea of responsibility that could work as a normative aspiration within
the political field. She argues that the capacity to grieve could become a
point of departure for imagining a new sense of political community, a new
idea of being together produced ‘on the basis of vulnerability and loss’
(2004: 20). Significantly, her idea of mourning is inevitably attached to a
process of transformation. ‘One mourns when one accepts that by the loss
one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever,’ she says (2004: 21).
For her, it is only by experiencing grief that it would be possible to recog-
nize one’s fundamental vulnerability and dependency on anonymous others.
I would like to argue that this transformative effect of loss is at work in
Argentina’s present. If we accept that complicity was not the only story for
a post-dictatorship era, if we accept that, during the last decades, the tran-
sitional democracy has also involved a collective process of transformation
that exceeds the margins of the juridical, Martel’s film becomes even more
astonishing. We have to consider the film precisely within this expanded
context of mourning, a new public culture that steps outside the script of
past complicity. Only in this perspective does the specific significance of
the film arise.
The Headless Woman engages with that traumatic past in an oblique
way. It reacts to the period of military violence by presenting the un-
comfortable script of a collective complicity. The plot that everybody knew
and nobody could tell. The script that reveals that someone can disappear,
can be kidnapped, tortured and murdered without leaving traces. The
Headless Woman exposes the present contours of this old script in the
contemporary context of a marginal province. It stages the frightening
suggestion that the old mechanisms can be perfectly reiterated in the
present time. While the main facts of the story point to an apparently linear
‘accident’, the silent narrative of the film seems to work on a more uncanny
level: the trauma of a violent past that has penetrated Argentine society and
shows in its actual resonances, layers and slips within contemporary local
culture. On that confused cross-over of times Martel’s film enacts a surrep-
titious machinery of denial that shows how a seemingly minor incident can

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256 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

be covered up without sweat, without mess, even in the most ordered and
perfect calmness. ‘The social mechanism of silence that was present during
the dictatorship is still alive. It is still present in the way poverty is denied.
Nonetheless the methods are increasingly sophisticated and because of that
more accepted. We live in a society of castes’, Martel has argued during an
interview (see D’Espósito, 2008). Departing from that minor accident, the
film offers the amplified scene of a hierarchical, asphyxiating social web
that works to organize a perfect system of silencing, a horrifying tale that
continues to haunt the collective present. It stages a narrative of counter-
mourning. But how exactly does this reverse narrative work? The Headless
Woman assumes the form of an appealing trap. By delivering the uncanny
mixture of madness, guilt and shame that surrounds, for Levinas and
Derrida, the survivors’ experience, the film manages to grip its audience
tightly.14 While it exposes the secret nuances of a terrible machinery of
silence, the film addresses the spectators with an uncomfortable question:
Do you want to be complicit too? In that way, The Headless Woman develops
a form of trust and responsibility towards the future.
But there is something that makes the film even more multifaceted and
compelling. A popular Argentine tale says that when someone has taken a
fright, the body remains without a soul, like a dead person who is nonethe-
less still alive. The Headless Woman is full of spectres. Not only has Vero
become a pale zombie, but also the servants, the murky employees of the
house, who in the film are literally out of focus, enact the unnoticed
presences that underpin the whole piece. Who are these shadowy figures
that keep on going all around the house, carrying out orders, bringing plant
pots, painting nails, cleaning bleeding animals, always in the background
like buzzing insects? The image of the startling blonde woman at the fore-
front of the first frame is in stark contrast with these dark bodies in the back-
ground, always in shadow, muttering like obscure creatures, not yet human.
Martel’s use of local slang and little words, sometimes even racist and
ironically stressed – which makes the film difficult to follow for non-Spanish
spectators – could not be more powerful in addressing the social inequali-
ties that still champion silence. They help to shape the polished and xeno-
phobic manners of the wealthy landowners in dealing with their seemingly
invisible but always present servants, the pedantic tone of a patriarchal
structure where things do not seem to have changed in more than 30 years
and where a woman’s guilt can be easily muted, as a sort of girlish
pathology in the rational ‘adult’ world.
At one point in the film, Aunt Lala murmurs from her bed: ‘The house
is full of ghosts. If you don’t look at them, they just go away.’ There is some-
thing imperative in the words of the old woman, something that suggests a
strong connection between the different temporalities lying at the core of
Martel’s piece. On the one hand we have the servants, the eerie spectres
who circulate within the space like phantasms: they are the ones who live
on the edges, the ones who have been perversely neglected such that they
have become almost invisible. But more than this, there are the other

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 257

spectres in the film, spectres that come from the past and, like the anony-
mous corpse on the highway, did not receive a burial: the disappeared, the
vanished lives of dictatorial times. The film suggests that the disappeared
are still encrypted in the present, circulating, emerging from different states
of humanity, embodied by the current marginalized lives. The first rever-
berate within the others, and back and forth. They are both faceless, lives
that have fallen outside the human, just of a different sort. In my impres-
sion, this horrifying entanglement of times is what gives the film its most
singular power. The dead gaze at the living through the shadowy figures of
the new excluded.15 It is also this complex temporality rooted in the national
trauma that gives a clue towards understanding why the piece has been
received as so difficult to grasp within the international festival circuit.
Significantly, The Headless Woman offers one exception within this
patriarchal machinery of silence. Candita, Vero’s 13-year-old niece, is in
love with her aunt. She has written a confessional letter to her and has
received no answer. ‘Love letters should be returned or responded to’,
complains the girl. Candita’s figure could not be more distinctive in the film:
she is the only character who dares to challenge the silence, and also the
only one who engages with the faceless in modes that go beyond commands,
orders and abuse, an interesting fact that stresses the non-normative
ingredients that Martel attributes to the queer romance. Not only does
Candita’s figure break the patriarchal family that supports the secret, but it
also helps to shape a more oblique examination of Argentina’s process of
grief. In that light, Martel’s inclination to remove any clear family tie could
be read alongside a violent past that left not only individual victims but
rather a collective experience of grief. In that way, the film helps us to
envisage the emergence of a non-normative system of kinship based on a
shared mourning.
If the local components of the national trauma resonated most clearly
when the film was screened in Argentina, my argument here intends to go
further and have wider implications: how may a specific piece of art
contribute to a national process of mourning? In what terms does a film
manage to establish an ethical engagement with its audience? Dismissing
any weeping testimonial clichés, The Headless Woman does not represent
but enacts that past: without uttering a word, the whole atmosphere of the
film evokes the dictatorship years. Most of the locations of the scenes are
the work of Larralde, one of the most emblematic architects of the military
period. The music also bears that emotional trace: the cheesy and sticky
version of ‘Mammy Blue’ by Julio Iglesias, the soundtrack of the military
era, keeps on playing following the accident.
It has been argued that Argentina’s transition was embedded in a
desire for justice that goes beyond legal procedures and trials.16 Precisely
on this ground The Headless Woman plays its part. It performs a narrative
of counter-mourning that works not as a sort of allegory but rather as the
material embodiment of an old guilt that offers a new layer for the nation’s
present. In this way the film emerges as a test for a new public culture in

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258 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

which all citizens have become permeated by the effects of mourning, not
just the direct descendants but rather the entire expanded society, includ-
ing the new faceless emerging at its most marginal borders.
Martel’s film also invites a dialogue with Los Rubios/The Blonds, the
film mentioned earlier directed by Albertina Carri, the daughter of a couple
murdered by state repression. The bridge between both films has the
peculiar form of hair tone. For if in Argentina’s struggle of classes the
opposition between the rich and the poor has traditionally been drawn in
‘coloured’ terms, by presenting two different versions of the deviant blonde,
both films ironically call up the idea of ‘cabecita negra’ (the ‘black head’),
an expression that usually refers to the working-class sectors.17 In both
cases, ‘blondeness’ invokes an indubitable sign of class that becomes
displaced and pushed to the most unforeseen implications. While in Carri’s
film the blonde wigs of the end turn out to be the figure of a non-normative
family that partakes in and debates a common destiny, Martel presents an
artificial blonde who manages to cleanse guilt thorough a complete experi-
ence of metamorphosis, a sort of redemption for a woman who seeks to be
absolved of guilt in a literal shift from blonde to brunette.
For if the experience of grief may become the landscape for imagin-
ing a new political community (Butler, 2004), Martel’s film works to reaffirm
that possibility in a new specific space and time. Touching the subtle traces
of a trauma at the affective levels of a marginal community in the north of
Argentina, recreating a tense and thriller-type atmosphere that has been
compared with Hitchcock’s films, The Headless Woman explores an
extended process of mourning that embraces its audience well beyond the
obvious sites of suffering. It manages to show to what point all Argentine
citizens are ‘structurally survivors’.18
By opposing the shadowy figures of the servants to a patriarchal system
of kinship, Martel’s film addresses a profound hierarchy of lives that, in some
sense, is reminiscent of that addressed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life:
‘Who counts as human? Whose lives are real? What counts for a grievable
life?’ (2004: 20). Butler’s answer could not be more significant for our case.
‘If a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life’ (2004: 34). In a parallel way,
the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new
faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the
current democratic regime and whose lives are, in a sense, ‘ungrievable’.
The Headless Woman performs a narrative of counter-mourning, one that
potentially reverses the ‘derealization’ mechanisms of the military era, and
also its reiteration during the democratic period, an imbalanced social-
economic regime that still ordains whose lives can be seen and whose lives
must remain invisible. In doing so, the film enacts a double struggle of
recognition: it reinstalls in the political field not only those missing figures,
who vanished during past dictatorial times, but also the shadowy faces of
the currently excluded, both spectres in a sense ‘ungrievable’ that The
Headless Woman subtly bonds. The film helps to throw light on the extent
to which the first cannot be grasped without the second.

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 259

Importantly, the tension that lies at the heart of Martel’s film is that
the experience of trauma can be productive in effecting the shift from the
individual to the collective. The Headless Woman is not only a story that
shows how a marginal north Argentine society becomes implicated in a
conspicuous ceremony of silence. Rather, Martel’s film performs a contem-
porary narrative that places the viewers in a double role: each of the
spectators becomes not only a witness but also a survivor, and thereby subtly
compelled to respond. For if the film turns on the fact that the crime is less
the ‘accident’ itself and more the web of denial that comes afterwards, signif-
icantly it offers the opportunity to reverse the web of complicities, inviting
the audience to break the silence. It offers a frightening mirror in response
to the guilt that flows from one time to another, embracing successive gener-
ations. In doing so, the film invites viewers to consider the distortions of
their eyes, and eventually to re-make reality. Of course, the piece also offers
the option of responding through refusal or denial. But the film sets its own
conditions: in its context silence means complicity and ultimately to remain
captured in the old machinery of guilt.
Martel has said recently that The Headless Woman is her most
Argentine film. It might be. However, its affective textures go far beyond
any nationalistic implications. The film reveals to what extent the spectres
of the past still demand an answer from the present. In this way, The
Headless Woman not only offers a new voice that still clamours for justice,
but also suggests a key to the changing of the future.
Notes
1. Films by NAC directors include, among others: Rapado (Rejtman, 1992), Picado
Fino/Fine Powder (Sapir, 1998), Pizza, Birra, Faso/Pizza, Beer, Smokes (Bruno
Stagnaro and Adrian Caetano, 1998), Mundo Grua/Crane World (Trapero, 2000), La
Cienaga/The Swamp (Martel, 2001) and La Libertad/Freedom (Alonso, 2001).
2. For many of the critics this new generation of filmmakers is defined in oppo-
sition to the magic realism or the allegorical style of their predecessors of the 1980s,
such as Eliseo Subiela, Fernando Pino Solanas or Hugo Santiago. It also marks a
change from the committed cinema of the 1970s, Leonardo Favio and even
Fernando Birri, considered the first theorist of political film in the continent and a
‘pope’ of the New Latin American Cinema.
3. For Gonzalo Aguilar: ‘the New Argentine Cinema was baptized with the Special
Award of the Jury given to Pizza, Birra, Faso at the Mar del Plata Film Fest (1997)
and its final consecration at BAFICI 1999, with the best director and best actor
going to Mundo Grua, by Pablo Trapero’ (2006: 14).
4. While the number of disappeared people is still under investigation, 30,000 is
the number reckoned by Argentine human rights groups.
5. Since The Official Story (1984), by Luis Puenzo, we can include in this collec-
tion films such as Papá Iván (María Inés Roqué, 2004); Historias cotidianas (Andrés
Habbeger, 2001); HIJOS: El alma en dos (Marcelo Céspedes and Carmen Guarini,
2002); Che vo cachai (Laura Bendersky, 2003); En ausencia (Lucía Cedrón, 2002);
Figli/Hijos (Marco Bechis, 2002); and Nietos: Identity and Memory (Benjamin Avila,
2004). All of these films, directed by sons and daughters of the disappeared, tend

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260 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

to make a cult of the figure of the victim. See my article in the Argentine newspa-
per, Pagina 12 (Sosa, 2003).
6. A crucial figure who is involved with both traditions is Lita Stantic. Film
producer, screenplay writer, director and the wife of a disappeared person herself,
she has been one of the most important producers of the post-dictatorship films as
well as the NAC. She has been responsible for the debut films of Lucrecia Martel,
Pablo Trapero and Adrián Caetano, among others.
7. The Swamp, a paradigmatic film and generally seen as the ‘masterpiece’ of the
New Argentine Cinema, received the Alfred Bauer Award at the 2001 Berlin Inter-
national Film Festival and The Holy Girl was nominated for the Golden Palm at the
2004 Cannes Film Festival.
8. Although all Martel’s films take place in her home province the locations of her
pieces remain mysterious. ‘I never mention the word “Salta” in my films. It would
be a betrayal. Salta’s reality is always much more complex than my films’, she said
when interviewed by Maria Delgado, during the Q&A after a screening of The
Swamp at the Discovery Latin American Film Festival in London (3 December
2008).
9. Borrowing from Levinas’ conception of ethics based on the face of the other, in
Precarious Life Judith Butler addresses a profound hierarchy of lives and states, in
which there are lives that do not count as human, the ‘faceless’ (2004: xviii).
10. During the last Latin American Film Festival in London, during an interview
with Maria Delgado, Martel accepted that the image of a fish tank was ‘quite perfect’
to characterize the particular atmosphere of her films. ‘In real life we live immersed
in an elastic fluid, it might be water but also air. We usually forget that we are
immersed in air’, she said.
11. Interestingly, Martel’s first inspiration for the film was a real case: in 1995 a
wealthy Argentinean girl ran over a child who died immediately. The young woman
left the scene without getting out of the car. The lady was Maria Victoria Mon (20)
and the victim, Juan Pablo Acuña (14). After a doubtful trial the young woman was
‘condemned’ to undertake light charity work.
12. The swimming pool brings us back to the main image of Martel’s previous film
The Swamp (2001) that showed the decomposition of the local bourgeoisie.
13. In 1990, in the name of a supposed ‘national reconciliation’, the Argentinean
President Carlos Menem decided to forgive most of the military who were respon-
sible for the kidnapping and murder of thousands of people. The so-called ‘indulto’
was passed in spite of strong resistance on the part of most of Argentinean civil
society. Actually, the ‘indulto’ followed the ‘Full Stop’ and ‘Due Obedience’ laws
that, in 1986 and 1987, had already put an end to most prosecutions for human
rights abuses during the period of the dictatorship. In 2001 these laws were
declared unconstitutional and prosecutions were allowed once again.
14. For Levinas to experience the death of the Other necessarily implies guilt.
The death of the Other affects me in my very identity as responsible. . . . This
is how I am affected by the death of the Other, this is my relation to his death.
It is, in my relation, my deference towards someone who no longer responds,
already a guilt of the survivor. (2000: 199)
Derrida goes further: ‘Levinas indeed speaks of the survivor’s guilt, but it is a guilt
without fault and without debt; it is, in truth, an entrusted responsibility, entrusted

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 Sosa – A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning 261

in a moment of unparalleled emotion, at the moment when death remains the

absolute ex-ception’ (2001: 204).
15. I was inspired to develop this argument by Vikki Bell’s (forthcoming) piece on
the work of the Argentine visual artist Graciela Sacco.
16. In ‘The Haunted Nomos: Activist-Artists and the (Im)possible Politics of
Memory in Transitional Argentina’, Vikki Bell and Mario Di Paolantonio address
the complexity of the transition in Argentina at the level of the nomos: ‘The attempt
to inhabit the law, or to call for a greater justice through legal means but against
present law, exposes law’s indeterminacy and therefore opens up the possibility of
its being more than what it presently is’ (2009: 177).
17. In the mid 1940s, President Domingo Perón took on and reversed the pejora-
tive origin of the expression in order to praise the working class, the first source of
legitimization of his governments.
18. After Derrida’s death, Butler stresses how the idea of ‘survival’ was for him the
constant form of any life. See Butler, ‘On Never Having Learned How to Live’
(2005).

References
Aguilar, Gonzalo (2006) Otros mundos: un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino.
Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcor Editor.
Bell, Vikki (forthcoming) ‘On Shadows: The Recent Work of Graciela Sacco’, M2.
Bell, Vikki and Mario Di Paolantonio (2009) ‘The Haunted Nomos: Activist-Artists
and the (Im)possible Politics of Memory in Transitional Argentina’, Cultural Politics
5(2): 149–78.
Bernades, Horacio, Diego Lerer and Sergio Wolf (2002) New Argentine Cinema:
Themes, Authors and Trends of Innovation. Buenos Aires: Fipresci, Ed. Tatanka.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (2000) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Butler, Judith (2001) ‘The Desire for Philosophy’, an interview conducted by Regina
Michalik, URL (consulted October 2009): http://www.lolapress.org/elec2/artenglish/
butl_e.htm
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2005) ‘On Never Having Learned How to Live’, differences 16(3):
27–34.
Cvetkovich, Ann (2003) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian
Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2001) The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
D’Espósito, Leonardo (2008) ‘Los noventa son el plan maestro de la dictadura’, an
interview with Lucrecia Martel, Critica de la Argentina 20 August, URL (consulted
October 2009): http://criticadigital.com/index.php?secc=nota&nid=9423
Enriquez, Mariana (2008) ‘La mala memoria’, Pagina 12 newspaper, Radar supple-
ment 17 August, URL (consulted October 2009): http://www.pagina12.com.ar/
diario/suplementos/radar/9–4766–2008–08–17.html

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262 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

Kasman, Daniel (2008) Review of The Headless Woman’, New York magazine, URL
(consulted October 2009): http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/328
Levinas, Emmanuel (2000) God, Death and Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Martel, Lucrecia (2008) ‘An interview conducted by Maria Delgado’, after screen-
ing of The Swamp at the Discovery Latin American Film Festival in London, 3
December.
Oubiña, David (2000) ‘Argentina’s Gritty Resurgence’, UNESCO Courier, URL
(consulted October 2009): http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_10/uk/doss26.htm
Sosa, Cecilia (2003) ‘Ojos bien abiertos’, Pagina 12 19 October, URL (consulted
October 2009): http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/subnotas/
1001-179-2003-10-23.html

Cecilia Sosa is a PhD student at the Department of Drama, Queen Mary,

University of London, working on a queer archive of mourning in response
to Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976–83). She graduated in Sociology from
the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and has worked as a cultural
journalist, specializing in theatre, cinema and visual art for the national
newspaper Página 12. In 2007, she was awarded with a Chevening
Scholarship to undertake the MA in Critical and Creative Analysis in the
Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London (awarded in
September 2008 with distinction). [email: sosaceci@gmail.com]

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