Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Joanna Page
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72 latin american popular culture
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 73
[when someone recalls things from their childhood – and that’s when it’s
easiest to see this at work – you can see that there are ways of structuring
phrases, tones, even bodily gestures, that refer much more to their childhood
than to the moment at which the person is speaking.]
Given the common use of prolepsis and analepsis, and the recovery of earlier
voices in oral narratives, we would be misguided to reserve for elite cultural
forms the temporal complexity that is also characteristic of popular storytelling.
This polytemporality pervades Martel’s films, in which sights and sounds in
the present trigger memories and shape a character’s interpretation of the past,
and, conversely, remembered images and noises can affect a character’s percep-
tion of the present. Such techniques often have the effect of reinforcing the
exteriority of our perspective as viewers, as we do not always immediately grasp
the associative links made by the characters. In La niña santa, for example, we
are unaware of an encounter that has taken place many years before the film’s
present, between Helena, the hotel owner, and Dr Jano, one of her guests; we
cannot therefore initially make full sense of a subjective camera shot showing
Helena flexing her feet, which marks the point at which Dr Jano starts to iden-
tify her with the diver he used to know as a younger man. Left to construct the
meaning of this shot retrospectively, we become aware of spectatorship as an
act of creating links by moving forwards and backwards through what we have
seen of the film so far, relying on our memory of previous scenes to help us
make associations. As Daniel Quirós suggests,
[what the film reveals to us is our discomfort, faced with a lack of clarity,
as it is we as spectators who search for and try to create a chronological
order of events. Faced with ‘absences’ and ‘gaps’ between shots, it is we
who establish logical connections that organize our experience as spectators,
accustomed as we are to temporal clarity.]
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74 latin american popular culture
more insistently to draw our attention to our own activity in constructing stories
from the visual and auditory fragments before us, an activity we see modelled
repeatedly for us by the films’ characters themselves.
Martel’s films, despite an apparent refusal to tell a story, are themselves full
of stories. In La ciénaga, one of the girls recites a folktale about a woman who
finds a stray dog in the street. She takes it home and feeds it in the yard, along
with her cats, but the next morning she discovers the dog covered in blood and
the cats nowhere to be found. When she takes the dog to the vet and explains
what has happened, the vet seizes an axe and chops the dog in two. It is only
then that the woman sees the dog’s double row of sharp teeth. This is no dog,
the vet tells her. It’s an African rat. This story, which seems to come from no-
where and to be unrelated to the diegesis of the film, turns out not to be acci-
dental to the plot at all: it becomes the cause of Luchi’s probably fatal fall as he
climbs a ladder against the patio wall, fearful that the neighbour’s dog may be
an African rat with ferocious teeth, ready to attack him.
Luchi’s accident throws into relief the contrast between the prevailing
critical approach to these films – which focuses on interpretation and finds a
lack of narrative coherence – and the alternative I wish to suggest here, which
explores the films’ construction and finds instead a wealth of narrative pat-
ternings. Aguilar, drawing attention to the common figure of the accident in
contemporary Argentine cinema, argues that Luchi’s fall at the end of La
ciénaga represents the irruption of chance which destroys any sense of nar-
rative order: as an absurd and arbitrary event, ‘ingresa en la historia para
hacerla añicos, con todo su desconsuelo, su poder y su injustificación’ [‘it
enters the story only to shatter it, with all its grief, power and lack of reason’]
(2006: 49). This sense of absurdity and the unexpected is, without doubt, what
first strikes the spectator. When Martel speaks about the same event, how-
ever, she emphasizes the extent to which the accident has been prefigured in
the narrative of the film. A number of scenes refer to possible or actual acci-
dents, and at one point Luchi plays dead on the patio in a game with other
children. Frequent insert shots of his troubled face during scenes in which
teeth are mentioned, or dogs are heard to bark, clearly indicate the extent to
which the African rat story plays on his mind, producing a fear and a curios-
ity which ultimately lead to his fall. Martel understands this prefiguring as a
hallmark of oral narration:
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 75
Jerome Bruner, for whom ‘Narrative is profoundly a folk art, trading in com-
mon beliefs about what people are like and what their world is like’, argues
in a similar manner that story-making is a means for coming to terms with the
unpredictable: ‘Stories render the unexpected less surprising, less uncanny:
they domesticate unexpectedness, give it a sheen of ordinariness’ (2002:
89–90). The premonitions of Luchi’s death reveal an attempt to reformulate
the unexpected as part of a hidden destiny. The insistent presence of these
prefigurings in the film should lead us to understand the text not so much as
a narrative representation of events, but a representation of how those events
might be narrativized.
This approach is also suggested by Martel’s identification of La niña santa
as ‘una fábula’, ‘un cuento de esa gente que vive en La Ciénaga’ [‘a fable’, ‘a
story told by those people living in La Ciénaga’]: the film does not relate a
series of events so much as a story that its characters might tell about those
events, and for that reason ‘Le falta un grado más de realidad’ [‘it is another
degree away from reality’] (Oubiña 2009: 68, 78). Martel is not so much in-
terested in portraying the senselessness of the accident, but the processes through
which we protect ourselves from that senselessness. In La mujer sin cabeza
the temporal thrust of La ciénaga is reversed, as the accident takes place at the
beginning of the film and other sights, phrases or sounds – a boy lying uncon-
scious on a football pitch, the ringtone of a mobile phone – seem to return the
protagonist to that earlier time. Whether premonitions of an event to come or
echoes of an event that has (or may have) already taken place, however, both
techniques reveal the process through which we construct stories to connect
perceptions or events. This process is thrown into relief if the films’ narratives
remain inconclusive or characters come to conclusions that are clearly errone-
ous. In La mujer sin cabeza, for example, the finding of a boy’s body in the
canal near to the place where Vero’s car hits something, or someone, may prove
that Vero did run over more than a dog, or it may not: in either case, we are
witness to the mental associations which gradually build into a coherent story
and which make sense of a series of unexplained or disparate events. Simi-
larly, in La niña santa, the girls attending their catechism classes are taught to
listen for the voice or call of God, which will reveal to them their individual
role in God’s plan. It is her search for this ‘call of God’ that allows the young
protagonist, Amalia, to interpret Dr Jano’s sexual touching as a divine message
that her role in life is to save him.
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76 latin american popular culture
This desire to locate the terrible or the unexpected within a broader narra-
tive, and Martel’s understanding of religion as precisely such a narrative,
brings her interest in stories and folktales to resonate with the concept of
‘fabulation’ developed by Bergson. For Bergson, fabulation – the bringing
forth of spirits, gods and other forces – has the purpose of supporting the
function of religion in society. Human intelligence gives us a considerable
amount of social autonomy, and left to our own devices we might conclude
that self-interest should prevail over the common good (Bergson 1935: 100–
1). But religion, underpinned by fabulation or myth-making, is there to instil
a sense of social obligation in us and to knit societies together, protecting us
against ‘the dissolvent power of intelligence’ (105). It also prevents us, Berg-
son claims, from succumbing to the despair our intelligence might lead us to
as it makes us aware of our own mortality: it protects us against a sense of the
inevitability of death (109) and allows us to think of a life beyond. Unlike
animals, we are not absolutely sure of ourselves because the end we have in
view is more remote; intelligence leads to a sense of risk, as between our ac-
tion and the result ‘there is more often than not, both in space and in time, an
interval which leaves ample room for accident’ (115–16). By fabulating, an-
thropomorphizing events of nature, looking for intention where there is sim-
ply a mechanism at work, or seeking connections between disparate events
that lend meaning to them we protect ourselves from the unforeseen and the
lack of continuity between our actions and their consequences (117).
In one of the examples Bergson gives to illustrate how fabulation works, a
woman is about to take a lift down to the ground floor of a hotel. Normally, the
lift doors would not have opened unless the lift had stopped at that floor, but in
this case a malfunction had caused the doors to open even though the lift had
stopped at a floor below. As the woman walks towards the lift, she feels herself
suddenly thrust backwards, and senses that the lift operator had pushed her away.
When she recovers herself she discovers that there is no operator there. As
Bergson states, ‘a miraculous hallucination had saved her life’ and stopped her
from stepping into the void (1935: 99). Fabulation for Bergson acts in pre-
cisely this way to protect us. As Ronald Bogue explains, ‘It counters the despair
created through an awareness of one’s death by inducing belief in immortal
spirits, and it checks the depressing recognition of one’s impotence by positing
supernatural intentions in nature that individuals can attempt to utilize, placate,
defer, overcome, and so on’ (2007: 93).
A story told by one of the girls in La niña santa bears a remarkable resem-
blance to Bergson’s anecdote. A man driving a truck at night is stopped by a
woman desperately crying for help. She tells him that an accident nearby has
left a couple dead but their baby is alive and can still be saved. When the firemen
pull the car out of the ditch, the truck driver sees that the woman – dead but still
clasping her breathing baby to her – is the same woman who had stopped him
on the road to beg for his help. The girls terrify themselves with their own
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 77
story and run shrieking through the undergrowth. But if such stories incite a
frisson of fear or mystery, they also give a reassuring glimpse of an order that
exists beyond our own perception, a plan that gathers up the accidents and
anomalies of life – and there are plenty of those in Martel’s films – into a coher-
ent narrative of judgement and redemption. If her characters’ fabulations do
nothing to explain the mysterious, they ultimately have a consoling effect by
suggesting that, at some (supernatural) level, there is a purpose that holds eve-
rything together. Neither endorsing this belief nor coldly deconstructing it as a
false illusion, Martel allows us to understand the power of such fabulatory nar-
ratives to protect us – in the way that Bergson suggests – from coming face-to-
face with mortality and the cruelly indifferent workings of chance.
Bergson’s fabulation is largely a self-preserving force, operating in what he
refers to as ‘closed societies’, in which certain individuals are included and
others are excluded (1935: 229). This is clearly the scenario of Martel’s films,
which expose the exclusions of race and class on which her conservative pro-
vincial society is founded. The role of religion in preserving the social fabric is
rehearsed with unwitting comicality by the character in La mujer sin cabeza
who welcomes family and friends to a gathering in her house with the words
‘después del heladito, vamos a rezar el rosario’ [‘after we’ve had our icecream,
we’re going to recite the rosary’]. The darker, exclusionary function of fabula-
tion is evident when Aunt Lala seems to refer to the indigenous servants in the
house as ghosts, flitting silently from room to room with the occasional creak
of a floorboard: ‘No los mires y se van’ [‘Don’t look at them, and they’ll go’].
But fabulation in Martel’s films is not restricted to this self-preserving func-
tion. Her emphasis on the creativity of oral narratives also brings her close to
the much more positive associations that fabulation acquires in Deleuze’s re-
working of Bergson’s concept. Deleuzean fabulation is associated with the
creative potential of art, which thrusts into the world images and sounds that
have such power that they can change our understanding of old truths and fab-
ricate new ones. This potential is epitomized, Deleuze suggests, in the docu-
mentary cinema of Pierre Perrault. In the making of Perrault’s films, both film-
maker and subjects (re)invent themselves in the process of storytelling. Perrault
captures his subjects in the act of making legends, but is also implicated in the
same transformatory process of telling stories: ‘He too becomes another, in so
far as he takes real characters as intercessors and replaces his fictions by their
own story-telling, but, conversely, gives these story-tellings the shape of legends,
carrying out their “making into legend”’ (Deleuze 1989: 147).
Unlike Perrault’s, Martel’s films are neither ethnographic nor collaborative;
nor are her characters’ stories – as actors rather than documentary subjects – so
evidently located on a point of tension between reality and fiction. For Deleuze,
however, if the process of fabulation is particularly salient in Perrault’s work, it
is common to all narrative art. Like Perrault, Martel also accords prominence to
the stories of her characters within her own narratives; she also privileges the
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78 latin american popular culture
spoken word in her films, and positions herself more frequently as a listener to
stories than a teller of them. That is why her films contain many stories, told by
one character to another, but may not themselves always constitute a fully coher-
ent narrative. Martel has conducted a series of workshops in which she recorded
oral narratives in order to analyse the use of language and the inscription of tem-
porality in particular. She refers to her interest in introducing realistic colloquial
spoken Spanish into her films as very much part of her political commitment as
a filmmaker (Martel 2009a). But crucially, she does not attempt to ‘give a voice’
in a simplistic manner to the subordinated ‘other’ in her films. The perspective
remains firmly that of the white, middle-class protagonists. Her cinema is not
ethnographic in its treatment of race; neither does it construct place with reference
to local customs. Martel deliberately avoids trying to explore marginalization from
within – because ‘esa no es mi vida’ [‘that’s not my life’] (Rangil 2005: 103) – and
instead turns a critical eye on to her own class. Folktales, popular beliefs and
stories are not placed at the service of representing the other, but of allowing us
to see the lines along which identity is constructed, and how it may be dismantled.
That is why these tales are always articulated by Martel’s white, middle-class
characters, and not by the indigenous servants and labourers:1 assigning these
discourses to the ethnic ‘other’ would have an essentializing effect.
Deleuze offers here a way of reconceptualizing the inescapable quandary of
the intellectual whose self-appointed role of ‘speaking for’ the people ulti-
mately reinforces the hierarchical relationship of subjugation, however revolu-
tionary that discourse may be. Not everyone can be an artist, but the artist’s
creativity is an extension of the fabulation in which all people engage. As Philippe
Mengue explains, fabulation ‘is the common element that can connect art with
the people. The people that does not make art can fabulate so as to join (partake
of) artistic fabulation, while art fabulates by addressing itself to a people yet to
come’ (2008: 226).
Martel’s cinematography would seem to respond to Deleuze’s call for ‘Nei-
ther identification nor distance, neither proximity nor remoteness, for, in all
these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of […]. One must, on the con-
trary, speak with, write with. With the world, with a part of the world, with
people’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 39). This act of creating ‘with’ or ‘alongside’
is evident in the camera’s frequent rejection of the usual role of narrator in
Martel’s films. As she explains,
1 In using the term ‘indigenous’ to describe the community from which the servants in
Martel’s films are drawn, I am avoiding the pejorative overtones of ‘indio’ (‘Indian’) which would
be the more usual name applied by the middle-class, European descendants living in north-western
Argentina. The term ‘indígena’ is frequently used in more formal speech in relation to this com-
munity and does not denote any kind of purity in racial heritage; it does, however, mark the clear
social, cultural and racial divide that separates this group from the wealthy ruling class. The term
‘mestizo’ is not used in this region.
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 79
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80 latin american popular culture
another vision’ (Wood 2006: 168). Her films may testify to this loss of a central
narrative, but they also dramatize this construction of alternative visions and
stories. For Martel, ‘Quizás ése sea el más primitivo uso de la narración: cu-
ando se cuenta, hay una intención de volver a armar el mundo de otra forma’
(‘Perhaps this is the most primitive use of narration: when someone tells a
story, there is an intention to reconstruct the world in a different way’) (Oubiña
2009: 70). And again,
To search for other forms of seeing, to construct alternative visions of the world,
is an inherently political activity. In Deleuze’s work, fabulation plays a crucial
role in envisioning new modes of collective life, of bringing forth something
which does not yet exist in actuality. To draw on Ronald Bogue’s summary,
Whether they are true or not, the stories characters hear and tell incite them to
make life-transforming (or life-ending) decisions. This power is what Martel
identifies as the most political aspect of her cinema (Guest 2009); it is in fabu-
lation that we are best able to see the immanence of the aesthetic realm to the
world in which it functions.
For Deleuze, the question of what constitutes ‘popular literature’ or ‘mar-
ginal literature’ can only be settled by appeal to ‘a more objective concept – that
of minor literature’. If Deleuze rarely approaches texts we would more readily
classify as belonging to ‘popular culture’, it is because he defines minor, or
minoritarian, literature as ‘a minor practice of major language from within’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). As such, he effectively bypasses the question
of whether popular culture is conservative or contestatory by redrawing the
boundary somewhere else: there is not popular art or elite art, but art which is
minoritarian and art which is majoritarian; art which is creative and art which
simply reproduces old perceptions. Indeed, the whole Deleuzean project militates
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 81
against any kind of stable taxonomy according to which we might assign texts
to the categories of ‘popular’ or ‘elite’, in favour of an unfixing of such identi-
ties expressed by the idea of ‘becoming-other’, or ‘lines of flight’, which allude
to ‘the paths along which things change or become transformed into something
else’.2 If this process of ‘becoming-other’ is common to all art – indeed, for
Deleuze it becomes the definition of art – then Martel’s films, somewhat like
Perrault’s, merely illuminate the fabulatory function of all art, as that which
marks its radical potential for political intervention.
The difference between this understanding of political cinema and that which
underpins a more conventional approach to analysing the politics of a text be-
comes clear if we turn in more detail to La mujer sin cabeza. To interpret the
film as a straightforward allegory of societal complicity in covering up disap-
pearances under dictatorship would be to assign a meaning in the form of ex-
ternal referents, to find fixed correlations between the parts the characters play:
the boy Vero may have run over in her car becomes the disappeared victim, and
Vero’s family represents wider society, which colludes in covering up the crime,
maintaining a veneer of civilization and normality while all traces are erased
and all consequences eliminated. This reading quickly becomes difficult to
sustain, however: the ‘crime’, if it did indeed take place, is an accident, and in
her psychological and emotional distress and disconnection, Vero effectively
cycles through the whole gamut of roles in dictatorship narratives, becoming
irreducible to any one of them: the killer never brought to justice, the amnesiac
victim of trauma, the truth-telling witness. This, of course, is the source of the
film’s rich suggestiveness: far from presenting a simple condemnation of the
complicity of an individual or a family, it uncovers a complex web of unbidden
acts of loyalty in which the truth cannot always be heard, and demonstrates how
the intensely symbiotic relations that bind a community together often obscure
the lines that ostensibly divide it.
To probe La mujer sin cabeza for evidence of potential allegorical meanings
is to assume a hierarchical relationship between the film’s signs and symbols
and a ‘deeper’ political meaning somewhere beyond these. This is the assump-
tion made by symptomatic readings in general, which plunge beneath the
‘surface’ of the text to discover repressed meanings, or to expose hidden ideo-
logical investments that either reproduce or challenge the prevailing power
structures of society. This approach, with its dual Freudian-Marxist heritage,
has dominated the study of popular culture. Many of the most sophisticated
2 Paul Patton provides a concise summary of the different ‘lines’ which compose both indi-
viduals and collectives in the work of Deleuze and Guattari: ‘molar lines that correspond to the
forms of rigid segmentation found in bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions; molecular lines
that correspond to the fluid or overlapping forms of division characteristic of “primitive” territo-
riality; and finally, lines of flight that are the paths along which things change or become transformed
into something else’ (2000: 86).
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82 latin american popular culture
practitioners of what has been called ‘ideological criticism’ (Ernst Bloch and
Fredric Jameson are but two names that come to mind) have taught us to ap-
preciate the emancipatory and utopian impulses to be discovered even in texts
that appear straightforwardly to reinforce dominant social discourses. In its
focus on demystification and unmasking meanings that lie within texts, how-
ever, ideological criticism can be sharply differentiated from the immanent
criticism practised by Deleuze, for whom texts neither represent nor impose
meaning on an existing world, but rather project future worlds. Aesthetic
creation is not a suspect activity, a covert encoding of our most hidden psy-
chological or ideological investments and our entrapment within certain subject-
positions; instead, it is an emancipatory process in which we participate in ‘the
expression and creation of what is not yet, not present or other than actual’
(Colebrook 2001: 99), and take up ‘the challenge of no longer acting as a
separate and selecting point within the perceived world, but of becoming dif-
ferent with, and through, what is perceived’ (132–3).
How might an immanent (Deleuzean) approach to La mujer sin cabeza differ
from a transcendent (allegorical, symptomatic, or ideological) one? In some
respects, the two methods would result in similar readings of the film. An atten-
tive critic starting from either position would want to note the crucial vulnerabil-
ity the film locates at the heart of the apparently invincible hierarchies of class
and race: the potential for counter-hegemonic discourses to insert themselves
within a regime of power. As Jens Andermann observes, Vero’s car accident
initially brings a change, ‘putting her into a state of fragility and confusion that
seems to incubate a new self-awareness’ (2011: 180). The psychological and
emotional dislocation Vero experiences in the period immediately following the
accident opens her up to new encounters and perceptions, epitomized in the
scene in which she finds herself sobbing uncontrollably in the wary arms of a
nonplussed dark-skinned plumber. In the aftermath of the accident, Vero seems
to see the indigenous labourers everywhere around her as if for the first time;
her attempts to approach them are poignant as well as excruciatingly inadequate.
The counter-hegemonic impetus of the film may also be witnessed in Candita’s
intimate friendship with a lower-class girl and the sexual undercurrent of her
relationship with her aunt.
Do Deleuze’s lines of flight connote anything really very different, then, from
a resistance to hegemonic narratives which would be discovered just as easily
in an ideological reading of the film? We can discern that Martel’s films expose
and ‘undo’ hierarchies of class and race without Deleuze’s help. Ideological
criticism, however, is more likely to place emphasis on the re-establishment of
the status quo at the end of La mujer sin cabeza, and to note that the film does
not finally appear to articulate any real possibility of change. As Andermann
points out, by the end of the film Vero has retreated into domestic routine, with
a new hair colour pointing only to the absence of any real inward transformation
(2011: 180). But if Vero eventually turns her back on such opportunities for
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 83
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84 latin american popular culture
Deleuze and Guattari reject any notion of revolutionary action as aimed toward
the realization of a plan or design of an ideal society. Rather, revolutionary
action proceeds through metamorphosis, change and becoming, through the
transformation of a present intolerable situation toward some unforeseeable
future. (2003: 84)
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 85
able to pronounce on the ideological meaning and function of a text, and towards
the power of writing and storytelling itself to engender new forms of being and
new experiences of the other. To read texts symptomatically – a common response
to popular cultural texts in particular – may close off their political potential
rather than opening it up. If texts do not represent life but are immanent to it,
do not contain covert or latent messages but constantly produce new perceptions,
and do not substitute signs or images for a real world beyond them, then to read
a text is not to interpret it in the light of a set of already established meanings.
For Colebrook, following Deleuze, ‘The more faithful we are to a text – not the
text’s ultimate message but its construction, or the way in which it produces
relations among concepts, images, affects, neologisms and already existing
vocabularies – the more we will have an experience of a style of thought not
our own’ (2010: 4). This is how the reader or spectator may best allow what is
not ourselves to transform what we understand ourselves to be.
If as critics we limit ourselves to making visible how a text reinforces or
challenges a dominant ideology, we ignore the fact that the function of all art is
to renew perception rather than to convey a message, that its most effective
political strategy – as Deleuze and Guattari admired so greatly in Kafka’s writ-
ing – is not ‘to protest oppressive institutions or propose utopian alternatives,
but to accelerate the deterritorializing tendencies that are already present in the
world’ (Bogue 2003: 84). Martel’s cinema intensifies the destabilizing forces
that are already at work in the social systems she depicts, heightening the
power of becoming that is inherent in the unexplained accidents, popular beliefs,
apocryphal texts and forbidden desires of her films.
And yet her work also suggests a corrective to Deleuze’s distinctly utopian
view of fabulation, as it simultaneously evokes Bergson’s original concept of
fabulation as self-preservation, a function which becomes entirely erased in
Deleuze’s reworking of the idea. These films suggest that the mere act of (self-)
invention does not necessarily involve a creative becoming-other: it does mat-
ter what stories we tell, as some stories reinforce the status quo and police
boundaries while others trace lines of flight across them; some, like Bergson’s
fabulations, produce closed societies while others open up possibilities for al-
ternative encounters. Most proscriptive of all is the story Vero eventually believes:
that nothing at all has happened. In Martel’s films we witness the power of
fabulation both to exclude and to embrace, to discipline and to liberate. By
defining all genuine art as an act of becoming-other, Deleuze conveniently avoids
having to deal with the darker side of fabulation as an act that may originate in
fear and self-protection. What is thoroughly underscored in Martel’s cinema-
tography, however, is Deleuze’s grasp of the political potential embedded in the
telling of other stories, the telling of the stories of others, and the becoming-
other in the telling of our own stories, which is the root of political change.
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86 latin american popular culture
References
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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 87
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