Judgment and the disappeared subject in the headless woman
pp. 234-254
in: Silke Panse, Dennis Rothermel (eds), A critique of judgment in film and television, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
When The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza 2008) by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel had its premiere at Cannes, it was booed. Given the favorable critical reception of her previous two features, The Swamp (La ciénaga 2001) and The Holy Girl (La niña santa 2004), this was both surprising and interesting. While the first two films had been challenging, The Headless Woman seemingly had crossed the line of difficulty. This difficulty is not simply in terms of the film's form, although its formal operations appear intent on thwarting spectatorial cognition; it is more a question of ideology. The film refuses to defer completely to the rules of classic narrative cinema, not so much by being deliberately obtuse, but because The Headless Woman is a film about the problem of figuring the female in film narrative. It is also a film about Argentine society.